In the classic 1966 American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew was miniaturized and injected into a body to fix a blood clot in the brain. That’s obviously not how future medical science is going to work, but the notion of creating microscopic machines to perform complex tasks is certainly on…
The Planet of the Apes prequels did much to explain how humans lost their status as the dominant species on the planet—a cataclysmic set of events fueled by a global pandemic known as the “Simian Flu.” This virus, the product of a medical experiment gone horribly wrong, wiped out the vast majority of humans, but it…
Look at this cute little snowman! I bet he won’t even melt and make me cry like the snowman from Jack Frost does.
Predicting the future is hard. It’s nearly impossible to know what technological marvels await in the next few years, let alone the next eight decades. Undaunted, we’ve put together a list of 10 super-advanced technologies that should be around by the year 2100.
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of scientists for their pioneering work in developing molecular machines. These gadgets measure just a thousandth of a human hair in width, and they’re poised to revolutionize everything from manufacturing and materials to medicine and the functioning of…
If the idea of a robot fish swimming through your veins elicits a Cronenberg-ian chill up your spine, you might want to brace yourself. Researchers at U.C. San Diego have created the first nanofish, the New Scientist reports—a magnet-powered bot that they hope to use for targeted delivery of medication, non-invasive…
Researchers working in the Netherlands have developed an atomic-scale rewritable data-storage device capable of packing 500 terabits onto a single square inch. Incredibly, that’s enough to store every book written by humans on a surface the size of a postage stamp. Holy shit.
Carbon nanotubes have been pegged as the wonder material that could finally allow us to build a space elevator. A discouraging new study suggests these microscopic strands aren’t as resilient as we thought—and all it could take is a single misplaced atom to bring the whole thing crashing down.
Nanomachines could revolutionize technology and modern medicine, if only we had viable power sources to make them move where we wanted them to go. Now scientists at the University of Cambridge have built the world’s tiniest engines, powered by light, as described in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National…
Li-on batteries gradually deteriorate as they’re repeatedly drained and recharged. But now researchers from University of California, Irvine have developed a new nano-wire battery that can survive hundreds of thousands of charging cycles.
Nanotechnology researchers at the University of Sydney now have a building that will make them the envy of the scientific community—with ultra-clean rooms, vibration-free floors and faraday cages aplenty.
Because the world keeps getting more bizarre, it turns out that the best way to get these microbots to navigate around obstacles is to smear them with the bacteria that causes urinary tract infections and send them through an electrical grid. See a demonstration!
Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.
Spider silk is nature’s Kevlar. It’s stronger than steel, it’s waterproof, and you can stretch it as much as 30 to 40 percent before it snaps. Now biophysicists at Johns Hopkins University think they know the secret to spider silk’s remarkable elasticity: protein threads that serve as stretchy “superstrings.” The…
To beat cancer, early detection is crucial. Now, a team of Japanese and American scientists has revealed extremely thin sensors that could one day be built into skin-tight, tumor-detecting gloves for doctors, who can share digitized findings with other physicians.
Some men produce sperm that are poor swimmers, a major cause of infertility. To help, researchers from Germany have developed motorized cyborg “spermbots” that can be guided directly to an egg.
Energy-saving bulbs may have some competition in the shape of an ageing technology. Scientists have developed a new kind of incandescent light bulb that uses modern science to ramp up its efficiency, almost matching that of commercial LED bulbs.
Hoverboards won’t stop exploding lately, perhaps due to overheating batteries. But what if the battery could shut off before all hot and flamey? That’s the idea behind recent research at Stanford, and the benefits go far beyond gimmicky gadgets looking to avoid recalls.
The medical profession has long dreamed of an ideal delivery system for getting drugs to wherever in the body they’re needed most. Nanoscientists at the University of San Diego have come up with a novel means of doing so: why not fire the drugs at the intended targets, using tiny little cannons?
These perfectly straight trenches were dug by molecules of gold. Under just the right conditions, gold will act like a mini-snow blower. It will pry molecules out of a material, puff away the detritus, and then move on to the next. One day, we could use this to make entire labs on a chip.
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