Dive Into a Galaxy of Footage From NASA’s Legendary X-Plane Program
The space agency has just released a trove of archival video, and it's awesome.
Our brains always plan one step ahead of our bodies when we walk
A brief glimpse of upcoming terrain one stride ahead of time enables your brain to make sure your next footfall hits the right spot
Robot spots signs of melted fuel at submerged Fukushima reactor
An underwater robot captured images believed to be the first signs of melted nuclear reactor fuel that sank after the plant’s 2011 failure
Tiny robots swim the front crawl through your veins
Swarms of gold nanobots with rotating arms powered by magnetic fields could swim through the human body and deliver medicine directly where it’s needed
Fake duck test shows drones and AI beat humans at bird census
A fun experiment with hundreds of plastic ducks on a beach shows that AI trained on drone photos could seriously improve seabird colony counts
Screaming gel balls reveal a way to power soft but noisy robots
Hydrogel beads bounce thousands of times per second on a heated surface, emitting a high-pitched shriek, and generating lots of kinetic energy
Australia to expand commercial fishing in marine sanctuaries
Fishing operations will be rolled out in Australia’s protected marine areas, in a move that could endanger fragile ecosystems
Tides on exoplanets could drive alien biological clocks
On watery worlds that lack days and nights because one face always points toward their star, tides may help life emerge – and algal blooms might be the giveaway
Restoring Estonian alvar grasslands to save unique species
A huge project to return one of Europe’s most biodiverse habitats to its former glory is already seeing success. Julianna Photopoulos reports from the site
Helix’s Bold Plan to Be Your One Stop Personal Genomics Shop
$80 and a spit sample gets you a spot on one of Helix’s sequencing machines and a chunk of its cloud storage for your exome sequence.