SpaceX cargo ship reaches International Space Station

Astronauts plucked a commercial cargo ship from orbit on Wednesday and attached it to the International Space Station, marking the reopening of a U.S. supply line to the orbital outpost following the space shuttles' retirement last year. After a 2-1/2 day trip, Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon cargo ship positioned itself 33 feet away from the $100 billion research complex, a project of 15 countries, which has been dependent on...

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Redefining Medicine With Apps and iPads - The Digital Doctor

As a third-year resident in internal medicine, Dr. Rajkomar was the senior member of the team, and the others looked to him for guidance. An infusion of saline was the answer, but the tricky part lay in the details. Concentration? Volume? Improper treatment could lead to brain swelling, seizures or even death. Dr. Rajkomar had been on call for 24 hours and was exhausted, but the clinical uncertainty was “like a shot of adrenaline,” he said. He reached into a deep pocket of his white coat and produced not a well-thumbed handbook...

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Citing privacy concerns, U.S. panel urges end to secret DNA testing

They're called discreet DNA samples, and the Elk Grove, California, genetic-testing company easyDNA says it can handle many kinds, from toothpicks to tampons. Blood stains from bandages and tampons? Ship them in a paper envelope for paternity, ancestry or health testing. EasyDNA also welcomes cigarette butts (two to four), dental floss ("do not touch the floss with your fingers"), razor clippings, gum, toothpicks, licked stamps and...

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Nobel for quantum "parlor trick" that could make super computers

A French and an American scientist won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for finding ways to measure quantum particles without destroying them, which could make it possible to build a new kind of computer far more powerful than any seen before.Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange behavior that previously could only...

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Bits Blog: From the Land of Angry Birds, a Mobile Game Maker Lifts Off

For a country with a population about the size of Minnesota, Finland has produced some giant global hits in the mobile business, like the phone maker Nokia and Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. A Finnish mobile games start-up called Supercell wants its crack at glory too. The Helsinki-based company calls itself a “tablet first” games company, meaning that it designs its games to take advantage of the larger screen of the tablet rather than just blowing up smartphone games to a bigger display (though...

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Design: Who Made That Escape Key?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times“It’s the ‘Hey, you! Listen to me’ key,” says Jack Dennerlein of the Harvard School of Public Health. According to Dennerlein, an expert on how humans interact with computers, the escape key helped drive the computer revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. “It says to the computer: ‘Stop what you’re doing. I need to take control.’ ” In other words, it reminds the machine that it has a human master. If the astronauts in “2001: A Space Odyssey” had an ESC key, Dennerlein points out, they could...

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Wal-Mart and American Express Join In Prepaid Card Deal

It is a surprising alliance between the discounter Wal-Mart and American Express, which until recently has been focused on high-end consumers. The move is intended to strengthen both companies’ position in the prepaid card market — which, unlike credit and debit cards, is largely unregulated and has far fewer consumer protections. The account, called Bluebird, will be available next week. The companies are positioning it as an option for people turned off by bank fees. “The only fees consumers will ever pay are clear, transparent...

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Mind: Recalibrating Therapy for a Wired World - The Digital Doctor

But the virtues of the digital age are not always aligned with those of psychotherapy. It takes time to change behavior and alleviate emotional pain, and for many patients constant access is more harmful than helpful. These days, as never before, therapists are struggling to recalibrate their approach to patients living in a wired world. For some, the new technology is clearly a boon. Let’s say you have the common anxiety disorder social phobia. You avoid speaking up in class or at work, fearful you’ll embarrass yourself,...

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U.S. Panel Calls Huawei and ZTE ‘National Security Threat’

The House Intelligence Committee said that after a yearlong investigation it had come to the conclusion that the Chinese businesses, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc., were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive information from American companies and their loyalties to the Chinese government. The companies sell telecommunications equipment needed to create and operate wireless networks, like the ones used by Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Many of the major suppliers of the equipment are based...

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3-D medical scanner: New handheld imaging device to aid doctors on the 'diagnostic front lines'

In the operating room, surgeons can see inside the human body in real time using advanced imaging techniques, but primary care physicians, the people who are on the front lines of diagnosing illnesses, haven't commonly had access to the same technology -- until now. Engineers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have created a new imaging tool for primary care physicians: a handheld scanner that would enable them to image all the sites they commonly examine, and more, such as bacterial colonies in the...

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Dick Costolo of Twitter, an Improv Master Writing Its Script

The audience, le beau monde of cinema, has gathered at the Debussy Theater on this unseasonably cool May morning on the French Riviera. The event, officially the opening of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, will be remembered for freakish storms that left stars shivering on the soaked red carpet. But before the Palme d’Or, a little stand-up comedy from Mr. Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter. He has prepared some sober remarks for the occasion — a paean to the mighty tweet, an explication of how new tools of social media are...

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Acoustic cell-sorting chip may lead to cell phone-sized medical labs

A technique that uses acoustic waves to sort cells on a chip may create miniature medical analytic devices that could make Star Trek's tricorder seem a bit bulky in comparison, according to a team of researchers. The device uses two beams of acoustic -- or sound -- waves to act as acoustic tweezers and sort a continuous flow of cells on a dime-sized chip, said Tony Jun Huang, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics, Penn State. By changing the frequency of the acoustic waves, researchers can easily alter the...

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Campaigns Use Social Media to Lure In Younger Voters

If the presidential campaigns of 2008 were dipping a toe into social media like Facebook and Twitter, their 2012 versions are well into the deep end. They are taking to fields of online battle that might seem obscure to the non-Internet-obsessed — sharing song playlists on Spotify, adding frosted pumpkin bread recipes to Pinterest and posting the candidates’ moments at home with the children on Instagram. At stake, the campaigns say they believe, are votes from citizens, particularly younger ones, who may not watch television...

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Art.sy Is Mapping the World of Art on the Web

But until now, there was no automated guidance for art lovers seeking discoveries online — no “If you like Jackson Pollock’s ‘No. 1,’ you may also enjoy Mark Rothko’s ‘No. 18.’ ” Enter Art.sy, a start-up whose public version went live on Monday. An extensive free repository of fine-art images and an online art appreciation guide, it is predicated on the idea that audiences comfortable with image-driven Web sites like Tumblr and Pinterest are now primed to spend hours browsing through canvases and sculpture on their monitors...

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Sea urchin's spiny strength revealed

For the first time, a team of Australian engineers has modelled the microscopic mechanics of a sea urchin's spine, gaining insight into how these unusual creatures withstand impacts in their aquatic environment. The skeleton of the purple-spined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii ), found in tidal waters along the coast of New South Wales, has many long spines extending from its core. These spiky features are used for walking, sensing their environment, and for protection against predators and rough surf. The long hollow...

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Engineers invent new device that could increase Internet download speeds

A team of scientists and engineers at the University of Minnesota has invented a unique microscale optical device that could greatly increase the speed of downloading information online and reduce the cost of Internet transmission. The device uses the force generated by light to flop a mechanical switch of light on and off at a very high speed. This development could lead to advances in computation and signal processing using light instead of electrical current with higher performance and lower power consumption. The research...

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Graphene nanopores can be controlled: Less costly ways of sequencing DNA

Engineers at The University of Texas at Dallas have used advanced techniques to make the material graphene small enough to read DNA. Shrinking the size of a graphene pore to less than one nanometer -- small enough to thread a DNA strand -- opens the possibility of using graphene as a low-cost tool to sequence DNA. "Sequencing DNA at a very cheap cost would enable scientists and doctors to better predict and diagnose disease, and also tailor a drug to an individual's genetic code," said Dr. Moon Kim, professor of materials...

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Case of missing quasar gas clouds now solved

The case of the missing quasar gas clouds has been solved by a worldwide research team led by Penn State astronomers Nurten Filiz Ak and Niel Brandt. The discovery was announced Oct. 1 in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, which describes 19 distant quasars whose giant clouds of gas seem to have disappeared in just a few years."We know that many quasars have structures of fast-moving gas caught up in 'quasar winds,' and now we know that those structures can regularly disappear from view," said Filiz Ak, a graduate...

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The Helix Nebula: Bigger in death than life

A dying star is refusing to go quietly into the night, as seen in a combined infrared and ultraviolet view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core. This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by...

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Ordered atoms in glass materials discovered

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered the underlying order in metallic glasses, which may hold the key to the ability to create new high-tech alloys with specific properties.Glass materials may have a far less randomly arranged structure than formerly thought.Over the years, the ideas of how metallic glasses form have been evolving, from just a random packing, to very small ordered clusters, to realizing that longer range chemical and topological order exists.But by studying the...

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A curious cold layer in the atmosphere of Venus

Venus Express has spied a surprisingly cold region high in the planet's atmosphere that may be frigid enough for carbon dioxide to freeze out as ice or snow.The planet Venus is well known for its thick, carbon dioxide atmosphere and oven-hot surface, and as a result is often portrayed as Earth's inhospitable evil twin.But in a new analysis based on five years of observations using ESA's Venus Express, scientists have uncovered a very chilly layer at temperatures of around -175ºC in the atmosphere 125 km above the planet's surface.The...

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NASA's infrared observatory measures expansion of universe

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have announced the most precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart.The Hubble constant is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world in the 1920s by confirming our universe has been expanding since it exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered the expansion is accelerating, or speeding up over time. Determining the expansion rate is critical for understanding...

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