New floating metal will not sink
Engineers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics have made an aluminum tube that will not sink. Punch it full of holes, hold it underwater…
Category: Technology
A houseplant that glows without a light bulb
You can buy one. The Firefly Petunia, sold by an Idaho company called Light Bio, looks like an ordinary white petunia in daylight and gives off a soft…
Your photos survive a lost phone, but not a wrong tap
Drop your phone in a lake and your photos are fine. Hand that same phone to a grandchild who taps the wrong thing and they can vanish from every device…
A font built to hide from AI
Here is a font you can only read while it is moving. Freeze the frame and the words dissolve into a storm of random dots…
This drone hunts mosquitoes
The world’s newest mosquito assassin just scored its first air-to-air kill. The victim, unfortunately, was an innocent moth. French startup Tornyol released the bug into…
Face paint that can read your heartbeat
The colorful tiger painted on a patient’s arm isn’t a temporary tattoo — it’s a working medical sensor. Engineers at Penn State University have developed…
IBM’s worst day, brought to you by the AI boom
On July 14, IBM had the worst day in its history. Its stock fell about 25 percent and roughly $69 billion in value vanished in…
How to control your lights with your voice
You get up in the middle of the night, still half asleep. The room is completely dark. Now where is the lamp? You can call forth light. A smart plug or a…
When the warehouse robot speaks your language
Until recently, putting a warehouse robot to work meant programming it through special software. Amazon’s newest machine simply needs to be told what to…
Why more robots can mean more injuries
Adding robots to a warehouse sounds like a clear win for safety. The surprise, according to reviews of federal injury data, is that the buildings packed…