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It’s like staring ‘into a black hole’: World’s darkest material will be used to make very stealthy aircraft, better telescopes Jul 14

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2015 Hyundai Sonata review: Driver assistance makes this the best midsize sedan made today Jul 2

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  What’s it like to unbox a supercomputer? Surprisingly, just like unboxing a normal PC August 1, 2014 at 1:37 pm

  I don’t know about you, but unboxing new gadgets gets me pretty excited. For me, it’s knowing that soon — very soon now, after I cut through the bubble wrap or peel back the protective plastic — the device will burst into life for the very first time. If I’m honest, it actually makes me feel like Frankenstein breathing life into his monster for the first time — especially when I unbox a bunch of components and build them into a new PC. What, then, must it feel like to unbox a brand new petascale supercomputer?
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  NASA tests ‘impossible’ no-fuel quantum space engine – and it actually works August 1, 2014 at 11:01 am

  NASA didn’t set out to confirm the feasibility of a seemingly impossible fuel-less thruster design, but it seems they did exactly that.
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  Movidius, the chip maker behind Google’s Tango, wants to be the king of computational photography August 1, 2014 at 10:09 am

  Already the heart of Google’s Project Tango, Movidius is upping the stakes with a 20x more efficient chip — the Myriad 2.
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  NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will hunt for signs of alien life, produce oxygen from Mars atmosphere August 1, 2014 at 7:48 am

  NASA has announced that the next Mars rover — currently codenamed Mars 2020 — will be outfitted with an array of sophisticated, upgraded scientific instruments that will let it delve deeper and farther than Curiosity, with the hope that it will be able to uncover signs of life on Mars. Perhaps even more excitingly, Mars 2020 will also be equipped with a new instrument that can convert the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere into oxygen — this is of utmost importance if humanity ever colonizes Mars — and another instrument that will gather and store Martian rock samples for eventual return to Earth.
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  New indoor positioning system lets you do Batman-like echolocation on your phone July 31, 2014 at 1:27 pm

  Echolocation has worked helped bats navigate for millions of years, and now Berkeley researchers think your laptop could do it too.
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  Bleep: BitTorrent’s new p2p chat client avoids the cloud so you can speak freely July 31, 2014 at 9:46 am

  The world’s most successful data transfer protocol could underlie the next generation chat client: Bleep will provide totally secure, totally peer-to-peer chatting from BitTorrent.
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  Self-driving forklift Ray brings automatic parking to the luxury market July 30, 2014 at 4:24 pm

  Dusseldorf Airport in Germany is trying out a new robot parking system that uses self-driving forklifts to increase parking efficiency by up to 60%.
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  Regeneration therapy from Biplastiq can rejuvenate tissue with light July 30, 2014 at 3:17 pm

  A new company known as Biplastiq plans to offer a radical new medical treatment. The technology uses genetically-transformed mitochondria that can be activated with light to provide additional energy where cells need it most.
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  The secret world of power generation, and the arrival of Earth-spanning super grids July 30, 2014 at 12:37 pm

  A long, long time ago — well, the middle of the 1800s to be exact — electricity was an intriguing but mostly useless thing. Some factories and residences toyed with early electric lights and motors powered by on-site generators, but most of the world used piped steam and natural gas to heat their homes and drive their machines for decades after electrification began. That would all change, however, with Nikola Tesla’s invention of three-phase high-voltage power distribution at the end of the 1800s and the creation of the world’s first synchronized national electricity grid in Great Britain in 1938.
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  This robot needs just a few seconds to learn to walk again after you break its legs July 30, 2014 at 10:14 am

  Some foolhardy roboticists in France, who clearly haven’t read enough sci-fi books, have created a robot that can recover from a broken leg. More accurately, if the robot is immobilized by a broken leg, it only takes a few seconds for it to learn how to walk again, using a new gait that minimizes the impact of the broken leg. If robots are to become truly useful, they’ll have to be able to autonomously recover from damaged circuits and broken limbs.

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