STEM

Finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease has defied medical researchers for decades now, but a team of scientists just gave us new reason to hope. They’ve discovered a way to zap away the bad proteins that cause diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (a.k.a. mad cow) disease—with lasers. It’s so simple, it’s incredible. The Polish-Swedish Continue Reading →

India launched its first unmanned mission to Mars on Tuesday as it tries to join a select group of countries that have managed to land spacecraft on the Red Planet. As the rocket sped off towards space from Sriharikota, a small island near Chennai in the southern part of the country, it was a huge Continue Reading →

Eighty kids got to attend academic summer camps and after-school programs this year thanks to Wishbone, and its education crowdfunding platform starts allowing needy children in the Bay Area or NYC to apply for assistance. The non-profit startup has spent the last year building out its fundraising and impact fulfillment components. Now Wishbone is ready Continue Reading →

  Computer engineering and program development are two of the fastest growing professions in the world. With such high demand, many developers created mobile apps disguised as games that teach the basics from the Elementary School through High School levels. These five computer programming apps for kids may have cracked the code. Move the Turtle. Continue Reading →

Code.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting computer science education, has unveiled a new campaign it calls “Hour of Code” targeting 10 million students in the United States. From December 9-15, 2013, Code.org is asking schools, teachers, and parents for their help in motivating students to look into what lies ahead with computer programming. What Continue Reading →

Rosetta Stone is expanding into the kids app market. The company just announced a line of iOS Spanish-learning apps for toddlers. The new, free Lingo Letters app teaches kids English phonetics while introducing them to the Spanish alphabet and common everyday phrases. West Stringfellow, Rosetta Stone’s CPO, told Fast Company the launch is part of Continue Reading →

Patent trolls are the villain du jour — taking advantage of an arcane and barely-functioning IP system to profit off of other people’s painstaking labors. Most often the strategy relies on a wide-net approach — wherein the troll gathers a portfolio of bafflingly broad patents and issues suits against everyone they can. The hope is Continue Reading →

The Turing test is one of the oldest ideas for imagining machine intelligence. Dreamed-up by computing legend Alan Turing, the idea is genius in its simplicity — if the average person can’t distinguish a particular machine from a real person through conversation, then that machine is said to possess thought. Each year, chat bots are Continue Reading →

If you’re going to make the world’s largest walking robot, you might as well go for broke. That’s what Zollner Elektronik AG — a firm out of Germany — did when it unveiled “Tradinno,” its 11-ton, 51 foot, winged, fire breathing dragon powered by a 2 liter turbo diesel engine. Now the real question is, Continue Reading →

The concept of the universal translator — a device that can fluidly convert any spoken language to that of the user – has been a sci-fi staple since pretty much the beginning of the genre as we know it today. The first known mention stretches all the way back to 1945, and it’s taken on Continue Reading →