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The Star Trek tricorder diagnosed any illness at once.Ten finalists have been chosen in a $10m (£6m) competition to develop a real-life "tricorder" - the medical scanner used in the Star Trek series.The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, launched last year, challenges anyone to develop a wireless device capable of detecting a range of diseases. The technology employs sensors and imaging to measure vital signs and diagnose conditions non-invasively. X Prize officials said the technology was now "fact, not science fiction". The 10 finalists come from a range of backgrounds, including universities, medical device manufacturers and tech start-ups. One research team...

Albert Einstein once told a friend that quantum mechanics doesn't hold water in his scientific world view because "physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance." That spooky action at a distance is entanglement, a quantum phenomenon in which two particles, separated by any amount of distance, can instantaneously affect one another as if part of a unified system. Now, scientists have successfully hijacked that quantum weirdness -- doing so reliably for the first time -- to produce what many sci-fi fans have long dreamt up: teleportation. No, not beaming humans aboard...

ALON® is an amazing new advanced ceramic that is based on a composition of aluminum oxy nitride with a cubic spinel crystal structure. It is hard, durable, and transparent in the near ultra violet, visible and near infrared wavelength of light. ALON® is synthesized and manufactured in tonnage commercial quantities by Surmet Corporation, the global leader in transparent optical ceramics technologies. Surmet is vertically integrated and synthesizes tonnage quantities of high purity ALON® powder for its own use. Surmet is a supplier of ALON® optical windows, domes, plates, rods and tubes for advanced applications. Fabricated ALON® products combine superior mechanical...

Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934.Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of...

The captain of the USS Enterprise thinks people should stay on Earth instead of going into space. Patrick Stewart, who plays Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the TV series Star Trek, says he thinks interplanetary travel for humans is a bad idea. "I'm a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the whole business of space travel," Stewart told the BBC. "I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out onto other planets - even though they may be utterly uninhabited," he said. Stewart said he...