Science

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

Chances are, most of us will never have the opportunity to walk on the moon, but we might have the opportunity to send a tiny spacecraft in our stead. A Kickstarter project from Pocket Spacecraft wants to launch a moon mission full of personalized space gadgets that would report back to their Earth-bound owners.

Pocket Spacecraft is attempting to raise $440,000 to build out a whole fleet of its tiny spacecraft (called Scouts) and invest in an Interplanetary CubeSat Mothership to transport the little tykes to the lunar surface.… 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

Headphones can be so easy to lose -- but not when you have them implanted in your ears.

That's what Rich Lee decided to do. Inspired by an Instructables tutorial on how to make invisible headphones using magnets and a coil necklace with an attached amplifier, the 34-year-old entrepreneur went a step further and implanted one such headphone in each ear.

The magnets sit on the outside of the tragus, the part of the ear that projects immediately in front of the canal. The magnets function as speakers, and the coil around Lee's neck transmits to them. … Read more

Congrats to Gary M. of Las Vegas for winning a pair of Pick-Pocket Proof Pants from Clothing Arts in last week's giveaway. This week's prize is for the young tinkerers out there.

We're giving away a Boe-Bot Robot Kit from Parallax, a company that specializes in DIY robotics. CNET's Donald Bell and Seth Rosenblatt visited the Rocklin, Calif., electronics manufacturer earlier this month, and returned bearing this gift and others (stay tuned for another Parallax giveaway soon).

The Boe-Bot kit, recommended for ages 14 and up (and that includes you geeky grown-ups) lets you build and program your own rolling robot with a BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller for a brain. The bot uses touch, light, and infrared sensors to independently navigate its environment. … 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