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 ... [Read More]

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. ... [Read More]

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 ... [Read More]

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 ... [Read More]

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 ... [Read More]

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 ... [Read More]

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 ... [Read More]