Airplanes are getting lighter (and higher), batteries are getting more sustainable, and aging is getting postponed — or might someday, at least. Physical improvement is at the heart of this week’s best scientific discoveries.
Scientists are getting closer to bioengineering organs for transplants in humans, regenerating bone to treat injuries and birth defects, and using next-gen materials to heal skin wounds and prevent infection. In this week’s coolest scientific discoveries, we’re becoming just a bit more superhuman — or at least more resilient.
Radiologists can see the body in color, polymers are shifting between hard and soft states, flying cars are no longer a dream, and the military is bringing mind-controlled robots one step closer to reality. We’re back to the future in this week’s 5 Coolest Things.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon built a self-healing skin whose applications could include bio-inspired robots, their colleagues at UCLA found a way to 3D-print muscles and connective tissue, and a team in Norway came up with “evolutionary algorithms” that enabled a robot to teach itself to walk. This week’s science roundup sounds a little like a script for a prequel to a Hollywood blockbuster. Can you name it?
Biologists transferred memories from one animal to another, scientists created a 3D printer for skin, and an already agile humanoid robot just got even more limber. This is the fast lane for science news, folks, and the future is roaring forward.
This week we learned about a facial recognition system for cows, a bacterium that consumes toxic metals and poops out gold without poisoning itself, and a live worm that lives inside a computer and can balance a pole on the tip of its tail. Together with the car now orbiting Earth, this week got a lot of mileage out of science.
A musician who lost an arm played the piano again thanks to a special prosthesis, new muscles allowed robots to lift as much as 1,000 times their own weight, and glowing trees could one day illuminate our streets. This week, the future seems especially bright!
Doctors in France designed a device that partially awakened a man who’d been in a vegetative state for 15 years, Spanish agriculturists genetically engineered a low-gluten wheat, and researchers in New York figured out how to use the human heart to secure computers. Does all this progress make your pulse quicken, too?
A tough, new plastic could allow astronauts to 3D print satellites in space and launch them from the International Space Station, Australian researchers are developing a 3D-printable gel that can heal itself, and biomedical engineers created implantable liver “seeds” that sprouted into fully functional organs in mice. We can work with this material.
A team at MIT developed an AI system that looks at pictures of food and suggest recipes, a slithering robot from Stanford inspired by vines and fungi can squeeze into tight spaces, and spray-on sensors from Japan can monitor your vitals. It feels like the future is just a heartbeat away.
