Science and biotech

In March, former Marine corporal Josh Maloney became the first Iraq war veteran and only the sixth American to receive a human hand, transplanted from an organ donor.

"He wanted to touch," said Patty Maloney, his mother. "He wanted to be able to feel again."

Four months later, the hand is actually starting to work.

"I can feel the soft touch up to there," he said. "I can feel hot and cold."

Maloney served two tours in Iraq, but came home and lost his hand in a training accident. He tried prosthetics, … Read more

Nanoparticles have ever-cooler applications. Here's another.

Researchers in India are developing a silver nanoparticle gel to treat burn wounds that could be more effective than conventional gels.

Burned skin is especially vulnerable to infection. Silver has been used as a purifying agent since ancient times, and burn creams have been around for some 30 years.

Silver sulfadiazine and silver nitrate gels are used in burn treatment as antimicrobial agents to accelerate healing, but some gels can cause skin discoloration and damage cells.

The researchers at the Agharkar Research Institute and Nano Cutting Edge Technology reported successful lab tests of … Read more

Venture capitalists are drawing their purse strings tighter than ever in reaction to the economic downturn.

Money from VCs to start-ups and IPOs sunk to $3.7 billion in the second quarter, a drop of 51 percent from $7.5 billion in the year-ago quarter. This marks the lowest ongoing level of venture capital funding over the past 12 years, according to a MoneyTree report released Tuesday by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The report was based on statistics from Thomson Reuters.

Although VC spending rose slightly from the first quarter's $3.2 billion, the ongoing … Read more

The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back even further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment.

The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The project had been expected to start again in October.

To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as "floats," while the remainder of the surrounding sectors … Read more

My CNET handler woke me early on Friday.

"It's those corpse-eating robot people," he barked down the phone. "They're after you."

"But I'm not dead yet," I replied. "I just look pretty rough first thing in the morning."

Still, he made me stagger to my laptop and the Robotic Technology site. There, I espied the words: "IMPORTANT MESSAGE CONCERNING EATR."

For those of you who have been asleep since Tuesday, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR, is a steam-powered robot being developed for military purposes. Its … Read more

Forty years after the first humans walked on the moon, NASA is trying again to reach the Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

It's not just about retracing 40-year-old footsteps in the lunar dust, though. This time, NASA wants its moonshot to become an outpost and eventually a Mars shot too, if Congress and others can be persuaded to part with the necessary money.

The new attempt is well past the idea stage. Two spacecraft are freshly launched on scouting missions to map the moon and see whether permanently shaded areas in craters on its south pole really do contain … Read more

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your trash is? A new project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes to find out.

A team of MIT researchers announced on Wednesday a project called Trash Track, designed to monitor trash from start to finish. The team will electronically tag different pieces of waste to trace their voyage through the disposal systems of New York City and Seattle.

By examining the patterns and costs of waste disposal, MIT hopes to educate people about the impact of garbage on the environment and make them aware of what they throw out.… Read more

Both the American public and researchers have a high regard for scientific advancement. But they disagree over the standing of science in the U.S.

A full 84 percent of the public believes science's effect on society has been mostly positive, reveals a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. And 70 percent feel scientists contribute a lot to society's well-being.

However, only 17 percent of the public think that U.S. scientific achievements rank as best in the world. That contrasts with 49 percent of scientists surveyed who feel U.S. science is still at the … Read more

And you thought it was a problem when folks went into the locker room toting cell phones with cameras.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a fabric made of a mesh of light-sensitive fibers that collectively act like a rudimentary camera. The fibers, which each can detect two frequencies of light, produced signals that when amplified and processed by a computer reproduced an image of a smiley face near the mesh.

"This is the first time that anybody has demonstrated that a single plane of fibers, or 'fabric,' can collect images just like a camera but … Read more