Science and research

Physicists based in the U.S. today presented evidence of the Higgs boson particle that correlates closely with European researchers' work at the Large Hadron Collider.

Researchers released an analysis of 10 years worth of data from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, which provide more hints of the Higgs boson, but not a conclusive finding.

The data, presented at a physics conference in Italy, indicate that the particle could exist at a mass of between 115 gigaelectronvolts and 135 gigaelectronvolts. This result is consistent with the last December's finding from CERN's Large Hadron Collider in … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Today, baseball is the statistician's playground, but telematics technology that tracks players and the ball could bring the same numeric precision to soccer as well.

At the CeBIT trade show here, the Fraunhofer Institute is showing technology that attaches chips with radio transmitters to soccer players and the ball. A collection of 12 receivers around a stadium measures the players' position 200 times a second and the ball's position 2,000 times a second, said Ingmar Bretz, a project leader.

"You can distinguish between good and bad players in real time," he said, by gauging … Read more

Scientists have long been puzzled to explain short-term memory loss that results from marijuana smoking. But while an open-and-shut explanation still remains elusive, a couple of neuroscientists may be getting close.

Writing in the journal Cell, Xia Zhang of the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, and Giovanni Marsicano of the University of Bordeaux, France, came up with a working explanation by focusing on a kind of signalling mechanism called astrocytes that previously had only been considered important for protecting neurons.

"Our study provides compelling evidence that astrocytes control neurons and memory," Zhang told the journal … Read more

The burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere don't affect just the air--it also impacts the Earth's oceans, according to U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Oceans absorb the carbon dioxide, which in turn changes the water's pH acidity levels. What this means is that coral reefs are growing at a slower rate and the survival of marine species is decreasing, according to NOAA.

Now, the speed at which ocean pH level is changing is faster than any time in the last 300 million years, according to a new … Read more

TOKYO--Nearly a year after the magnitude-9.0 quake that pummeled Japan, construction of the world's tallest tower, the Tokyo Sky Tree, is now complete.

Builder Obayashi, which recently announced plans for a space elevator to start services by 2050, declared the Sky Tree complete ahead of a ceremony Friday. While the world's tallest man-made structure remains the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 829 meters (2,720 feet), the Sky Tree tops the list of the tallest free-standing towers at 634 meters (2,080 feet).

It's 34 meters taller than the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China, and nearly twice the height of its predecessor, Tokyo Tower (333 meters). Operated by Tobu Railways and a consortium of media companies, the Sky Tree will serve as a digital terrestrial broadcasting center for Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto region. … Read more

Sometimes, there seems no way to get others to stop talking.

One might want them to be quiet because they are spouting nonsense, or merely because they sound like Woody Woodpecker.

And yet some people do go on, often at the most inappropriate moments for our ears and our moods.

Some Japanese researchers--Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University--have created the perfect solution for this painful dilemma: a gun. No, they're not suggesting you go Dirty Harry on those who annoy you.

Instead, this appealing firearm jams the vocal output of the unwanted up to a distance of 100 feet.

The technology behind it is deafeningly simple. The gun listens in with a directional microphone and plays it back to them with a 0.2 second delay. This creates an environment in which one is simply unable to speak. The technical term for this is Delayed Auditory Feedback. … Read more

The demands placed on smartphones by marathon sessions of texting, streaming video, and surfing the Web require that they have blazing-fast processors while, at the same time, be able to disburse the heat these processors generate. A team of engineers is proposing something of a counterintuitive model to designing smartphones in the future--one that has processors alternately powering up and then cooling down, more like sprinters than long-distance runners.

Heat dissipation has become a major limitation to the computational power of processors used in smartphones, where there is no room for a fan or other type of cooling system. Only … Read more

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.--There's good energy at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit.

The conference, held this week and organized by the ARPA-E agency, brings together the movers and shakers in clean-energy technologies who are trying to take inventions from research labs and make them viable commercial products.

So far, no startups which received grants have gone on to become a Google or Apple of green tech. But ARPA-E, which operates with a $180 million budget this year, has had a big impact on entrepreneurship by setting a high bar for technical performance and asking technologists to think big.

Here'… Read more

The way we use computers now looks very antiquated compared with a new interactive see-through OLED display from Microsoft Applied Sciences.

Jinha Lee, an MIT Media Lab Ph.D. student and a research intern at Microsoft, worked with Cati Boulanger (a researcher at the company) on a new type of computer that seems like a stepping stone to something much greater. Lee describes the see-through 3D desktop in greater detail on his personal blog. … Read more