Robear robot care bear designed to serve Japan's aging population

The way Robear was designed allows its joints to be faster and more responsive, to have softer movements and to be able to lift and help patients in a safe and comfortable manner. "We really hope that this robot will lead to advances in nursing care, relieving the burden on caregivers today," says Toshiharu Mukai, leader of the Robot Sensor Systems Research Team. "We intend to continue with research toward...

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When it comes to the vocabulary of sensory perception, smell is at a significant disadvantage - especially if you speak English

Several years ago, the sensory psychologist Avery Gilbert wrote a blog post on the subject of body odor in the erotic romance novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” by E. L. James. The book, he observed, is liberally scented. At one point, its male protagonist, Christian Grey, is said to be redolent of “freshly laundered linen and some expensive body wash,” which prompts its female protagonist, Anastasia Steele, to announce, “I want to breathe this elixir for eternity.” Ana’s aroma is equally enticing...

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In Short-Lived Fish, Secrets to Aging

Turquoise killifish last no more than a few months, giving researchers a faster way of learning more about the mechanics of getting older.

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Drones Sacrificed for Spectacular Volcano Video

Video technology and science converge on an active volcano in Vanuatu, where explorer Sam Cossman operated camera-mounted drones to capture high-definition images of the spectacular yet dangerous Marum Crater. Cossman and his team piloted the drones over the 7.5-mile-wide (12-kilometer) caldera while confronting toxic gases and boiling lava.

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Pornhub Is Pioneering An Alternative Energy Source Through Wearables

As wearables gain popularity, it comes as no surprise that we're seeing them address more diverse problems and concerns. Pornhub's soon to be released Wankband is possibly the first wearable device targeted at our masturbation habits.

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Did Grief Give Him Parkinson’s?

These identical twins led virtually identical lives—with one tragic exception,

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Spring Constellations, Planets and a Solar Eclipse - March 2015 Skywatching Video

The Gemini Twins and a dimmer Cancer constellation make their way into the night sky in March. Venus, Mars and Jupiter can be seen in the early evening and Jupiter rises in the early morning.

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Life 'not as we know it' possible on Saturn's moon Titan

A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form that can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth has been modeled by a team of Cornell University researchers.

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Why 40-Year-Old Tech Is Still Running America's Air Traffic Control

On Friday, September 26, 2014, a telecommunications contractor named Brian Howard woke early and headed to Chicago Center, an air traffic control hub in Aurora, Illinois, where he had worked for eight years. He had decided to get stoned and kill himself, and as his final gesture he planned to take a chunk of the US air traffic control system with him.

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Breakthrough in understanding how cancer cells metastasize

A protein commonly found in human cells could be an important switch that activates cancer cell metastasis, according to a new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital -- The Neuro at McGill University and the MUHC. The finding focuses attention on a biological mechanism that until now was largely overlooked. The discovery of the protein's effect significantly expands our understanding of epithelial cancers such as breast and lung cancer.

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Research shows Asian herb holds promise as treatment for Ebola virus disease

New research that focuses on the mechanism by which Ebola virus infects a cell and the discovery of a promising drug therapy candidate is being published February 27, 2015, in the journal Science. Dr. Robert Davey, scientist and Ewing Halsell Scholar in the Department of Immunology and Virology at Texas Biomedical Research Institute announced today that a small molecule called Tetrandrine derived from an Asian...

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Lockheed Martin's new fusion reactor might change humanity forever

This is an invention that might change civilization as we know it: A compact fusion reactor developed by Skunk Works, the stealth experimental technology division of Lockheed Martin. It's the size of a jet engine and it can power airplanes, spaceships, and cities. Skunk Works claims it will be operative in 10 years.

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Hyperloop Construction Starts Next Year With the First Full-Scale Track

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, the company that wants to move the revolutionary transit system out of Elon Musk’s brain into the real world, plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. OK, it will only run five miles around central California, and it won’t come anywhere close to the 800 mph Musk promised, but it’s a start.

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Remember Leonard Nimoy with 12 great Spock moments

We take a trip down memory lane to bid a fond farewell to a sci-fi icon.

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Why Natural Selection Hasn’t Trashed Mental Illness

New research suggests that schizophrenia is part of what makes humans, human.

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The Eiffel Tower now generates its own power with new wind turbines

France's most recognisable landmark, the iron Eiffel Tower erected in 1889, has seen its iconic frame festooned with many different decorations and objects over the years for various celebrations. Its latest addition is a little more subtle -- and maybe a little more in keeping with the tower's original purpose as a monument to human ingenuity and artistry. As part of a major renovation and upgrade to the tower's first floor, the Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel will be adding...

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New 5G technology can download 30 movies in a second

In ten years we might look back at how we used to have to wait for films to download, or web pages to load, and wonder how we ever coped. A team of researchers has developed a 5G data connection that is 65,000 times faster than current 4G technology. The astonishing speed reached one terabit (125 gigabytes) per second - the equivalent of downloading about 30 movies in a single second.

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What It’s Like to See 100 Million Colors

Tetrachromats can see colors that most people cannot — up to 100 million, estimates suggest, which is 100 times that of the average human. Most people have three cells, or receptors, in their retinas, but tetrachomats have a fourth receptor, which may be what allows for their heightened color perception. They are usually female, and it’s estimated that about 12 percent of women carry the gene for this fourth receptor.

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NASA's Global Rainfall and Snowfall Map

NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission has produced its first global map of rainfall and snowfall. The map covers more of the globe than any previous precipitation data set and is updated every half hour, allowing scientists to see how rain and snow storms move around nearly the entire planet.

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Internet slang meets American Sign Language

As language evolves, the powers that regulate language tend to shift. Just look at the Oxford English Dictionary, who added terms like “duck face,” “lolcat,” and “hawt” to their prestigious lexicon this past December. But how do these new, internet-laden turns of phrase enter the sign language community? Was there a way of expressing “selfie" in ASL, was there a sign for “photobomb?” Our simplistic question turned into a larger conversation about the nature of communication.

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Stone Age Britons Were Eating Wheat 2,000 Years Before They Farmed It

Scientists have recovered cultivated wheat DNA from an 8,000-year-old submerged site off the British coast. The finding suggests hunter-gatherers were trading for the grain long before they grew it.

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Harrison Ford to reprise role as Deckard in 'Blade Runner' sequel - CNET

The original Rick Deckard returns in a sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic. Scott will executive produce while "Prisoners" director Denis Villeneuve has been tapped to helm the new film.

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Leonard Nimoy dead at 83

Leonard Nimoy, who lived long and prospered, died Friday at his Los Angeles home.

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Coral City

Take an exclusive look at the process behind Coral Morphologic's living artworks, colorful reefs created using coral polyps native to Miami.

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Meet 2 New Spider Species: 'Skeletorus' and 'Sparklemuffin'

A graduate student studying peacock spiders in Australia discovered two new species of the colorful eight-legged beasts.

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Dartmouth Scientists Show New Evidence That Comet Killed Dinosaurs, Not Asteroid

Some 66 million years ago, a giant hurtling mass killed off almost all the dinosaurs and around 70 percent of all other species living on Earth. Most scientists think that the extinction event was an asteroid. Professors Jason Moore and Mukul Sharma of the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth in New Hampshire say that a high-velocity comet killed off the dinosaurs.

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What Color Is This Goddamn Dress?

Since it hit Tumblr yesterday, the image below has started an internet schism that may never be healed. Some maniacs, it seems, see the dress as gold and white, while other completely reasonable people see it as blue and black.

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How science made an honest man of God

Until the Scientific Revolution, God’s power included a licence to deceive. How did science make an honest man of Him?

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Shy female kangaroos have fewer 'friends' but gather in larger groups than bolder individuals

Making friends and acquaintances is not a random act for kangaroos, instead they actively choose who they mix with and how often. Female eastern grey kangaroos have been shown to spend time with some other females while avoiding others altogether. Kangaroos live in a fission-fusion society, characterised by frequent changes of group membership, with individuals moving between temporary feeding groups and switching groups many times a day.

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Shy female kangaroos have fewer 'friends' but gather in larger groups than bolder individuals

Making friends and acquaintances is not a random act for kangaroos, instead they actively choose who they mix with and how often. Female eastern grey kangaroos have been shown to spend time with some other females while avoiding others altogether. Kangaroos live in a fission-fusion society, characterised by frequent changes of group membership, with individuals moving between temporary feeding groups and switching groups many times a day.

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Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota)

Name the tallest structures in the world. Maybe flashy skyscrapers in China or the Gulf States come to mind. Or maybe you’re thinking of U.S. icons like One World Trade Center in New York or the Willis Tower in Chicago.You’re almost certainly not thinking of TV towers. But dozens of nearly anonymous towers around the United States, most in small rural communities, dwarf all but the tallest man-made structures in the world.

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Men have hands amputated and replaced with bionic ones

Bionic hands are go. Three men with serious nerve damage had their hands amputated and replaced by prosthetic ones that they can control with their minds. The procedure, dubbed "bionic reconstruction", was carried out by Oskar Aszmann at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. The men had all suffered accidents which damaged the brachial plexus – the bundle of nerve fibres that runs from the spine to the hand. Despite attempted repairs to those nerves, the arm and hand remained paralyzed.

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Astronomers find a shockingly ancient black hole the size of 12 billion suns

Some 12.8 billion light years away, astronomers have spotted an object of almost impossible brightness — the most luminous object ever seen in such ancient space. It's from just 900 million years after the big bang, and the old quasar — a shining object produced by a massive black hole — is 420 trillion times more luminous than our sun.

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Five Things Alice in Wonderland Reveals about the Brain

Lewis Carroll’s humble tale has inspired countless films, paintings, and even a ballet. What is less well known is the way it shaped our understanding of the brain. Not just Freudian psychology and analysis, but modern neuroscience.

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Using Faulty Forensic Science, Courts Fail the Innocent

While expert testimony hooks audiences in TV dramas, in real courts, such testimony is often flawed, if not completely false.

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Europe destroys last space truck to ISS

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Sunday said it had destroyed its last supply ship to the International Space Station, bringing a seven-year venture to a successful close.

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How do dogs "see" with their noses? - Alexandra Horowitz

Let’s Begin… You may have heard the expression that dogs ‘see with their noses.’ But these creature’s amazing nasal architecture actually reveals a whole world beyond what we can see. Alexandra Horowitz illustrates how the dog’s nose can smell the past, the future and even things that can’t be seen at all.

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Are ET3 magnetic levitation tubes the future of Vancouver Island transit?

Technology company ET3 is advocating for a futuristic tube transportation system on Vancouver Island, that could move passengers from Nanaimo to Swartz Bay using magnetic levitation. "It is literally space transport on earth," Daryl Oster, founder and CEO of U.S.-based ET3, told On The Island's Gregor Craigie. "It's car-sized vehicles that are magnetically levitated and they operate in a network of tubes that have almost all of the air removed from them, to remove almost...

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Decline in smoking rates could increase deaths from lung cancer

More people may die from undiagnosed lung cancer because they don't qualify for low-dose CT scans, according to a new study.

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Networks of Genome Data Will Transform Medicine

A global network of millions of genomes could be medicine’s next great advance.Availability: 1-2 years

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NASA Satellite Tracks Saharan Dust to Amazon in 3-D

Amazing video shows how dust moves from the Sahara Desert to Brazil.

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Cannabis More Than 100 Times Safer Than Alcohol, Study Finds

You are 114 times more likely to die from overdosing on alchohol than you are from cannabis, a recent study has found. The report, published in Scientific Reports journal, compared the risks associated with 10 substances using the margin of exposure approach. This method compares a lethal dose of the drug with the dosage typically taken by recreational users. Substances tested included alcohol and nicotine, as well as illicit drugs including cocaine, heroin, ecstasy (MDMA) and methamphetamines.

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Peer into the $770,000 fighter pilot smart helmet, with X-ray vision and Iron Man head-up display

It's arguably the most expensive and technically complex piece of headgear ever produced and before any Royal Australian Air Force pilot steps into the cockpit of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) jet, they will need to be fitted with a custom-made $770,000 flight helmet. With the Australian government committed to purchasing 72 of the controversial fighters at a cost of $12.4 billion, the bill for these smart helmets alone could exceed $55 million.

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A Plan to Save the Earth That Might Kill Us All

All it requires is billions of sunlight-reflecting particles, a time commitment of centuries, and not taking the phrase 'moral hazard' too seriously.

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How Crazy Am I to Think I Actually Know Where That Malaysia Airlines Plane Is?

The unsettling oddness was there from the first moment, on March 8, when Malaysia Airlines announced that a plane from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, Flight 370, had disappeared over the South China Sea in the middle of the night. There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky—just a plane that said good-bye to one air-traffic controller and, two minutes later, failed to say hello to the next. And the crash, if it was a crash...

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After 8 centuries, rats exonerated in spread of Black Death. Gerbils implicated.

After nearly eight centuries of accusing the black rat for spreading the bubonic plague, scientists say they have compelling evidence to exonerate the much-maligned rodent. In the process, they’ve identified a new culprit: gerbils. It’s always the cute ones you have to watch out for, isn’t it? According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate data dating back to the 14th century contradicts the commonly held notion that European plague...

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The dark future of American space exploration: NASA's golden age is about to come to a thudding halt

One by one they flickered to life. Venus, first, in 1962, and two and a half years later, Mars. Our spacecraft flew by those planets, orbited them, and became manmade meteors streaking toward the first soil we couldn’t generically call "earth." Later, when we grew ambitious and confident in our abilities, humanity reached for the outer planets, probing Jupiter and Saturn in 1973 and 1979. Each mission turned conjecture into fact...

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Scientists Tried Trolling Conspiracy Theorists

For all those people claiming to “fucking love science” on the internet, there's a bunch more rallying around bullshit conspiracy theories. And research just published in ​​PLOS ONE reveals that whatever critical thinking skills the conspiracy theorists lack, they make up for in numbers, passion, and the ability to stay in their own echo chambers. It's to the point where conspiracy theorists even have a hard time (to be kind) spotting conspiracy theory parodies.

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The Luxury Liner of the Future

Watching the process of loading a cruise ship is a bewildering spectacle of logistics and organization. Tons of food and drink join a seemingly endless assembly of trucks packed with other essential supplies—lugging aboard a menagerie of goods aimed at anticipating the every need of paying passengers. Which is a sort of nice way of saying: There’s a lot of junk that gets loaded onto a cruise ship. And even more that ends up coming off of it.

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What being strapped to a rocket launch looks like (hint: awesome)

This is just awesome. A camera was strapped onto a GoFast 2014 rocket--an amateur rocket that set the record for highest and fastest rocket ever launched into space--so that we can see the entire launch from the rockets point of view. The initial burst and thrust into the air is epic and then the world starts spinning and then we see space.

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