BBC Focus Magazine

Image Credit: SPL

"I'm a neuroengineer, and one of my goals is building brains."

Prof Steven Potter was disarmingly understated as he introduced himself.

It's not that tissue engineering is unusual. Nor even that doing it with neural cells should be an issue.

If heart cells or skin cells can be reprogrammed, why not neurons?

But "building brains" had been my flip way of labelling an intriguing, indeed unnerving, branch of science: the neurophysiology ...

Click - 08/06/2013

Featuring a look at the world's first digital currency and a conversation with the creator of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Includes tech news and web roundup.

Click - 01/06/2013

It's a deluge of data, Click shows you what you can do with it, as we examine the info behind your pictures. Plus we plug into the tech that's lighting up San Francisco.

Click

With a report from the USA on Microsoft's new gaming console the Xbox One and a look at what makes the latest smart watches tick.

In regards to the M'soft's latest iteration of their console series, prepare to be left aghast and possibly well disappointed. :|

A cognitive curiosity that lies at the root of many things, well worth reading up on I think.

Image Credit: Google Earth

People have long seen faces in the Moon, in oddly-shaped vegetables and even burnt toast, but a Berlin-based group is scouring the planet via satellite imagery for human-like features. What's behind our desire to see faces in our surroundings, asks Lauren Everitt.

Most people have never heard of pareidolia. But nearly everyone ...

Its density is less than helium (0.16mg/cm3) and yet the newly created aerogel clearly isn't floating in the picture shown in the press release. It is very light but it's not floating... upwards. http://www.zju.edu.cn/c165055/content_2285977.html.

Why? I've read the comments at http://io9.com/this-is-a-picture-of-the-lightest-substance-on-earth-461681135 and nobody has yet explained it in an easy-to-understand way! If somebody has come up with an answer that could explain this to a (notional) 10-year-old I'll post you a book from the Focus ...

Probably should have put this in the Questions bit but here goes nothing. :?
The latest mag has a story about building underground, like giant skyscrapers but straight down not up and it made me wonder what everyone thought about it? I have been in places that are underground with shops and offices but not actual homes and how does everyone feel about living like that?

Ok, so many years ago I visited an Eco-village and it was not an experience I found to be very encouraging. Suffice to say that a cluster of rather squalid dirt and timber hovels surrounding a dank 'pond' with a couple of crude windmills and solar panels providing feeble and intermittent power did very little to encourage me to take this sort of 'back to the land' idea for future living very seriously at all. ...

Kickstarter, IndieGogo and other crowd funding sites are increasingly hosting an array of technology projects, with some raising a lot of money, while others have raised debate.

3Doodler claims to be the first 3D printing pen, and raised over $2.3m (£1.5m), having required just $30,000. Currently the Glowing Plants project is creating enthusiasm and controversy with the team's plan of making sustainable natural lighting by using synthetic biology to make plants glow.

There has also ...

Obviously many of you have noticed the sudden increase in the Red Kite since it's reintroduction. I have concerns on their well being though. I have noticed them being "bullied" by smaller birds which I find strange. I witnessed crows attacking them above my house the other day and this morning I saw about three smallish birds, maybe a bit bigger than house martins chasing after them.

Is that normal?? You look at these magnificent ...