Toshiba has developed a fast-charging lithium ion battery that can charge to 80% capacity within a minute. Hat tip to Kjell Hagen of Norway who suggests that this technology might make electric vehicles practical. The batteries that Toshiba is working with are meant for smaller items like portable electronics, but Kjell makes an important point. […]

Like time travel (at least the going back in time part) and teleportation (as it applies to anything other than photons), invisibility has been one of those standard plots devices of casual science fiction — that is, TV and movies — with very little theoretical grounding. But that may be changing: The idea of a […]

It’s a good-news, bad-news day for the salvage industry. This morning we learned that “Electronics recycling is a growing business.” But this afternoon we learned that “Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower.” Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola has come up with a polymer […]

This is interesting. Perhaps a stop-gap solution before full-blown brain prosthetics become commerically available: Connecting a battery across the front of the head (the prefrontal cortex) can boost verbal skills, says a team from the US National Institutes of Health. A current of two milliamperes applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant […]

No, not one of those documents. We’re talking about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Wired Magazine reports that it is not an ancient alchemical treatise, nor a thought experiment from Leonardo da Vinci, nor a relic from an alternate universe. (Well, I guess they can’t completely rule that last one out, but Occam’s Razor and all […]

I don’t know what’s harder to believe — that these things make their way here (and somebody actually finds them), or that we’re able to figure out so much about precisely where they came from. The rock left the Moon no more than 340,000 years ago, carved out of the Imbrium Basin — the right […]