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Google's Quest for Cheap Wireless VR
Cardboard is convenient from the perspective of cost and usability, but is lacking in processing power, a method of interacting within the virtual world (save for one button on the side) or even ... More > -
Robot Surgeon "Superior" To Human Doctors
In recent years, robots have steadily crept their way into the operating room, helping to perform procedures as humans direct their movements. Robotic devices in surgery have a lot of potential ... More > -
Infecting Mozzies... To Kill Zika?
For its size, the Wolbachia bacterium packs a powerful punch. When it infects an insect, it hijacks the animal's reproductive system and ensures that it can only mate with other infected ... More > -
The Biggest Player in Offworld Mining is...
The next gold rush might be the race for asteroids, and the nation-states that dominate this new industry may not be the usual suspects. After all, in space the amount of land you control on Earth ... More > -
China Wants Humans Back on the Moon by 2030
Lieutenant General Zhang Yulin, deputy commander of the manned space program, announced that China would land a man on the moon in the next 15-20 years. Chinese authorities also announced their ... More >
Activists say their drones delivered thousands of memory cards to North Korea. The totalitarian communist Democratic People's Republic Of Korea, long isolated from the rest of the world, tightly controls what media people inside the country can access. For decades, human rights activists and others have tried to get messages into the country, which is difficult because of the the heavily fortified demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
It's long been accepted by physics that nature has supplied us with four fundamental forces. Gravity holds the planets and galaxies together, and the electromagnetic force holds us and our molecules together. At the smallest level are the two other forces: the strong nuclear force is the glue for atomic nuclei, and the weak nuclear force helps some atoms go through radioactive decay. These forces seemed to explain the physics we can observe, more or less.
Nicknamed "silent professionals," America's Special Operations Forces exist on the edge of war, moving behind and around front lines, preparing battles behind the scenes. They are as protected by obscurity as they are their own skill, which means that when they move around, it's best if they can do it without any loud engines giving them away.
No one expects college kids to beat NASA to the punch. On Saturday, students at University of California San Diego launched a rocket with a completely 3D-printed engine. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space claims to be the first university group to do this. Watch it fly!
A long time ago (nearly four decades at this point) Star Wars burst out of theaters and straight into the marketing departments of companies like Kenner and Hasbro. Action figures and starship models have long populated the landscape of nerdy childhoods around the world, but no one toy was ever as coveted or abused as the plastic toy lightsaber.
It sounds almost like something out of a cartoon. Someone crosses the road on a hot day and gets stuck in the melting asphalt, leaving behind shoes like some kind of Family Circus trail .
Let's say you're looking for a type of place, rather than a specific place, to visit. You could be a skateboarder looking for an empty pool to ride in, an urban explorer looking for abandoned warehouses to explore... or you could be a bored internet user looking for satellite photos of shipwrecks off the coast of New York City just because it's cool.
What a consumer drone sells is a new perspective, a better grasp of where one is. A drone is an eyeball, flung into the sky overhead. That's true with all drones, and is the explicit selling point of Xiaomi's Mi Drone, unveiled today.
While Google's bubble-shaped car putters around in California and Tesla's Autopilot guides cars into garages, Georgia Tech is taking autonomous driving to the extreme. A team of researchers from both the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing at the university have built AutoRally, an autonomous rally truck that pushes the limits of its performance.
The International Space Station is set to start testing its first expandable habitat. Tomorrow, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will swell to its full size, beginning a two-year stint at the ISS. During this time, astronauts will measure how well BEAM holds up against space debris, radiation and temperature swings. Lightweight expandable habitats, made from aluminum and fabric, might provide a home for astronauts on future deep space missions.