Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, scientists have created analogue and digital electronic circuits inside living plants, using the vascular system of living roses to build – or rather ‘grow’ – the central components of electronic circuits.

Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden merged numerous electrical components inside the roses, including wires, digital logic, and even display-based elements, thanks to a special polymer that’s capable of acting like a wire while still transporting organic material such as water and nutrients through the rose’s stem.

By successfully incorporating electronics into the living systems of plants, it’s hoped we’ll be able to find out much more about the chemical processes and pathways that make them function – and we could even learn to control and manipulate them.

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The fastest time to solve a Rubik’s cube by a robot is 2.39 seconds, achieved by a robot built by Zackary Gromko (USA) at an event at Saint Stephens, Bradenton, Florida, USA, on 15 October 2015. Read the full story: http://bit.ly/GWR-RubiksCubeRobot

The robot utilises 6 arms (one for each face of the cube) connected to stepper motors to rotate the faces of the cube.

Continue reading “Fastest robot to solve a Rubik’s Cube — Guinness World Records” »

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Engineers at the University of California, San Diego developed a new technology that uses an oscillating electric field to easily and quickly isolate drug-delivery nanoparticles from blood. The technology could serve as a general tool to separate and recover nanoparticles from other complex fluids for medical, environmental, and industrial applications.

Nanoparticles, which are generally one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, are difficult to separate from plasma, the liquid component of blood, due to their small size and low density. Traditional methods to remove nanoparticles from plasma samples typically involve diluting the plasma, adding a high concentration sugar solution to the plasma and spinning it in a centrifuge, or attaching a targeting agent to the surface of the nanoparticles. These methods either alter the normal behavior of the nanoparticles or cannot be applied to some of the most common nanoparticle types.

“This is the first example of isolating a wide range of nanoparticles out of plasma with a minimum amount of manipulation,” said Stuart Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego and first author of the study published October in the journal Small. “We’ve designed a very versatile technique that can be used to recover nanoparticles in a lot of different processes.”

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The Lisa Pathfinder will test equipment for an orbiting observatory that will peer into the universe’s darkest corners.

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Interesting look at the future of human augmentation.

To celebrate the launch of critically acclaimed video game DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, Square Enix has commissioned filmmaker Rob Spence aka Eyeborg (a self proclaimed cyborg who lost an eye replaced it with a wireless video camera) to investigate prosthetics, cybernetics and human augmentation.

Continue reading “Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary” »

Five Desktop 3D Printers

More Videos by Interesting Engineering.

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It’s still early days in the bacteria becomes our food production process. However, several Silicon Valley scientists are creating lab-grown edibles of the truly bizarre or mixing up animal substitutes based on some interesting ingredients. Here are 10 of them.

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In science-fiction movies like Fantastic Voyage and Innerspace, plucky individuals board microscopic submersibles and take a trip inside the human body… where predictably dramatic consequences ensue.

We’re not quite there yet, but it seems we’re getting close. Scientists in the US have developed nanosubmarines (aka. unimolecular submersible nanomachines) composed of a single molecule of just 244 atoms.

The nanosubs are powered by ultraviolet light, with the motor’s tail-like propeller – which operates more like a bacteria’s flagellum than a conventional motorised propeller – moving the nanomachines forward by 18 nanometres with each full revolution.

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