University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC)

Phytoplankton form the base of the marine food chain but are notoriously difficult for scientists to account for — a little like trying to identify and count motes of dust in the air. A truly independent underwater vehicle shows it can do the job. Trygve Olav Fossum watched an orange, torpedo-shaped instrument slide off the

Cell circuits remember their history MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the cell’s DNA and passed on for dozens of generations. The circuits, described in the Feb. 10 online edition of Nature Biotechnology, could be used as long-term

ETH researchers are able to make objects such as particles and liquid droplets fly in mid-air by letting them ride on acoustic waves. For the first time, they have been able to also control the movement of objects, merge droplets, letting them react chemically or biologically and even rotate a toothpick in the air. A

A way to write messages that will vanish spontaneously

Image via CrunchBase Raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that launches today to ensure

Image by mmechtley via Flickr Researchers have overcome a fundamental obstacle in developing breath-analysis technology to rapidly diagnose patients by detecting chemical compounds called “biomarkers” in a person’s respiration in real time. The researchers demonstrated their approach is capable of rapidly detecting biomarkers in the parts per billion to parts per million range, at least

Google’s experiment shows that having more processing power and more data makes a difference Working at the secretive Google X lab, researchers from Google and Stanford connected 1,000 computers, turned them loose on 10 million YouTube stills for three days, and watched as they learned to identify cat faces. The research, thus summarized, is good

Because nature does not present the world in the form we would like, we must reorder it. To create this new order, we need information about what that order is supposed to look like, knowledge about how to build it and energy to get it into shape. Many technological revolutions of the past have focused

More powerful batteries could help electric cars achieve a considerably larger range and thus a breakthrough on the market. A new nanomaterial for lithium ion batteries developed in the labs of chemists at ETH Zurich and Empa could come into play here. They provide power for electric cars, electric bicycles, smartphones and laptops; nowadays, rechargeable

Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind, two-armed, robotic rehabilitation exoskeleton that could provide a new method of high-quality, data-driven therapy to patients suffering from spinal and neurological injuries. Mechanical engineering researcher Ashish Deshpande and a team of graduate students from the Rehabilitation and