The process of using roaches to create power has something to do with an enzyme roaches have that can be turned into a cockroach biofuel cell. The enzyme from the roach is able to break down sugars in the digestive tract into simpler sugars called monosaccharides. A second enzyme is introduced that oxidizes the monosaccharides and results in the release of electrons or creation of power.

So far, the system only produces around 100 µW of power, which admittedly isn’t much. Who knows what be done with that little bit of power in the future, perhaps something along the lines of little remote-control roaches to invade roach strongholds and disperse bug killer. According to the researchers, hailing from Case Western Reserve University, the little bugs aren’t harmed in any way. The electronics that are used to create power can be removed from the insects with no lasting effects.

[via medGadget via OhGizmo!]

The coolest of the projects that received grant money is one proposed by a team of scientists at Boston University that want to figure out if you can grow brown fat cells and then inject them into the human body as a way to boost metabolism and burn fat, leading to weight loss. The human body has both brown adipose tissue and white adipose tissue. The white fat cells make people obese, yet the brown fat cells help burn calories.

In fact, a recent study showed that a pockets of brown fat cells can burn as much as 250 calories in a three-hour time span. Those brown fat cells can even steal energy from white fat cells, further stunting obesity. The researchers hope to develop a method of growing those brown fat cells and injecting them into the body with the goal of helping overweight soldiers lose weight. You can bet that if the team is successful, this will also be highly profitable in the private sector with obese people looking for a way to lose weight.

[via Wired: Danger Room]

Right now the single biggest space hazard in orbit are the thousands of pieces of debris left over after the Chinese conducted an anti-satellite test with a missile back in 2007. Early Sunday morning this past weekend, mission controllers in Russia had to make a change in the orbital altitude of the ISS to avoid a chunk of that Chinese space debris that was coming perilously close to the ISS.

Mission controllers fired up the engines on the Russian Zvezda service module and over 64 seconds raised the orbit of the ISS by 1.7 km. The ISS is now orbiting at an altitude of 391.6 km above the surface of the Earth. The increased orbital distance was enough to get the ISS away from the chunk of space debris. It seems like we need to start coming up with a good plan to clean up all the junk orbiting the Earth.

[via SpaceDaily]

According to the Russian, the object is an organism with the body of a scorpion or a crab, a disc shape and a back flap that changed position from one shot to the next the probe took. Life on Venus is hard for most people to imagine, since the surface of the planet can reach temps of 464°C, and the gravity is nine times that of Earth.

A scientist that works with the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University doesn’t believe the Russian is seeing what he thinks. According to Jonathon Hill, who processes images NASA takes of Mars, what Prof. Ksanfomaliti sees is a piece of mechanical equipment which broke off on landing. He also thinks that the reason it looks like it changed positions is that the images were taken by two different cameras on the craft.

Hill also says that the same object shows up in photos taken by another probe called Venera 14 that landed nearby. Venera 14 and Venera 13 are identical, and likely both dropped the same bit of debris on the ground. What do you think from the blurry images here? I can certainly see something you might think are legs, but the mechanical equipment theory seems much more logical.

[via Telegraph]

Demonstrated in the video below – albeit on a very small fire – their system manages to snuff out a flame by destabilizing the fire by playing with electromagnetism and acoustics. While the DARPA program that drove the experiment aims to extinguish fires instantly, this technique does take a few seconds to kill these small methane flames.

It’s unclear exactly how it works, and there’s no evidence that they could scale it up to put out larger fires with the same technique. Still, it’s kind of magical how they just wave that little wand over the flames, and it puts them out for good.

[DARPA via Geekosystem]

The project is aimed at making a roof for a car that would allow the people inside to see out at during the day and capture solar energy as well. Then at night, the roof turns into a glowing OLED light. I think the windows of homes could someday use this technology too. They could capture solar power during the day to power the house and then turn into room lighting at night.

The OLED light is only 1.8mm thick and provides a uniform and soft glow across the entire surface. By combining this with an invisible solar panel, you get power and light in one device without blocking your view. Apparently, the technology is being developed for the sunroof of Daimler’s unusual Smart Forvision concept EV, shown below:

[via TG Daily and OLED-Info]

For people who are wound up too tight, it’s a great way to release the stress and pent-up energy. And for the interns at  Open University’s computer science department, it’s something that has been programmed to take punches and turn them into different forms of stimulus and feedback.

The characteristics of each punch are detected using impact sensors and an accelerometer. These signals are then processed in an Arduino processor, which provides sounds, lights, images, and other information. In addition to playing music, this particular punching bag can also emit laughter, or even a sigh when hugged.

The interactive punching bag was intended investigate the impact of feedback and stimulus on the users (or the punchers), as well as observe what effects impact interactive design might make on the user (or puncher) experience over time.

Pretty cool, huh?

[via Dvice]

Generally, the smaller the wires in a semiconductor get, the more resistance they have making them less efficient. The team of researchers from the University of New South Wales has discovered a way to make tiny wires that have extremely low resistance. The tiny wires are made by stringing together individual atoms on silicon making wires as tiny as four atoms wide. For those of you counting, four atoms measure about 1.5 nanometers.

The team prepared each wire by lithographically writing lines onto a silicon sample with microscopy techniques and then depositing phosphorus along the line. The closely packed phosphorus atoms were then encase in silicon and resistivity stayed down, at least at low temperatures. The new wires have the carrying capacity of copper and could allow microchips to continue the shrink and meet Moore’s law ever-increasing demands.

[via Scientific American]

The LHC I am talking about here was created out of LEGO bricks by a physicist named Sascha Mehlhase in his spare time away from all the physicsy stuff he does during his normal days.

He did a heck of a job with it too – it looks very realistic. The 1:50 scale LEGO LHC uses 9,500 different components, and took Sascha about 33 hours to build (after spending about 48 hours on the 3D model to base it on.) The thing cost 2000 euros (about $2585 USD) in parts to build.

I wonder what he did with the finished product. I also wonder if he could create a tiny LEGO Higgs boson particle so at least one LHC could find the particle it’s looking for.

[via Nerdcore via PC World]

Apparently, the bone was discovered when the “permanently” frozen permafrost thawed thanks to global warming. Inside this particular thighbone hides some well-preserved bone marrow. Inside that bone marrow is suspected to be DNA that could be harvested for nuclei and then that nuclei could be implanted into an elephant embryo.

Since the mammoth and elephant are closely related, the mammoth DNA-based embryos would then be implanted into elephants for the wait until a baby mammoth pops out.

We heard something similar to this story back at the beginning of the year, but with the potential DNA now in hand, it could make mammoths roaming the planet a reality even sooner. The team plans to study whether or not this is possible in 2012.

[via Google]

Part of the problem is having an infrastructure and supply chain for such liquid refills. That’s where urine comes in handy. We all produce it everyday, so it is widely available and cheap. Researchers at the University of the West of England in Bristol have started experimenting with urine as the fuel for a microbial fuel cell.

Microbial fuel cells generate their power from bacteria feeding on the sugars and give off electrons. Did you know that humans produce 6.4 trillion liters of urine every year? That’s just humans. If you include farm animals there’s 38 billion liters every day right there.

So far, tests have produced a very small amount of power (peaking at whopping 8 milliamps). By miniaturizing and stacking microbial fuel cells, they hope to increase the power significantly. It’s fascinating stuff. Just think – one day our toilets could power our homes.

[via BBC News via geek]

This latest idea gets rid of those random clumps and decides to instead make larger grains (ten nanometers, up from seven to eight nanometers), in regular patterns, which each store one bit. A spokesperson from Singapore’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering likens it to packing your clothes in a suitcase. The neater you pack it all in, the more it can carry.

They use an e-beam lithography process that produces fine nano-scale structures for the discs and when sodium chloride is added to the developer solution, they found that they could create nanostructures with a higher resolution: down to 4.5 nanometers half pitch, without overly expensive equipment. In the end, this salty process could allow for anywhere from 1.9TB to 3.3TB per square-inch, a substantial increase from today’s capacities.

[via Wired]

Just think: self-cleaning underwear, self-cleaning aprons, self-cleaning baby clothes, self-cleaning shirts, and so on and so forth. It seems too good to be true, but it’s all made possible because of a chemical compound called 2-anthraquinone carboxylic acid or 2-ACQ.

The compound was developed by a team of researchers from the University of California: Davis. Ning Liu, who came up with a method to incorporate 2-ACQ into cotton fabric, explained: “The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing and farmworkers, as well as military personnel.”

2-ACQ forms a strong bond with the cellulose in cotton, so it’s extremely hard to wash off. When the compound is exposed to light, it produced reactive oxygen species, such as hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals, that combat bacteria and cause organic compounds such as pesticides and other toxins to disintegrate.

[via medGadget via Oh Gizmo!]

Since human beings are so naturally curious, some scientists have implanted several monkeys with implants that have allowed them to “move and feel virtual objects” much like humans can do with just their (well, our) imaginations. These researchers from the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering say they have achieved the “first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body” using brain-machine-brain interfaces.

Like Jake Sully in Cameron’s Avatar, these primates were able to control simian avatars in a virtual world filled with virtual objects. What was impressive was that they were able to identify what an object was, simply by feeling it out virtually in the virtual world. Now that’s virtual identification.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Neurobiology professor Miguel Nicolelis, who serves as the leader for the study, describes some practical uses for this technology in the future: “We hope that in the next few years this technology could help to restore a more autonomous life to many patients who are currently locked in without being able to move or experience any tactile sensation of the surrounding world.”

…or we could use it to send monkeys into space to convince some aliens to give up their Unobtanium.

[via io9 via Dvice and Geeks Are Sexy]

Kidding aside, the technology is Boeing’s way of “bringing science to the art of firefighting.” When I read “water balloons,” the first thing that popped into my head were the type of water balloons that I used to throw at my sisters (to piss them off) when I was much younger. Obviously, the ones used for Boeing’s firefighting system, Precision Container Aerial Delivery System (PCADS), are much larger, more durable, and environment-friendly. Each water balloon can hold about 250 gallons of water or fire-retardant. Not only is this method of fighting fires more accurate, but a regular C-130 cargo plane can be used to drop them, and can drop water at a higher altitude than traditional firefighting airplanes.

PCADS is still in its test phase, though, so forest fires will still have to be fought the traditional way for now. But I’m interested to see how big of a difference using PCADS will actually make in fighting such fires.

[via Dvice]

Gallant Lab researchers Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu and Jack L. Gallant used a complex computer program that looked at the minute changes in blood flow inside the brain during an fMRI and then used those changes to approximate the video that the person being studied was watching on YouTube. Obviously, the video recreated isn’t high quality, but it is a close approximation to what was actually being viewed.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The computer used shapes and colors to approximate the video images giving them the rough and general feel of the video being seen by the participant. The cool part is that future applications for this software may allow us to actually watch our dreams or daydreams.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via ABCNews]

But if your kids love insects, then you might want to buy them this gadget, which lets them suck up bugs and then study them up close and personal. The fly-goodbye gun uses pump-action suction to capture bugs into plastic cylinders, each of which keep your bug prisoners alive long enough to inspect them via a magnifying lens at the end of the tube.

Of course, you can also use it to suck up unwanted pests and let them loose outside (or cut off their air supply and put them out of their buggy misery if you’re feeling cruel). It’ll also sweep up dead bugs you just would rather not touch.

The Fly-Goodbye bug gun is available over at Gizmine for $59.95 (USD).

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

So what several Japanese scientists from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute did instead was develop a chemical reagent that could turn biological tissues transparent. The photo above is not of a human embryo (because not only is it unethical, it’s also illegal, but the thought still crossed my mind all the same), but of a mouse embryo.

The reagent is called Scale (with an italicized “l”, as you can see) and was developed by Atsushi Miyawaki and his team at RIKEN. Scale can turn any tissue transparent, without causing any major alternations or changes in the overall shape or proportion of the sample. While Scale is definitely the most advanced of its kind, it still has a long way to go. The reagent can be used on living tissue; however, it quickly turns the tissue from living to non-living because of its nature.

Miyawaki explains that Scale was primarily intended for conducting research on the brain of mice, but that he and his team hope to improve the reagent more to extend its application to heart, muscle, and kidney tissues–not only of rodents, but also to human and primate tissues in the future.

[via PopSci via Dvice]

I doubt that’s ever going to become a reality. But what scientists are coming close to doing is coming up with a laser that, when shot at clouds, can induce precipitation. In simpler words, that translates to “make it rain.”

Humans making it rain? That doesn’t like it’s something new, I know, but this method is. Traditionally, man can induce rain by using a method called cloud seeding. It’s basically injecting a certain chemical or substance such as silver iodide that serves as the “seed” to make it rain. However, some of these chemicals (specifically, silver iodide) are toxic and have detrimental effects on humans and animals.

The team of scientists from the University of Geneva have recently published their results detailing how they were able to induce the formation of droplets of water in the air, which is the first step to creating rain itself. After over 113 hours of firing from a mobile laser lab, the team discovered that the laser was able to create particles of nitric acid in the air, which can jumpstart the condensation process.

[via Wired]

About 4 km underneath the Amazon River, they have discovered a new river that has been dubbed the Rio Hamza after the leader of the team. The river is said to be twice as wide as the Amazon River and just as long.

The Amazon River is 1km to 100km (~.62 to 62 miles) in width. The Rio Hamza is thought to be in the 200km to 400km (~124 to 248 miles) wide range. The underground river is much slower than the Amazon is though. The Amazon can flow as fast as 5 meters per second whereas the Rio Hamza only flows at about a millimeter an hour. The river was discovered using old deep wells abandoned by an oil drilling company in the 70′s and 80′s.

[via Guardian]