in-the-lab
This Physicist Turned Time Crystals From a Theoretical Oddity to an Odd Reality
Last year, scientists created a time crystal for the first time in a lab. It wouldn’t have been possible without the theories of Chetan Nayak.
Behind the Gorgeous Microorganismal Art of Nurit Bar-Shai's 'Chemical Tweets'
Biotech meets art on a petri dish.
The Beautiful Math Behind Hollywood's First Computer-Generated Sequence
Take a look at how fractals revolutionized the film industry, turning mathematic algorithms into realistic landscapes.
Watch the Third Part of Noah Hutton's 10-Year Film on a Mapless Quest To Simulate the Human Brain
What's the minimum amount of information needed to simulate a human brain ? Do we need the whole, complete map (known as a connectome) before we begin the (computer, obviously) simulation, or some lesser knowledge threshold from which everything else...
The Higgs Boson Might Not Be as Weird as We Hoped
Wait, what? New Higgs boson results? Did you think it was over? Oh hell no. "A post today":http://profmattstrassler.com/2012/11/14/higgs-results-at-kyoto/ from physicist Matt Strassler discussing the newest Higgs findings puts it well, "Knowledge...
Science Is Giving Bee-Like Robots Bee-Like Brains
The word "drone" comes, in part, from bees, so it's really only fitting that researchers are developing aerial drones that are the size of bees. To make them so small, researchers "at Harvard":http://robobees.seas.harvard.edu/ have had to figure out...
Soon Cops Will Digitally Dust Crime Scenes for Partial Footprints
Generally, my assumption of the ins and outs of crime scene forensics is a mythicism of field detectives performing high-tech feats in order to solve a mystery with some encrusted semen. I'd only expect that investigation units have access to some...
Packaging Nature in Just the Right Way To Kill HIV Dead
The development of highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART) for HIV in the '90s is widely credited with turning a certain and excruciating doom into a chronic illness. Nowadays, instead of futilely fighting off opportunistic infections as a...
Patent Trolling Is Draining the Blood from the Idea Economy, and It's Just Getting Worse
US Patent No. 6,599,460 is barely comprehensible and not even the slightest bit sexy. It has to do with preventing irregularities in a certain kind of injection molding; like, if you were making a cheap, thin drinking cup in a mold from liquid plastic...
Our Nearest Neighbor Star Hosts an Earth-Mass Planet
An Earth-ish planet orbiting a red dwarf star would be the saddest thing. A perfect ball of rock, featuring plenty of carbon and water and methane, orbiting a dark star with no visible light, and stuck in tidal lock. That is, it orbits the star so...
CERN Is Not Creating World-Destroying Black Holes, Court Rules
A nice, concerned and probably crazy German woman is out of luck after a higher administrative court in Muenster rejected her claim that the particle accelerator at CERN is quietly creating a black hole that will destroy all of mankind. "The plaintiff...
The Navy's MacGyver Bot Makes Its Own Tools, Doesn't Have a Mullet
Having whole-heartedly employed "drones":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/20/who-the-hell-knows-how-many-civilians-drones-have-killed for air strikes, the U.S. military is now embarking on a project to put autonomous robots on the ground to serve as...