China has revealed plans for what it is calling a "Mars cruise drone", and it looks very familiar to another flying vehicle we all know and love traversing the skies of the Red Planet right now. But you know what, the more the merrier, we say. Mars has plenty...
A cost-effective, eco-friendly, and large-scale system is essential to store and retrieve renewable energy. Currently, there are no sustainable methods for storing green energy, as batteries are environmentally toxic. This is a big problem. Cornell bioengineer Buz Barstow, Ph.D. ’09 have suggested the solution to this problem: a bacteria called...
A government research organisation in China has outlined plans to design and build "ultra-large" spacecraft, potentially miles-wide and assembled piecemeal in space. The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has recently published a five-year plan articulating the "urgent need" to invest in studies on space exploration equipment. This equipment could...
As far as Lower Paleolithic archaeology goes, this is quite the haul: Experts have uncovered a record 98 elephant-bone tools at a site dating back some 400,000 years. In a new study, University of Colorado Boulder archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues surveyed tools excavated from a site in...
In April this year, Nasa’s Ingenuity helicopter made history when it undertook its first flight in the Martian atmosphere, rising some 10 feet above the planet’s surface. It was humankind’s first successful attempt at flying a powered aircraft in another world. Now, according to a Reuters report, China has developed...
Life as we know it took a pretty funky turn around 541 million years ago. That’s when a period called the Cambrian emerged, and with it, the so-called Cambrian explosion ushered in practically all major groups of animals. It lasted for about 25 million years and resulted in the...
In 1916, Albert Einstein put the finishing touches on his Theory of General Relativity, a journey that began in 1905 with his attempts to reconcile Newton’s own theories of gravitation with the laws of electromagnetism. Once complete, Einstein’s theory provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property...
In 2019, a lake on an ice sheet in East Antarctica vanished completely over the course of three days. The strange occurrence went unnoticed until the next summer, when Dr. Roland Warner, a glaciologist with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania, noticed discrepancies in satellite images...
Singapore researchers have developed a smart foam material that allows robots to sense nearby objects, and repairs itself when damaged, just like human skin. Artificially innervated foam, or AiFoam, is a highly elastic polymer created by mixing fluoropolymer with a compound that lowers surface tension. This allows the spongy...
French researchers have found that an unusual fish, the coelacanth, can live up to a century, doesn't fully mature until it reaches age 45, and spends years in the womb. Coelacanths are nicknamed, "living fossils." Previously, it was estimated that the coelacanth was a fast-growing fish that lived for about...