In The News

A Global Challenge: Training Engineers for the 21st Century

November 22, 2013
Experts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics – the so-called STEM fields – help grow economies. Yet interest in these fields is down in the US and Europe. “Within industrialized countries, scientific and technical courses are deemed to be difficult, uninteresting and not competitive in terms of salary expectations,” reports ParisTech Review. An introduction to the essay points out...

Why This Might Be the Model T of Workplace Robots

Tom Simonite October 31, 2013
New applications, innovation, competition and mass production drive down prices of most tech products over time while improving capability – and that is true of robots. A new startup company, Unbounded Robotics, is selling 3-foot robots for $35,000 to academic and industry researchers who currently would pay $100,000 plus for similar technology or build themselves. Now researchers can purchase...

How Science Goes Wrong

October 25, 2013
Business interests like to think of themselves as taming science, selecting among the discoveries and presenting them to the world. Scientific research ultimately instigates new trends, comforts, life-saving treatments, new businesses and more. “But success can breed complacency,” suggests an essay in the Economist. “Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying – to the...

Power From the Sea?

October 21, 2013
The nonstop movement of ocean wavers could make them an ideal source for energy. Zhong Lin Wang leads a team at Georgia Institute of Technology that developed “an inexpensive and simple prototype of a triboelectric nanogenerator that could be used to produce energy and as a chemical or temperature sensor,” reports Phys.org. The research was introduced in the journal Angewandte Chemie, and Phys....

The Dragon’s Spear: China’s Asymmetric Strategy

Loro Horta October 17, 2013
As the world’s leading military powers invent new weapons systems, other nations develop countermeasures. “China has no illusions about its military inferiority via-à-vis the United States and knows that the status is likely to endure for at least two decades,” explains security analyst Loro Horta. “As such the PLA has been developing a full range of asymmetric strategies to deter the US until...

China Employs 2 Million Microblog Monitors, State Media Say

Dong Le October 16, 2013
Blogs and social media sites are ideal for posting complaints, but China does not want discontent to spread. One group is assigned to monitor the trends in griping – the Chinese government employs more than 2 million as “internet opinion analysts,” to monitor internet posts and even delete problem posts, according to a report in Beijing News, as described by BBC News. The monitors struggle to...

Shutting Down US Antarctic Research Will Have Global Repercussions

Jeffrey Marlow October 16, 2013
Failing to reach agreement on spending, US legislators closed non-essential government services. The designation reduces employee morale and threatens US contributions to trade, health and scientific endeavors, including Antarctic research. Because of the shutdown, the US National Science Foundation put the program in caretaker status. “The logistical ordeal of transporting people and supplies to...