A bacteria that can knit together cracks in concrete structures by producing a special ‘glue’ has been developed by a team of students at Newcastle University. The genetically-modified microbe has been programmed to swim down fine cracks in the concrete. Once at the bottom, BacillaFilla produces a mixture of calcium carbonate and a bacterial glue… »
In a first step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Dow AgroSciences reported engineering a plant that produces industrially relevant levels of compounds that could potentially be used to make plastics. The research is reported online in Plant Physiology, and will appear… »
Most of the today’s popular music artists use technology to add effects or adjust their singing in order to make it more interesting to new generations of listeners. A program called Vocaloid can synthesize singing of male or female voices which have been used for choruses and it has been around since 2004. One of… »
Thanks to a partnership between Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Houston’s Rice University and an Indian nonprofit, Villages for Development and Learning Foundation (ViDAL), some of the estimated 100 million Indian children who attend schools without electricity may soon have access to one of the world’s most advanced electronic notepads. Dubbed I-slate, the device is… »
By using information about specific ethical dilemmas supplied to them by ethicists, computers can effectively “learn” ethical principles in a process called machine learning. A team of researchers programmed Nao robot (toddler-sized robot we wrote about in our article about RoboCup 2009) with an ethical principle that was discovered by a computer. This learned principle… »
In one of our previous articles we already wrote about a green wall built on PNC Financial’s headquarters, and in this article we’re going to write about the currently largest and most biologically diverse outdoor green wall in North America. Designed and planted by Green over Grey designers, it is covering the Semiahmoo Public Library… »
A team from University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, led by professor Nasser Peyghambarian, developed a new type of holographic telepresence that allows the projection of a three-dimensional, moving image without the need for special eyewear such as 3D glasses or other auxiliary devices. The technology is likely to take applications ranging from telemedicine,… »
Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) robot called Tethys spent most of October crisscrossing Monterey Bay as part of Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institute (MBARI) CANON experiment where oceanographers used it to track patches of microscopic algae that were carried around the bay by currents. During this experiment, the robot showed that it could travel fast enough… »
