Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Sep 30, 2007

Phone Uses Jaw Bone to Transmit Sound

The Pantech A1407PT cell phone has a unique ability to let you listen. It allows you to listen to your calls with your bones. The Pantech phone uses bone conduction; when the phone is placed against your jaw, the mechanical vibration from the phone is conducted to your inner ear,...

Jul 31, 2007

Company Now Selling Real Flying Saucers

Right now, only $90,000 stands between you and ownership of your own flying saucer. Except it won't take you to Venus—it looks like flying saucer but it's really a car-sized hovercraft intended to fly no higher than 10 feet. Called the M200G from Moller International of Davis, CA, the craft...

Jul 31, 2007

Custom Print Human Bones With 3-D Inkjet Printer

Custom-made artificial bones for implantation in humans are being printed using 3-D inkjet printers. Researchers at the Tissue Engineering Department at the University of Tokyo Hospital and venture capitalist Next 21 have performed trials on 10 people in the past year and a half. Here's the process used to make...

Jun 30, 2007

New Supercomputer is Fastest Yet

Running about 100,000 times faster than a high-end desktop PC, IBM has unveiled the world’s fastest computer. Already, it's not fast enough. The new king of the supercomputers is the IBM Blue Gene/P running at a speed of at least one petaflop per second, meaning it can solve one quadrillion...

Jun 30, 2007

Smart Robot Learns to Climb Mountains

The first climber to ascend the highest mountain in the solar system might be a robot rather than a human. The humble origins of such a mechanical pioneer? A robot that stumbles around a lot before it nimbly stalks the slopes. Before any mountaineering robots ever head off to space,...

Jun 30, 2007

Move Over Elmer's: New 'Geckel' Glue Redefines Sticky

Glue like the kind that mussels use to glom onto rocks has been combined with the stickiness seen in gecko feet to form a new adhesive dubbed geckel that could one day bind wounds closed and help robots climb walls underwater. Geckos are lizards with the remarkable ability to scamper...

Jun 30, 2007

New Fingerprint Technique Could Reveal Diet, Sex, Race

A victim might not care if a murderer is a smoker or a vegetarian. But having such knowledge could help police solve a case. Details like this could one day be at their fingertips if a new fingerprinting technique pans out as expected. Standard methods for collecting fingerprints at crime...

Mar 31, 2007

New Hard Drives Hold a Terabyte of Data

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell,...

Feb 28, 2007

Medication 'Robot' Fits Inside Tooth

IntelliDrug is an IST Program project to develop a device for controlled drug delivery that is the size of a tooth (it may be as large as several molars). The IntelliDrug device would be implanted in the mouth of a patient, where it could provide regular, measured doses of medication....

Feb 28, 2007

Robots Might Benefit from Sleep, Too

In his recent paper What Do Robots Dream Of, Dr. Adami, Professor of Applied Life Sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute, speculates that a robot might benefit from some down time just like people do. Recent work in the study of dreaming indicates that more than just subconscious entertainment is...

Jan 31, 2007

Origami Optics Promise Better Spy Cameras

The cameras in cell phones and robot spy planes could become more powerful by using optics folded like origami, researchers report. To zoom in on distant objects, professional cameras use telephoto lenses. These conventionally must be super long ?to bend and focus light. Since cell phones are small, they can...

Jan 31, 2007

Stealthy Iris Scanner in the Works

A public iris scanning device has been proposed in a patent from Samoff Labs in New Jersey. The device is able to scan the iris of the eye without the knowledge or consent of the person being scanned. The device uses multiple cameras, and then combines images to create a...

Jan 31, 2007

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds

Hackers attack computers every 39 seconds, according to new research. The study, which investigated how exactly hackers crack computers, confirms those regularly issued warnings about password vulnerability. Experts advise longer passwords, regularly changed and not based on users' biographies, that mix letters and numerals and are hard to guess. “Our...

Jan 31, 2007

Incredible Robots Walk, Roll, Climb and Cooperate

They’re not quite Transformers, but new robots created by researchers at the University of Southern California are definitely more than meets the eye. Called “superbots,” they are made up of identical modular units that plug into each other to create robots that can walk on four legs like an animal...

Dec 31, 2006

Invisible 'Radio' Tattoos Could Identify Soldiers

Somark Innovations announced biocompatible RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) ink, which can be used to tattoo cattle and laboratory rats and can be read through animal hair. It might even be used on humans eventually. This is a passive RFID technology that contains no metals; the tattoos themselves can be colored...