research
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New Gesture-Recognition Tech Lets You Control Your Phone In Your Pocket
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could skip to the next track without taking your phone out of your pocket — or without touching anything at all? Or if you could adjust the thermostat with the flick of a wrist? You may soon be able to thanks to new gesture-recognition technology. It doesn’t even require…
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This Crazy Contraption Weighed A Single Electron 13x More Accurately
Last week, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics published the most exact value ever observed for the weight of a single electron — a value 13 times more accurate than the previous estimate. And the Penning trap, the kooky looking device shown above, was crucial in obtaining this measurement.
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Muscle Made From Fishing Wire Is 100x Stronger Than Yours
Synthetic muscles are generally expensive, weak, and not very durable — not exactly a welcome replacement for natural muscle. Thankfully, a research team led by University of Texas at Dallas Professor Ray Baughman just turned all of that around, making wickedly strong artificial muscle fibres from nothing more than fishing wire.
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Scientists Turn Off Pain Using Nothing But Light
Pain is a hard problem. Sure, we can throw a little morphine at pain in the short term, but researchers continue to struggle with solutions for chronic pain. New research from Stanford’s futuristic Bio-X lab looks like a light at the end of the tunnel — literally!