Read it.

Over 1.5 million Americans travel abroad each year for medical procedures in what is called Medical Tourism. Services typically sought by medical tourists include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as heart surgery, dental surgery, joint replacement, and cosmetic surgeries. However, virtually every type of health care, including complementary & alternative treatments, psychiatry, and convalescent care are attracting Americans by saving as much as 90% off of medical procedures.

U.S. based healthcare providers have taken notice as have self-funded employers and health plans. The reality is most people, if given the choice, would rather travel for medical purposes to Tucson than Thailand to save time and uncertainty. Top surgical facilities realized they can be price competitive and have extra capacity so they have embarked on a program of domestic medical tourism. The byproduct, if you follow it to the logical extreme, is the creation of a national market for non-emergent surgery that has historically been strictly a local market. As the USA Today recently reported, costs commonly vary in healthcare by 600% or more (Source: change:healthcare) for the same procedure and same outcome even in the same city let alone from one to another.

The less friction there is to impede information flow, the more efficient markets become.

Read it.

Hydrostor takes the excess energy created during periods of off-peak consumption and converts that energy into compressed air via an air compressor, which in turn inflates accumulators placed under the surface of a body of water. The depth of the water keeps the air at a constant pressure, helping to store the energy potential.

When power is required, the air is released through an expander and electricity is produced. Through the heat-exchanger, modern compressors and expanders, the system approaches adiabatic operation, achieving efficiencies over 70 percent.

Read it.

The D-Dalus (a play on Daedalus from Greek mythology) is neither fixed wing or rotor craft and uses four, mechanically-linked, contra-rotating cylindrical turbines, each running at the same 2200 rpm, for its propulsion.

The key to the D-Dalus’ extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that’s just the start of the story.

…

D-Dalus is particularly suited for such conditions and can thrust upwards and hence “glue down” on landing, which it can also do on a moving vehicle. Indeed, landing on a moving vehicle is one of the D-Dalus’ many party tricks, and it’s a natural for landing on watercraft. Not surprisingly, since it initially broke cover at the Royal Aeronautical Society conference a few days ago, it has already attracted a lot of interest from military quarters.

The D-Dalus is also near-silent, and has the dynamic stability to enter buildings and handle rough weather with ease – things which existing rotorcraft simply cannot achieve. The aircraft also has a sense-and-avoid system which, in conjunction with its complete lack of vulnerable external parts (such as rotors), means it can hover in very close proximity to vertical rock faces and walls, making it suitable for search-and-rescue operations, as a surveillance drone with hover-and-stare capabilities and as a proactive tool for urban battlefield situational awareness.

We also might see the return of helicopter transport to and from airports again, long since banned due to safety concerns. The conjunction of improved safety with decreased noise are going to make the military jump on this like a duck on a junebug.

This will also go a long way toward a true ‘flying car’.

Read it.

I predict that it will be used primarily by non-English speakers to practice English than by English-speakers wanting to practice foreign languages.

Just a hunch.

Read it.

The front teeth have horizontal lines that were so neatly filed, archaeologists believe it must have been done by a skilled craftsman rather than by their owners, and the process undoubtedly would have been excruciating.

Read it.

Ah, the cry of we-want-the-future-now folks has been “where’s my flying car?” Well, a very simple version of one may finally be coming to market. A year ago, we noted that the Terrafugia Transition “roadable aircraft” had been approved by the FAA for flight as a light sports aircraft (meaning you don’t even need a full pilots license). But it apparently took another year for the Transition to get the necessary “exemptions” from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to let the thing go on the road.

Note that the key roadblocks to ‘the future’ are caused by the government … for our own good, of course.

Read it.

Shear-thickening fluids, whose properties are so strange they earn the moniker “non-Newtonian,” increase in viscosity when under great strain. A simple shear-thickening fluid can be made by combining cornflour with water, Sheffield informs. Get the ratio just right, and you’ll have a substance that will remain a fluid when left alone, but will turn rigid and behave like a bouncing ball if you throw it against concrete. Explains Sheffield: “Under normal circumstances, the particles in STFs repel each other slightly, however following sudden impact, the extra energy in the system proves stronger than the repulsive forces, causing the particles to clump together in structures called hydroclusters, which bump into each other, consequently thickening the fluid.”

Read it.

Australian scientists have uncovered the world’s biggest marsupial – a “three-tonne monster” the size of a four-wheel drive that lived up to two million years ago.

It’s amazing what you find when you look hard enough.

Read it.

No doubt to give him a reward.

Read it. And watch the video.

A group of modders have launched a Star Wars themed takeover for Call of Duty 4, giving gamers the chance to play Modern Warfare as an Imperial Stormtrooper or Rebel Alliance soldier.

This is pretty slick. Very impressive work. I really wish I had the time to play these games.

Read it.

British scientists have produced a new study suggesting that the Sun is coming to the end of a “grand solar maximum” – a long period of intense activity in the Sun – meaning that we in Blighty could be set for a long period of much colder winters, similar to those seen during the “little ice age” of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Gotta love that Global Warming.

Read it.

Do you know what the Vikings ate for dinner? What a typical meal of a wealthy family in Roman Britain consisted of, or what food was like in a Victorian Workhouse? Why not drop into history cookbook and find out? This project looks at the food of the past and how this influenced the health of the people living in each time period. You can also try some of the recipes for yourself.

Read it.

Read it.

Geologists say they’ve uncovered expansive new deposits of rare earth minerals, buried within a seabed some 20,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean surface. Research leader Yasuhiro Kato estimates that the deposits contain anywhere from 80 to 100 billion metric tons of rare earths, which, if commercially viable, could pose a serious threat to China’s global hegemony.

And it couldn’t happen to nicer people.

Read it.

I say, let’s just mash all of the latest technologies together and see what kind of a game that makes, what? Jolly good.

Read it.

And there was much rejoicing.

Oxford comma: Eats, shoots, and leaves.

Inferior comma: Eats, shoots and leaves.

Read it.

The wrinkles that develop on wet fingers could be an adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions, the latest theory suggests.

So why do our faces get wrinkled as we get older? Some scary thoughts there….

Read it.

Gotta like that.

Read it.

In other news, Bashar al-Assad claims that time is running out for Hillary Clinton.

Let’ see who leaves office first.

Read it.

Read it.

And you can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Three dialysis patients have received the world’s first blood vessels grown in a lab from donated skin cells. It’s a key step toward creating a supply of ready-to-use arteries and veins that could be used to treat diabetics, soldiers with damaged limbs, people having heart bypass surgery and others.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The Russian double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman and nine other Kremlin spies to the CIA last summer has been found guilty of state treason as a Moscow military court revealed a poignant final message he wrote to his wife.

A poignant reminder that just because the Russians are no longer Communist doesn’t mean they aren’t still our enemy.

Read it.

I’ll bet that was a surprise.

Read it.

In a federal announcement issued on Tuesday, famous crazytech company General Atomics was awarded a $39,833,499 contract for “High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) Phase 4, Demonstration Laser Weapon System”.

…

DARPA wants the HELLADS programme to produce a directed-energy weapon of war-grade power (say 150 kilowatts) and weighing no more than 750kg, light enough to put onto a US combat jet. Existing lasers are so heavy that they require at least a cargo plane or a monster jumbo to carry them.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Read it.

Using a multiferroic alloy of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and tin, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered a method of creating green electricity from waste heat sources. This alloy could be placed near your car’s exhaust to create electricity — or in the cooling towers of power stations to convert wasted heat into electricity. Beyond creating the alloy itself, which is made from common and abundant elements, there are no extra costs — and no additional pollution, either.

No word on whether it comes with a free pony.

Read it.

By morphing and repositioning a small aircraft’s vertical tail to resemble the cranial crest of a pterosaur, researchers have shown that the aircraft’s turn radius can be reduced by 14%. The ability to make sharper turns is especially important for small aircraft that operate in urban environments and in the presence of obstacles.

Read it.

“This could ultimately be the cleanest, most efficient and cost-effective way of converting coal into electricity,” says Professor Meilin Liu, engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “And by providing an exhaust stream of pure carbon dioxide, this technique could also facilitate carbon sequestration without the separation and purification steps now required for conventional coal-burning power plants.”

Read it.

Keith McMillen Instruments of Berkeley, California, has released the SoftStep KeyWorx, a USB foot-operated input device that combines the company’s SoftStep USB/MIDI foot controller – a musician’s stomp-pad – with KeyWorx software to, as the company’s marketing blurb explains, “Get your feet in the game”.

But the SoftStep KeyWorx is not only designed to give “computer gamers a competitive edge.” It can also, the company claims, put to use the pedal extremities of video editors, programmers, and “data entry professionals”.

Read it.

Not so surprising when you realize that most military submarines are playing blind man’s buff – they go forward into the dark and rely on charts to avoid stationary obstacles and depend on their sense of hearing (sonar) to avoid moving objects. Using active echolocation would, of course, make things a lot safer, but the whole point of a military submarine would be sort of undercut by their emitting loud noises at regular intervals.

Read it.

How accommodating.

Read it.

Chinese developers are making knock-offs of European towns.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Being the last place that anyone would look.

Read it.

This would appear to be the famous ‘palm lock’ that we all know and love from classic science fiction stories.

Read it.

Scientists have designed a brain implant that restored lost memory function and strengthened recall of new information in laboratory rats — a crucial first step in the development of so-called neuroprosthetic devices to repair deficits from dementia, stroke and other brain injuries in humans.

Rats get all the good stuff….

Read it.

Read it.

In 2006, serial inventor Cordani, 49, was experimenting with protective coatings to defend homes from hurricanes. At the same time, wildfires were raging in his home state of Florida. On a hunch, he took a sample of a viscous gel he’d developed and tried a few experiments.

“I stuck a Popsicle stick in it and tried to light it — it wouldn’t catch,” he recalls. “Then I sprayed it on a pine tree and tried to light the tree. I couldn’t.”

Very impressive.

FireIce is shipped and stored as a powder; it becomes a gel when mixed with water. Unlike firefighting foam, it does not contain noxious chemicals that remain in the environment after its use, Cordani says. (As if torching his hand wasn’t enough, Cordani has also eaten FireIce, to attest to how benign it is.)

Very nice.

It obviously blocks heat transmission. So when can we use it for insulation in houses and vehicles?

Read it.

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth – far from facing a global warming problem – is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

How about that Global Warming? We can all keep warm by laughing at AlGore.

Read it.

Now, a company called Avita Medical is taking wound and burn treatment to a whole new level with a new technology called ReCell. ReCell allows a doctor to take a small sample of healthy skin and cover a much larger area that has been injured. What’s really cool about this technology is that it’s a spray! That’s right, you lose a few layers of skin and doctors can now spray some back on! And from some of the before and after pictures seen below, ReCell shows promise as a breakthrough in treating skin injuries.

Read it.

The RPG is a mechanical rather than chemical approach to portable energy storage. Its energy capacity is potentially ten times greater than a typical battery, company representatives wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. That depends on the kind of fuel it uses— the invention is essentially a very tiny, highly efficient engine.

This looks very interesting.

Read it.

Modern photography using Victorian tools and techniques. At last it is revealed why most upper-class people in the 19th century looked dimwitted.

Pretty awesome.

Read it.

Archeologists in Croatia have identified what they believe is the world’s only triple-barrel cannon inspired by the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.

The bronze cannon, from the late 15th century, bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus – the largest collection of his drawings and writing.

Read it.

‘Precious Reynolds’? *sigh* On the other hand, perhaps it’s that name that helped to make her strong.

Read it.

Just goes to show that you don’t have to be stupid to be Green.

Read it.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

Detailed specs haven’t been offered, we only know that it will feature “cutting-edge internal components,” but we can tell you there are a bevy of customization options. You can choose everything from the wood stain color, to keyboard fonts, to etched brass lids or clockwork gears like the original design (except these will tick and turn).

And a beautiful thing it is, too.