Aedan O'Brien

Get water in your lungs, and you’re in for a very bad time. But when water enters a new type of “lung” created by researchers at Stanford University, the result is hydrogen fuel – a clean source of energy that could one day power everything from our cars to our smartphones.   Though this isn’t

Your home is likely a hotbed of toxins, with everything from formaldehyde to chloroform finding its way into the air you breathe daily. It’s common knowledge that houseplants can remove some of those toxins from the air, but not in dramatic amounts. Experts estimate you’d likely need two large houseplants per every 100 square feet

Quantum internet promises ultra-secure, next-generation communications, but is it actually feasible on a global scale? Absolutely, according to a new experiment carried out between satellites in orbit and a station on the ground.   The team of scientists was able to exchange several carefully managed photons in pulses of infrared light, carried between Russian GLONASS

It’s not been a great year for Facebook, with security breaches and privacy scandals aplenty, but it turns out many of us still put a high price on the cost of quitting the social network – a price of around $1,000 in fact.   In a study in which over a thousand participants were asked

A new nanotech breakthrough comes courtesy of a material you’d likely find in any nursery. A team from MIT has figured out a way to quickly and inexpensively shrink objects to the nanoscale. It calls the process implosion fabrication, and it all starts with polyacrylate — the super-absorbent polymer typically found in baby diapers.   Size

A 13-year-old scientist from California has won US$25,000 for inventing a solar-panel system that can determine where the Sun is at any given time. Georgia Hutchinson, from Woodside, California, took the top prize at the Broadcom Masters nationwide STEM competition for middle-school students.   She placed first in a pool of 30 finalists, who received

Acoustic levitation – using the pressure generated by sound waves to levitate a single tiny particle – has been around a long time. Manipulating the particle and moving it through space is only a relatively recent development.   But now a pair of researchers from Spain and the UK have achieved a huge breakthrough: an

A delivery robot burst into flames at the University of California, Berkeley, and students were said to be so devastated, they held a candlelit vigil to mark its demise. The incident took place on Friday, when a Kiwi delivery robot caught fire after its battery malfunctioned, the company said in a Medium blog on Sunday.

Anybody can win the presidency of the United States. But you really know you’ve broken through when you make it onto the list of the worst passwords people use on the internet.   So Donald Trump can feel justifiably smug that ‘donald’ just made its official debut on a list of the 100 most commonly

An initiative called Breakthrough Starshot wants to explore another star system using ultra-powerful laser beams and wafer-thin spaceships. It’s a goal that sounds so fantastic, you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as science fiction. But it’s no joke, and the project’s chief engineer says millions of dollars’ worth of work is moving along without any

When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another. But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those

What internet users Down Under say online will no longer be kept on the down low. On Thursday, Australia’s Parliament passed the Assistance and Access Bill. The legislation will force tech companies to help Australian authorities decrypt users’ online communications — and it could represent a major blow to data privacy elsewhere in the world.

The promise of quantum computing brings with it some mind-blowing potential, but it also carries a new set of risks, scientists are warning. Specifically, the enormous power of the tech could be used to crack the best cyber security we currently have in place.   A new report on the “progress and prospects” of quantum

There are a few things we should demand from a decent power supply. Not least, it shouldn’t require oven-like temperatures to function. That’s just a given. For decades, fluoride has sat on the sidelines as a potential competitor for lithium-ion batteries. If not for its need to bake at more than 150 degrees Celsius (300

Britain’s Parliament has just given the world an unprecedented look at the ruthless tactics of Facebook’s executive team. On Wednesday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published leaked emails from the Silicon Valley tech giant’s leadership team that had been obtained by Six4Three, an app developer that’s locked in a legal battle with Facebook

A year ago today, Tesla’s big battery in South Australia began dispatching power to the state’s grid, one day ahead of schedule. By most accounts, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery has been a remarkable success. But there are some concerns that have so far escaped scrutiny.   The big battery (or the Hornsdale Power Reserve,

Bill Gates sees nuclear energy as a potential solution to lowering carbon-dioxide emissions around the world, and he has spent the past decade funding new ways to produce the energy in a safe, affordable way.   About 10 years ago, Gates cofounded a company called TerraPower to build new kinds of nuclear reactors. TerraPower is

It happens all the time. You’re online, checking out products, maybe looking for a holiday, or researching home loans, when all of a sudden there’s a pop-up. “Live help is available! Chat now with a member of our friendly customer support team!” It’s easy to dismiss these chat dialogues, but it’s also easy to take