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It would be hard to think of a more arresting experience than waking up in the middle of your own open heart surgery. While many patients make an excellent recovery, the body does not readily forget the trauma of this now familiar procedure. A softer, more creative approach to treating damaged hearts has recently been developed by Amit Patel at ...

Remember back in the day, when a single Bitcoin traded for a mere $ 100? It was a simpler time, before the nightly news began reporting on the value of hash strings, before every shared startup space was home to at least one virtual prospector and all the associated leaflets about crypto-anarchist society meetings. Bitcoin’s most avid supporters were still the ...

Impurities in diamonds can not only give them color, they can also turn diamonds into precise sensors of magnetic field and temperature. When the impurity happens to be a nitrogen atom, the crystal structure is deformed in such a way that a gap or defect, known as a nitrogen vacancy-center (NVC), is created. Electrons that are trapped in the centers ...

At Intel’s Analyst Day last week, the company spoke a great deal about its plans for the future of tablets and its belief that the PC market was done contracting. Along the way, almost incidentally, Intel gave notice that the company’s old plans for the mobile phone market were dead in the water. To understand how significant the change has ...

Renewable energy has been of increasing interest as the dwindling supply of easily accessible fossil fuels pushes us toward dirtier sources of oil and natural gas. Researchers are constantly pushing the boundaries of what solar cells and wind turbines are capable of, but the constraints of land and weather limit where vast solar or wind farms can be set up. ...

It’s crazy, but one of the most dangerous things you can do is visit the hospital. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that nearly two million hospital patients contract a healthcare-associated infection (HAI) every year, and 90,000 of those HAIs result in death. These infections — superbugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile (C. diff) — ...

Over the last few decades, we’ve slowly gained the ability to digitally affect the human senses. First, of course, there was smell-o-vision, which releases a combination of chemicals to simulate a specific scent (smoke, chocolate, oranges, etc.) With electrical stimulation of our nerves, we can simulate the sensation of touch. In the last few years, we’ve seen retinal implants that ...

You are looking at a stunning photo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest dwarf galaxies to the Milky Way. Captured by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (points for creativity), the photo shows an active region of stellar birth on the right, and the remnants of explosive stellar death — supernova — on the left. The VLT is the ...

Over the past year, we’ve told the sad story of NASA’s Kepler space observatory, and how the failure of two vital components have resulted in the sad and premature retirement of humanity’s best tool for spotting Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe. Just when all hope seemed lost, though, NASA has approved an ingenious plan to bring Kepler back online ...

Believe it or not, the first cold fusion power plant is now available to pre-order. The E-Cat 1MW Plant, which comes in a standard shipping container, can produce one megawatt of thermal energy, using low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) — a process, often known as cold fusion, that fuses nickel and hydrogen into copper, producing energy 100,000 times more efficiently than ...