Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Breaks Speed Of Sound In First Rocket-Powered Test Flight
Virgin Galactic successfully completed the first rocket-powered test of its SpaceShipTwo (SS2) aircraft, the vehicle that the company will use to launch the world's first commercial space flights later this year.
Doctors Say Playing Tetris Could Cure Eye Ailments
A while ago we saw how action-packed games can help kids with dyslexia. Now videogames have revealed yet another way in which they are a miracle, as a research team led by Dr. Robert Hess from McGill University Health Centre is using the timeless classic Tetris as part of a new treatment for adult amblyopia, more commonly known as "lazy eye".
Your Old DVD Player Can Now Test For HIV
DVDs are becoming all but obsolete, thanks to the likes of Blu Ray and online streaming. But their cheap optics may find new life, as scientists have turned a commercial DVD player into a laser scanning microscope, capable of testing for HIV on-the-spot.
ESA Develops App That Turns Your Drone Into A Spacecraft
The Parrot drone quadcopter is a commercially-available drone notable for the fact that it can be controlled with an iOS Device, and now the European Space Agency is using this to help simulate docking with a virtual space station.
Psychics Fail 'Halloween Test' At Goldsmiths
It may or may not come as a surprise to you depending on your gullibility for such phenomena, but in a scientific test designed and conducted at Goldsmiths, University of London, two mediums have failed to prove the existence of psychic abilities.
New Eye Test Can Detect Schizophrenia With "Exceptional Accuracy"
In Macbeth, King Duncan once famously said "There is no art to find the minds construction in the face" researchers from Aberdeen University would have to respectfully disagree, as they have developed a method of determining mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, from a person's eyes.
Researchers Devise Test To Determine If We're Living In 'The Matrix'
Are we living in a computer simulation right now? If so, the human race would be completely oblivious to a programmed existence. That is until now, as University of Bonn nuclear physicist Silas Beane and his colleagues have devised a test that exploits a key feature of simulations; the existence of an underlying lattice construct by finding its end points or edges.
Rat Walks Again After Spinal Cord Injury. A Cure For Human Paralysis?
The rat you see in the above photo, besides being in an action shot you'd compare to the likes of a 90s training montage, was paralysed with a spinal cord injury just a few weeks ago. Thanks to a special treatment developed by researchers at the EPFL, control over its own limbs has been regained, posing a possible cure to human paralysis.
Intel-Powered Smartphone Performance ‘Better Than Any Other’
Tests carried out on the latest handsets powered by Intel chips has concluded performance exceeds the levels seen in current, at-market smartphones; including Apple’s iPhone 4S and Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S2. The results come from a series of ‘benchmarking’ tests carried out by website Anandtech on Intel’s ‘Medfield’ reference platform.
Nokia: solar charging mobile phones are possible but not ready yet
The results from Nokia's solar charging experiment are in, and while it is possible to juice up your phone via the Sun's rays, it's nowhere near consistent enough yet.
For the experiment, Nokia have used their C1-02 (one of their millions of dumbphones), attached solar panels onto the back, and sent them to a variety of countries over the last six months. Five participants were selected from across the world: two in the Arctic Circle, one in Southern Sweden, one in Kenya, and one in the Baltic Sea, each with varying lifestyles and varying weather conditions to give this a fair shot.
O2 conducting tests of London's first 4G LTE network
O2 has commenced testing of their 4G LTE network in Central London for a course of 9 months, providing speeds to hundreds of test subjects of 50mbps realistically (150mbps theoretically).
Both consumers and business users alike will be involved in the testing of O2's recently installed Long Term Evolution (LTE) network across parts of the City, providing download capabilities many times faster than those over 3G.