Cutting Edge

Boeing today outlined its plans for preventing the 787 Dreamliner's batteries from overheating or igniting, issues that have kept the aircraft's global fleet grounded for nearly two months.

While noting that it had not identified the root cause of the heat issues, the aircraft maker said during a news conference Friday in Tokyo that it had developed additional safety features designed to prevent heat issues with the planes' lithium-ion batteries.

"We've come up with a comprehensive set of solutions that result in a safer battery system," Boeing Chief Project Engineer Mike Stinnett said in a … Read more

Some 2 billion people around the world are affected by parasitic worms. Researchers trying to help them may soon use a simple iPhone hack.

The Toronto General Hospital's Isaac Bogoch and colleagues found that "mobile phone microscopy" has a sensitivity of about 70 percent for detecting the eggs of parasitic worms, also known as helminths.

Reporting in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (PDF), the researchers described attaching a ball lens costing less than $15 to the camera of an iPhone 4S with double-sided tape.

They pierced a small hole in the tape and placed the ball lens against the hole.

Next, smear slides of stool samples from children in Tanzania were held up against the tape while a flashlight illuminated the slides.

The camera snapped images of the samples and the results were checked for the presence of eggs. The camera could resolve eggs as small as 40-60 micrometers in diameter. … Read more

Shortly before midnight on a recent business trip to Detroit, a 40-year-old man sent his wife the following text messages over the course of two minutes:

"Oh baby your"

"I am happy."

"I am out of it, just woke up, can't make sense, I can't even type, call if ur awake, love you."

Concerned, his wife had him go to a hospital the next morning, where a routine bed test -- including assessment of fluency of speech, reading, writing, and comprehension -- indicated he was fine. The doctors did note a very slight slackness on one side of his face. Then they handed him a smartphone and asked him to type, "The doctor needs a new BlackBerry."

He texted, "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb," looked it over, and concluded that his message contained no errors. (He was also, it seems, unable to crack any BlackBerry jokes.)… Read more

It's looking more likely that a particle CERN physicists discovered last year is the Higgs boson, researchers said today.

They cautioned it's not yet certain the particle is in fact the so-called "God particle" that can help explain how masses in the universe were formed. But this morning the leaders of the experiments running through the giant Large Hadron Collider said the analysis of more data -- two and a half times more, to be precise -- shows that the "new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson."

An electrical engineer at Stanford has led the effort to develop an endoscope that is not only as thin as a human hair but also boasts a resolution four times better than existing ultrathin models. The "micro-endoscope" could lead to far less invasive bio-imaging, making it easier and safer to peer inside living organs and tissue to, say, study the brain and detect cancer.

The researchers, led by Joseph Kahn at the Stanford School of Engineering, report in the journal Optics Express and the Optical Society of America's Spotlight in Optics that the prototype can resolve objects … Read more

Today, the International Space Station gets a change of command as outgoing NASA Commander Kevin Ford transfers leadership of the space lab to Commander Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian astronaut to assume the role. Hadfield and crew will carry out the planned Expedition 35 mission (PDF).

Our gallery below looks back at some the extraordinary images of Earth Hadfield captured with dSLRs during his first few months aboard the space lab (he and Expedition 34 arrived in mid-December). The unique vantage point of the ISS delivers unforgettable vistas, from the astoundingly abstract Australian Outback to a sensational shimmer of gold on the waters of the San Francisco Bay.… Read more

Hitachi today unveiled a robot vehicle that can pick up and drop off passengers autonomously. Take that, all you old-fashioned driver-dependent personal mobility devices.

The tiny, single-seat Ropits (Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System) is meant to travel on sidewalks, or even be used indoors for getting in and out of elevators.

It's equipped with GPS to find its way and relies on cameras and 2D and 3D laser distance sensors to avoid obstacles (sometimes also known as pedestrians) and slow down in narrow spaces. Gyro sensors help it stay upright on uneven surfaces. … Read more

The Federal Aviation Administration has approved Boeing's plan to redesign the batteries of the 787 Dreamliner airplanes but testing is needed before the planes can serve passengers again, the Associated Press reported today.

The planes were grounded in January when the batteries of one, a Japan Airlines 787, caught fire.

The Federal Aviation Administration told the AP that Boeing's plan includes "a redesign of the internal battery components to minimize the possibility of short-circuiting, better insulation of the battery's eight cells and the addition of a new containment and venting system."

Boeing said it submitted … Read more

Oreo wants you to devote some mental space to cookies again, and has taken to social media with an effective campaign for your neurons.

Its Cookie vs Creme ads have featured a Rube Goldberg-style contraptions to separate the two Oreo elements.

The ads are set to vintage NES music by Anamanaguchi, a heady digital stew that sounds like a sonic Oreo made of YMO and Polysics. But I digress.

The coolest video in the series stars Carnegie Mellon University's HERB robot butler. Under development for seven years, HERB has multi-joined arms and a camera on its head. … Read more