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A superyacht captain used sonic weapons to fend off pirates, an industry insider told The Times of London.

They also deployed “pain rays,” which create a burning sensation on the skin, the worker said.

The captain used the weapons against armed pirates approaching on inflatable boats, the worker added.

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The Large Hadron Collider. xenotar/iStock

Whoosh!

After three years of maintenance and upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider — one of the most powerful scientific instruments ever built — has whizzed past its own record. In preparation for its third major run of experiments, the particle accelerator has created the most energetic beams of protons ever made by humans. The particles went racing around the 17-mile (27 km) tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, with an energy of 6.8 trillion electronvolts (TeV).

The failures of One Laptop per Child have much to teach us about fixing educational inequities.

A team of researchers at Seoul National University has created a stronger and faster hydrogel actuator by combining turgor design and electro-osmosis. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their approach and how well the resulting actuator performed when tested in a real-world experiment. Zhen Jiang and Pingan Song, with the University of Southern Queensland, outline some of the difficulties researchers have faced in trying to create hydrogels that imitate biological organisms and comment on the work done by the team in Korea in a Perspective article published in the same journal issue.

Hydrogels, as their name suggests, are gels made with a water base. Roboticists have been studying them closely for several years. The goal is to create soft actuators, which are deformable components that are able to interact with the environment in desired ways. To succeed, the actuator needs to be able to convert some form of energy into mechanical work, similar in some sense to human muscles. To make them more useful, scientists would like them to have stronger actuation forces than are now possible and to respond faster when the need arises. In this new effort, the researchers have taken another step toward achieving both goals.

The team created a hydrogel using standard techniques but enclosed it in a highly osmotic and stiff wrapping. The stiffness was designed to contain a swelling environment as a liquid made its way into the turgor cell-like construction. This allowed pressure to build up, and as it did so, it exerted a force against nearby objects. Testing of the cell showed it created enough force (730 N) to split a common building brick. The researchers note that such force was approximately 1,000 times greater than any other known hydrogel. And to speed up the action, the researchers applied an electric current, which drove the actuation speed to 19 times that of its normal osmotic rate.

North Virginia will make multi-billion dollar decisions this year on the region’s transportation future—decisions that are only going to induce more driving.

“You can do it quickly, you can do it cheaply, or you can do it right. We did it right.” These were some of David Toback opening remarks when the leader of Fermilab’s Collider Detector unveiled the results of a decade-long experiment to measure the mass of a particle known as the W boson.

I am a high energy particle physicist, and I am part of the team of hundreds of scientists that built and ran the Collider Detector at Fermilab in Illinois – known as CDF.

After trillions of collisions and years of data collection and number crunching, the CDF team found that the W boson has slightly more mass than expected. Though the discrepancy is tiny, the results, described in a paper published in the journal Science on April 7, 2022, have electrified the particle physics world. If the measurement is indeed correct, it is yet another strong signal that there are missing pieces to the physics puzzle of how the universe works.

During an industrial control systems hacking challenge, a Dutch team won $40,000 for cracking tech used to control the power grid.

When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn’t know. Here’s how far we’ve come.

Elon Musk, the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO, will acquire Twitter for $54.20 per share in a deal worth about $44 billion.