You need to see this, Amazing, eh? The researchers are scheduled to present this work sometime this week at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) being held in New Orleans, US, from October 20-23, 2019. Here’s more about ‘Portal-ble’ in an October 16, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily, A new software system developed by Brown University [US] researchers turns cell phones into augmented reality portals, enabling users to place virtual building…

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Markus Buehler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been working with music and science for a number of years. My December 9, 2011 posting, Music, math, and spiderwebs, was the first one here featuring his work. My November 28, 2012 posting, Producing stronger silk musically, was a followup to Buehler’s previous work. A June 28, 2019 news item on Azonano provides a recent update, Composers string notes of different pitch and duration together…

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I don’t know what’s happened but either there are way more science type events or I’ve changed some pattern of internet use and am stumbling across more of them. I vote for the former. In any event, this is the third ’roundup’ of science type things and/or events that I’ve published this October 2019. Ingenium All three of the museums that are included in the Ingenium portmanteau (formerly the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation)…

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The ‘smart city’ initiatives continue to fascinate. During the summer, Toronto’s efforts were described in a June 24, 2019 article by Katharine Schwab for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed), Today, Google sister company Sidewalk Labs released a draft of its master plan to transform 12 acres on the Toronto waterfront into a smart city. The document details the neighborhood’s buildings, street design, transportation, and digital infrastructure—as well as how the company plans to…

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I don’t know the dates for the last ‘golden’ age of electronics but I can certainly understand why these Japanese researchers are excited about their work. In any event, I think the ‘golden age’ is more of a play on words. From a June 25, 2019 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed), One way that heat damages electronic equipment is it makes components expand at different rates, resulting in forces that…

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Caption: The CRISPR Journal delivers groundbreaking multidisciplinary research, advances, and commentary on CRISPR, the extraordinary technology that gives scientists the power to cure disease and sculpt evolution. Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers The CRISPR Journal’s publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., released two notices about their special issue on ethics. I found this October 10, 2019 media alert on EurekAlert a little more informative than the other one, Highlights from this Issue: 1. Human Germline…

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Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada) have discovered a way to turn cotton waste into a potentially higher value product. An October 15, 2019 UBC news release makes the announcement (Note: Links have been removed), In the materials engineering labs at UBC, surrounded by Bunsen burners, microscopes and spinning machines, professor Frank Ko and research scientist Addie Bahi have developed a simple process for converting waste cotton into much higher-value nanofibres.These fibres are the…

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Caption: Eucalyptus bark extract has never been used to synthesise graphene sheets before. Courtesy: RMIT University It’s been quite educational reading a June 24, 2019 news item on Nanowerk about deriving graphene from Eucalyptus bark (Note: Links have been removed), Graphene is the thinnest and strongest material known to humans. It’s also flexible, transparent and conducts heat and electricity 10 times better than copper, making it ideal for anything from flexible nanoelectronics to better fuel…

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I’ve already written about October 2019 science and art/science events in Canada (see my Sept. 26, 2019 posting), but more event notices for Octoberhave come my way. These events are all art/science (or sciart as it’s sometimes called). … on the future of life forms … a two-night (Oct./Nov.) discussion in Toronto, Canada Here’s more from the ArtSci Salon’s October 3, 2019 announcement (received via email) “…now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow…

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