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One of the main impediments to making electric vehicles (EVs) a viable option for mainstream adoption continues to be the weight of batteries. Even with next-generation li-ion cells like those used in Tesla vehicles, it’s very difficult and expensive to get enough juice packed into such a small space. Volvo has been toying with EVs for a few years now, ...

Researchers from MIT have unveiled a new form of motion tracking that uses a three-point system to follow a person’s position, even through a totally opaque wall. Though the word “Kinect” has been thrown around quite liberally for the sake of accessibility, this is strictly a positional tracker — that means that it won’t be interpreting sign language or reading ...

When Backyard Brains began pushing its open source, remote-control cockroaches on Kickstarter, the widespread reaction was, “Why?” The project got a lot of attention, but the public was skeptical about the claim that kids were learning real science while driving a living creature, and nobody seemed to be able to come up with any other useful application for the technology. Now, ...

This story is steeped in conditional phrases and the trademark weirdness of quantum science, but for all that, it has serious implications for computing and for our basic understanding of physics. A team of researchers has managed to (very technically) break Newton’s third law of motion — that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — by accelerating laser ...

Conventional solar cells based on photovoltaic technology have come a long way in recent years, but they’re still missing a big chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum. The silicon semiconductors in a solar cell are geared toward taking infrared light and converting it directly to electricity. Meanwhile, the visible spectrum is lost as heat and longer wavelengths pass through unexploited. A ...

With a few taps, your smartphone can connect to wireless networks all over the world, but connectivity stops at the surface of the water. Using a network of sensors, a team of researchers have unveiled plans to knit the world above and below the waves together to create an underwater internet. The proposed technology has the potential to improve scientific data ...

There was a huge controversy last year surrounding publication of a paper in Science about the bird flu virus. The paper basically described how bird flu can be made more virulent. The same drama is now being played out once again, only this time it involves a particularly nasty variety of the botulinum bacteria, which happens to be the same ...

At long last, engineers at Florida International University have found a way of breaking the 2D limitation of magnetic hard drive storage. By moving to three dimensions, the researchers have massively increased areal density, with the possibility of 100-terabyte (and larger) hard drives now firmly on the horizon. While we’ve covered a lot of magnetic storage breakthroughs, they have all ...

On Jupiter and Saturn, half-inch diamonds fall from the atmosphere like rain. No, this writer isn’t enjoying a particularly opulent LSD trip: New research by a NASA scientist says that up to 1,000 tonnes (2.2 million pounds) of diamonds are created in Saturn’s atmosphere every year, with Jupiter’s atmosphere being a prodigious producer of diamonds as well. This new research ...

There will likely come a day when humanity itself has shuffled off the mortal coil, leaving behind nothing but data to list our accomplishments. However, most of the data storage methods we currently have only last a few decades if we’re lucky. The accumulated history of mankind surely deserves more longevity than that, doesn’t it? A team of Dutch and ...