Science

Giant Crystals Create an Alien Landscape

This photo looks like it could have been taken on another planet – miners harvesting dilithium, perhaps. But this cave full of monstrous crystals is located in Mexico, and the crystals themselves are a form of gypsum, one of the most common elements on Earth. What geologic processes caused the crystals to get so freaking…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Oct 23

Scientists Build Computer Circuit From Brain Cells

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel have managed to build reliable logic gates out of neurons instead of wires. The process actually sounds fairly simple: a glass plate is coated with cell repellent then etched with the desired circuit pattern. The pattern itself is coated with a cell-friendly adhesive which forces…

Tech News Sean Fallon Oct 23

Scientist’s Flying Plasmonic Lens Could Make Chips Ten Times Denser

Optical lithography is the secret sauce in the fabbing technology that makes the chips inside your computer, and a clever bunch at the University of California, Berkeley have worked out a new adaptation of the tech to produce chips that could be ten times more detailed. It basically combines a hard-disk-alike spinning platter and scanning…

Gadgets Kit Eaton Oct 23

Scientists Discover New State of Matter, Could Be Used To Upgrade Microchips

McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter to go along with good ol’ solid, liquid, gas, plasma and a handful of quantum states—it’s called a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal. While the name sounds like something that would sap Superman’s powers, this new state of matter could be used to fabricate modern transistors and…

Tech News Elaine Chow Oct 23

Check Out the World’s Most High-Tech Planetarium

San Francisco has just opened the city’s shiny new Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, and it’s the world’s most high-tech spot for learning about the universe. The completely-computerized theater can feed real-time climate data from satellites into the show, as well as allow audiences to reprogram the show while it’s in progress.…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 22

A Pill to Selectively Erase Your Traumatic Memories

In a few years you might have a pill to help you forget your bad breakup just the way Jim Carey did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. With a high dose of just one enzyme, scientists can now erase very specific memories while you’re in the act of recalling them. The enzyme known…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 22

Naked Martian Robot

It’s the Phoenix Lander the way you’ve never seen it before, with all its private parts showing. This image by a NASA artist shows what Phoenix looked like before it opened up and unfurled all its lab equipment and other tools. Every single piece of equipment that Phoenix brought had to be packed into a…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 22

Study Finds the Color of Dreams Dependent On the Color of Your Childhood TV

Further evidence that media’s placating massage fingers mine even the deepest jelly regions of our brains, a new study has claimed to prove the long-thought notion that the type of TV and film exposure during youth drastically affects the color of dreams, even much later into life. In the study, only 4.4 percent of those…

Television John Mahoney Oct 22

New Robot Lets Surgeons Operate on a Heart While It Still Beats

Heart surgery is usually a case of “be still my beating heart” since it’s easier to work with static tissue, despite the risk of brain damage and all the complications of cardiopulmonary bypass machines. No longer, perhaps: some clever bods at Harvard University and the Children’s Hospital Boston have come up with a robotic system…

Health Kit Eaton Oct 22

Implanted Microchip Will Monitor Your Health, Deliver Drugs From Under Your Skin

One of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with a chronic illness, such as diabetes or lupus, is the need to test your body constantly to make sure you’re healthy. MicroCHIPS is looking to alleviate that with a new device that’s implanted under the skin of a patient. The “chip,” about the size of a…

Tech News Elaine Chow Oct 21

You Have 60 Minutes To Do Complex Math Or Else You’re Dead. Go!

Mathematics becomes more than the stuff of SAT nightmares in Fermat’s Room, a tense thriller screened last night at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City. When four skilled mathematicians solve a puzzle and are invited to a secluded conference, they’re promised the world’s greatest enigma. Instead, they find themselves in a slowly…

Movies Kaila Hale-Stern Oct 21

Titan 80-300 Cubed is the Most Badass of All Microscopes

You are looking at the most powerful electron microscope on Earth. Housed at MacMaster University in Ontario, Canada, the Titan 80-300 Cubed will allow researchers to peer into the workings of molecules and atoms on a scale never before possible. What they find with the ultra microscope could revolutionize material science, medicine and energy production.…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Oct 21

LEDs May Really Be The Wondergadget: Now They Can Banish Wrinkles

Great Scott! It looks like the ubiquitous LED may be becoming even more of a wondergadget, since a group of German researchers are saying light from LEDs may actually be able to smooth away skin wrinkles. Their study, due for publication soon, showed that exposure to high-intensity light from LEDs daily for several weeks resulted…

Health Kit Eaton Oct 21

NASA’s IBEX Ready to Measure the Edges of Our Solar System

A NASA mission to measure and study the mysterious edge of the solar system is underway this week. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is one of the low-cost “Small Explorers” missions – it can study the termination shock area of our solar system without even leaving Earth’s orbit. How will it manage that? By acting…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Oct 20

2,400-Year-Old Drug Paraphernalia Found in West Indies

Click to view The people who settled the Caribbean Islands over 1500 years ago brought with them special ceramic bowls (similar to those pictured) for holding hallucinogenic drugs that they sniffed through long, ceramic straws. More surprising than their modern drug ritual, however, is the fact that these “sniffing bowls” were already hundreds of years…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 20

Samsung Demos Carbon Nanotube-Based Color E-paper

Looks like I really wasn’t wrong when I said e-paper is in the news: Samsung’s just demonstrated its own funky e-paper tech, only this time the display uses carbon-nanotube electrode technology—also a technology that’s in the news. The color carbon nanotube active matrix electrophoretic display (say that after a few pints of beer) works by…

Gadgets Kit Eaton Oct 20

Korean Research Makes Hydrogen Manufacture 30 Times Cheaper

Scientists at Korea’s S&P Energy Research Institute have worked out a way of manufacturing hydrogen that’s 20-30 times cheaper than current methods. Typical electrolysis methods in use take about 4 to 4.5 kWh of energy for each cubic meter of H2 gas but the new Korean method (apparently a chemical process) takes just 0.1 kWh,…

Gadgets Kit Eaton Oct 20

Color E-Paper Debuts on Waterproof MP3 Player

E-ink and e-paper are the display buzzwords of the moment, but generally the devices are mono colored… until now. And though KDDI showed a concept color e-paper display recently, it looks like the first device to market sporting a colored e-paper display will be an MP3 player from Freestyle Audio. Qualcomm have come up with…

Gadgets Kit Eaton Oct 20

Buckypaper: Silly Name, Incredibly Strong and Light Material

Flying in a plane made of a material called ‘buckypaper’ may not seem too appealing at first, but this new type of carbon nanotube may be the future of lightweight, high strength composite. Discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star, buckypaper is far from reaching its potential, but…

Tech News Dan Nosowitz Oct 18

The Sound of Greenland’s Glaciers Shattering

It’s one thing to see pictures of Greenland’s ice sheets growing cracks and slowly crumbling into the water. But the whole process takes on a visceral, terrifying quality when you watch the two movies we’ve got for you below the jump: One is the result of a researcher recording a glacier breakup, then speeding up…

io9 Annalee Newitz Oct 17

Giant Crystals Create an Alien Landscape

Scientists Build Computer Circuit From Brain Cells

Scientist’s Flying Plasmonic Lens Could Make Chips Ten Times Denser

Scientists Discover New State of Matter, Could Be Used To Upgrade Microchips

Check Out the World’s Most High-Tech Planetarium

A Pill to Selectively Erase Your Traumatic Memories

Naked Martian Robot

Study Finds the Color of Dreams Dependent On the Color of Your Childhood TV

New Robot Lets Surgeons Operate on a Heart While It Still Beats

Implanted Microchip Will Monitor Your Health, Deliver Drugs From Under Your Skin

You Have 60 Minutes To Do Complex Math Or Else You’re Dead. Go!

Titan 80-300 Cubed is the Most Badass of All Microscopes

LEDs May Really Be The Wondergadget: Now They Can Banish Wrinkles

NASA’s IBEX Ready to Measure the Edges of Our Solar System

2,400-Year-Old Drug Paraphernalia Found in West Indies

Samsung Demos Carbon Nanotube-Based Color E-paper

Korean Research Makes Hydrogen Manufacture 30 Times Cheaper

Color E-Paper Debuts on Waterproof MP3 Player

Buckypaper: Silly Name, Incredibly Strong and Light Material

The Sound of Greenland’s Glaciers Shattering

This 5-Star Ryzen 5500U Mini PC Is Now 44% Off While Apple’s Mac mini Stays at Full Price on Amazon

This 4-in-1 Ergonomic Laptop Sleeve Hits a Record Low With $53 Worth of Free Extras Included

Samsung Clears Out Galaxy SmartTag2 at 42% Off, Now Nearly Half the Price of Apple’s AirTag

‘Daemons of the Shadow Realm’ Has Four Banger Songs For the Price of Two

JBL Boombox 3 Portable Speaker Drops to 40% Off, Though This All-Time Low Price May Not Stick Around for Long

Apple’s M5 13-inch MacBook Air Hits Record Low With Its Biggest Discount Yet Since Launch, Cheaper Than 2025 Model on Amazon

‘Chucky’ Is Finally Returning to the Big Screen

Used Electric Vehicles Are Having A Resurgence

Anker’s EufyMake E1 Finally Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages

This Loud-Ass Party Speaker Almost Got Me High AF

Asus Zenbook A16 Review: Start Considering Snapdragon on PC, for Real

Aqara Thermostat Hub W200 Review: Almost Better than My Ecobee

HP Omen Max 45L Review: 4K60 Gaming Has Never Been So Easy

Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni Review: Window Cleaning Robots Have a Long Way to Go

AirPods Max 2 vs. Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen): Which ANC Headphones Win?

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