Ultrawideband tech could connect your body to doctors, bring Tricorders to the mainstream

The academic paper ‘Experimental Characterization of a UWB Channel for Body Area Networks’ won’t reshape your mental state, but that’s because academic papers are rarely titled ‘OMG. Tricorders !’. A team of scientists at Oregon State University have examined ultrawideband tech to see if it’s capable of transmitting the enormous load of data required to monitor a human body.

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Ultrawideband tech could connect your body to doctors, bring Tricorders to the mainstream

Detroit DIYer cooks up stronger, lighter steel, shames scientists

You’d be forgiven for dismissing an amateur metallurgist if he claimed to have improved upon the presumably perfected technology of steel making. But Flash Bainite, the creation of Detroit entrepreneur Gary Cola, wowed a team of Ohio State University engineers by turning centuries of alloy processing on its head

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Detroit DIYer cooks up stronger, lighter steel, shames scientists

Scientist cooks up adjustable strength metals

As you may know, crafting a katana is a delicate process that involves carefully constructing a razor-sharp high-carbon edge around a soft shock-absorbent core. One day though, smiths and forging fires could be replaced by electrode-wielding mad-scientists, with the technology to selectively harden and soften metal at will

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Scientist cooks up adjustable strength metals

Visualized: a decade of mapping the universe, and all we got was this bloated JPEG

Thousands upon thousands of galaxies. Ten years to complete. A glance at the most complete map of the local universe anywhere in existence.

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Visualized: a decade of mapping the universe, and all we got was this bloated JPEG

X-Prize reveals plans for tricorder competition, suspiciously lacking Nimoy endorsement

We could feed you a line about the final frontier or exploring strange new worlds, but we’ll just give it to you straight: the X-Prize Foundation has teamed up with Qualcomm to design the Tricorder X-Prize, a $10 million competition designed to boldly go where no contest has gone before. Sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves. The most recent addition to the ambitious X-Prize stable is aimed at producing a mobile medical device, similar to those used on Star Trek, that can “diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.” Said device would allow regular folks to “quickly and effectively assess health conditions, determine if they need professional help,” and then decide on a plan of action

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X-Prize reveals plans for tricorder competition, suspiciously lacking Nimoy endorsement

Researchers take one step closer to neural-controlled bionic legs for safer mobility

We’ve seen our fair share of prosthetic arms and computer interfaces operated with little more than the firing of a synapse, but legs? They’re a different story: balancing and propelling a sack of (mostly) flesh and bone is a much more complicated task than simply picking up a sandwich. Thankfully, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago’s Center for Bionic Medicine is now one step closer to thought-controlled lower-limb prosthetics

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Researchers take one step closer to neural-controlled bionic legs for safer mobility

Large Hadron Collider smashes beam intensity record, inches closer to discovering God particle

Already a record holder for mashing protons together at 7 TeV (trillion electron volts), the Large Hadron Collider can now add world’s brightest beam to its list of accomplishments. Beam intensity is a way of measuring the number of collisions in its 17-mile-long track, and a higher intensity means more impacts — which, in turn, means more data, increasing the likelihood that the elusive Higgs boson will rear its head (should such a thing exist). The LHC smashed the previous luminosity record set last year by the Tevatron collider

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Large Hadron Collider smashes beam intensity record, inches closer to discovering God particle

Chlorine could be key to the cheaper, more efficient OLED TV of your dreams

Chlorine — it’s not just for keeping your clothes white and your pool clean anymore! Soon, layers of the stuff, just a single atom thick, could play a pivotal role in OLED manufacturing. Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that this tiny amount of Cl can almost double the efficiency of existing displays while reducing complexity and driving down costs. Using a rather simple procedure involving UV light, the team was able to chlorinate standard electrode panels found in conventional OLEDs without having toxic chlorine gas wafting about

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Chlorine could be key to the cheaper, more efficient OLED TV of your dreams

Scientists unlock the secrets of bike stability, make riders optional

We’ve peered back in time to the early days of the universe, just following the Big Bang, and unraveled the mysteries of the human genome — yet we don’t really know how a moving bicycle manages to stay upright without a meatbag manning the handlebars. Scientists have long thought that it had something to do with the gyroscopic effect created by the spinning wheels and the caster effect of having the front wheel trail the steering axis (don’t worry, it’s all explained in a video at the source link). Researchers at Cornell, however, have created a tiny bike that generates neither of those effects yet, thanks to carefully calibrated mass distribution, still stays vertical when moving over 5MPH.

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Scientists unlock the secrets of bike stability, make riders optional

Week in science: high-performance computers and radiation risks

High-performance computing on gamer PCs, Part 1: Hardware : In this three-part series, Ars takes you inside the process of building a high-performance computing cluster from the same kinds of gaming-oriented PC hardware that you’ll find in our system guides. This first installment describes the design of the system, and includes performance benchmarks

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Week in science: high-performance computers and radiation risks

Mutations in tumor suppressor take other genes down with them

p53 is a potent tumor suppressor. Its job is to scan along DNA, identify mutations that might cause cancer, and then halt cell growth until they can be repaired—it kills the cell if they cannot.

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Mutations in tumor suppressor take other genes down with them

Popular Science has sold 10,000 iPad magazine subscriptions

When Apple introduced its new subscription terms earlier this year, Popular Science embraced this change and introduced subscription-based billing into its iPad-based magazine. Now that six weeks have elapsed, publisher Bonnier Technology Group is happy to report that Pop Sci now has 10,000 iPad subscribers . Each subscriber pays US$14.99 for one-year of access to the magazine’s digital content.

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Popular Science has sold 10,000 iPad magazine subscriptions

Harvard physicist puts fires out with electrified wand, hopes to share on HarvardConnection

Okay, so maybe Ludovico Cademartiri will be forced to share the good news on Facebook (or ConnectU, if he’s into playing the role of rebel), but at least he’s bound to see over a couple of hundred hits. According to The Harvard Crimson , the aforesaid physicist and a smattering of other researchers have stumbled upon a novel way to extinguish flames: electricity. The idea is eventually enable firefighters to squash fires without having to douse a home or object with water and foam — if hit with a beam of juice, there’s at least a sliver of a chance that something can be salvaged.

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Harvard physicist puts fires out with electrified wand, hopes to share on HarvardConnection

Silicine might be the new graphene, now that it’s been physically constructed

Surely you’ve heard of graphene , the one-atom-thick layer of pencil lead that has the potential to change the world of computers, batteries and screens? You might want to familiarize yourself with the term “silicine,” too

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Silicine might be the new graphene, now that it’s been physically constructed

Mac OS X’s Creator Leaves Apple for Science

Back to basics for this veteran.

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Mac OS X’s Creator Leaves Apple for Science

Making a microscope without a lens

Those of you who have suffered through my writing before will know that I have a thing for imaging.

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Making a microscope without a lens

How to feed 9 billion people: the future of food and farming

Last week we discussed a session from the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Spacecraft swings into first orbit around Mercury

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft swung into position around Mercury last night, making it the first spacecraft ever to orbit the innermost planet. Engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, 96 million miles from Mercury, received the signal confirming that Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) had completed its final maneuver at 9:10pm EDT

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Spacecraft swings into first orbit around Mercury

Storyboard Podcast: Modernist Cuisine, the Last Cookbook You’ll Ever Need

The kitchen is the lab in everybody’s house. But with his new cookbook Modernist Cuisine , former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold has taken the science of food to a whole new level

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Storyboard Podcast: Modernist Cuisine, the Last Cookbook You’ll Ever Need

The oceans of 2050: will there be any fish left?

It’s no secret that I’ve been pessimistic about the state of our oceans. So when I saw there was a session entitled “2050: Will There Be Fish in the Ocean?” at this year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), I knew it would be one I’d attend. And while the message wasn’t particularly encouraging, it’s not all doom and gloom on the seas.

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The oceans of 2050: will there be any fish left?