Ever since the first human genome was decoded at a cost of $3 billion, scientists have been pushing for a moonshot goal: a system that can process thousands of genomes at a cost of $1,000 each. Today, Illumina unveiled a set of machines that do just that. For geneticists and medical researchers, this is a watershed moment.
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Personal banking apps make managing a checking or savings account easy, eschewing the need for a laptop or firing up a browser. Whether they keep your personal data secure is … Continue reading
These days there are a couple of different ways in which we can charge our smartphones. This can be done through conventional methods, such as plugging it into a power outlet, or it can be done through “greener” methods such as solar charging or using kinetic energy, like cycling, for example. However a couple of researchers at the University of Texas Arlington, Smitha Rao and J.C. Chiao, have come up with an even cooler concept (literally) that you might use in the future to help charge your devices, and that is through the use of minuscule windmills that are apparently so tiny that you could fit about 10 of them on a grain of rice itself, meaning that it is also small enough where you could embed it into a phone, hold it up to a fan or just walk with it that it could potentially juice up your device.
However effective it will be at charging your phone remains to be seen, but it is definitely an interesting idea. According to the researchers who created it, the windmills are made of a durable nickel alloy so you don’t have to worry about the blades breaking off due to strong winds. There’s no telling what other applications are there for such technology, but as it stands a Taiwanese company has managed to gain exclusive rights to the technology and are exploring different ways of commercializing the concept. One suggestion by the researchers include, “Flat panels with thousand of windmills could be made and mounted on the walls of houses or building to harvest energy for lighting, security or environmental sensing and wireless communication.” Pretty cool, huh?
Researchers Develop Minuscule Windmills That Could Charge Our Phones original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington have come up with a way to build a nickel alloy windmill so small, 10 of them could be mounted on a grain of rice. And if all goes as planned, hundreds of the little things could end up in a case that charges up your smartphone.
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Many would agree that one of the scariest creatures in the ocean is the great white shark. We can thank Jaws for most of that fear of the sharks. Scientists … Continue reading
There’s a suspicion among many that wearable tech is simply today’s digital navel-gazing; a self-indulgent and meaningless set of metrics bordering on narcissistic over-obsession. The quantified self could soon become … Continue reading
Just because we can’t fry food in the vacuum of space
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Researchers at Rice University have a new, laser-powered way to diagnose malaria infection. They say it’s the first through-the-skin method that doesn’t require blood samples or chemical tests. Essentially, it listens for belly sounds as the malaria parasite chows down on blood cells. If it pans out, it could revolutionize how we diagnose this disease.
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Flexible, stretchable
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Perfect pitch is the ability to accurately name any musical note you hear. It’s a talent possessed by just one in 10,000 people, and it can only be learned during a critical period before age 7. Now, scientists have discovered that a common psychiatric medication can restart that learning ability in adults, even if they’ve never had musical training.
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