Blogs / Discoblog

When you get a cut on your arm, blood will clot around it to stop
the bleeding. British engineers have borrowed that natural defense and adapted it for another purpose – fixing planes while they’re still in the air.

Airplanes get little cracks or holes not only from impacts, like an unfriendly meeting with a stone or a bird, but also from simple wear and tear. Many are too small for the naked eye to see. So a team led by Ian Bond at Bristol University in the U.K. mimicked the way human bodies protect themselves in an attempt to create a self-healing plane.

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When Ugo Conti piled his family into a sailboat to take a three-year trip around the world, the main problem wasn’t his lack of sailing experience—it was his tendency to get sick at sea. So, like a lactose-intolerant ice cream lover, he was eager to find a solution to his problems—and confident that he could be the one to make it happen. After a few years spent MacGyvering around in his garage, he developed wave adaptive modular vessels (WAM-V) technology—boats that are flexible enough to conform to the water’s surface, skimming along the surface instead of busting through waves.

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Is there anything microwaves can’t do? They create perfect s’mores, cause light bulbs to glow in every color, turn grapes into glowing balls of plasma, and make fireballs out of toothpicks (not to mention creating Internet, cable TV, radar, GPS, and, oh yes, heating up food). And now, a group of researchers at Louisiana State University have developed a system that will use microwaves to kill marine life trying to hitch free rides on cargo ships.

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Japan’s legendary vending machines dispense everything from batteries and hot ramen to alcohol, cigarettes, porn, and panties purportedly worn by school girls. But these instant gratification sin machines aren’t selling their wares ad libitum—well, at least not all of them.

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Millions of cell phone users have adopted text messaging as a regular form of communication, to the point where the informal lexicon of “text speak” is infiltrating the school system. But all those “LOL”s and “C U l8er”s may be costing consumers a hefty price. Dr. Nigel Bannister, a space expert at the University of Leicester, compared the cost of sending a text message with the cost of obtaining a megabyte (MB) of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Sure enough, the text messages were far more expensive.

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And here your parents thought all those Mortal Kombat skills would never amount to anything useful: A research team at the University of Washington has created a video game called Foldit, which challenges dexterous gamers to fold protein strands according to the actual laws of physics—thereby helping to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins that could mean cures for diseases from Alzheimer’s to HIV.

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In the midst of controversy proclaiming WiFi as the harbinger of brain tumors, it’s nice to hear that wireless might actually be doing us some good. The same technology that lets you jabber into your Bluetooth earpiece can also let your doctor know you’re having a heart attack.

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Every year, 935 million packs of gum are chewed by 28 million Britons, leaving millions of sticky, inconvenient lumps in their wake. The globs can only be removed with high pressure steam hoses, expensive freezing machines, or corrosive, environmentally unfriendly chemicals, costing taxpayers £150 ($300) million per year. The desperate state of affairs has attracted millions of dollars of research into non-stick chewing gum, but the country wants a quicker solution.

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Robots may not only be cleaning your house and providing you with love and companionship in the coming years—they may also be performing your surgery. A team of engineers at Duke University have completed a set of feasibility tests that they call the “first concrete steps” toward making robot surgery a fully, er, operational process.

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