Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Jun 30, 2013

Technology Should Replace Testing on Animals (Op-Ed)

Kathleen Conlee is vice president, animal research issues, for The Humane Society of the United States. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Efforts are underway — and moving at an exponentially increasing pace — that ultimately will yield medical- and cosmetic-testing technologies that provide timely...

May 31, 2013

New System Detects Touch, Gesture on any Surface

Composite image illustrates how fingers and hands are computed in a touch-activated system that projects onto walls and other surfaces and allows people to interact with other people and things. (Image credit: Purdue University.)This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. This...

May 31, 2013

Why the Supercomputing Arms Race Benefits Everyone (Op-Ed)

Gregory Scott Jones is a writer specializing in the field of supercomputing. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Next week, a torch will be passed. On June 17, the Top500, a biannual ranking of the world's fastest computers, will be announced in Leipzig, Germany. In...

May 31, 2013

Body-Double: Lifelike Android Demoed at Futuristic Conference

NEW YORK — An extremely humanlike robot made a public appearance today (June 15) here at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress, a futuristic conference focused on the technological singularity. Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, Japan, described some of his efforts to...

Apr 30, 2013

The 7 Weirdest Things Made By 3D Printing

The cost of 3D printing has long kept the technology in a select few hands, but all that is changing as 3D printing blossoms into a full-fledged trend. This June, Staples will start retailing a consumer 3D printer, the Cube 3D Printer, for $1,299 — not cheap, but not out...

Mar 31, 2013

Apple Doesn’t Need an iCar to Rule the Road

It’s no secret that late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was keen on bringing the company’s technology to the automotive world. In fact, according to longtime Apple board member Mickey Drexler, “Steve’s dream before he died was to design an iCar.” Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Phil Shiller, echoed...

Feb 28, 2013

A Quantum Leap For Basketball 'Bracketology'

(ISNS) -- Like many sports fans across the country, five groups of physicists at the University of Maryland are filling out their brackets to predict the winners and losers in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. While most people use a strategy to guide their picks -- such as relying on...

Jan 31, 2013

Mechanically Inspired Musical Insights

(ISNS) -- Creativity, technique and talent are all required to dance beautifully, or play a piece of music in a truly exceptional way, but researchers report that the discipline of biomechanics can reveal how to make the movements of performing artists more efficient and less likely to cause injuries. Biomechanics...

Nov 30, 2014

Ho, Ho, How to Track Santa's Journey This Christmas

When is Santa coming? It's a question that pops up a lot this time of year. But Santa fans can rest assured they'll get a quick, detailed answer to that query this holiday season, thanks to the folks at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). For more than 50...

Nov 30, 2014

Math for Drones, Self-Driving Cars Wins Top Student Science Award

Mathematical research that could help drones navigate, and computer models for how trees growsnagged top honors at a national student math and science competition, the event's organizers announced today (Dec. 9). Twenty of the nation's brightest high school students descended on Washington, D.C., over the weekend for the 15th annual...

Nov 30, 2014

'Captain America' to 'Interstellar': The Science of 2014's Sci-Fi

From intelligent machines to intelligent apes, and from alien plant creatures to wormhole-hopping spacefarers, the sci-fi movies of 2014 brought a heap of science tidbits to the screen. Here are the 12 best science nuggets from the last 12 months of science-fiction films: January: I, Frankenstein shows how science blurs...

Oct 31, 2014

Here’s How to Fix America’s Crumbling Bridges

This article was originally published on The Conversation. The publication contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. There are about 600,000 bridges in the United States, and about one in four is classified as functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. This doesn’t mean they’re in danger of...

Sep 30, 2014

Chaos! Space Tourists, Entrepreneurs Geek Out at Math-Themed Gala

NEW YORK — It's not every day that a gala event is devoted to the celebration of math, but that's exactly what happened Tuesday night (Oct. 14), when actor Alan Alda and mathematician Steve Strogatz regaled a crowd of New York's business elite here at the National Museum of Mathematics'...

Sep 30, 2014

Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence Is Humanity's 'Biggest Existential Threat'

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is concerned about artificial intelligence. In fact, the inventor of the private spaceflight company SpaceX and the car company Tesla says that AI is humanity's biggest existential threat. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence, Musk said in response to an audience question...

Aug 31, 2014

Apple's Watch Promises Fitness Tracking (Infographic)

The Apple Watch combines a suite of sensors with an innovative interface to provide a new computing experience on the wrist. Combined with an iPhone 5 or later (required), the Apple Watch provides fitness data and personal tracking information as well as time and other functions. The Watch's force-sensitive retina...