Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 30, 2005

Crickets Have Their Own 'Holodeck'

Amy Young, who creates mixed-media interactive sculptures and digital media works, has vaulted the common cricket into the 23rd century of human imagination with her Cricket Holodeck. (Cricket Holodeck) The 'holodeck' consists of a hand-blown glass enclosure, sand and microphone, with a computer running a video projector. She writes: If...

Nov 30, 2005

Ultimate Mood Light: New LED Panels Snap into Electronic Walls

Electronic walls and ceilings with interchangeable LED panels would allow you to change room lighting at a whim, in a new design proposed today. The modular panels snap in and out of an electrical grid so light fixtures can be moved anywhere. The new concept represents a paradigm shift in...

Oct 31, 2005

Implant Relieves Nausea Without Drugs

Johns Hopkins University has just patented a new device for relief from nausea. In the patent, Dr. Ronald Lesser, MD and Dr. Robert Webber, PhD propose a system that could help pregnant women cope with nausea without using drugs that could endanger the health of the fetus, among other uses....

Oct 31, 2005

Britain to Deploy Roadside 'Big Brother' System

ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) cameras are being used to create a 24x7 national vehicle movement database that will log the movement of every vehicle on the United Kingdom's roads. Your every move will be retained in the system for two years. Besides denying criminals the use of the roads,...

Oct 31, 2005

Robot Mouse Has Real Whiskers

The AMouse artificial mouse is a robot with two active whisker arrays -- made from real mouse whiskers. Part of the intent in building the robot mouse is to study biological models of mouse behavior and to investigate the interplay between different sensory modalities (visual and somatosensory). Science fiction fans,...

Sep 30, 2005

Like a Hawk, Robotic Plane Rides Thermals

Hawks and eagles glide on currents of rising warm air called thermals to extend their flight time without needing more fuel. NASA aerospace engineer Michael Allen and a team of engineers working on the Autonomous Soaring Project at Dryden Flight Research Center have succeeded in extending the range of small...

Sep 30, 2005

Video iPod: An Improvement H.G. Wells' 1899 Device

Apple's new video iPod holds up to 150 hours of video, showing it on a nifty 2.5 inch display. The iPod has a far greater capacity than H.G. Wells' moving picture player, from his 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes. Apple's new device comes in 30 and 60 gigabyte models;...

Sep 30, 2005

Military: New Aluminum Windows Stop .50-Caliber Bullet

A new type of transparent armor made of aluminum could one day replace glass in military vehicles. The product is called aluminum oxynitride. It is being tested by the Army and the University of Dayton Research Institute in Ohio. The material is a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength...

Sep 30, 2005

The World's Smallest Car

Using the parts inside a single molecule, scientists have constructed the world's smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. It'd be a real squeeze to take it for a spin, however. The whole car...

Sep 30, 2005

Radar as Death Ray?

According to Aviation Week, the Pentagon is now developing active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars that could be used as weapons. A bizarre historical twist to this story is that in 1934, a rumor was started to the effect that Nazi Germany had developed a death ray based on radar....

Sep 30, 2005

Digital Newspapers Almost Here

Siemens, a German electronics firm, says that it has lowered production costsfor paper-thin displays sufficiently to allow their use in newspapers and magazines. Norbert Aschenbrenner of Siemens claimed the new screens can do everything a regular TV screen or computer monitor can do, but at a fraction of the cost:...

Sep 30, 2005

Microbe and Machine Merged to Create First 'Cellborg'

Fully merging microbe and machine for the first time, scientists have created gold-plated bacteria that can sense humidity. The breakthrough is the first cellborg in what might become an array of devices that could sense dangerous gases or other hazardous substances. The bioelectronic device swells and contracts in response to...

Aug 31, 2005

Housing for Katrina Victims: Ideas from Science Fiction

In the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the flooding of New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of survivors have been left homeless -- probably for many months. Large areas have been devastated, without any services. Readers wrote in suggesting that perhaps science fiction writers had some ideas that could be of...

Aug 31, 2005

The Military's Walrus: An Unlikely Flying Machine

DARPA's Walrus program to develop and evaluate a very large airlift vehicle has moved forward; DARPA announced the contractors for the first phase of the program. Despite detailed early descriptions of war-balloons in late nineteenth century science fiction, this isn't your father's (not to mention great-grandfather's) dirigible airship. According to...

Jun 30, 2005

Space Station's Air Problems Like a 1942 Novel

The International Space Station and the fictional Venus Equilateral Station (from a 1942 story by George O. Smith) have a problem in common - a failure of the air plant. The ISS uses (among other components) the Elektron oxygen generation system. After several stoppages, the unit failed completely about a...