Monday - May 5, 2008
One gray squirrel, its bushy tail twitching, barked a warning as another scrounged for food nearby. It was an ordinary spring day, except that the rodent issuing the warning was powered by amps, not acorns. Dubbed "Rocky" after the cartoon character, the robo-squirrel was working its way into a live-squirrel clique, controlled by researchers several yards away with a laptop computer and binoculars. By capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky may help researchers decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts.
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Monday - May 5, 2008
Bioengineering professor Boris Rubinsky has what he hopes is the perfect antidote to bulky, expensive, hard-to-use medical machines: the mobile phone. The University of California professor says that by reducing a complex electromagnetic imaging machine to a portable electromagnetic scanner, he has essentially replicated a $10,000 piece of equipment for just hundreds of dollars.
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Friday - May 2, 2008
eBay's strange legal dispute with Craigslist just got weirder. The auction giant has disclosed the details of its lawsuit against the king of online classifieds, and here's what the dispute boils down to: eBay took a stake in Craigslist, agreeing to certain conditions regarding competitive behavior.
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Friday - May 2, 2008
Scientists believe that virtual worlds can help patients in therapy to overcome addictions. A new study by University of Houston associate professor Patrick Bordnick reveals that a virtual reality environment can provide a safe haven in which patients can practice how to say "no" when offered drugs or alcohol.
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Friday - May 2, 2008
Last week, GlaxoSmithKline announced it will buy Sirtris Pharmaceuticals for $720 million, giving weight to the claim that antiaging biotech firms can be a good bet. This is good news for Americans, given that a recent Harvard-affiliated study showed that some parts of the country have seen declines in expected longevity.
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Thursday - May 1, 2008
Researchers at HP Labs have proven the existence of the "memristor," a component of electrical circuits that could lead to computer systems with memories that never forget, the company announced Wednesday. The memristor -- short for "memory resistor" -- was previously only theorized to be the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering.
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Thursday - April 24, 2008
Galaxies colliding! Sounds like a job for the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Astronomers believe galaxies have been running into each other for billions of years. There's even evidence our own Milky Way galaxy has swallowed a smaller companion, with more to come, both big and small.
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Thursday - April 24, 2008
Major greenhouse gases in the air are accumulating faster than in the past despite efforts to curtail their growth. Carbon dioxide concentration in the air increased by 2.4 parts per million last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Wednesday, and methane concentrations also rose rapidly.
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Monday - April 14, 2008
NASA's new Mars rover aims high. It's bigger, more powerful and more sophisticated than any other robotic vehicle that has landed on another planet. It will try to answer a big question: Has life existed elsewhere in the solar system? Its very ambition has gotten the rover in trouble. Thanks to a mix of technological setbacks and engineering misjudgments, the rover's epic scale is matched by epic problems.
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Wednesday - April 9, 2008
As a Russian Soyuz spacecraft rose into the bright blue sky Tuesday, spectators held their breaths, South Koreans celebrated their first astronaut and the astronaut's mother fainted. The flight itself -- launched from the same pad that sent Yuri Gagarin and Sputnik into space -- seemed flawless. The spacecraft lifted off within seconds of its scheduled departure and delivered its crew into orbit about 10 minutes later.
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Tuesday - April 8, 2008
Here I am tempting fate. Risking my life. Writing a blog post. Bloggers are living on the edge, suggests Matt Richtel. It's harrowing having to come up with all those ideas and translate them into words. The hunger for cyber scoops robs them of sleep. The endless hunt for eyeballs is a merciless slog.
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