Building an Implantable Artificial Kidney

A prototype uses kidney cells to help it perform vital functions.

Nearly 400,000 people in the United States--and as many as two million worldwide--rely on dialysis machines to filter toxins from their blood because of chronic kidney failure.

The Next Stage of Online Video Evolution

HTML5 is changing the look of Web video, but can it edge out Flash?

At the end of August, the band Arcade Fire launched an online experiment with Google that allowed fans to build a personalized music video to accompany the new song "We Used to Wait." But the video was more than a normal video: it was a collection of video windows within the Web browser that provided, among other images, aerial and street-level footage of any address a user provided (via Google Maps).

Big Bang Detector Heads to Space

A unique particle physics detector will be attached to the space station to study the universe and its origins.

In an effort to uncover some of the universe's greatest mysteries, an international team of researchers has developed the largest space-based particle physics detector. Known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02), it will study the universe and its origins by searching for dark matter and antimatter and measuring the composition of cosmic rays with greater precision than any previous device.

A static universe better explains the properties of the cosmos than the Big Bang and avoids the nagging problems of dark matter and dark energy, according to a new cosmology

The idea that the universe began in an event called the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago has a special place in science and in our society. We like the idea of a beginning.

Fuel Sipping Diesel Hybrids to Debut in Europe

High fuel prices make the cars cost-effective in Europe.

Next year, European automakers Peugeot and Mercedes-Benz will introduce the first diesel hybrid cars, which will get about 60 miles per gallon. Peugeot expects to be the first to market with its 3008Hybrid4 in the spring. The Mercedes E 300 Blue Tec hybrid is due out by the end of 2011.

Clean Water for the Developing World

Cotton fabric treated with nano inks produces a water filter that's efficient and needs little power to work.

A water filter under development at Stanford University removes bacteria from water quickly and without clogging--and could lead to a simple and inexpensive method of cleaning water for the developing world. The device, which uses a piece of cotton treated with nanomaterial inks, kills bacteria with electrical fields but uses just 20 percent of the power required by pressure-driven filters.

New Chip Captures Specialized Immune Cells

The device could help scientists predict which patients are susceptible to serious infections.

A novel microfluidics chip developed by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will let doctors examine how white blood cells called neutrophils help the body cope with burns and other traumatic injuries. It may also shed light on why the immune system sometimes spirals out of control, resulting in dangerous inflammation.

The latest thinking about quantum gravity suggests that spacetime is two-dimensional on the smallest scale. And there may be a way to prove it.

In 1973, George Ellis and Stephen Hawking published a book called The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime. Their aim, they said, was to understand spacetime on the scale ranging from 10^(-13)cm to 10^28cm or, in other words, from the size of elementary particles to the radius of the universe.

If hackers got access to enough smart phones, they could paralyze wireless communications.

In 2009, Scott Totzke, vice president of security at Research in Motion -- maker of the BlackBerry smartphone -- told Reuters that his nightmare scenario was a type of attack in which a sufficient number of smart phones in a given area were compromised in a way that they would send so much data through a local cell phone network that normal cell phone service would effectively be knocked out.

Video - Making a Nano-Water Filter for the Developing World

Are Genetically Modified Salmon Headed to the Supermarket?

The FDA is poised to decide whether biotech animals should be sold as food.

A genetically engineered strain of Atlantic salmon that's designed to grow twice as fast as its unaltered cousins may soon be eligible for dinner. After a decade of debate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month will review an application to market fish created by AquaBounty Technologies, a company headquartered in Waltham, MA. If approved, the salmon would become the first "transgenic" animal--one that has DNA from another animal--in the world to be sold for human consumption.

A Cheaper, Safer Way to Move Natural Gas

A new transport method involving ice crystals could make it practical to get natural gas from remote areas, with no worries about explosions.

Storing and shipping natural gas by trapping it in ice--using technology being developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy--could cut shipping costs for the fuel, making it easier for countries to buy natural gas from many different sources, and eventually leading to more stable supplies worldwide.

Web Service Goes Date a-Mining

Much like Netflix can suggest movies, an Internet recommendation engine called Wings points you toward dating prospects.

A computer might be able to discern your tastes in romance even better than you can.

British engineers perfect a way to characterise the properties of new photonic metamaterials using the brute force methods of combinatorial chemistry

The ability to make and test thousands of different but structurally related molecules has had a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry. These days, it's not uncommon for a company to make (or simulate) tens of thousands of similar molecules in an attempt to identify one in which the required biochemical activity is optimised. This brute force method, called combinatorial chemistry, is also used to identify new catalysts, light emitting materials and electronic devices.

A scale model is further proof that beamed-energy propulsion works.