Forget Red Bull. Xiaogang No.1 High School uses intravenous drips to help energize its students. “The state grants a 10-yuan subsidy for amino acids to each graduating senior that will participate in the gao kao (National College Entrance Exam). Any student that feels not well can go to the infirmary and take amino acids on the IV drip,” explained the Director of Office of Academic Affairs. The IV drips became

Cybernetic prostheses usually replace lost function but in Japan they’re the latest fashion statement, known as Neurowear. It combines technology and fashion to created an “Augumented Human Body.” Necomimi are cybernetic cat ears that move in sync with your brainwaves to convey emotion. However, the movements are more accurate to the fictional cat girls that populate anime rather than actual cats. “When cats are frightened or want to scare away

First Google got into phones, now it has its sights set on eyewear. It’s posted a video demonstrating augmented reality glasses, dubbed Project Glass. The lensless glasses have a display in the corner which digitally superimposes things like weather stats, text messages, map directions, subway alerts, calendar reminders, and of course Google+. “A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps

Missed calls could soon be a thing of the past. Nokia has filed a patent for magnetic tattoos that vibrate in tune with your phone. The vibrations can be calibrated to distinguish between things like text messages, voice mail, and low battery. “The magnetic field, when detected by the apparatus, will cause a different effect based on its characteristics,” the patent states. “For example, the magnetic field may cause vibration

Homeless Hotspots are the squeegee men of the information superhighway. Equipped with MiFi, mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, they offered internet access to attendees of South by Southwest (SXSW) for a suggested donation of $2. It was the brain child of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) Labs, which has been criticized for exploiting the homeless. BBH has no immediate plans to continue the program but insists it’s not been canceled as widely reported.

John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, thinks he knows what’s behind the mysterious disappearance of honey bees. The self-described absent-minded professor collected some of the bees to feed to a praying mantis but forgot about them. He returned to find the bees had been consumed from the inside out by Apocephalus borealis (Figure A), a parasitic fly native to North America. The fly injects its

The tricorder is the Swiss Army knife of the Star Trek Universe, a handheld device capable of scanning and instantly diagnosing a patient (human or otherwise). The earthly applications aren’t lost on trekkie Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation & Grand Challenges Canada are investing $38.5 million to replicate a tricorder, which would be a literal life safer in developing countries where doctors typically wait days for results.

As part of its effort to become a world leader in robotics, South Korea will start using robot prison guards next spring. Unlike the deceptively cute Jailbot featured in Superjail!, these R2-D2s with smiley faces are genuinely benign. Creator Lee Baik-Chul programmed the robots to monitor inmates for abnormal behavior. “But the robots are not Terminators. Their job is not cracking down on violent prisoners. They are helpers. When an

It’s long been known that the heat from laptops can decrease sperm count but a new study from the Nascentis Centre for Reproductive Medicine in Cordoba says that the electromagnetic radiation produced by Wi-Fi networks could be even worse. Researchers exposed the sperm of 29 healthy men, aged 26 to 45, to a Wi-Fi enabled laptop for 4 hours and found that 25% of the sperm had stopped moving and

A group of physicians has just released the coffee table book to end all coffee table books. Stuck Up! 100 Objects Inserted and Ingested in Places They Shouldn’t Be is a collection of 100 X-ray images showing foreign objects ingested or inserted into human bodies, “accidentally” or on purpose. The photos are accompanied by deep commentary: Patients who suffer from the problem of having a bottle stuck up their rear

A NASA-affiliated scientist is asking: Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? The paper, published in the journal Acta Astronautica, theorizes that extraterrestrial environmentalists may destroy humanity to save the planet. After all, if human tree huggers are willing “to advocate harm to their own civilization by drawing upon universalist ethical principles, then it is at a minimum plausible that ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] could advocate harm to humanity following

Normally being called a caveman implies being too masculine, but archaeologists in the Czech Republic have revealed that they also had a feminine side, literally. The team unearthed a 5,000-year-old man buried on his left side, a practice typically reserved for women. “We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a transvestite or third-gender grave in the Czech Republic,” said archaeologist Katerina Semradova.

University of Washington professor Magnus Feil told his students to “push the boundaries of current upper-limb prosthetic design.” Differently-abled The students simulated life as an amputee by taping up one hand and soon realized that their restricted hand was still capable of simple tasks like bracing objects. “That was an important discovery–that it doesn’t always make sense to recreate a hand or fingers,” said Feil. “It’s more important to look

Researchers at Harvard have reversed the aging process in mice. First they prematurely aged the mice by genetically engineering out telomerase, an enzyme that creates protective caps on the end of DNA strands called telomeres. The mice suffered from a variety of age-related afflictions such as testes reduced in size and depleted of sperm, atrophied spleens, damage to the intestines, and shrinkage of the brain along with an inability to

The Science Channel’s new series Through the Wormhole looks at life’s big mysteries, and what bigger mystery is there than “Is There a Creator?” In this premiere episode, astronomer Rich Terrile takes intelligent design to a whole new level by suggesting that God is a programmer and we are the program. Quantum Mechanics, the branch of mathematical physics that deals with atomic and subatomic systems, shows that when you zoom