Undergraduate’s prototype conductive nail polish could turn long fingernails into touchscreen styluses. The rise of touchscreen technology has been a boon in many respects, but for people with long fingernails, there can be issues with the capacitive variety since fingernails are non-conductive and thus don’t register on the screen…
Analyzing dozens of cases around the world yields some practical lessons. Generally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where…
Katalyst Space Technologies must launch the Swift rescue mission by this summer. BROOMFIELD, Colorado—One of NASA’s oldest astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as scientists await the arrival of a pioneering robotic rescue mission. The 21-year-old spacecraft is…
Policymakers debate if we even need deep ocean mining and if we can do it safely. More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock…
This week’s result is just the latest in a growing collection of discoveries. On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in…
“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do.” Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary…
ULA’s Vulcan launch vehicle is grounded after a solid rocket booster anomaly last month. For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military’s GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the…
There may be a river delta hidden under the obvious delta in a Martian crater. When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the…
“We put fuel in a rocket, blow it up in a remote location, and measure how big the boom is.” For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity,…
Stop trying to make “Clovis First” happen; it’s not going to happen. A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the…
