Category: Visionaries

Forget swallowing pills or being poked by a needle. According to ABC News, scientists at Georgia Tech University have developed a way to inject vaccines directly into cells by using a laser beam to blow holes into that most basic unit of life. In this technique, scientists place blackened carbon nanoparticles (called "soot") next to the cells in question, which are then blasted with infrared ...

In the visually illustrious world of Hayao Miyazaki, anything goes. Children fly, parents turn into pigs, and shadows cook udon. One thing that doesn't exist in his fantasy land, though, is the iPad. It's a well known fact that Miyazaki is a staunch anti-techie. He owns no computer, DVD player or cell phone, and proudly communicates via handwritten letters whenever he feels the need to express ...

As it's widely argued that the Internet has depersonalized and globalized human communication, it's easy to forget that the Web was invented by a person, and in a place. With that thought in mind, Web entrepreneur and Yelp co-founder David Galbraith decided to find out, once and for all, where and by whom the Internet was brought to life. Over the course of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, who ...

Nerds everywhere are wetting their pants in anticipation of 'The Social Network' -- David Fincher's upcoming flick about Mark Zuckerberg and the birth of Facebook -- so we had to post the brand new teaser trailer. The super-cut of disembodied sound-bytes from the first trailer have been given faces -- er, more like avatars -- as the whole thing is done in instant message format. Trent Reznor's ...

Researchers at Harvard and the Children's Hospital in Boston recently combined lung and blood vessel cells with microchip technology to create what they've dubbed a "lung-on-a-chip." It may sound like the name of a cannibalistic afternoon snack, but the new gadget reportedly behaves and reacts like real lung tissue, and could radically change the way in which medical researchers study human lungs. ...

Share Everyone's worried about energy, right? Whether it's the thought of a peak-oil catastrophe (while a zillion gallons fester in the Gulf), or just an ecological desire to go green, we've become a country that frets about our future power sources. And what about pacemakers, or artificial kidneys? We can't very well expect those to go solar, but it turns out that a sugary diet might be able to ...

We all take it for granted now, but there once was a time, not too long ago, when withdrawing cash from your bank account meant waiting in lengthy lines at your local bank. Everything radically changed, of course, with the birth of the ATM. On Saturday, John Shepherd-Barron, the man widely acknowledged as responsible for creating the cash dispenser, passed away in Scotland at the age of 84. ...

Albert Einstein first postulated the possibility of amplifying protons to create "masers" in 1917, but the theory wouldn't produce effective technology until the post-World War II period. The science of masers continued to evolve over the following decade, and, in 1958, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs published a seminal report that would spark a scientific revolution. The paper ...

Don't look now, but soon HP could know about every move you make. According to CNN, HP will start depositing "smart dust" around the globe in the next two years. The term was coined in the 1990s by UC Berkeley researcher Kris Pister, who envisioned "smart dust" spreading rice-grain sized sensors across the Earth (think a more mobile version of Helen Hunt's tornado trackers in 'Twister'). These ...

According to Fox News, Japan will launch a spacecraft called Ikaros (or, Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) on May 18th on a mission to Venus. The Ikaros propulsion system uses a 46-foot sail to harness the pressure created by solar particles bouncing off the material, similar to the principle of using sails to catch wind. In fact, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ...

Wired reports that scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have created an ultrathin brain implant made from silk that could revolutionize brain-computer interface (BCI) design. BCI implants are used to record paralyzed patients' brain signals, which can be translated into computer or robotic movements. By printing electrodes onto a thin and flexible silk film, doctors could monitor parts of ...

For tech geeks, searching through old sci-fi books and films for their prescient predictions and monumental failures provides unceasing possibilities for both effusive praise and snarky ridicule. Ray Bradbury's ominous 'Fahrenheit 451' offers an assortment of such once futuristic and now modern creations, and, thanks to Ryan Hoagland, we now seem to be approaching the successful realization of ...

Researchers at Stanford University have found a way to harvest 'green' electricity from algae. WonHyoung Ryu and her team enveloped a gold electrode in an algae cell membrane, and used it to trap electrons created during photosynthesis. This is 'green' energy in its purest form (and color), since only protons and oxygen are released during this process. "This is potentially one of the cleanest ...

We wrote about Organovo's game-changing human tissue printer back in January, and the company's endeavor has gained a ton of attention since then. But organs are rather complex chunks of meat, and we've got a while to go before we see freshly printed livers shooting out of tissue machines in operating rooms. Skin, by comparison, is relatively simple stuff. Researchers at the Armed Forces ...

Muscles aren't exactly the most complex machines in the world, even if they do happen to reside within the most complex machine. As giant rubber bands, our muscles simply expand and contract to create locomotion. And yet we've relied, for the most part, on a different kind of physics for the artificial machines that we create -- typically based on simple machines (pulleys, levers, wheels and ...