Science

Acoustic Fabric

Engineers at MIT and The Rhode Island School of Design have developed a piezoelectric fabric that can capture sounds by detecting vibrations and convert them into electric signals like a microphone. It is envisaged that the acoustic fabric could be used to monitor heart rates and respiratory sounds of the wearer. The fabric can also reverse the process and play sound that can be picked up by other fabric.

Innovation

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Mouth Robot

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Professor Hideyuki Sawada from Kagawa University has created an utterance robot that manipulates the shape of a mouth and nasal cavity to produce sounds that simulate how humans speak. The robot also uses machine learning to hear its own utterance and improve them over time.

Science

Tech

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Earth's History In Sand

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Australian scientists have discovered how to map the geological history of the earth in grains of sand, by measuring the distribution of zircon within the sand.

Environment

History

Science

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Synthetic Organic Neurons & Synapses

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Researchers at Linköping University have created and connected synthetic organic neurons and synapses to those of a Venus fly trap plant and successfully triggered the plant to close its leaves.

Innovation

Science

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Fighting Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

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Researchers at the University of Texas have developed a new technique to fight antibiotic resistance in bacteria by identifying and inhibiting proteins that help store and spread resistance information.

Innovation

Science

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Podcast Of The Week: Pablo Escobar's Hippos on NPR Shortwave

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Did you know that Pablo Escobar brought 4 hippos into his estate in Colombia? After he died in 1993, the hippos were left run wild. Fast forward almost 30 years and there are now 400 of them ravaging the ecosystem of the Colombian landscape near the estate. This great episode of shortwave debates the different conservation options that the Colombians are investigating to manage the hippo population, which could reach 500 by 2030 if left unchecked.

History

Podcast

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Tsunami Detection Using Magnetic Fields

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Researchers in Kyoto University in Japan have demonstrated how the magnetic field generated by the conductive waves of a tsunami arrives about a minute before the waves themselves, and can be used as an early warning sign and a means to predict the height of the wave.

Environment

Innovation

Science

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Holographic Camera Sees The Unseen

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Researchers at Northwestern University have built a scattered light holographic camera that can see the unseen. The camera indirectly scatters coherent light onto hidden objects and detects any subsequent light scattering that arrives back into the camera. An image is then reconstructed using this returned scattered light to visualise hidden objects.

Innovation

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Cloaking Atoms

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MIT physicists have successfully demonstrated the Pauli exclusion principle, where a cloud of atoms that are ultra-cooled lose their ability to scatter light and start to become less visible.

Science

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First Synthetic Fuelled Flight

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Captain Peter Hackett of The Royal Air Force has set a world record for the first flight fuelled with synthetic fuel. The flight lasted 21 minutes on fuel made from captured carbon dioxide from the air combined with hydrogen molecules from water.

Environment

Science

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