Tech
- Tech
Prepping for drone exploration of Mars
Twelve-year-old James Fagan, a budding engineer from Riverside, Calif., has built a wind tunnel. He uses it to test scale models of drones and other vehicles under Mars-like conditions.
- Physics
Scientists vote to fix the world’s weight-loss problem
Scientists will soon vote to change the definition of the kilogram. The event shows how much we depend on a tiny metal cylinder locked in an underground vault in France.
- Chemistry
Super-water-repellent surfaces can generate energy
Scientists knew they could get power by running salt water over an electrically charged surface. But making that surface super-water-repellent boosts that energy production, new data show.
- Tech
Solar panels and more garner big prizes for middle-school researchers
A motorized system for solar panels garnered Georgia Hutchinson, 13, of Woodside, Calif., the top $25,000 prize at the Broadcom MASTERS teen science competition.
- Materials Science
Soft robots get their power from the skin they’re in
A flexible electronic “skin” embedded with air pouches or coils can wrap around inanimate objects, turning them into handy robots.
- Physics
The perfect spaghetti snap starts with a twist
A spaghetti-snapping machine helped scientists find the secret to cleanly breaking pasta in half: First, give it a twist.
- Health & Medicine
Scientists enlist computers to hunt down fake news
Who can you trust? What can you believe? Scrolling through a news feed can make it hard to decide what’s real from what’s not. Computers, however, tend to do better.
- Computing
Computers can now make fool-the-eye fake videos
Hackers can now use computers to move facial expressions (and more) from someone in one video to a person in another. The results look totally real, ushering in a whole new type of fakery.
- Agriculture
Tarzan the robot was actually inspired by a sloth
‘Tarzan’ the robot saves energy by swinging. Someday, it could help with farm work by moving along wires strung across fields of crops.
- Computing
What powers these electronics? We do!
Active people may end up becoming the 'fuel' for their electronics. Engineers are developing ways to harness the body’s motions to power the many devicess on which we now depend.
- Math
Cool Jobs: The art of paper folding is inspiring science
See how bringing art and math together led to the development of robo-roaches, self-folding papers and medical implants.
- Computing
New tech helps deaf-blind people ‘watch’ TV
An innovative system can let deaf-blind people “watch” television in real time without needing someone right there to interpret for them.
