CelestialScience - Slashdot User

Submission + - Phase-changing material for Robots.

Submitted by rtoz on Monday July 14, 2014 @09:24AM

rtoz writes: In the movie "Terminator 2," the shape-shifting T-1000 robot morphs into a liquid state to squeeze through tight spaces or to repair itself when harmed.

Now a phase-changing material built from wax and foam, and capable of switching between hard and soft states, could allow even low-cost robots to perform the same feat.

The material developed by MIT researchers could be used to build deformable surgical robots. The robots could move through the body to reach a particular point without damaging any of the organs or vessels along the way.

The Robots built from this material could also be used in search-and-rescue operations to squeeze through rubble looking for survivors.

Submission + - Chemists build first 'buckyball' made of boron (nature.com)

Submitted by CelestialScience on Monday July 14, 2014 @09:19AM

CelestialScience writes: Researchers have built the first “buckyballs” composed entirely of boron. Unlike the original, carbon-based buckyballs, the boron molecules are not shaped like soccer balls, with tessellating pentagons and hexagons. Instead, they are molecular cages made up of hexagons, heptagons and triangles. As Lai-Sheng Wang of Brown University and colleagues report in the journal Nature Chemistry, each one contains 40 atoms, compared with carbon buckyballs which are made of 60. Boron is not the first element after carbon to get "buckyballed", but the boron balls may be the closest analogue to the carbon variety. Because of their reactivity, they could be useful for storing hydrogen.

Submission + - Interviews: Juan Gilbert Answers Your Questions

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 14, 2014 @09:08AM

An anonymous reader writes: Last week you had a chance to ask the Associate Chair of Research in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida, Juan Gilbert, about the Human Centered Computing Lab, accessability issues in technolgy, and electronic voting. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

Submission + - New quantum computing record set by recycled photons (newscientist.com)

Submitted by CelestialScience on Tuesday October 23, 2012 @08:33AM

CelestialScience writes: A recycling technique has enabled a quantum computer to carry out a quantum calculation known as Shor's algorithm on a larger number than ever before.The benchmark algorithm exploits quantum mechanics to simplify the factorisation of numbers into their prime components — a hard task for classical computers when the numbers get large. Until now, the largest number factorised using Shor's algorithm was 15. Now Anthony Laing at the University of Bristol, UK and colleagues report in Nature Photonics that they used a recycled photon to factorise 21 — still far too small and trivial to spook cryptographers, who rely on the difficulty of factorising large numbers for their widely-used techniques. But a record nonetheless.

Submission + - Exoplanets form never-seen-before celestial alignment (newscientist.com)

Submitted by CelestialScience on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @01:46PM

CelestialScience writes: The heavens have aligned in a way never seen before, with two exoplanets overlapping as they cross their star. Teruyuki Hirano of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues used data from the Kepler space telescope to probe KOI-94, a star seemingly orbited by four planets. It seems that one planet candidate, KOI-94.03, passed in front of the star and then the innermost candidate, KOI-94.01, passed between the two. The phenomenon is so new it doesn't yet have a name though suggestions include "planet-planet eclipse", "double transit", "syzygy" and "exosyzygy".

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