Stories

I spent part of the week at the 2011 Siemens PLM Connection Americas Users Conference (in Las Vegas!). William Allen, senior engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and mechanical systems design lead on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), spoke to the crowd about how the JPL, based in Pasadena, CA,...

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) recently wrapped up its BODY FORWARD Challenge. Teams were asked to explore bio-engineering possibilities and discover innovative ways to improve and maximize the body's potential. The winning team, known as the "Flying Monkeys," will receive up to...

Want to learn how to fire a Patriot missile at something? There’s an app for that. No, seriously…there’s an app for that. According to a press release I received last week, a company called C2 Technologies has just developed the first of what will be 7 mobile iPhone applications designed to train the U.S Army’s...

There may be some new movies coming out in 3-D, and no, I'm not talking about a Yogi Bear sequel. A new live-cell microscope invented by scientists at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus lets researchers use a thin sheet of light to reveal three-dimensional shapes of cellular landmarks....

Ideally, the concept of "on demand" shouldn't limit itself to pay-per-view movies. If 3D printers were widely available in every household, consumers could quickly "demand" and fabricate specialized food and other objects at the touch of a button. Scientists in the emerging field of "bioprinting" are even attempting to make it...

Will tomorrow's cars run on fungi fuel? As gas prices are set to rise, I thought it'd be interesting to point to recent biomass fuel efforts by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. The Sandia team is modifying an endophytic fungus so that it will produce hydrocarbons, which work well as fuels for internal combustion engines....

This week's question addresses a robot and one of America's most well-known game shows. A supercomputer named Watson, designed by IBM and consisting of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers, is set to face two human contestants on the US quiz show Jeopardy this...

This week's question looks at an announcement from scientists operating NASA's Kepler satellite, who reported this week that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially three times the previously recorded number. Although no Earth-like planet has been...

This week's Question of the Week focuses on Web 2.0 interaction. A recent report from the University of Texas, Austin, says that networking sites like Facebook make users more sociable and "afford opportunities for new expressions of friendship, intimacy and community." A recent book by Sherry Turkle, "Alone...

Software called Micropilot may help researchers struggling to pinpoint particular cells in their microscopes. The technology, developed by European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) scientists, searches for cells with specific features. After detecting the cells that a researcher is interested in, the...

This week's Question focuses on a new service from T-Mobile that, for just 4.99 a month, automatically disables rings and messages, and sends calls to voicemail when the phone is in a moving car. The services being tested and deployed are voluntary and can be overridden if a driver...