Emerging trends in technology and new developments in science will affect the way we live. Chris Jablonski selects and analyzes news about our future that you'll almost never find anywhere else.
Christopher Jablonski is a freelance technology writer.
Italian researchers have designed a new camera-in-a-pill which can move or stop inside your body according to what your doctors want to see and which is radio-controlled. Human trials should begin soon.
Scientists from Brazil and the U.S. think so. In a surprising discovery, they've found that a GPS station in Manaus, near the center of the Amazon River basin, showed that the Earth level was going up and down by almost 3 inches (75 mm) every year with the seasonal floods of the big river.
Colloids are found almost everywhere, in butter, milk, aerosols or paints. But in space, they behave differently. And several experiments under progress aboard the International Space Station (ISS) could lead to new technologies, such as computers operating on light instead of electricity.
German researchers have discovered why some fluorescent proteins switch between two optical states. And they've cultivated protein crystals which exhibit the same switching characteristics. This discovery might lead to new optical data storage devices.
The concept of aesthetic computing can be used to teach algebra by encouraging students to express equations as pictures or stories. This approach aims to make abstract ideas or algebraic formulas look 'real' through drawings, sculptures or computer graphics.
Scientists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have discovered a new way to generate trillions of proteins from a single organism. And their new protein copying technique will help to produce novel drugs.
New nanohelices created from zinc oxide and which bear a resemblance to the helical configuration of DNA discovered 50 years ago, could become a basis for creating nanoscale sensors, transducers, resonators and other devices that rely on electromechanical coupling.
Eighteen months ago, I was writing that shape searching could become a reality. Now, the researchers at Purdue University who developed this initial system are providing benchmarking tools to evaluate how well their search system is working.
Scientists have designed a molecule which, like a human, walks in a straight line on a flat surface, one step at a time. The fact that the motion is fully controllable might lead to applications in molecular computing, for example for storing large amounts of information on nanoscale chips.
Don Quijote is the name of a space mission that will be launched in 2007 or later by the European Space Agency (ESA). The goal of this mission is to check if it's possible to modify the trajectory of an asteroid before it becomes a threat to Earth.