Just in time for Christmas comes a new international survey on belief in Santa Claus. According to the survey, which sought to determine at what age people lost their belief, kids don't take long to figure out the truth. As well, the survey found that many adults wish they believed in Santa and many kids pretend to believe even after learning the truth.
It's called Implosion Fabrication. They can't quite shrink humans yet, but they can print a very tiny version of most any shape you choose. The MIT responsible for this project invented a way to capture the shape of an object and replicate it, further shrinking it down to nanoscale upon drying. It's sort of like Ant Man and the Wasp (2018), but just a little bit different.
Keeping an eye on crops is getting to be a high tech job for farmers. Already farmers can use drones to fly over their fields and keep an eye on the temperature, humidity, and crop health. The catch is that the large drones have short flying times before they need to land and recharge. This has led researchers at the University of Washington (UW) to create a tiny sensing system that is small enough to be attached to the back of a bumblebee.
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have been able to create what they call tiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universe. The matter they created formed three distinct shapes and sizes including circles, ellipses, and triangles. The image below is a visualization of the expanding drops of quark gluon plasmas.
Scientists from the University at Buffalo or UB are working to better understand volcanos. The process of gaining understanding involves creating lava and then blowing it up with the goal of illustrating the physics of lava-water interactions. The interaction of water and lava can make volcanic eruptions more dangerous.
MIT has announced an engineering breakthrough that has resulted in the smallest 3D transistors ever created. These new MIT transistors are half the width of the slimmest commercial models available today. MIT worked with the University of Colorado on this new transistor.
Honda Research Institute has announced a new breakthrough battery chemistry developed in collaboration with Caltech and NASA JPL researchers. The technology, which was detailed in a newly published study, has a better eco footprint while enabling the use of higher energy density materials in comparison to existing battery tech.
Normally the people at SETI are using their equipment to scour the universe looking for radio signals that might hint we aren't alone in the universe. SETI turned to a different task recently, and that task was to scan the interstellar object called Oumuamua and see if it had any radio emissions hinting that there might be technology aboard. Speculation suggested that the object might not be natural and could have come from an alien civilization.
Researchers from Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering have created the world's smallest wearable, battery-free sensor. The sensor is designed to measure exposure to light across multiple wavelengths spanning UV to visible light. It's able to record up to three separate wavelengths of light at once.
MIT researchers have created something very weird called Elowan. The researchers say that Elowan is a cybernetic lifeform made up of a plant and a machine. Elowan is able to use its own internal electrical signals to move towards a light when it is switched on.
Researchers have made a new discovery the changes how supermassive black holes are thought to operate. The discovery is based on computer simulations and new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). What the scientists have found is that the rings of gas surrounding active supermassive black holes are not simple donut shapes as previously believed.
MIT and Facebook have teamed up on a new potential way to give addresses to people who currently don't have one. Approximately four billion people around the globe lack a physical address, a problem that impacts everything from registering to vote to something as seemingly basic as receiving mail. Machine learning may be the solution to this problem, the two entities revealed in a recent study.