24 January 2025 – One millionth Gay wedding
A postcard from the future that tells the news of the millionth gay wedding celebrated in the United States in 12 years.
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Tested a vaccine against synthetic drugs
When you hear about “Ice”, “Shaboo” or “Crystal Meth” you know that these are some of the most widespread synthetic drugs in the world, as well as the most dangerous. These are active ingredients all deriving from methamphetamine, a sympathomimetic that literally bombards the brain with dopamine. According to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, there are as many as 25 million users and dependents on these substances worldwide. A team of scientists… Read more
DARPin E2-79, is the beginning of the end for allergies
How stupid are allergies. Stupids. Our immune system becomes hysterical in reacting to external impulses and does so for no reason: an 'excess defense' which in the most serious cases can even lead to death. The so-called 'vaccines' currently on the market are only desensitizing treatments that actually act on the symptoms, nothing that eliminates the underlying cause once and for all. [highlight]Today a new molecule could succeed in the mission:[/highlight]its name is DARPin E2-79 and it comes… Read more
Holland drops 5 axles for the motorway of the future
We often tend to think of innovations in the field of road safety as solutions limited to cars, but a team of Dutch designers makes us understand how the road itself can also play an active role. This gave rise to a series of interesting studies to make driving safer. The Glowing Lines concept takes inspiration from the lines of reflectors that can be found here and there on European motorways, but replaces the latter with a special luminescent paint in … Read more
Eyes on me, please
Try to imagine a mechanic with grease-stained hands trying to flip through the pages of a car maintenance guide. Every time you put the wrench down, clean yourself carefully so as not to get dirty, turn the page and start again. The scientists at the Fraunhofer Center for Organics, Materials and Electronic Devices in Dresden (better known as COMEDD) must have experienced this sensation many times, having developed special glasses capable of allowing the wearer to browse ... Read more
Hitachi develops crystal storage media
Chopin and the Beatles teach us that things like good music can last a very long time: from tomorrow they could be preserved forever thanks to more stable and long-lasting memories. From the advent of the information age onwards, the most pressing problem of the industry (and of people) has been to protect an increasingly large amount of data, to save them from the wear and tear of time and their own 'volatility'. Locking paper photos in a safe means guaranteeing them a long life, but closing ... Read more
A bionic leg guided by thought and chasing a record.
Zac Vawter lost a leg in an accident 3 years ago and since then he has been through an ordeal looking for a prosthesis (he calls it a 'fake leg') which for him had satisfactory answers close to those of a real leg. So the thirty-one-year-old software engineer from Washington signed up in 2010 as a volunteer tester in a research program with the aim of creating a thought-guided bionic leg. The Rehabilitation Institute of the Medical Center… Read more
Connectomics – Building a map of the mind
There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the brain of an adult human, and each of these neurons is connected to hundreds of others for a total of approximately 150 billion connections in total. Neuroscience is discovering that it is the pattern of these connections, the structure of this immense neural network, that is largely responsible for the functionality of the brain, in other words for our mental life: everything we feel, think, experience or do. Our … Read more
You move on to artificial blood
Artificial blood could soon become a reality thanks to the first successful human transfusion. Dr. Luc Douay of the Parisian University 'Pierre et Marie Curie' extracted stem cells from bone marrow and 'encouraged' them to grow and transform into blood cells by administering a cocktail of growth factors: finally he injected 10 billion of these cells (the equivalent of 2 milliliters) in the donor's spinal cord. After 5 days 94% of the cells were still alive and… Read more
Lumineyes: in 20 seconds the eyes change color (forever).
Have you always dreamed of having a beautiful pair of blue eyes, but were you born with dark eyes? A Californian doctor has patented and developed a method capable of changing dark eyes to blue (forever) in just 20 seconds. How does Lumineyes work? Dr. Gregg Homer is an optical specialist at the Stroma Medical Institute in California. He has patented and uses a technique called Lumineyes to remove the brown pigment (melanin) from the top layer of the iris using a unique laser. … Read more
Smart steering wheel controls vital signs while driving
We have already said a lot about devices that check if you are too drunk to drive, but today a group of German researchers want to take this concept a little further: their 'intelligent steering' constantly monitors the driver's vital functions and changes behavior of the vehicle in their operation. Developed by the Munich Technical University in collaboration with BMW, this steering is equipped with numerous sensors capable of measuring heart rate, oxygenation levels and blood pressure: if … Read more
Extraterrestrial life: the radio bubble hypothesis
The question was referring to the fact that it seemed strange to him that we were not receiving any extraterrestrial transmissions from space. If it is true that there are millions of planets similar to ours out there and if at least a small percentage of them have developed intelligent life, why don't we receive any radio transmissions? This inconsistency was later called the “Fermi Paradox”. It is clear that if intelligent life develops on a remote planet, once technological development has been reached, it will necessarily have to... Read more
Airdrop, water from the air in real time
There is nothing more devastating than drought for agriculture: hectares and hectares of cultivated land literally go up in smoke due to the prolonged absence of rain: a prototype developed by Edward Linnacre, a student at Swinburne University in Australia, promises to erase this problem in the future. His name is Airdrop. Here's how it works Despite its rather essential design, Airdrop is able to filter hot air from the environment through a turbine, filter it thanks to a complex system of pipes, … Read more
Blood nanorobot to treat infections and tumors
This is the case of "nanobots" or microscopic machines (about 50 nanometers in size) that science fiction had imagined in the Star Trek series and which, injected into a patient's circulation, went there to rebuild damaged tissues, eliminate pathogens such as viruses and resistant bacteria or even eradicate a cancer. Unfortunately, the economic factor often stops the ideas and drive towards innovation of motivated researchers: no one puts in the money and the research remains on paper. … Read more
Today is World Toilet Day: the future is also to have more hygiene.
Dirty, smelly and not recommended for hygiene, but they do their job: these are our sewers. Although it may present serious structural problems (often all sorts of problems arise from their congestion, in conjunction with rains and overflows), our Network is an achievement of civilization from which not everyone in the world can benefit. Take developing countries: the absence of any system for disposing of our biological waste causes the death of hundreds of people every year... Read more
In nanomachine towards the future
It's not the first and it won't be the last. Scientists from the University of Groningen (Holland) and the Empa research center (Switzerland) have created a nanometric transport system equipped with four motor units (translation: a “namomachine”). It's electric, four nanometers long and every half turn of the wheels has to fill up... It works thanks to a scanning tunneling microscope positioned above it, which transmits a tiny electric charge that causes reversible structural changes in the wheels (translation: … Read more
Jobs of the near future: 26 jobs of tomorrow
In the days that mark the fall of the Berlusconi government and the Italian economic crisis (remember? we predicted it on the old site) I am as disheartened as all of you. The moment is difficult: we can only get out of it if all levels of our country change by looking to the future more than to the past. Some jobs will still survive in the future, let's be clear: but there is a whole series of jobs that don't exist today and which could be useful in the near future. Let's go with common sense: 60%... Read more
Synthetic organ made 'from scratch' with stem cells.
If you are still not convinced that stem cells are the future of medicine, listen here: a group of Japanese researchers used stem cells to synthesize a new, fully functional organ in the laboratory, starting from SCRATCH. This is the research team at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, which took mouse stem cells and transformed them into a perfectly functioning pituitary gland: the pituitary gland, otherwise called the pituitary gland, is a small organ... Read more
Preserving the brain to live again in digital form: plastination.
Death is the end of everything. Our brain, which has functioned well for many decades, at the moment of our departure from the world, in the space of just twenty minutes undergoes anoxia and neurons and synapses fall apart. No machine, after such damage, will be able to revive us; it will be able to reactivate cardiac functions and circulation but our brain will be gone forever. And to say that the brain has "gone" for philosophy... Read more
Repairing the damage of time will 'cure' you from old age
Day after day this ambitious goal is starting to become reality thanks to the progress of biomedical research. For several years, researchers have believed that the cells most damaged by aging, called "senescent", damage the surrounding tissue causing many of the pathologies characteristic of old age. These cells, which have stopped dividing due to the ravages of time, continue to secrete large quantities of molecules, many of which are toxic, in the surrounding environment. In a study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature, scientists from "Mayo ... Read more
Speed Cameras? A joke: CORDON arrives
Your glory days are gone: you will no longer be able to happily roam the highway in defiance of the miserable speed cameras on duty: an American company, Peak Gayn Sistems, has developed a special photographic radar capable of viewing and identifying up to 32 vehicles different in a single shot, analyzing up to 4 motorway lanes and recording license plate numbers and cruising speed of each vehicle. That's not enough: the CORDON (this is the name of the system) is capable of... Read more
