Insects have provided the inspiration for a team of European researchers seeking to improve the functionality of robots and robotic tools.

The research furthers the development of more intelligent robots, which can then be used by industry, and by emergency and security services, among others. Smarter robots would be better able to find humans buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, for example.

The EU-funded SPARK project set out to develop a new robot control architecture for roving robots inspired by the principles governing the behavior of living systems and based on the concept of self-organization.

A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister’s calculations were used for the Channel 4 Dispatches program “The Mobile Phone Rip-Off.”

Satellites currently use radio waves to exchange data. Now the data rate has been increased a hundredfold in two test satellites by using lasers instead of radio signals.

The tests between German satellite TerraSAR-X and US satellite NFIRE, covering more than 5000 kilometers in space without any errors, was special in that the space tests recently performed by Tesat-Spacecom was that the data was transmitted by laser.

The bandwidth achieved in the test was a hundred times greater than during conventional communication by radio waves, enabling a data rate equivalent to roughly 400 DVDs per hour. This could make it possible to transmit large data packets between several satellites in the future, for instance to send image data from Earth observation satellites to a ground station. That has not been possible until now, as the bandwidth of radio waves is not large enough. Another advantage of this new form of communication is that lasers are easier to focus than radio waves, which means that data transmissions can be directed more accurately.

Stem cells, the body's wonder tool, are extremely versatile. They can develop in 220 different ways, transforming themselves into a correspondingly diverse range of specialized body cells.

Biologists and medical scientists plan to make use of this differentiation ability to selectively harvest cardiac, skin or nerve cells for the treatment of different diseases. However, the stem cell culture techniques practiced today are not very efficient. What proportion of a mass of stem cells is transformed into which body cells? And in what conditions?

“We need devices that keep doing the same thing and thus deliver statistically reliable data,” says Professor Günter Fuhr, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering IBMT in St. Ingbert.

Like video games? Want to also solve puzzles for science?

A new game, named Foldit, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes – key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer's to vaccines.

After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they're playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science.

Current biochemical detectors are slow and produce an unacceptable number of false readings because they are easily fooled by subtle differences between deadly pathogens and harmless substances. They simply cannot fully monitor or interpret the different ways these substances interact with biological systems.

To solve this problem, three faculty researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineeringare are learning how to incorporate real cells into tiny micro-systems to detect chemical and biological pathogens.

They are collaborating across engineering disciplines to make advanced "cell-based sensors-on-a-chip" technology possible. Pamela Abshire, electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and Institute for Systems Research (ISR); Benjamin Shapiro, aerospace engineering and ISR; and Elisabeth Smela, mechanical engineering and ECE; are working on new sensors that take advantage of the sensory capabilities of biological cells.

If you use one of America’s top internet service providers, you may share server space with an organization that enables worldwide terrorism, says a new study by Tel Aviv University.

The findings were presented in Berlin to a closed audience of high-ranking representatives from NATO in February 2008.

Enlisted by NATO officials to study the web activity of terrorist organizations, researchers found that some of the world’s most dangerous organizations are operating on American turf. Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda all have websites hosted by popular American Internet service providers –– the same companies that most of us use every day.

There was a recent study that provided a revised view of the Internet Structure in the U.S. The Global information Technology Report was released a few weeks ago. The study was done by Insead, the French business school, on behalf of the World Economic Forum.

The conclusion was that the Internet infrastructure of the United States is one of the world’s best. This, of course, is a different conclusion than recent opinion that suggested the U.S. is lagging far behind the rest of the world. The report used an index generated from 68 variables including market factors, technological infrastructure and political and regulatory environments, rather than just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds. The U.S. is now ranked fourth in the world behind Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland.

If you've ever used an internet translation tool, you know how immature the translation technology is compared to other sorts of computer programs. Punctuation errors, misplaced words and grammatical mistakes can make them almost unintelligible.

Verbal language translation is ever worse. Mo one has been able to develop an automatic translation system that comes anywhere close to the capabilities of a human translator or interpreter. ‘Constrained speech’ utilities that can only translate certain predefined words and phrases are adequate for a tourist booking a hotel but useless if you want to understand a news bulletin.

Europeans have a keen desire for a true universal translator. With 23 official languages, European institutions spend more than a billion euros a year translating documents and interpreting speeches. Companies trading across the EU’s internal borders spend millions more just to understand their business partners. It's a situation unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

If you have kids, and you happen to be of a certain age, you probably have some Speed Racer cartoons in your house because you watched them when you were a kid and want your own children to understand the magic of embedded car jacks that can propel them into the air. Eventually engineering reality will crush those dreams but there's plenty of time later for that.

I don't have all of the episodes on DVD because I get irritated buying things twice but I have key ones, like the 'greatest hits', which includes the authentic tire rubber case. We get a lot of mileage out of them, if we're allowed puns on a science site, and those are the primary story for the live action movie coming out May 9th. It should inspire a new generation of kids and, with some luck, new interest in cool car technology.

Most kids who are already fans will want to be Speed Racer or Racer X. Not mine. They'll get obscure, steeped as they are in Speed Racer lore, and be Ace Deucey or Snake Oiler or Guy something-or-other, a name I can't even pronounce but they can. We have little Speed Racer cars and then bigger Speed Racer cars.