All the focus is on Russia’s state-sponsored doping program at these Games, but as the Olympics has a long and storied history of athletic prowess, it also has a long and storied history of people getting juiced up to win. As this graphic shows, Team USA has been at the forefront of the Olympic underbelly since doping first became a thing.
Stat put together a visual history of Olympics and doping. They traced the first substance violation to 1968 and Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, who used alcohol to go faster.
Which will come first: flying cars, or self-driving cars? Both are technologies that have been in the works for some time, but neither one is remotely ready for mass market. So why not just combine both?
That’s the thinking behind Terrafugia, a flying car company that has already been around for 10 years, and now wants to make an autonomous flying car. I guess no one can accuse them of thinking small!
Gardening at home can be tricky. If you’re growing things indoors, there’s all sorts of pitfalls to consider: lighting, nutrients, space, the cops busting down your door. The last one is kinda hard to deal with, but a new product wants to try and take care of everything else for you.
Grobo is a large cabinet that’s meant to handle every aspect of growing virtually any kind of plant. The founders of the Canadian startup describe it as “Keurig for plants,” only this uses seeds instead of coffee pods. Also, the results take months not minutes.
Four strips of bacon, pan-fried. Two-egg omelet with cheese, a couple fried tomatoes, and a stack of pancakes. Top with orange juice and coffee, and that sounds like a good breakfast to me.
Instead, Silicon Valley meal-replacement cult Soylent thinks you should just drink this shake and be done with it.
The genetically-enhanced super-insects are normally what end up killing the humans in just about every sci-fi dystopia ever. But the FDA doesn’t appear to seen that memo, so on Friday morning, the “What Could Go Wrong?!” department green-lit the use of genetically modified Zika-killing mosquitoes in the Florida Keys.
On Friday morning, the FDA officially approved field trials of a genetically modified mosquito made by biotech company Oxitech. The FDA concluded the trials “will not have significant impacts on the environment.”
I’ll just say it: a wall-climbing “spiderbot” that spins incredibly strong webs from carbon fiber strands is not the kind of thing I want to be fighting when the robots rise up. But death-by-robotic-web aside, these wall-climbing swarm construction robots mark a breakthrough in robotic construction and bots working together.
The proper name for the spiderbots is the “Mobile Robotic Fabrication System for Filament Structures,” and it’s designed by the Institute for Computational Design at the University of Stuttgart. As Dezeen explains, the system relies on multiple Roomba-esque robots, which climb up walls, passing around a spool of carbon fiber to weave an intricate structure.
Last week, we got news that Zika is being spread by mosquitos in Florida. That marks the first time that the virus has been contracted in the US, rather than being contracted abroad and brought back.
Today, we’ve got another first: the CDC has issued a travel warning for somewhere inside the United States. Specifically, don’t plan a trip to Miami if you’re going to get pregnant any time soon.
Remember the ice bucket challenge stunt that went viral almost two years ago? It turns out it was more than a gimmick, as it helped not only spread out awareness about ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), but also provide key funding that allowed researchers to discover one of the genes involved in the disease.
Medical technology company Ava is touting a fertility bracelet that works with a smartphone app.
The tracker device, which is FDA approved, is worn at night. While the wearer is sleeping, it collects three million data points related to the reproductive hormones estradiol and progesterone, including pulse and temperature.
Harvard researchers have created a penny–sized stingray robot that can swim using genetically-modified rat heart cells activated by LED light.
It’s the latest in a new line of robotics that combines silicone with living cells. Prior to the stingray, the team, led by Kit Parker, professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Harvard University, built a robot jellyfish out of similar material back in 2012. When the robot’s heart cells were electrically stimulated, the jellyfish swam around… aimlessly. There was no way to steer it.
If you’re already scared of the emergence of robots and powerful artificial intelligence, then you’re not going to like the thought of building machines out of living tissue. Scientists have built a functioning biohybrid robot made of living tissue and 3D printed parts, which is an incredible accomplishment. However, the robot prototype can only move at speeds of 0.04cm per minute right now, and it doesn’t yet have the wits that might put us in peril. More →
This is the final design for NASA’s newest Mars rover, which should be romping around the surface of our red neighbor. It’s packed full of technology, with bigger wheels to get around, and better cameras to look at things.
But in my highly uneducated, non-rocket-scientist opinion, it also looks like the engineers got 90% of the way there and said fuck it.
