Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Dec 31, 2005

Why Cell Phones Should be Allowed in Hospitals

The prohibition against mobile phones in hospitals may do more harm than good, a new report reveals. Medical facilities prohibit cell phone use, but some doctors already use them. And it turns out they reduce medical errors because communication is more timely, a new study finds. Mobile phones rarely cause...

Dec 31, 2005

Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's web site, if you click on Telegrams in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue...

Sep 30, 2007

Three-Legged Robot Has a Swinging Walk

A unique three-legged robot called STriDER is under development at Virginia Tech University. It's name stands for (Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot. This cunning four-foot tall stick-figure bot has a totally unique way of walking. One researcher described it as being like a biped with a walking stick. The STriDER...

Sep 30, 2007

Hillary Clinton Promises Science-Friendly White House

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton today accused the Bush Administration of conducting a war on science and vowed to promote scientific discovery in research, medicine and space exploration if elected. For six and half years under this president, it's been open season on open inquiry, Clinton said in a wide-ranging science...

Sep 30, 2007

Stem Cells Printed in 3-D with Inkjet Devices

The creation of implantable human organs with an ink-jet printer isn't as far-fetched as it might seem, a materials scientist said—at least in the future. Scientists already use ink-jet cartridges to print stem cells into exacting patterns, and now engineers are taking the technology to a whole new dimension—quite literally—by...

Sep 30, 2007

Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050

Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows. My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots, artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his...

Sep 30, 2007

Phone Uses Jaw Bone to Transmit Sound

The Pantech A1407PT cell phone has a unique ability to let you listen. It allows you to listen to your calls with your bones. The Pantech phone uses bone conduction; when the phone is placed against your jaw, the mechanical vibration from the phone is conducted to your inner ear,...

Jul 31, 2007

Company Now Selling Real Flying Saucers

Right now, only $90,000 stands between you and ownership of your own flying saucer. Except it won't take you to Venus—it looks like flying saucer but it's really a car-sized hovercraft intended to fly no higher than 10 feet. Called the M200G from Moller International of Davis, CA, the craft...

Jul 31, 2007

Custom Print Human Bones With 3-D Inkjet Printer

Custom-made artificial bones for implantation in humans are being printed using 3-D inkjet printers. Researchers at the Tissue Engineering Department at the University of Tokyo Hospital and venture capitalist Next 21 have performed trials on 10 people in the past year and a half. Here's the process used to make...

Jun 30, 2007

New Supercomputer is Fastest Yet

Running about 100,000 times faster than a high-end desktop PC, IBM has unveiled the world’s fastest computer. Already, it's not fast enough. The new king of the supercomputers is the IBM Blue Gene/P running at a speed of at least one petaflop per second, meaning it can solve one quadrillion...

Jun 30, 2007

Smart Robot Learns to Climb Mountains

The first climber to ascend the highest mountain in the solar system might be a robot rather than a human. The humble origins of such a mechanical pioneer? A robot that stumbles around a lot before it nimbly stalks the slopes. Before any mountaineering robots ever head off to space,...

Jun 30, 2007

Move Over Elmer's: New 'Geckel' Glue Redefines Sticky

Glue like the kind that mussels use to glom onto rocks has been combined with the stickiness seen in gecko feet to form a new adhesive dubbed geckel that could one day bind wounds closed and help robots climb walls underwater. Geckos are lizards with the remarkable ability to scamper...

Jun 30, 2007

New Fingerprint Technique Could Reveal Diet, Sex, Race

A victim might not care if a murderer is a smoker or a vegetarian. But having such knowledge could help police solve a case. Details like this could one day be at their fingertips if a new fingerprinting technique pans out as expected. Standard methods for collecting fingerprints at crime...

Mar 31, 2007

New Hard Drives Hold a Terabyte of Data

Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). Yes, you can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Breaking the ice with a Hitachi drive was Dell,...

Feb 28, 2007

Medication 'Robot' Fits Inside Tooth

IntelliDrug is an IST Program project to develop a device for controlled drug delivery that is the size of a tooth (it may be as large as several molars). The IntelliDrug device would be implanted in the mouth of a patient, where it could provide regular, measured doses of medication....