A next-generation material first earmarked for use in electronics has proven itself a capable clean-up agent for polluted waters. Boron nitride, or white graphene, can soak up organic pollutants such as industrial chemicals or engine oil in incredible amounts for their size, according to a report in Nature Communications.
Is it a solar cell? Or a rechargeable battery? Actually, the patent-pending device is both. The inventors at Ohio State University call it the world's first solar battery.
Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be ten times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.
Imagine a machine that can turn almost anything into oil. Imagine that it uses natural processes like heat and pressure, and produces no pollution. Imagine recycling waste from landfills, refuse from poultry factories, sludge from city sewage, or even infectious medical waste. We now know it can be done.
Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast. But a dark, tapered stone blade, found near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting that its makers probably paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the western migration.
A trainee surgeon, who is also a self-confessed 'technology geek,' has figured out a way to save the U.K. National Health program a lot of money by taking advantage of 3D-printer technology.
High School seniors Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao want to continue pursuing a solution for how to make plastic decompose using natural bacteria already evolving on the planet. The two were finalists for Canada's top student biotechnology award, the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge, where their project was judged to have the greatest commercial potential of any project entry, valued at $10 million. Now they are bringing their ideas to the TED stage.
Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago.
Two theoretical physicists who suggested that an invisible ocean of energy suffusing space is responsible for the mass and diversity of the particles in the universe won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday morning. The theory, elucidated in 1964 by Peter Higgs, 84, of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and François Englert, 80, of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, sent physicists on a generation-long search for the Higgs boson (also referred to as the God particle).
Robot fish developed by British scientists are to be released into the sea off north Spain to detect pollution. The team hopes to use the five-foot-long robotic fish to find pollution in rivers, lakes and seas across the world.
Fly ash, a byproduct of coal-burning electric power plants, could save billions of dollars if used in the repairing of U.S. bridges and roads, scientists told a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif., Tuesday.
The little lantern fish, Symbolophorus, are smaller than your finger. Every night, all around the world, huge numbers of glowing fish rise from the depths of the sea, eat heaps of carbon-rich plankton, and then drop back down again sealing the carbon in their waste.
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