A fungus living in the soils of Nova Scotia could offer new hope in the pressing battle against drug-resistant germs that kill tens of thousands of people every year, including one considered a serious global threat.

via Team unearths what may be secret weapon against antibiotic resistance.

A new invisibility cloak can hide objects in semi-plain sight — sometimes. Unlike earlier cloaking devices, this one can conceal things from light of any color and coming from any direction. But that flexibility comes at a price: This cloak only works under hazy conditions, such as in fog, in a cloud or when viewed through frosted glass.

via Hazing: How to hide in nearly plain sight | Student Science.

California’s thirst for water is creating unrest. During the dry season, tiny earthquakes rattle the state. And its mountains have begun creeping higher, bit by bit.

Scientists have just linked the two phenomena to the heavy pumping of water from natural reserves below California’s Central Valley. The groundwater provides drinking water and irrigates some of the country’s most productive farms.

via Thirst for water moves and shakes California | Student Science.

Wrap-around smartphones and roll-up computer tablets could soon be coming to a store near you. A British electronics firm has created a plastic transistor. That could make possible a host of devices with flexible electronic displays.

To illustrate the possibilities, Plastic Logic showed off a flexible smartwatch with its new transistors at the Society for Information Display meeting last week in San Diego, Calif.

via Digital displays get flexible | Student Science.

It converts chemical energy directly into electrical energy. Still, there hadn’t been a market breakthrough for the fuel cell. The systems were too complex. Now, Fraunhofer and Vaillant have developed a simple device for home use.

via The fuel cell for home – Research News June 2014 – Topic 2.

I get that many believe that the amazing technologies of tomorrow will only be available to the rich and powerful, while the poor and working class suffer with nothing, but what I can’t comprehend anymore is why they believe that when they’re shown, first hand, the exact contrary! Yes, their strongest arguments lie on the more recent tech advancements which, granted, are quite expensive at the moment – i.e. Google Glass – but even their strongest arguments are weak in nature.

via SERIOUS WONDER | The Future of Technology Isn’t Just a Rich Man’s Game – SERIOUS WONDER.

Nature Physics offers a unique mix of news and reviews alongside top-quality research papers. Published monthly, in print and online, the journal reflects the entire spectrum of physics, pure and applied.

Message found in a gravity wave : Article : Nature Physics.

There’s a quiet revolution underway in theoretical physics. For as long as the discipline has existed, physicists have been reluctant to discuss consciousness, considering it a topic for quacks and charlatans. Indeed, the mere mention of the ‘c’ word could ruin careers.

That’s finally beginning to change thanks to a fundamentally new way of thinking about consciousness that is spreading like wildfire through the theoretical physics community. And while the problem of consciousness is far from being solved, it is finally being formulated mathematically as a set of problems that researchers can understand, explore and discuss.

Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.

Via The Physics ArXiv Blog

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SYNTHETIC biology is not like other sciences. At its first big conference, held just 10 years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the startling initial premise was that life is simply too complicated for biotechnologists to easily modify and that it would be better if engineers rebuilt life from scratch so the created organisms did exactly what was required.

The youthful enthusiasm that powered the field, and brought together engineers, biologists, computer scientists, physicists and biohackers, persists today. There have been a few major achievements, most notably last month’s creation of a computer-designed yeast chromosome. And before that, the creation of the first synthetic cell.

Via New Scientist

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