Their dart-like rifle round is designed for small-caliber firearms like those carried by the average grunt or law enforcement officer. The duo is still sorting out some engineering issues and looking for a private sector partner to help develop the guided round into a marketable product, but for now the four-inch prototype bullet is proving that smart rounds are by no mean unfeasible, or even prohibitively expensive.

Their bullet works much like a precision guided aerial bomb might function. An optical sensor in the nose of the bullet detects a laser beam painted on a target and sends that information to a guidance and control system also packed on board. An eight-bit CPU commands electromagnetic actuators to adjust tiny fins that deploy from the round immediately after it exits the muzzle. From there, the on-board electronics aerodynamically guide the bullet home to its target, allowing the shooter to adjust a round’s trajectory in flight to correct on a long shot or to stay with a moving target.

In order for a finned design to work, of course, the engineers had to dispense with some fundamentals of modern firearm design, like the rifled barrel that puts spin on conventional bullets. That spin, like a spiraling football, stabilizes conventional rounds and helps them to fly straight. The smart rounds eschew rifling and spin for the active guidance provided by the fins, and in doing so computer simulations suggest they could narrow the average margin of error on a half-mile shot from nearly 10 yards down to just 8 inches.

Meaning a “miss” on a target of any decent size–let’s say for the sake of the argument, a target the size of a grown man’s torso–would still likely result in a “hit” of some degree. The video below doesn’t go very far by way of technical explanation, but you can see the round exit the muzzle and deploy its self-guiding fins in super slow-mo.

As the basic structural and functional unit of all known living organisms, the cell is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing. Although there are various theories – meteorites, deep-sea vents, lightning – there is still no scientific consensus regarding the origin of the first cell.

"We don’t understand this really fundamental step in our existence, which is how non-living matter went to living matter," said Neal Devaraj, assistant professor of chemistry at UCSD. "So this is a really ripe area to try to understand what knowledge we lack about how that transition might have occurred. That could teach us a lot – even the basic chemical, biological principles that are necessary for life."

Cell membranes are composed of a lipid bilayer usually made mostly of phosopholids that have heads that mix easily with water and tails that repel it. When exposed to water, they arrange themselves to form a double layer with heads out and tails in, forming a barrier that sequesters the contents of the cells. Devaraj and Itay Budin, a graduate student at Harvard University, created similar molecules with a novel reaction that joins two chains of lipids.

"In our system, we use a sort of primitive catalyst, a very simple metal ion," Devaraj said. "The reaction itself is completely artificial. There’s no biological equivalent of this chemical reaction. This is how you could have a de novo formation of membranes."

The synthetic membranes were created from a watery emulsion of an oil and detergent that is, on its own, very stable. But the chemists say that adding copper ions results in sturdy vesicles and tubules beginning to bud off the oil droplets. After 24 hours, the oil droplets are gone, having been "consumed" by the self-assembling membranes.

Although a research team from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JVCI) had previously claimed to successfully produce the first self-replicating, synthetic bacterial cell, only its genome was artificial. To claim fully artificial life would also require a synthetic three-dimensional structure to house the information-carrying genome. Something that Deveraj says is, "trivial and can be done in a day. New people who join the lab can make membranes from day one."

So that’s pretty huge. What we generally hear about when we hear about invisibility is some new trick with metamaterials that allows for cloaking in two-dimensions by bending light around some tiny object. This means that from a single side, the object is concealed. Take a walk around the object, and it reappears. Less like a cloak, more like an invisibility curtain.

The UT team used a different method, known as plasmonic cloaking, to conceal an 18-centimeter cylinder from every direction. This is true “cloaking,” as the plasmonic material is actually coated onto the object to be concealed. These plasmonic materials work by doing the opposite of what normal materials do: reflecting light. When you see an object, it’s because light is bouncing off of it and striking your eyes, which send that info on to the brain for processing. Plasmonic materials scatter light instead, producing what is essentially transparency from all angles of observation.
Ready for the attached strings? This has only been demonstrated with microwaves. In the visible range, the cylinder is still plenty visible. But the UT Austin team thinks that making this work in the visible spectrum isn’t outside the realm of possibility. And if they can pull that off, you’ll know it because it will be leading the news here. In previous studies the team has shown that its plasmonic coating can cloak any object regardless of shape or symmetry. If they can sort this out in visible light, we may someday be able render just about anything invisible.

Photo Quiz! Can you tell which one of these women is ovulating and which one is menstruating?

In a study published online last month in the journal Ethology, psychologists Nathan Pipitone at Adams State College and Gordon Gallup at SUNY Albany asked three groups of men to listen to voice recordings of 10 women counting from one to five. Each woman was recorded four times over the course of one full menstrual cycle. (For those who aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of the female reproductive cycle, women are most fertile during ovulation, when their ovaries release an egg, and least fertile during menstruation, when they shed the unfertilized egg and the lining of the uterus.)
After the first group of men listened to all four recordings from each woman, played in random order, they were asked to guess which recordings were made during the women’s periods. The men had a one in four chance of guessing correctly, but they actually did so 35 percent of the time, a significant difference, the researchers say.
In 2008, Pipitone and Gallup showed that men find the voices of ovulating women more attractive than voices recorded during other points in the cycle, so for the second group in the new study, the researchers replaced the recording made closest to ovulation with one from a less fertile day. Even after the potentially telltale contrast was eliminated, the men pinpointed the voice recorded during menstruation 34 percent of the time.
Perhaps the most telling element of the study was the third experiment, in which a new group of men were not told that the research had anything to do with menstrual cycles. Instead they were asked to choose the most “unattractive” voice recording for each woman. They chose the menstrual recording significantly more often than was predicted by chance—again, 34 percent of the time.
In fact, according to the researchers’ calculations, all three groups singled out the voices recorded during menstruation more often than any of the other voices.
So what was it about the women’s voices that gave away their reproductive status? The men in group one who correctly identified the menstrual recordings said they could tell by the mood (bad versus good), quality (harsh versus smooth), pitch (low versus high) and speed (slow versus fast) of the women’s voices. When the second two groups were asked to score the voices based on these characteristics, they reported that menstrual voices sounded lower in mood, quality and pitch. “The men seemed to determine menstrual voices by picking the most unattractive voice,” Pipitone explains.
There’s already evidence that men subconsciously judge where a woman is in her cycle—lap dancers make 80 percent more money in tips when they’re ovulating compared to when they’re menstruating, according to a 2007 paper—but the new study is the first to demonstrate one way men make that determination.
A subconscious (and often conscious) aversion to menstruation makes sense in evolutionary terms, since males wanting to pass on their genes are better off seeking out females closer to ovulation. Over time, the ability to parse a woman’s menstrual cycle could have proliferated, as more perceptive men reproduced more successfully.
Pipitone says the adaptation is an example of the reproductive arms race known as sexually antagonistic coevolution, a phenomenon seen across living species, from humans to brine shrimp. Males show more interest in females when they’re fertile, so it makes sense that human females—who need a lot of help to raise their particularly helpless infants—hide their fertility status. (Female chimps, by contrast, broadcast their fertility with engorged genitalia.) Theoretically, human males retaliated by developing the ability to detect more subtle fertility cues such as those “leaked” by the female voice.
Hormones induce the vocal changes that give women away. “Vocal production is closely tied to our biology,” Pipitone says of men and women. For example, “Cells from the larynx and vagina are very similar and show similar hormone receptors.” The result is that, “The sound of a person’s voice contains a surprising amount of reproductively relevant information,” Gallup says. The obvious example: By speaking on the phone, we can determine a person’s gender and age. But researchers have also shown that voices alone can be used to directly and indirectly predict characteristics like facial appearance, body type, physical strength and even sexual behavior.
I think one of the most interesting results of the study is that across the board, men chose the menstrual voice around a third of the time. It would seem some men are more perceptive to women’s cycles than others. Pipitone and Gallup plan to investigate this question next.

That agent, called thrombin, is coated onto sponges that can be easily packed by soldiers and field medics (or civilian medical personnel for that matter) and shaped to fit just about any kind of wound. Those pre-coated sponges are a pretty big improvement over tourniquets and gauze, which are limited in their ability to stop every kind of bleeding. Tourniquets obviously can’t be used on many parts of the body (the neck is a good example), and other glues and chemically treated bandages designed for dressing battlefield wounds come with their own complications and shortcomings.

Thrombin, on the other hand, is already used by the body to stop bleeding. Civilian hospitals also use it already, but it’s in liquid form so sponges must be soaked immediately before they are applied to the wound, making them impractical for the battlefield. MIT’s sponge instead uses a spray-on biological nanoscale coating using alternating layers of thrombin and tannic acid, which results in a film that contains a large amount of functional thrombin with a shelf life that makes it feasible to pack them into the field. Both substances are already FDA approved, the researchers say, which means the sponges could quickly find their way into wider use.

That’s good news for soldiers, and potentially good news for anyone who sustains a trauma far from the emergency room. The MIT lab is now working on a sponge that combines a blood-clotting coating with an antibiotic layer in a single sponge to help fight off infection even as a dressing stops the initial bleeding.

Recognizing that using a real insect is much easier than starting from scratch to create a device that works like an insect, Case Western Reserve chemistry professor teamed up with graduate student Michelle Rasmussen, biology professor Roy E. Ritzmann, chemistry professor Irene Lee and biology research assistant Alan J. Pollack to develop an implantable biofuel cell to provide usable power for the various sensors, recording devices, or electronics used to control an insect cyborg.

To convert chemical energy harvested from the insect and turn it into electricity, the team used two enzymes in series to create the anode. The first enzyme breaks down the sugar trehalose, which a cockroach constantly produces from its food, into two simpler sugars, called monosaccarides, while the second enzyme oxidizes the monosaccarides to release electrons. A current them flows as the electrons are drawn to the cathode, where oxygen from air takes up the electrons and is reduced to water.

After testing the system using trehalose solution, the team inserted prototype electrodes in a blood sinus away from critical organs in the abdomen of a female cockroach. The cockroaches suffered no long-term damage, which the researchers say bodes well for long-term use.

"Insects have an open circulatory system so the blood is not under much pressure," Ritzmann explained. "So, unlike say a vertebrate, where if you pushed a probe into a vein or worse an artery (which is very high pressure) blood does not come out at any pressure. So, basically, this is really pretty benign. In fact, it is not unusual for the insect to right itself and walk or run away afterward."

Using an instrument called a potentiostat, the team determined the maximum power density of the fuel cell reached nearly 100 microwatts per square centimeter at 0.2 volts, with a maximum current density of about 450 microamps per square centimeter.

The researchers are now working to miniaturize the fuel cell so that it can be fully implanted into an insect while still allowing it to run or fly normally and examining which materials might last for a long time inside an insect. They are also working with other researchers to develop a signal transmitter that can run on little energy and also exploring how to add a lightweight rechargeable battery to the system.

"It’s possible the system could be used intermittently," Scherson said. "An insect equipped with a sensor could measure the amount of noxious gas in a room, broadcast the finding, shut down and recharge for an hour, then take a new measurement and broadcast again."

The device is made up of a thin film of salmon DNA that has been impregnated with silver atoms, then sandwiched between two electrodes. When UV light is shone onto the system, the atoms cluster together into nanoparticles.

Subsequently, when no or little voltage is applied to the electrodes, only a low electrical current is able to travel through the UV-irradiated DNA. This is the equivalent of the device’s "off" state. Because the material is unable to hold a charge under a high electrical field, however, once the voltage exceeds a certain threshold, a higher current is able to travel through the DNA. This represents the "on" state.

These changes in conductivity were found to be irreversible – once the device has initially been set to either "on" or "off" it stays that way, regardless of what voltages are subsequently applied. Even after up to 30 hours, it retains its conductivity.

The scientists are now hoping that their discovery could lead to new techniques for the design of optical storage devices.

This isn’t the first time that DNA has been suggested for such applications. Researchers at Imperial College London have created logic gates using DNA and bacteria, while American scientists have genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing the solution to a classic mathematical puzzle.

Personal energy harvesting

While big ideas like solar, tidal and wind power certainly show promise, the IBM researchers believe that much of the energy used to run our homes will come from smaller, more personal sources. These could include things such as piezoelectric generators in our clothing, batteries that are charged by the spinning of our bicycles’ wheels, or turbines that are spun by the water flowing through our homes’ pipes. Essentially, anything that moves could be harnessed as a source of power.

Biological passwords

The days of having to memorize and keep track of alphanumeric passwords will come to an end, as biometrics take over. In order to authenticate our identities online and in person, we will use technologies such as retina scans, voice prints, fingerprint scans or face recognition.

Mind reading

Yep, mind reading. It won’t so much be about spying on other people’s private thoughts, however. Instead, it will involve things like controlling computers or other devices with our brain waves – if you want to call someone on your smartphone, for instance, you will just have to think about doing so in order to make it happen.

"Mind reading" will also be used to analyze the thought patterns of people with brain disorders, in order to help assist them in daily living, and to treat their condition.

No more information gap

While the world wide web has done much to disseminate information across the planet, its "world" hasn’t included people who can’t afford computers or smartphones, or who live in places lacking the infrastructure to connect such machines to the internet. With the rise of low-cost mobile devices, however, people in developing nations will gain full access to that world.

Farmers will be able to check weather reports to determine when to fertilize crops, patients will know when the visiting doctor is scheduled to be in town next, and financial transactions can be conducted without the need of a physical brick-and-mortar bank. The possibilities are endless.

Computers that know us

Presently, in the emails and other information updates we receive, we have to sift through a lot of stuff that doesn’t apply to us. Within five years, however, analytics and sensemaking technologies will allow our computers to "know" us, and filter out information that we don’t need.

It is even suggested that by combining our personal preferences and calendars, computers could proactively reserve tickets to a concert by our favorite rock band, if we were free on the date of the performance.

All the technologies on IBM’s latest list are already in development, so it’s not a huge stretch to state that they will gain prominence in years to come. Perhaps, however, there’s something that should have been on the "top five" list, but wasn’t. Do you think IBM missed anything?

It’s easy — OK, not easy, but relatively practical nowadays — to take two particles or two microscopic things and intertwine their fates. Now for the first time, scientists have accomplished quantum entanglement on the macro scale, entangling two millimeter-sized diamonds.

The findings, published in this week’s issue of Science, are a potential major leap for both quantum and classical mechanics. It’s the first time entanglement has been achieved between two fairly large objects — and at room temperature to boot.

Who interested they know, entanglement is the process of connecting two separate things, be they photons or nanoscale objects, so that they behave the same no matter their distance apart. What happens to one particle also happens to the other, even if they are separated by the entire universe.

Researchers at Oxford University took two small diamonds, about 3 millimeters square and 1 millimeter thick. They exposed them to incredibly short bursts — about 100 femtoseconds — of laser light, in a method called ultra fast pump probe spectroscopy. What happened next is complicated: The light induced some vibration in the lineup of the molecules in the diamond crystals. These inherent oscillations (present in all atoms, they’re just being taken advantage of here) are known as phonon modes. The pulse excited one phonon mode in both of the diamonds, and also produced two photons, which were scattered by the diamonds and which would be used to entangle the phonon states. Then the scattered photons were brought together, using a complicated setup involving a beam splitter and single-photon detectors.

The two diamonds were about half a foot apart, but when one of the photons was detected, the two diamonds were sharing a phonon. In other words, what happened to one diamond happened to the other. The researchers confirmed this by working backward, de-exciting the phonon and emitting another photon, which was itself detected. Entanglement lasted about 7 picoseconds, so it’s too short to be used in a quantum computer or other device — at least for now.

“The two diamond samples coherently shared one phonon, which is the hallmark of a quantum-entangled state,” explains L.-M. Duan, a physicist at the University of Michigan who wrote a perspective paper accompanying the Science paper. “These results provide a striking example that entanglement is not particular to microscopic particles but can manifest itself in the macroscopic world, where it could be used in future studies that make fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.”

The lens harvests energy from an external source using an antenna and has an integrated circuit to store the harvested power and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip with a single blue LED. Unfortunately, while the range of the display was about one meter in free space, that range was reduced to about two centimeters when it was placed on the eye.

Another of the challenges facing the creation of a Terminator-style eye display is that the minimum focal distance of a human eye is only a few centimeters. This means that information displayed on a contact lens would appear blurry. To address this, the researchers used thin Fresnel lenses to magnify the display.

More research is needed before we’ll be able to read text on our eyeballs though. "We need to improve the antenna design and the associated matching network and optimize the transmission frequency to achieve an overall improvement in the range of wireless transmission," said Parviz, co-author of the study. "Our next goal, however, is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."