Stories

This week's Question: In a BBC interview last year, renowned physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence. Hawking said AI "would take off on its own and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate," passing the limited abilities of humans. A...

This week's Question: NASA recently proposed a mission that one day may send astronauts, via a balloon, toward Venus' upper-atmosphere to research the possibility of a "cloud city community." Although the waterless planet has an unforgiving temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the clouds of Venus...

This week's Question: Last week, NASA's 30,000-pound Orion capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean after going further than any spacecraft built for humans had reached in more than 40 years. Without astronauts aboard, Orion circled Earth for two orbits, eventually reaching an altitude of 3,600 miles so it could...

Chemists at the University of California, Riverside have fabricated novel rewritable paper, one that is based on the color-switching property of commercial chemicals called redox dyes. The dye forms the imaging layer of the paper. Printing is achieved by using ultraviolet light to photobleach the dye, except...

Touch feedback, known as haptics, has been used in entertainment, rehabilitation, and even surgical training. University of Bristol researchers, using ultrasound, have developed an invisible 3D haptic shape that can be seen and felt.Led by Dr Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah, and...

This week's Question: NASA has worked with industry to help create the Synthetic Vision System (SVS), a virtual reality display system for cockpits. The SVS uses 3D to provide pilots with intuitive means of understanding their flying environment, including graphical displays of terrain and hazards. In...

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have developed an efficient method to measure residual stress in metal parts produced by powder-bed fusion additive manufacturing (AM).The 3D-printing process produces metal parts layer by layer using a high-energy laser beam to fuse metal powder...

An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.Plumes of carbon dioxide in the simulation swirl and shift as winds disperse the greenhouse gas away from its sources. The simulation also...