Science and research

Many superheroes come equipped with special seeing abilities, like X-ray vision or night vision. Superman even sports telescopic vision, the ability to see over long distances. Researchers are working on a contact lens that bestows telescopic vision, though it won't let you spy on faraway planets.

The lens experiment came about through DARPA-funded research into vision enhancement devices for soldiers. What the researchers developed could become a solution for people suffering from age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness for older adults. The goal is to improve vision with an unobtrusive device.… Read more

The tale of the Arkyd telescope is like that of the "little engine that could."

What seemed like a difficult task -- raising $1 million from a Kickstarter campaign to launch the world's first public space telescope -- was overcome on Monday as the crowdfunding goal was met with more than $1.5 million in pledges.

Not only did asteroid mining company Planetary Resources achieve its goal, it surpassed it, which means that the extra money can be used to add even more features to the telescope.

More than 17,600 people backed the Kickstarter campaign -- … Read more

When I was a varsity swimmer in high school, I was taught creative visualization, which is a fancy way of saying that I would sit in a quiet place, close my eyes, and imagine myself in an upcoming race -- stroke for stroke. I could feel the temperature of the water, the pounding of my heart, the overwhelming urge to breathe as I sliced through the water without once turning my head for air. It was a mental rather than physical exercise, and for me at least, it translated to faster racing times.

For years, researchers have investigated this phenomenon, and now a new little study out of Temple University's Center for Obesity Research and Education finds that watching an avatar model healthy behaviors can actually help women lose weight in the real world.… Read more

Ann Makosinski is a 15-year-old with a flashlight obsession. She won a bronze award for a piezoelectric flashlight at the Canada-Wide Science Fair last year. This year, her battery-free Hollow Flashlight has taken her all the way to the top-15 finalists of the Google Science Fair.

Makosinski was inspired by the idea that the human body is like a walking 100-watt lightbulb with untapped thermal energy potential. She decided to build a flashlight powered only by the warmth of a hand.

The basis for the Hollow Flashlight is Peltier tiles, tiles that produce electricity when one side is heated and the other side cooled.… Read more

Ever lose sleep over e-mails you've sent? Messages of an embarrassing nature that make you wish you hadn't clicked on "send"?

AT&T is thinking of you. It applied for a patent for self-deleting e-mail. Once sent, these missives won't hang around in some inbox waiting for someone to do what he pleases with them. They'll disintegrate, so to speak.

"Method, System, and Apparatus for Providing Self-Destructing Electronic Mail Messages" is U.S. patent application number 20130159436 and was recently made public. … Read more

File this one under the grossly, absurdly, and perhaps soon patently awesome. Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a system by which cockroaches may actually perform search and rescue.

Using Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect, they plotted a path for cockroaches and tracked them. Researchers nudged the roaches into motion with wires attached to the bugs' sensory appendages, and they steered the roaches by sending small electrical impulses to wires attached to the bugs' antennae. The old-fashioned horse and whip are just so crude by comparison.

Still, why the cockroach? Presumably their size could prove useful in … Read more

Do you really wish you had X-ray vision? Sure, it would be fun to see what your neighbors are doing behind those walls -- until you see something you wish you hadn't.

Regardless, researchers at MIT have developed a sensing technology that uses low-power Wi-Fi to detect moving people. It follows other wall-penetrating sensor tech using radar and heavy equipment.

The Wi-Vi system by Dina Katabi and Fadel Adib sends out a low-power Wi-Fi signal and tracks its reflections to sense people moving around, even if they're in closed rooms or behind walls. … Read more

Most vaccines work by giving the immune system a crash course in how to attack bacteria or viruses. The goal is to protect against diseases -- think influenza, polio, and smallpox, which have collectively killed tens of millions of people in recent history.

Now an experimental vaccine being developed at Stanford University uses an entirely different approach to get at the same end goal -- protecting against type 1 diabetes by instructing a diabetic's immune system to stop attacking its own body.… Read more

A prototype device created by John Hopkins University grad students can enable a pathologist to inspect excised breast tissue mid-surgery to determine whether a cancerous tumor has been fully removed.

The prototype's ability to dramatically reduce the time to inspect breast tissue -- down to as quickly as 20 minutes -- could ultimately decrease, if not flat out eliminate, the need for a second operation on the same tumor, John Hopkins announced this week.

One in five women who have surgery to remove cancerous breast tissue have to go back for follow-up surgery because not all the diseased tissue … Read more