Usually, throw the internet an image of something you can’t identify and it’s only a couple of minutes until you’re bombarded with people pointing out how dumb you are. Not so with this mystery cocoon, though—because nobody can work out where it comes from.
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Other than a few models from Boston Dynamics, most robots don’t exactly leave us quaking in fear. That might be off the table soon, though, thanks to a breakthrough from researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS). They’ve developed polymer-derived artificial muscles that can stretch out up to five times in length, enabling them to lift 80 times their weight. That could one day result in life-like robots with “superhuman strength and ability,” which could also run on very little power, according to the team. They expect to have a robotic limb that could smack down any human in arm-wrestling within five years — putting a possible cyborg version of Over The Top alarmingly within reach.
Your 11-year-old self appears at your office. He or she takes a look at what you’ve become—some desk-jockey with yesterday’s Panera Bread crumbs on their cheek, some dystopian deformity of the 11-year-old who built their own time machine just to come see you. He or she doesn’t cry, but you can tell, they’re quite disappointed.
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A team of 20 researchers from University of Alberta proudly announced a commendable achievement on Thursday. Using no fewer than five different experimental methods, they’ve discovered over 3,000 different chemical compounds in human urine. And it only took them seven years.
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The biggest volcano ever found on Earth—one of the biggest we know of in the solar system—has been hidden for ages. But now scientists have found it, just chillin’ beneath the sea. It’s a monster.
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Optical illusions
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Silicon is great, but we’re tickling the edges of its speed limit. As a result, researchers at Oregon State University have been plugging away at a low-cost, faster alternative for the past three years: tiny quantum devices called metal-insulator-metal diodes, or MIM diodes for short. Silicon chips involve electrons traveling through a transistor, but MIM diodes send electrons “tunneling” through the insulator in a quantum manner, such that they appear “almost instantaneously” on the other side. The tech’s latest development doubles the insulator fun — transforming the MIM into a MIIM (pictured above) — giving the scientists another method for engineering quantum mechanical tunneling. With MIIMs, super fast transistor-less computers could be around the corner. The Oregon researchers aren’t bold enough to put a date on making any of this happen outside of the lab, but they promise entire new industries may “ultimately emerge” from their work, and we’re far too under-qualified to doubt them.
Source: Oregon State University
Today I found out that Marie Curie once had two duels fought over her after she had an affair with a married man.
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A slew of negatives plague video games — Peter Pan Syndrome, hyper-violence, camping — but their youthfulness could do just what Nintendo’s Brain Age promised: improve elderly brain function. Over four years, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco had a group play a custom game (video of it in action is after the break) that tasks players to drive and identify road signs that appear while ignoring certain others, according to the New York Times. It’s not quite Grand Theft Auto, but it proved how hard successfully multitasking becomes with age. However, after training with the game, the 60 to 80 year old test subjects stomped those a fraction of their age who had no prior exposure to it. What’s more, this experience produced brain functionality benefits outside of the game.
This isn’t a fluke, either. For proof, the scientists used electroencephalography to monitor the older subjects and found that while playing, the theta wave activity — associated with attention — in their prefrontal cortexes looked like that of a younger adult’s. These findings may help scientists understand what areas of the brain “could and should” be manipulated to improve cognitive functions like memory. The study appears in today’s edition of Nature and backs up similar research from May that also used a concentration-heavy game, and reported like results. Now if you’ll pardon us, we have to show our parents that all those hours of our childhood weren’t wasted.
Filed under: Gaming, Science, Alt
Source: New York Times
A group of scientists from Canada have discovered evidence that an extraplanetary body came down over Canada about 12,900 years ago. The evidence suggests that the comet might have triggered the death of giant animals roaming North America and triggered a cooling spell in the Earth’s climate. Scientists say that during the Younger Dryas climatic […]
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