science

If electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla designed a weapon, it very well might look like Rob Flickenger's Tesla Gun.

The self-described "mad science" enthusiast dreamed up a Tesla rifle after reading the graphic novel "The Five Fists of Science," which features a cover image of a young Tesla wielding several weapons with a built-in Tesla coil.

Flickenger tapped "Seattle's many hackerspaces" to help design and build the Tesla coil cannon over the course of many months. The high-voltage gun balances seriously dangerous science and an array of everyday electrical components capable of firing off 20,000 volts of hair-raising power with a simple click of a trigger. … Read more

Materials scientists have turned high-tech powders into an electronic nose that could be used for safety and health applications.

U.K.-based Peratech today announced that it has designed a device able to detect harmful chemicals, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs). It uses a new type of electronically conductive material, made in a powder form, which is also being used to add touch controls to mobile phones and other surfaces.

Called quantum tunneling composite material, it can create an electrical current when it bends or is touched. For the electronic nose, the material can be placed on films and … Read more

President Obama today made a campaign stop at a major chip research and manufacturing in hub in New York to reemphasize his made-in-America theme.

Obama visited the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany, State University of New York. CNSE is an education and research facility centered on nanotechnology.

The visit was intended to highlight "insourcing" and the connection between education, innovation, and manufacturing in supporting investment and bringing jobs back to the U.S.

The region is home to chipmakers IBM and Globalfoundries, the latter is in the final stages of constructing … Read more

President Obama will visit a chipmaking region in New York that includes a just-completed Globalfoundries manufacturing facility, one of the most advanced in the world.

Globalfoundries (GF) announced that it will take part in hosting a visit by President Obama on May 8 at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering's (CNSE) NanoTech Complex at the State University of New York in Albany. The President's visit was originally planned to be held at Globalfoundries new Fab 8 facility but was moved to CNSE for logistical reasons, according to the chipmaker.

Fab 8 -- located in Malta, N.Y. … Read more

Once in awhile, a supermassive black hole gets a sumptuous treat. A passing star wanders too close and gets caught in the black hole's gravitational pull, like a fly trapped in a spider's web. The star then becomes an easy meal for the black hole, which tears its prey to bits and ingests a good portion of it.

Astronomers have witnessed several such disruptions before in distant galaxies, but usually only toward the end of the process. (These feedings are far too rare, however, to have been witnessed in our own Milky Way anytime in recent human history; … Read more

Are people endangering with their lives, risking cancer, brain tumors, and infertility by talking on their cell phones? A new review by the U.K.'s Health Protection Agency (HPA) says no.

Scientists conducting the review looked at hundreds of studies and assessed all major research into "low-level radio frequency," which they said comes not only from mobile phones but also TV and radio broadcasting, Wi-Fi, and other technologies, and concluded that everyone in the U.K. is exposed to "universal and continuous" radio frequency, according to the BBC.

Despite this constant exposure, the scientists said … Read more

The latest iPad and its "resolutionary" display have made ever-smaller pixels all the rage, but here's a sculpture that boldly and beautifully goes in the opposite direction.

"Patterned by Nature" (see video below) is made up of 3,600 tiles of LCD glass -- each roughly the size of a laptop screen -- and is 90 feet long and 10 feet wide. The giant sculpture hangs in the several-story atrium of the just-opened Nature Research Center in North Carolina, a new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Each LCD can display various levels of blue-gray transparency, from clear all the way to opaque. And the matrix as a whole is used as a giant screen of sorts to show 20 different animations of different natural phenomena -- a flock of geese swooping through the atrium, say, or the pattern of rain splashing into a pond.… Read more

Calm down, already. NASA swears that the Earth absolutely, definitely will not be annihilated by a massive flaming belch from the sun this year.

But just in case you're still a little worried, you'll no doubt be reassured to know the august space agency is holding nothing back in its efforts to study the sun's activity in 2012. In fact, it's even gone so far as to enlist the help of a very, very serious group of high school students, equipped with that most serious of scientific instruments: the rubber chicken.

Yes, students of Bishop Union High in Bishop, Calif. -- along with their mentor, Science@NASA's Tony Phillips, and a group of fifth-grade assistants -- recently launched a rubber chicken into the stratosphere during the most intense solar radiation storm since 2003.

Don't post a nasty, budget-related comment just yet, though. This wasn't any old astrorubberchicken; this was Camilla -- the mascot of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory -- and she was wearing a specially knitted spacesuit complete with high-tech sensors for measuring radiation. She was also accompanied by a specially modified lunchbox equipped with four cameras, two GPS trackers, a cryogenic thermometer, two-dozen sunflower seeds, and seven insects.… Read more

We all struggle with our priorities daily.

Who, therefore, cannot hold loving hands with the fine, struggling minds at the University of Florida? For they have searched their souls and deduced that quite a lot of its Computer And Information Science and Engineering Department might be surplus to requirements.

I was initially grateful to Forbes for offering this disturbing information.

Forbes said that the school -- faced with the need to cut budgets -- sees insufficient use for teaching assistants in computer science, so it intends to chop them out. The graduate and research programs? Oh, what can they possibly … Read more