NewScITech

The noise of aircraft taking off, road traffic or a booming discotheque often drive inhabitants of the neighborhood to a nervous frenzy. The first-ever windows with active sound insulation offer much-needed relief to local residents in their homes and offices. Read the rest of this entry »

In a breakthrough that could free nanomachines from the bulk of batteries, researchers have developed a novel nanogenerator–an array of tiny filaments that converts the smallest motions into electrical current. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have invented a way to reversibly silence brain cells using pulses of yellow light, offering the prospect of controlling the haywire neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Read the rest of this entry »

With the help of a new type of suture based on MIT research, patients who get stitches may never need to have them removed. Read the rest of this entry »

At age 32, Maggie Fermental suffered a stroke that left her right side paralyzed. After a year and a half of conventional therapy with minimal results, she tried a new kind of robotic therapy developed by MIT engineers. A study to appear in the April 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation shows that the device, which helped Fermental, also had positive results for five other severe stroke patients in a pilot clinical trial. Read the rest of this entry »

MIT researchers have created an inexpensive method to screen for millions of different biomolecules (DNA, proteins, etc.) in a single sample–a technology that could make possible the development of low-cost clinical bedside diagnostics. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists return this week to the world’s deepest known sinkhole, Cenote Zacatón in Mexico, to resume tests of a NASA-funded robot called DEPTHX, designed to survey and explore for life in one of Earth’s most extreme regions and potentially in outer space. Read the rest of this entry »

Leafy greens and beans aren’t the only foods that pack a punch of folate, the vitamin essential for a healthy start to pregnancy. Read the rest of this entry »

New drugs could be discovered much faster thanks to a screening process developed by scientists at the University of Oxford. The process is over 1500 times faster than current techniques. It works by searching a database of molecules for those with a similar shape to known drugs; as molecules with similar shapes are likely to have similar properties. The new method could bring huge benefits for the pharmaceutical industry and have many other uses including creating a new breed of Internet search engine. Read the rest of this entry »

People’s intentions have been read via brain scans by a team of scientists including Professor Dick Passingham from Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology. Read the rest of this entry »

The Altair 8800, introduced in the early 1970s, was the first computer you could build at home from a kit. It was crude, didn’t do much, but many historians would say that it launched the desktop computer revolution. Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, thinks a little machine he calls a Fab@Home may have the same impact. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time, MIT scientists have applied a computer model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Powered by mere vibrations or the movement of magnets, novel sensors and transmitters developed by a small company in Vermont are changing the way engineers are looking at fatigue. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have successfully generated electricity from heat by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles, an achievement that could pave the way toward the development of a new source for energy. Read the rest of this entry »

Bioengineers and public health researchers have developed a novel spray-drying method for preserving and delivering the most common tuberculosis (TB) vaccine. The low-cost and scalable technique offers several potential advantages over conventional freezing procedures, such as greater stability at room temperature and use in needle-free delivery. The spray-drying process could one day provide a better approach for vaccination against TB and help prevent the related spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world. Read the rest of this entry »