Tech
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Tech
Device fingers chemical thugs at scene
A compact, new instrument exploits quantum mechanics to rapidly identify illegal drugs, pollutants, and other chemicals, on the spot.
- Tech
Robosaur roams with spring in its step
The novel dinosaur robot Troodon takes two-legged walking machines onto new terrain.
- Tech
Polymer takes dim view of explosives
By spraying surfaces with a light-emitting polymer, researchers have taken a step toward making new sensors for traces of common explosives.
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- Tech
Getting Nanowired
Makers of nanowires may overcome the limits that loom for microchip fabrication.
- Tech
Electromagnetism acts oddly in device
Without breaking any physical laws, a novel, fiberglass-copper structure affects microwaves so strangely that a beam of radiation passing through it bends at an angle opposite from what it get bent at an angle opposite from what it would have exiting any other known material.
- Tech
Stuff gets stiffed by unstiff inserts
In an odd twist, material that is so extremely yielding that it is said to have negative stiffness will make already stiff materials even stiffer when it's blended into them.
- Tech
New device opens next chapter on E-paper
Researchers have developed a paperlike plastic that could become the pages of the first electronic books and newspapers.
- Tech
Novel fuel cell gets hot, but not by a lot
A new type of fuel cell that works above the boiling point of water—but not too much above it—may lead to improved nonpolluting power sources suitable for cars and portable electronic gadgets.
- Tech
Oceans of Electricity
The world's first commercial wave-power plant began pumping current into a Scottish island's electric grid last winter, just ahead of a host of competing schemes for converting ocean-wave motion into electricity.
- Tech
Optical biopsy hunts would-be cancers
A new optical tool allows physicians to scout for precancerous tissue by analyzing the fluorescent responses of cells when light is shone on them.
- Computing
Automatic Professor Machine
Check out an amazing, new information-dispensing device at the Web site of technology critic Langdon Winner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Winner’s Automatic Professor Machine delivers online doctoral degrees without the student ever having to set foot on a college campus. A spoof of the distance-learning craze, the site features a news report, radio interview […]
