Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

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...

Jun 24, 2019

NASA Set To Launch a Deep-Space Atomic Clock Tonight

NASA is set to launch an incredible new atomic clock into orbit on a Falcon Heavy today (June 24) in a technology demonstration mission that could transform the way humans explore space. The Deep Space Atomic Clock, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a space-ready upgrade to the atomic...

Jul 6, 2019

Skywatcher Captures Rare Image of Mysterious X-37B Military Space Plane

Skywatcher and satellite tracker Ralf Vandebergh of the Netherlands recently caught a rare glimpse of the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane. Vandebergh said he'd been hunting for the robotic spacecraft for months and finally managed to track it down in May. But it took a bit longer to...

Oct 1, 2019

Why You Shouldn't Worry About China’s New 'Hypersonic' Nuclear Death Machine

Nervous ripples spread across U.S. social media Monday night (Sept. 30), as reports spread of China unveiling a scary-sounding new nuclear missile at a military parade. The missile is designed to move very fast, even for a ballistic missile. (That's why they call it hypersonic.) It approaches its target at...

Oct 3, 2019

Could Elon Musk's Starship Threaten Alien Life?

Elon Musk, founder of private space-faring company SpaceX, recently unveiled his new Starship craft. Amazingly, it is designed to carry up to 100 crew members on interplanetary journeys throughout the solar system, starting with Mars in 2024. The announcement is exciting, invoking deep emotions of hope and adventure. But I...

Jan 14, 2020

World's First 'Living Machine' Created Using Frog Cells and Artificial Intelligence

What happens when you take cells from frog embryos and grow them into new organisms that were evolved by algorithms? You get something that researchers are calling the world's first living machine. Though the original stem cells came from frogs — the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis — these so-called...

Jan 24, 2020

DARPA scraps XS-1 military space plane project after Boeing drops out

Phantom Express won't get off the ground after all. Boeing has withdrawn from Experimental Spaceplane (XSP), a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program designed to increase the nation's access to space. The aerospace giant had named its hypersonic concept vehicle Phantom Express. That moniker is now oddly appropriate,...

Feb 12, 2020

Hackers could shut down satellites — or turn them into weapons

Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world's largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe....

Feb 24, 2020

DARPA's hypersonic 'Glide Breaker' could blast missile threats out of the sky

An artist's concept of DARPA's Glide Breaker anti-hypersonic-weapon system. (Image credit: DARPA)Aerojet Rocketdyne is working on technology to help knock high-speed maneuverable vehicles out of the sky, under a new contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Since 2018, DARPA has been developing a hypersonic defense interceptor...

May 26, 2020

'Vigorous' magnetic field oddity spotted over South Atlantic

A long-standing weak spot in Earth's magnetic field is getting weirder, and it may be splitting into two distinct zones of weakness. The South Atlantic Anomaly is a section of Earth's magnetic field between Africa and South America. For decades at least, this region of the magnetic field has gotten...

Nov 28, 2020

How do fax machines work?

Like a cross between a telephone and a printer, fax machines copy documents in one location and print them out in another — even thousands of miles apart. Before the ubiquity of computers and high-speed internet and when the other options were snail mail or a courier, a fax could...

Apr 22, 2021

US military picks 3 companies to test nuclear propulsion above low-Earth orbit

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has picked three big space companies for the first phase of a larger project to test nuclear propulsion above low Earth orbit by 2025. General Atomics, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin each received contracts for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO)...

Oct 27, 2021

What's the world's longest bridge?

The world's longest bridge is the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge in China, part of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. The bridge, which opened in June 2011, spans 102.4 miles (165 kilometers). China constructed the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge in just four years, employing 10,000 workers, at a cost of...