Science

The United States National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has successfully fired the most powerful laser beam ever recorded. It took 192 laser beams to deliver more than 500 trillion watts, or terawatts, of peak power and 1.85 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light to a t...

Pluto may no longer be considered a true planet following its official reclassification in 2006, but that doesn't appear to be stopping the tiny dwarf planet from amassing a considerable number of celestial "followers." Just this week, in fact, a team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telesco...

Making use of sleek black gloves, sophisticated sensors, a microcontroller and a smartphone, students from the Ukraine have created a device that translates sign language into speech. Called "Enable Talk," the system won first place in the software design category at Microsoft's 10th annual Imagine ...

The search for the elusive Higgs boson continues as scientists analyze the data from two recent experiments conducted at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research. On Tuesday, scientists raised the possibility that the data might indicate that the particle they observed was a Higgs impost...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has issued an open call to the robotics industry soliciting expert proposals to create more power-efficient robots. The agency aims to maximize robotic technology potential and improve the power efficiency of current robots by 2,000 percent. Robots are h...

After years of searching, particle physicists say they have all but certainly pinned down the elusive Higgs boson. Popularly known as the "God particle," this boson will help provide a better understanding of how most of the particles of nature acquire their mass, improving physicists' understanding...

Researchers at Rice University have developed a paint that works as a battery, and it could change the way batteries are produced and reduce energy storage restrictions. The paint-on battery is similar in material balance to traditional lithium-ion batteries. It has five layers -- a positive and a ...

Twisted infrared light beams have propelled wireless data transmission to a dazzling 2.56 terabits per second via a system developed by a multinational team of researchers led by the Optical Communications Laboratory at the University of Southern California. The process, called "orbital angular mome...

A neural network built over the years by researchers from Stanford University and Google has managed to teach itself to recognize faces and cats. The network consists of 16,000 processors on a cluster of 1,000 computers. After being exposed to 10 million images downloaded from the Internet, the netw...

To test the 1-gigapixel AWARE-2 camera his team developed, David Brady, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, took it out to Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in eastern North Carolina and took a few snapshots of tundra swans. "Normally, with bird photography you'...

Mention the words, "splitting the atom," and most people will automatically think of nuclear fission, bombs and radioactivity. Recently, however, physicists at Germany's University of Bonn not only managed to "split" an atom but also put it back together again. "The fact that atoms, photons and mole...

Eight months after the multinational Opera research team caused an uproar among physicists with its findings that some neutrinos appeared to travel faster than light, its findings have been officially refuted. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on Friday said that four experiments...

The growing consumerization of IT is turning into a security nightmare for many IT departments, but it's perhaps hitting the healthcare industry worst. "BYOD is an emerging issue in healthcare, as staff bring their latest and greatest devices and ask to use them in their work," said Christina Thiels...

The planet Venus will create a rare spectacle on Tuesday when it passes directly in front of our sun, creating an image for viewers on Earth that won't be repeated until the year 2117. Known as "the 2012 Transit of Venus," the nearly seven-hour journey will begin at 3:09 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (...

Re-Enter the Dragon

SpaceX's Dragon space capsule returned to Earth on Thursday, 10 days after it took off into the wild blue yonder to resupply the International Space Station. The capsule touched down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:42 a.m. ET a few hundred miles west of Baja California, Mexico. It will be taken by boat t...

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