News

Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin go all in on moon settlements

Ingestible “bacteria on a chip” could help diagnose disease

This “bacteria-on-a-chip” approach combines sensors made from living cells with ultra-low-power electronics that convert the bacterial response into a wireless signal that can be read by a smartphone. In the new study, appearing in the May 24 online edition of Science, the researchers created sensors that respond to heme, a component of blood, and showed that they work in pigs. They also designed sensors that can respond to a molecule that is a marker of inflammation.

Americans Less Trusting of Self-Driving Safety Following High-Profile Accidents

Americans are less trusting of self-driving cars following two deadly accidents involving autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, with half of U.S. adults considering those automobiles less safe than human drivers, according to a new poll. A Morning Consult survey conducted March 29-April 1 among a national sample of 2,202 adults found that 27 percent of respondents said self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, while 50 percent said autonomous vehicles are less safe. Eight percent said the automobiles are on par with human drivers when it comes to safety.

Making driverless cars change lanes more like human drivers do

The Internet of Trash: IoT Has a Looming E-Waste Problem

The US government wants to start charging for the best free satellite data on earth

World’s Biggest Planetarium Achieves Jaw-Dropping 10K Resolution

Planetarium No. 1, the world’s biggest planetarium, uses NVIDIA graphics to showcase the universe with a level of clarity, detail and interactivity like never before. Russian dome with half-acre of screen area powered by NVIDIA Quadro graphics. Housed in a 19th century natural gas storage building, the planetarium’s exterior is about the only thing that isn’t on the cutting edge of modernity.

How Brain Waves Surf Sound Waves to Process Speech

When people listen to speech, their ears translate the sound waves into neural signals that are then processed and interpreted by various parts of the brain, starting with the auditory cortex. Years of neurophysiological studies have observed that the waves of neural activity in the auditory cortex lock onto the audio signal’s “envelope”—essentially, the frequency with which the loudness changes. (As Poeppel put it, “The brain waves surf on the sound waves.”

Engineered Band Gap Pushes Graphene Closer to Displacing Silicon

A new method for engineering a band gap into graphene maintains its attractive electronic properties Graphene might bethe best conductor of electrons we know. However, as a pure conductor it can’t stop the flow of electrons like a semiconductor such as siliconcan. Silicon’s ability to create an on/off state for the flow of electrons makes it possible to create the “0” and “1” of binary digital logic for computing.

A Classical Math Problem Gets Pulled into the Modern World