After 525 posts this blog is being discontinued - but don’t worry, New Scientist’s regular patents column has a new home as part of our new Invention special report.
The latest columns about the latest, greatest and weirdest patent applications will be added to the report as they arrive. If you’re following this blog using [...]
Continue reading about Invention blog is dead - long live the special report
Zap a metal with light and the electrons on the surface ripple into waves – known as plasmons – which emit light of their own. The frequency of that light reflects the electronic nature of the surface and is highly sensitive to contamination.
Kevin Tetz and colleagues in the Ultrafast and Nanoscale Optics Group at the [...]
Security services interested in automatically spotting people who may be security risks are also interested in systems that listen out for footsteps. It should be possible to estimate someone’s speed, footwear and perhaps build from the sound of their steps.But detecting footsteps is harder than you may think. Any airborne sounds of footsteps are quickly [...]
Fatigue occurs when muscles become weaker with repeated or intense exercise, or as a result of an illness.
Researchers have long thought that fatigue is caused by a build-up of lactic acid in the muscles, but in the past decade, a number of teams have shown that this process does not cause fatigue (and may in [...]
Oil sands are naturally occurring mixtures of clay, sand, water and extremely viscous bitumen. Such deposits in Canada alone are thought to contain 173.7 billion barrels of oil, a source of oil second in size only to Saudi Arabia.
The extreme viscosity of oil sands, though, makes them very expensive to mine, and difficult to process [...]
Quad bikes are expensive machines that are designed to cope with a wide range of terrains, and are known in some parts of the world as all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). But they do not always cope with snow as well as some users would like.
For all those people, Michael Nanowski and Umed Panu at Lakehead University, [...]
Quad bikes are expensive machines that are designed to cope with a wide range of terrains, and are known in some parts of the world as all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). But they do not always cope with snow as well as some users would like.
For all those people, Michael Nanowski and Umed Panu at Lakehead University, [...]
Paint-based graffiti can usually be removed relatively easily from buildings, bus shelters and other street furniture. But graffiti that is scratched into surfaces such as Perspex is much more difficult to cope with and usually requires the entire surface to be replaced at great cost.
So Seng Chu Tan and colleagues at Curtin University of Technology [...]
Growing numbers of people are waiting for heart transplants. And engineers are developing miniature pumps known as ventricular assist devices to help.
Small enough to fit inside the patient’s body, these pumps act like a second heart, boosting blood circulation and taking some of the load off the ailing organ.But David Bull, a surgeon at the [...]
Pain can often be better managed when two types of painkiller are used together. For example, it has recently become known that cannabinoids such as THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, enhance the painkilling effects of opioids such as morphine.
Teaming them up could allow doses to become smaller, reducing the possibility of addiction. But a [...]
