Category: 3. Tech

At first glance, the 5-inch-long wandering salamander doesn’t appear particularly suited for a life of aerial acrobatics. The amphibians, which can spend their entire lives in the crowns of California’s redwood trees, don’t have the membranes or skin flaps seen in gliding lizards, frogs, or mammals. But when disturbed, wandering salamanders will launch themselves into… Continue reading Skydiving salamanders have mastered falling with style

In a project led by the University of Washington, researchers showed that some people enter a state of dissociation similar to daydreaming when surfing social media. The team designed an app called Chirp, which was connected to participants’ Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users’ likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers… Continue reading People enter a ‘dissociative state’ when using social media

Researchers have developed soft robots that are capable of navigating complex environments, such as mazes, without input from humans or computer software. The soft robots are made of liquid crystal elastomers in the shape of a twisted ribbon, resembling translucent versions of rotini pasta. Credit: Yao Zhao, NC State University Researchers from North Carolina State… Continue reading Noodle-Like Robots Navigate Mazes Without Human or Computer Guidance

Credit: CyLab Privacy, security, and control of those things are paramount in the world of cryptocurrencies. “The whole cryptocurrency decentralized business is about giving control of the digital coins to you,” says Aravinda Thyagarajan, a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department advised by CyLab’s Elaine Shi. “You should control your coins, and you don’t… Continue reading Towards having your privacy and security and exchanging crypto too

Everyone loves and plays video games. Right from when we’re kids, we’re hooked on video games, and we play them well into adulthood. They’re a release from the dreariness of our everyday lives, an escape into an unknown world where we’re free from the real world for a short time. Unfortunately, we were all told… Continue reading Video games can help boost children’s intelligence

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg faces a lawsuit in Washington over his role in the network’s privacy practices. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named personally in a Washington lawsuit Monday alleging he played a direct role in decisions that set the stage for the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. The US capital’s attorney general argues that Zuckerberg… Continue reading Facebook’s Zuckerberg targeted in US privacy lawsuit

Credit: North Carolina State University Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for extracting hydrogen gas from liquid carriers that is faster, less expensive and more energy efficient than previous approaches. “Hydrogen is widely viewed as a sustainable energy source for transportation, but there are some technical obstacles that need to… Continue reading Prototype achieves 99% yield 8 times faster than conventional batch reactors

Postdoctoral researcher Jamie Kee and Professor Su Ha and the novel reactor they developed to produce pure compressed hydrogen. Credit: WSU Photo Services A new energy-efficient way to produce hydrogen gas from ethanol and water has the potential to make clean hydrogen fuel a more viable alternative for gasoline to power cars.  Washington State University… Continue reading Hydrogen production method opens up clean energy possibilities

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Digital pathology is an emerging field which deals mainly with microscopy images that are derived from patient biopsies. Because of the high resolution, most of these whole slide images (WSI) have a large size, typically exceeding a gigabyte (Gb). Therefore, typical image analysis methods cannot efficiently handle them. Seeing a need,… Continue reading A novel AI algorithm for digital pathology analysis

Modern technology certainly has a massive role to play in the fight against climate change. Solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles often take center stage. Still, there’s one more technology that isn’t so often discussed in the climate realm that could play a major role in the fight against climate change: Artificial intelligence.  Artificial… Continue reading How AI can help—and hinder—climate change action