Google Science Fair 2013 came to a close yesterday, as 15 young scientists aged between 13 and 18 demonstrated their projects in front of Google’s expert panel. With over a thousand submissions worldwide, only four entrants were able to take home prizes, but it was 17-year-old Eric Chen who walked away with the biggest prize. By combining computer modeling and biological studies, Chen’s research focused on leads for a “new type of anti-flu medicine” to help fight the spread of the influenza virus. Australian Viney Kumar and Canadian Ann Makosinski took home awards for an early warning app for oncoming emergency vehicles and a flashlight that operates without batteries or moving parts, respectively. This year, voters got the chance to affect the outcome, awarding a new prize to Elif Bilgin, from Istanbul, who showed it was possible to create plastic from banana peel. Each winner took home a trophy built from Lego, as well as prizes from National Geographic and Scientific American. Chen, however, walked away with a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands and his school gets both $10,000 and a Hangout with the boffins at CERN. Well deserved, we’d say.
Source: Official Google Blog
To get paid while you are doing something that you love is more or less the dream of every single person out there. After all, it is not called work then, is it? For those of you out there who love nothing better than to grab some shuteye, then you would be more than pleased to discover that NASA is working on a study which will require folks to lie in a tilted bed for up to 70 days. This particular bed is not your usual piece of furniture where you sleep on at night, but rather, it will be slanted at an angle of 6 degrees which is meant to assist researchers in developing new methods so that astronauts who return from space missions are able to physically adjust themselves to daily life with as little issues as possible.
Are robots taking over the world? Well, the answer might be yes, although to have the kind of robots that we have seen in Will Smith’s I, Robot, is still a far fetched scenario, but we are definitely not going to deny that such a thing can happen down the road. However, if there is one domain that robots might creep in slowly but surely, it would be the role of a bartender. “James” is a robot that has been designed to be a bartender, and chances are it will be one of the most fair and attentive mixologist whom you will ever come across.
Will robots as well as exo-skeletons become a permanent fixture in everyday life sometime down the road? Perhaps, although science fiction buffs will tell you that this is definitely the case. We have seen some robotic exo-skeletons make an appearance over at trade shows as well as press events in the past, but to find someone donning these as part of his or her clothes is something else altogether. However, Yaskawa Electric might just change things with the latest design of their Ankle Walking Assist Device (AWAD), making it a possible robotic exoskeleton that is the first of its kind to arirve for the masses.
A camera phone is a useful tool to have, the thing is, most camera phones might have been developed to work pretty well for ordinary shots, and even some scenic captures. However, when it comes to close ups, a camera phone is not exactly the best kind of device for you to use. It does seem that this particular school of thought might change soon, as a professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aydogan Ozcan, has worked alongside a team of researchers to successfully develop an imaging device that is said to be so sensitive, it is capable of detecting sub-wavelength objects – where among them include both bacteria and viruses.
