Stories

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...

Fuel cells use the chemical energy of hydrogen or other fuels to efficiently produce electricity or heat with minimal byproducts, primarily water. The DOE is accepting applications for a total of up to $74 million to support the research and development of clean, reliable fuel cells for...

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a nickel-size, curvilinear camera with a 3.5x optical zoom. Or, to put it simply, an eyeball camera. The lens and photodetectors are on flexible substrates. A hydraulic system then changes the shape of the substrates, allowing the...

This week's question addresses last week's news that Verizon will soon sell the iPhone 4. Although some analysts say the move may double Apple's market share, many enterprises and financial institutions have held back on the mobile device due to concerns of its...

Photoelectrochemical cells convert sunlight into electricity, but their light-absorbing dyes, called chromophores, eventually degrade because of sunlight exposure. For plant cells, the degradation of chromophores isn't a big deal - they simply self-regenerate. Now, Purdue researchers are in the early stages of creating a...

The DOE is accepting applications for up to $184 million over three to five years to accelerate the development and deployment of new efficient vehicle technologies that will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, save drivers money, and limit carbon pollution.

Mother Nature is a great innovator. In fact, one might argue that some of today's most efficient technologies were not engineered, but rather, exist in nature as the byproducts of a little process called evolution. As such, it comes as no surprise that scientists sometimes look to nature as a source of...

The emergency room may look a bit different in five years. And when I say "different," I mean that mobile robots will be waiting on you and collecting your blood pressure and pulse rate. Computer engineers at Vanderbilt University have a new idea about improving a hospital's emergency department, proposing...

We’ve been hearing for some time now how emissions-free electric vehicles (EVs) could someday save the planet – or at least our part of it – by replacing cars powered with internal combustion engines. What nobody can seem to tell us is when that day will come. Two companies that hope to answer that question are...

Matter and antimatter are almost identical, but their one crucial difference, an opposite charge, can cause mutual annihilation when the two are mixed. So if there's plenty of matter here in the world, where is its counterpart? When the universe formed, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal...