This past week the New England Journal of Medicine reported an interesting advance in prosthetic limbs - the development of nerve controlled robotic limbs. The original article can be accessed here.

Although robotic hands and arms*, and even a few experimental legs have been built before in robotics labs around the world, this new result incorporates the patient's original nerves in a new way. Specialized surgeons redirect the severed nerves into part of the thigh muscle, resulting in small mu...
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Last week NASA reported with pride that Voyageur 1 was still going strong after more than thirty years in space, and became the first man made object to leave the solar system. This week comes less joyful news that the Deep Impact probe has been formally declared to be dead.

Deep Impact was launched on a Delta II rocket on January 12, 2005 with the goal of performing several fly-bys of nearby comets. The first target was Comet Tempel 1, which was extensively photographed in July 2005, before t...

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Some readers may remember back in July that some scientists at NASA believed that the Voyager 1 probe had left the solar system, but there was still some debate about the issue. Now, just over two months later, there is more evidence that it not only is beyond the edge of our solar system, but that it may have left as early as August 2012. (The official news release can be found here.)

Unfortunately there is no clear delineation of the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. ...
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Since I mentioned the live webcast of the 22nd first annual Ig Nobel prizes, I suppose I should reveal the winners to those who were unable (or dare I say uninterested) in watching the results.

The prize for medicine has gone to a team of Japanese researchers for their study of the effect of opera music on mice who have had heart transplants. It may sound strange, but if successful, their results could produce better methods of helping humans with heart transplants to recover quicker and healt...
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There is great news today for physics students around the world - the legendary Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available online in glorious HTML & LaTeX. They can be accessed through the website: http://feynmanlectures.info/flp.html

For those not familiar with the story, long ago (the early 1960s) the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was working at CalTech when someone brought up the idea of an introductory physics course for first year students, which would present many of t...
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OK, so the title is just a tad over-dramatic. However there is an interesting new software tool being developed for tracking the time and date of phone calls or wiretaps, and it requires no special hidden devices or spyware on the targets phone or home. It is simply a matter of listening to the background hum of electrical appliances.

People generally assume that electricity is constant and unchanging. But it isn't. The electrical current that runs all of your household appliances from the ran...
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Some loyal readers will recognize this entry as a repeat from the last two years. I have had requests from some of my readers to repeat it again this year, and so I must once again acquiesce to the masses...

To all the students starting University, enjoy this time of your life. Long ago when I started, a prof told me that this is the start of your real education. Now you get to choose your own courses and your own field of study. It is entirely up to you to decide what to do with this chance.

I...

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This is a completely trivial posting, but some friends requested this information and I thought others may benefit from it. Apparently some parents are having financial problems due to purchasing software for their children's school needs. So here are a few links to free (and legal) alternatives which are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts.

Office Software: OpenOffice (replaces Microsoft Office or the Corel Packages)

Mathematics Software: SageMath (basic alternative to Math...

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