Photo: MIT Museum Ernesto Blanco invented his stair-climbing wheelchair in 1962 and entered it in a design challenge from the National Inventors Council, a U.S. agency that sought out technologies of potential military use. Blanco even created a one-quarter scale model [above] to show that the design actually worked. Stairs are of course tricky to… Continue reading Forget Jet Packs—Why Don’t We Have Stair-Climbing Wheelchairs?
Author: IEEE_Spectrum
Synthetic Biology Behemoth Aims to Police Its Own Industry
Photo: Ginkgo Bioworks Try as a nefarious actor might, it would be near impossible to order the ingredients for making a deadly virus such as smallpox from scratch—at least not from any reputable company. That’s because the world’s leading gene-synthesis firms all routinely screen customer requests against DNA sequences from hazardous viruses, bacteria, toxins and… Continue reading Synthetic Biology Behemoth Aims to Police Its Own Industry