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Smart specs for the blind
Electronic canes for blind people are designed to detect nearby objects and provide a stereo audio signal that informs a person of the location of obstacles. But they do not distinguish between...
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Brain signal decoder
Interfacing with the brain to control devices such as wheelchairs, robots and prosthetic devices has great potential. Monkeys have shown impressive ability to control robot limbs using brain implants,...
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Energy efficient display
Only 10% of the light produced inside an LCD panel ever reaches a viewer's eyes. The rest is absorbed and wasted, making the devices very inefficient.Many groups are attempting to change this, for...
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Hair-follicle fertiliser
Humans are born with a full set of hair follicles, but these can be lost as genetic baldness sets in, or through damage to the skin and in conditions such as alopecia.The market for treating such...
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Exoskeleton for grannies
Finding ways to assist and care for the growing elderly population in many developed countries is a growing problem. One challenge is to work out how to improve the strength and utility of ageing...
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Force-feedback CPR coach
A person suffering cardiac arrest is at risk of death as their blood is no longer circulating. Some studies have shown that patients' survival rates can increase by a factor of 3 when high-quality CPR...
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Botox face cream
Botulinum toxin or botox is injected by cosmetic surgeons to paralyse muscles and reduce the appearance of wrinkles. But the procedure can be painful and even cause tissue damage leading to problems...
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Morphine-cannabis super-painkiller
Pain can often be better managed when two types of painkiller are used together. For example, it has recently become known that cannabinoids such as THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis,...
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Laser microphone for sonar
Certain plastics and glasses have a property known as photoelasticity - they restrict the speed of light differently as the materials are stretched or compressed.Noureddine Melikechi and Aristides...
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Electronic nose radiation sniffer
US shipping ports receive about 6 million cargo containers each year. Officials would like to be able to check each one for smuggled nuclear material, but today's detectors cannot process such numbers...
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Flat-panel ion thrusters
You may think spacecraft thrusters need to be big and powerful, but Brian Gilchrist and colleagues at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, are thinking small. They propose that tiny "nano...
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Human-motion energy harvester
Magnetoelastic materials change their shape when zapped with a magnetic field and are widely thought of as a way to produce movement, for example in small robots. But they also work in reverse,...
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Satellite image sharpener
Images from spy satellites are often blurred by swirls of atmospheric turbulence. Finding better ways to correct for that could help anyone from CIA spooks to people checking out the neighbour's...
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Bed with built in treadmill
Adjustable beds are commonly used in hospitals to help patients change position and get up with minimal help. Now Charles Filipi, a surgeon at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, wants to take...
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Pre-diabetes test
Over 170 million people suffer from diabetes – just under 3% of the world's population – and experts say that number will double by 2030.Most cases are type II diabetes, linked to obesity and lifestyle...
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Helicopter airbags
Several of NASA Mars rovers have successfully landed on Mars, protected from impact with the ground by sophisticated airbags.Now the helicopter manufacturer Bell Helicopter based in Fort Worth, Texas,...
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Space satnav
The most accurate way of navigating on Earth is to use the Global Positioning System (GPS) – a receiver reads the signals broadcast by at least three orbiting satellites and calculates its position to...
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Heart repair pump
Growing numbers of people are waiting for heart transplants. And engineers are developing miniature pumps known as ventricular assist devices to help.Small enough to fit inside the patient's body,...
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Graffiti alarm system
Paint-based graffiti can usually be removed relatively easily from buildings, bus shelters and other street furniture. But graffiti that is scratched into surfaces such as Perspex is much more...
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Quad bike skis
Quad bikes are expensive machines that are designed to cope with a wide range of terrains, and are known in some parts of the world as all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). But they do not always cope with snow...
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Oil sands upgrader
Oil sands are naturally occurring mixtures of clay, sand, water and extremely viscous bitumen. Such deposits in Canada alone are thought to contain 173.7 billion barrels of oil, a source of oil second...
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Muscle-fatigue blocker
Fatigue occurs when muscles become weaker with repeated or intense exercise, or as a result of an illness.Researchers have long thought that fatigue is caused by a build-up of lactic acid in the...
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Bat-style footstep detector
Security services interested in automatically spotting people who may be security risks are also interested in systems that listen out for footsteps. It should be possible to estimate someone's speed,...
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Universal detector for everything
Zap a metal with light and the electrons on the surface ripple into waves – known as plasmons – which emit light of their own. The frequency of that light reflects the electronic nature of the surface...
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Invention blog is dead - long live the special report
After 525 posts this blog is being discontinued - but don't worry, New Scientist's regular patents column has a new home as part of our new Invention special report.The latest columns about the latest,...
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