Nearly 240,000 miles from Earth, Nasa is preparing a new kind of transportation hub where spacecraft could one day arrive, wait, dock and depart without a single runway, road or parking bay. The Gateway space station, planned for lunar orbit as part of the Artemis programme, is expected to host Orion crew capsules, lunar landers…
Electra takes a different approach to hybrid aviation. Instead of a traditional engine operating the propellers, the aircraft has a gas-powered generator in the nose. (Image: MIT News) A class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 studied a new type of aircraft; now, it has ballooned into a $850 million Ohio…
In Houston, the heat is part of the setting. During the FIFA Fan Festival, though, some of the infrastructure around the event had a rather different experience of the Texas summer. Roofs treated with a thin cooling film stayed dramatically cooler than nearby untreated metal surfaces, even while sitting beneath direct sunlight.The material was not…
Image(s): Left/ Princeton University/Right/Wikipedia While a desk covered in books, papers and unfinished notes may be seen as a sign of an untidy mind, the great scientist Albert Einstein had a different view of this assumption. In particular, he asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is…
Porous polymer coating reflects sunlight and releases heat, keeping surfaces cooler than the air As temperatures rise during hot weather, keeping buildings and other structures cool can require large amounts of energy. Air conditioners are a common way to deal with the heat, but they consume electricity and need access to cooling systems and, in…
When archeologists found the tooth it was already damaged, measuring only 23 millimeters. Its crown had been split by agricultural activity into two parts. (Image Courtesy: N. Marković) It sat on a museum shelf for nearly twenty years, unseen, mistaken for something far more common. But now a closer look at a tiny, worn tooth…
In 1929, local homesteader and photographer Benjamin Loomis and his wife, Estella, formally gave 40 acres of valuable mountain land to the United States government. The donation included a hand-built museum and a working seismograph station beside Manzanita Lake. The deal was the first known case in American history of a privately built museum being…
Leon Wang, the 17-year-old Connecticut student (Image Credit: Society For Science) Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the most difficult neurological disorders to treat, partly because the processes behind it can begin damaging brain cells long before symptoms become apparent. Now, a project by 17-year-old Connecticut student Leon Wang has drawn attention for exploring whether medicines…
Beneath the surface of the Great Barrier Reef, a 165-tonne building is being slowly reshaped by the environment around it. The Coral Greenhouse, an underwater installation at John Brewer Reef, was designed to work with the sea rather than simply sit on the seabed. Coral can grow across its surfaces, fish can move through its…
Representational photo of a frozen optical fiber core in a glass capillary, which guides and couples light and sound waves efficiently. (Science Daily picture) Freezing liquid inside an optical fibre has helped scientists create an unusual environment where light and sound can interact more than 1,000 times more strongly than they do in ordinary optical…