Improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapons of suicide bombers, are a major cause of soldier casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. A group of engineering undergraduate students has developed a new way to detect them.

Scientists have developed an innovative robot rat which can seek out and identify objects using its whiskers. The SCRATCHbot robot will be demonstrated at an international workshop looking at how robots can help us examine the workings of the brain.

Researchers have devised a microscale tool to help them understand the mechanical behavior of biofilms, slimy colonies of bacteria involved in most human infectious diseases.

A robotic vision system that mimics key visual functions of the human brain promises to let robots maneuver quickly and safely through cluttered environments, and to help guide the visually impaired.

The vast majority of species on Earth are single-celled. Most of these languish in obscurity – many have never even been named – but some of the relatively few species that have been studied exhibit remarkable abilities. Many of these are physical: some micro-organisms are amazingly strong; others can hibernate for hundreds of thousands of years or thrive in environments so extreme that they would kill off most other life forms in a flash.

An anonymous reader tips us that researchers at Toyota have developed a brain-machine interface system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought. The system processes brain thought patterns (such as the thought of moving one's left foot) and can turn them into left, right, and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-eighth of a second.

EurekaFest is a yearly event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that showcases the prototype inventions of high school students from around the country. The inventions consist of various gadgets and devices aimed at helping solve real-world problems.

Scientists using data from the recently-Moon-smacked Kaguya spacecraft have found evidence of radioactive elements on the lunar surface, including, for the first time, uranium! That's pretty cool. It's a little unexpected to me, too. One of the key aspects of the Moon is that it's not as dense as the Earth – in fact, it's just a bit more than half the Earth's density – so you don't expect it to have a lot of denser materials.

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

Dean Kamen's Segway has been a modest success, but it certainly hasn't become "to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy," as the inventor once predicted. Still, that hasn't stopped Kamen from continuing to invent new types of transportation. The latest is a hybrid electric scooter that uses a Stirling engine to partially recharge its battery pack. Kamen has already used a Stirling engine–technology that that was invented in 1816, nearly a century before the internal combustion engine–in a car that has been shown off to the public. But while he is rumored to have used the prototype bike on his estate, we still only have drawings to go on. According to Kamen's patent, the invention appears to be a conventional scooter with a Stirling engine and fuel tank under the seat, a rechargable battery pack in the floor, and a radiator in the front. The Stirling engine has a low energy output on its own, but it could supply power when the bike is at a standstill, making sure that the battery never dies. The inventor has invested $50 million in Stirling engine technology, which uses two pistons (a power piston and a displacer piston) to turn a crankshaft without using valves. The power piston's cylinder is heated from the outside, forcing gas inside the cylinder to expand, moving the power piston and giving the crankshaft a power stroke. Momentum from the flywheel keeps the engine moving. Instead of shooting expanded gas into the atmosphere, it's sent into the cooled displacer piston, where it contracts and is sent back to the power piston to be heated and used again. In other words, the Stirling engine, which can run on anything that burns, completely uses up whatever fuel is provided. And since the engine doesn't release any unburned hydrocarbons, CO2 emissions are minimal. Kamen's hybrid bike won't revolutionize anything–plenty of companies are working on hybrid scooters, bicycles, and motorcycles–but it could at the very least help make Stirling engines cool again.