Bionic hands are go. Three men with serious nerve damage had their hands amputated and replaced by prosthetic ones that they can control with their minds. The procedure, dubbed "bionic reconstruction", was carried out by Oskar Aszmann at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. The men had all suffered accidents which damaged the brachial plexus – the bundle of nerve fibres that runs from the spine to the hand. Despite attempted repairs to those nerves, the arm and hand remained paralyzed.

A new way to produce metals could have wide-ranging effects.

Electric cars are quick and quiet, with a range more than long enough for most commutes. If you want a car with extremely fast acceleration, the Tesla Model S is hard to beat. And, of course, electric vehicles avoid the pollution associated with conventional cars, including emissions of carbon dioxide from burning gasoline. Yet they account for a tiny fraction of automotive sales, mainly because the batteries that propel them are expensive and need to be recharged frequently.

Changes to road regulations and car maintenance checks will be necessary to accommodate driverless cars on the roads of the UK, a Department of Transport report has confirmed.

A 19 year old recent high school graduate who built a $350 robotic arm that can be controlled with thoughts is showing any one how to build it for free. His goal is to allow anybody who is missing an arm, like an amputee, to use the robotic arm at a vastly cheaper cost than a prosthetic limb that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Space colonization has reached an impasse, for reasons far more fundamental than a lack of money for the Space Shuttle program. There is simply no way humans can travel easily offworld without using massive amounts of rocket fuel to escape the gravity well — and that's both expensive and environmentally unsustainable. So how will we get off this rock?

The following is reprinted from the book Uncle John's Unsinkable Bathroom Reader.It’s easy to forget that until very recently in history, families who lived in cold-weather areas were snowbound on their land throughout the long winters. One man dedicated his life to changing that. AN INVENTIVE KIDFourteen-year-old Joseph-Armand Bombardier was driving his father crazy by constantly tinkering with everything around the house. Young Armand took apart and then rebuilt clocks...

America is a nation of pavement. According to research conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, most cities’ surfaces are 35 to 50 percent composed of the stuff. And 40 percent of that pavement is parking lots. That has a large effect: Asphalt and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, retaining heat — and contributing to the “urban heat island effect,” in which cities are hotter than the surrounding areas.

One of the major reasons that solar panels are facing such hurdles to replace conventional electricity sources is because they are very inefficient. The most efficient (and most expensive) panel is currently somewhere around 32 percent efficiency. However, scientists in Switzerland have figured out a way to utilize Graphene in solar panel design, raising its efficiency to an absolutely staggering 60% – a finally feasible amount.

A PhD student in the Netherlands has demonstrated a technique that could cut the cost of producing graphene by a factor of a thousand, opening up the real-world potential of the so-called "wonder material". Shou-En Zhu from the Delft University of Technology described in his thesis how chemical vapour deposition of methane on a copper sheet can create graphene crystals that align together to form an "endless sheet" of pure graphene.

In an effort to significantly improve artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, the research arm of the of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently announced a program whose chief goal is to reverse engineer human brain algorithms.

Bio-reactors and micro-algae sound like the stuff of science fiction, but this is the real deal: biomass built into panel glass on an actual working structure.

Tokyo plans to spend 45.2 billion yen on fuel-cell vehicle subsidies and hydrogen stations for the 2020 Olympics as part of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plan to reduce Japan’s reliance on nuclear power. Japan’s capital will build 35 stations to fuel hydrogen-based FCVs and is in negotiations with Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) and Honda Motor Co. to put 6,000 hydrogen cars on its roads by 2020, said Makoto Fujimoto, who heads the planning team at the metropolitan government’s energy department.

Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings. Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications such as rust prevention, anti-icing, or even in sanitation uses. However, as Rochester's Chunlei Guo explains, most current hydrophobic materials rely on chemical coatings.

Materials scientists may have unlocked a new battery technology.

The backbreaking chore usually done by women around the world could get easier.

Elon Musk tweeted that he'll be building a 5-mile Hyperloop test track probably in Texas. Say whaaaaat?!

Imagine a future in which cities are no longer grown from the ground up with poured concrete. Factories spit out bathrooms, kitchens, and whole apartment floors to be stacked and sealed into dazzling towers. Faster, more environmentally efficient, and affordable housing is a given, and megacities more closely resemble tightly assembled airplane engines than accidents of density and sprawl.

EVERY decade or so, enthusiasts dream up plans for yet another spaceplane—a craft that can take off from a runway like an aeroplane, fly up into orbit to deliver a payload, and then glide back to Earth for a runway landing. And then be ready to do the same again within a day or two. Nothing has ever come of them. Even so, the dream persists. What is not to like about a workhorse launch vehicle that jettisons none of its parts while climbing up to orbit and returns to Earth intact, ready to...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the world leader in space exploration. JPL scientists have put robots on Mars, sent probes into interstellar space, and collected dust from the tails of comets. But what if the real purpose behind its mission was something darker? What if the lab was less interested in exploring outer space than the depths of the void? What if its researchers huddled around their computer screens in search of paranormal entities or dark gods crawling clear of the event...