d6gacn-1200x800[1].jpg By Aviva Rutkin Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim. In h...

shape2[1].gif It’s the ultimate Transformer. Flick a switch and watch as your house packs itself into a backpack, or its walls open into a doorway. That’s the vision behind a material that can be programmed to change shape. Developed by Johannes Overvelde at Harvard University and his colleagues, t...

mg22830501.900-1_800[1].jpg OUCH! A detailed simulation of a human leg injured by flying shrapnel, gushing blood and all, could help train medics for real combat situations. The video simulation was created by Jeff Eldredge at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues. The main ...

dn28427-1_800[1].jpg “About 33,000 people die on America’s roads every year. That’s why so much of the enthusiasm for self-driving cars has focused on their potential to reduce accident rates,” says Chris Urmson, technical director of Google’s self-driving car programme. But a report suggests that ...

Apps that let users talk to human therapists or keep tabs on their own mental state are making therapy more accessible and affordable mg22730384.200-1_800[1].jpg LIE down anywhere that suits: the world is now your therapist’s couch. People with problems such as anxiety or mood swings are turning to...

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0CqRcFZHbc[/media] Being skinny isn't always the answer. By giving a robot cockroach a rounded back, it became much better at navigating narrow gaps, as shown in the video above. Although a streamlined shape is key to making a robot fly or swim, this isn't usu...

dn27741-1_1200[1].jpg New energy policies in China are being heralded as the source of a potentially historic break in the link between global economic growth and rising carbon dioxide emissions. Last year, carbon emissions were unchanged even as the global economy grew by 3 per cent compared with ...

[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awufipq9JnQ[/media] It self-folds, walks and even swims – then recycles itself when its job is done. Made by Shuhei Miyashita and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 1.7-centimetre-long origami robot made of plastic and containing a magnet ca...

dn27629-1_300[1].jpg Are you ready for your smellfie? Photo captions on visual social networks like Flickr and Instagram can be used to create detailed smell maps of urban areas. A team led by Daniele Quercia at the University of Cambridge used data taken from the sites to plot maps of aroma distri...

dn27631-1_300[1].jpg EVERY year, hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the Valley of the Temples, a large park of Greek ruins situated on the south-west coast of Sicily. But soon you could be able to get a drone's-eye view of the sights. Helmut Hlavacs at the University of Vienna has developed a ...