Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 8, 2017

Here's What It's Like to Be the Planetary Protection Officer at NASA

If you want a job protecting Earth from threats from outer space — or even protecting Mars from us — NASA has an opening for you — sort of. The job of planetary protection officer generated quite a bit of buzz last week, when the public learned that a role...

Aug 28, 2017

Pod Traveling at 201 MPH Wins Elon Musk's Hyperloop Competition

A team of students from Germany sent a carbon-plastic pod whizzing through a tube at 201 mph (324 km/h) last weekend, securing the top spot in Elon Musk's second Hyperloop competition. Musk, the founder of SpaceX, Tesla and brain-interface company Neuralink, aims to revolutionize transportation with his Hyperloop concept, which...

Aug 29, 2017

Elon Musk's Neuralink Gets $27 Million to Merge Humans and Machines

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, perhaps the world's most famous futurist, has made a career of pursuing far-fetched projects that have one leg planted firmly in science fiction. SpaceX aims to colonize Mars. The Boring Company wants to dig tunnels to transport cars at high speeds along sliding electric skates. And...

Sep 22, 2017

World's Largest Aircraft Starts Engine Tests

For the first time, the private spaceflight company Stratolaunch tested all six of the engines on a colossal airplane with the largest wingspan of any aircraft in the world. In these initial tests, each of the six engines operated as expected, Stratolaunch, which is led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen,...

Oct 11, 2017

'Beam of Invisibility' Could Hide Objects Using Light

Once thought of as the province of only Star Trek or Harry Potter, cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a beam of invisibility, according to a new study. Theoretically, most invisibility...

Feb 23, 2018

Chinese Scientists Unveil Plans for Weird Hypersonic Jet with Extra Wing

Building a useful plane that's faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, is a difficult engineering challenge, but a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a plan to pull it off. The trick to making these faster-than-Mach 5, or hypersonic, vehicles is...

Mar 2, 2018

Pollution from Ships Creates Massive Clouds Visible from Space

NASA's Aqua satellite was orbiting over Portugal back in January when it snapped the above photo. It shows a thin film of clouds above the brilliant blue of the North Atlantic, slashed with white lines of thicker clouds that look like scars or etchings. Those thicker clouds, NASA officials explained...

Mar 13, 2018

The Science Websites That We Read Every Day

There's a lot of junk on the internet, but the web is still a wonderful place to share and discover knowledge. For science enthusiasts and news connoisseurs who don't want to waste time searching out the most interesting and legit conveyors of this knowledge, Live Science editors and reporters put...

May 31, 2018

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is the result of using technology to superimpose information — sounds, images and text — on the world we see. Picture the Minority Report or Iron Man style of interactivity. Augmented reality vs. virtual realityThis is rather different from virtual reality. Virtual reality means computer-generated environments for you...

Jun 4, 2018

Scientists Figured Out How to Make Ceramics That Bend and Mush Instead of Shattering

A team of scientists has figured out how to make ceramics that bend and mush instead of shattering (though under enough pressure they will still crack). That's a potentially lifesaving discovery: Heat-resistant ceramics are critical materials in machines that run hot, and they also coat the metal parts inside airplane...

Aug 31, 2018

Harvard Printer Blasts Droplets with 100 Times Earth's Gravitational Force (Video)

Stop a droplet. Let it grow. Then, pull on it harder than the gravity at the surface of the sun. A new printing technique designed at Harvard University's engineering school uses sound waves to control and fire droplets from a nozzle with incredible force, allowing researchers to print with liquids...

Oct 17, 2018

Jam-Resistant US Military Communications Satellite Lifts Off in Midnight-Hour Launch

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket launched the satellite, known as Advanced Extremely High Frequency 4 (AEHF-4), at 12:15 a.m. EDT (0415 GMT) from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. AEHF-4 is an advanced jam-resistant and nuclear-hardened satellite designed to provide survivable, global, secure, protected and...

Oct 18, 2018

X-37B Military Space Plane Wings Past 400 Days on Latest Mystery Mission

The latest mystery mission of the U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane has now passed the 400-day mark . This mission — known as Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-5) — was rocketed into Earth orbit on Sept. 7, 2017, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at...

Nov 5, 2018

New Supercomputer with 1 Million Processors Is World's Fastest Brain-Mimicking Machine

Scientists just activated the world's biggest brain: a supercomputer with a million processing cores and 1,200 interconnected circuit boards that together operate like a human brain. Ten years in the making, it is the world's largest neuromorphic computer — a type of computer that mimics the firing of neurons —...

Jan 14, 2019

Physicists Built a Machine That Breaks the Normal Rules of Light

Physicists have built a ring in which pulses of light whip circles around each other and the normal rules that govern light's behavior no longer apply. Under normal circumstances, light displays certain kids of physical symmetry. First, if you were to play a tape of light's behavior forward and then...