Velcro is one of the best inventions ever. It allows us to wear shoes that don’t need tied, keep swimsuits fastened without zippers or buttons, and hand stuff on the wall and still be able to get it down easily.

Velcro would be great in many industrial uses too, if it could withstand heat and chemicals. A new metallic Velcro has been spied that has hooks and loops made from metal. The stuff is crazy strong.

All most of us know about nuclear explosions today comes from the 60′s and movies. Back during the cold war, kids in school had bomb drills, which were weird considering the radiation could make it under your desk.

A new photo and story has surfaced that occurred back in 1962. The US strapped a hydrogen bomb to a rocket and fired it 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The bomb used was 1000 times more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima.

A space probe launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is expected to land in the Australian outback late Sunday after a seven-year journey to a nearby asteroid. Scientists hope the probe will be carrying a sample from the asteroid which will mark the first time a spacecraft has returned to Earth with samples other than from the Earth’s moon.

The probe named Hayabusa landed on the asteroid Itokawa two times in 2005 and after its long return journey will be landing a remote desert in Australia. Among the team to find and recover the probe will be indigenous Aboriginal elders to ensure that the landing of the device did not damage any sacred grounds.

In an article published Wednesday in Nature, researches in Japan reported the successful passing of a transgene from a primate to its offspring, marking a milestone in this type of research. In the study the scientists injected a number of marmoset embryos with a manufactured virus which contained a gene that would be inserted into the animals DNA, making their feet glow green under ultraviolet light.

NASA has announced that they are looking for ideas on what to do with the two space shuttle orbiters and main engine display kits by issuing a Request For Information (RFI) to the public. If you can convince them that you can appropriately display the shuttle to the public along with having enough money to transport and store them then you may have a good chance and scoring your own space shuttle from NASA.

Officials at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced on Tuesday that the world’s biggest physics experiments will be on hold until April. This comes as result of recent large, unexpected helium leak into a sector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Earlier this month CERN had its first successful test run of the LHC by sending a beam of protons clockwise through a 17 mile ring making up the system. The next steps were to send the proton beam counter-clockwise through the LHC, and then eventually send beams in both directions having them collide in an attempt to study new forms of matter that could not be studied in any other existing machine.

Research into the helium leak has shown that the likely cause was electrical connections between two of the superconducting electromagnets which caused a …

In what is probably the biggest physics experiment in history, today marks the first successful test of the Large Hadron Collidor in Geneva by sending a beam of protons through the the entire underground ring that makes up the world’s largest particle collider. The beam sent through travels through the 17 mile underground ring and nearly the speed of light and can make 11,000 laps through the tube every second.

Officials with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) dubbed the test a success today and the next step will be to send a beam of protons through the tunnel in the opposite direction. Today’s beam went clockwise and the next trial will be to send the beam counter-clockwise.

If successful then the team will be able to work towards the ultimate goal of sending protons through the tunnel in both …

A sensor-based idea first drawn up and tested in the Harvard University Robotics Lab and originally funded by DARPA research grants has now found its way to market. It is called the Pressure Profile Systems FingerTPS and you’ll find it pricing around $5,000 for a single-hand system.

The Pressure Profile Systems FingerTPS, as you can see from the photo, places flexible sensors on select parts of the hand to “transmit accurate, repeatable tactile force data to a PC via wireless Bluetooth connection.” The maker says this data, integrated with video, “provides a complete representation of user interaction with tools, sports equipment, new
product designs, or medical applications.”

According to the Space Adventures tourism company out of Virginia, Sergy Brin, cofounder of Google, has put a $5 million deposit down for a vacation in space aboard a Russian spacecraft. The total trip will cost $35 million dollars and the launch date is scheduled for sometime in 2011.

Brin joins a small number of elite individuals who have both the desire to travel into space and more importantly the deep pockets to make it happen. Richard Garriott’s trip with Space Adventures is still coming up this fall. Brin’s $5 million deposit also makes him the founding member of a new Space Adventure club called the Orbital Mission Explorers Circle. The membership appears to work something like a vacation timeshare, but for space. Brin and any other new members that join get preferential options to the mission seats or can sell the seat to another space traveler if there schedule just doesn’t allow for traveling to space that day.

After over three years of direct planning and ten months of traveling through space, NASA’s Phoenix Mars spacecraft today sent back signals that it has made a safe landing on the surface of Mars. The Phoenix spacecraft appears to have hit the intended target in the icy area of Mars’ arctic circle.

Signals sent from Phoenix were delayed by 15 minutes as they were routed through the Odyssey satellite currently orbiting Mars and back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Earth which caused the celebrations of steps of the landings to take place shortly after they actually happened on Mars.

The University of Melbourne announced on Friday a new technology they are calling “GiFi”, which promises some serious game-changing wireless transfer speeds for all types of consumer gadgets. The tiny silicon chip invented by professor Stan Skafidas is able to move data through the air as fast as 5 gigabits per second at a distance of just over 30 feet.

This short-range wireless technology would potentially be a competitor or more than likely a replacement for WiFi, and things like Bluetooth might want to look out as well. The transfer speeds combined with the constantly increased storage capacities of small handheld devices could really take media down some new avenues as well. The Age newspaper uses an example of transferring a high-definition movie from a kiosk at a store to your mobile phone in seconds. Then that same movie can be transferred just as quickly from the phone to your home computer or entertainment system to watch.

Some scientists from the U.S. and Canada have teamed up to create a new knee brace that generates electricity from your steps. The brace takes advantage of the stop energy that occurs after swinging the knee forward which would otherwise dissipate as heat, much like braking on an electric or hybrid car.

According to the initial studies on the 3.5 pound prototype, a person walking at 2.2 mph was able to create around 5 watts of electricity while wearing a brace on each leg. The researchers state that this device can generate enough electricity to power as many as 10 cell phones, or possibly a small laptop. Some practical future applications include using the knee-mounted generator for campers or soldiers who are not near electricity to power up GPS devices or satellite phones.

Anytime waterproofing is added to a gadget it just seems to make it that much more cool, but unfortunately not many electronic devices are able to live through being accidentally dropped into your Mai Tai or withstand a simple vodka resistance test because the the difficulty and expense of making small seals for all those cracks and crevices.

Well, thanks to some scientists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Porton Down, Wilts. who originally developed the technology, gadgets may soon be getting something called an Ion-Mask coating to provide waterproofing to all sorts of devices. The Ion-Mask was a military technology originally designed to protect soldiers clothing from chemical attacks but soon could be used to protect mobile phones and media players from moisture, rain and the occasional drop in the drink.

Some California residents might be receiving electricity from a more novel, environmentally friendly and source in the coming years. PG&E has announced that it is going to team up with Finavera Renewables to build a “wave farm” off the coast of California in order to generate electricity.

The wave farm consists of “wave energy converters”, or basically large buoys like Finavera’s Aquabuoy pictured here. As the buoy moves up and down on top of the waves that pass by it drives a piston which is anchored on the ocean floor. The piston creates pressure which drives a turbine and in turn creates electricity. A single full-scale Aquabuoy can generate 250 killowatts which can power approximately 80 homes. The initial plan is to create a farm of these buoys that will generate 2 megawatts of electricity by 2012, and if things go well they will ramp up the farm to produce 100 megawatts.

This next story should give you pause to think about what may be ahead in the near future for the emerging biotechnology sector. A science team at South Korea’s Gyeongsang National University announced that they have successfully cloned kittens that have a modified gene that alters their skin color. When placed underneath an ultraviolet light a unmodified cat will look green. These new genetically modified cats have a fluorescent protein inserted into their DNA which makes their skin appear red under the same kind of UV light.

Three cloned Turkish Angola kitties were born in early 2007 but one died shortly after. The two surviving cats now weigh 3.5 kilograms and appear to be perfectly healthy representatives of the feline race. Aside from being able to make funky colored critters the new procedure is hoped to be used for bringing back the populations of animals on the endangered species list as well as identifying and eliminating genetic diseases in people and pets.