Top News Online

While NASA struggles to keep projects afloat amid a widespread government shutdown, SpaceX continues to push the boundaries of aerospace engineering. Last week, the company more than doubled the previous height record of its remarkable Grasshopper rocket system. The reusable, vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing (VTVL) rocket hit a peak altitude of 744 meters before slowly settling back down to the ground. The ...

Titanium is roughly half the weight of steel and twice the strength of aluminum. It also withstands much higher temperatures, and is far more inert than either. The downside is it can cost 10 times as much per pound as aluminum and 40 times that of steel. The high cost is not much because of its rarity, but rather the ...

Etsy.com is about to get a whole lot more interactive, as a simple printer could bring multitouch functionality to paper craft. Researchers at Saarland University and MIT Media Lab have announced a new, printable sensor film with multitouch that is designed to keep working even after it’s trimmed into different shapes using normal scissors. The challenge set by these researchers ...

The integrity of our circulatory system is maintained by critically balancing the tendency to leak, with that to clot. In an intracerebral hemorrhage, blood leaks into the brain, and then forms a massive clot. Treatment with drugs is a precarious path because those that break down clots can also make any residual leak worse. A minimally invasive way to get ...

Improvements in solar power technology come at a frustratingly slow pace. There’s abundant free energy raining down on the planet every day, but we simply haven’t found a highly efficient way to collect it. Researchers are looking at new materials to improve photovoltaic cells, but one of the most promising of them wasn’t concocted in a lab from exotic nanoparticles, ...

Could your next car get 86 mpg? It might if it’s a Honda. The next-generation Honda Fit subcompact will be unveiled this fall and arrive in the US in the first half of 2014. Most of the buzz over the new Fit, called the Honda Jazz in some countries) is the hybrid version, which promises a 35% improvement in fuel ...

When it comes to low-cost subcompact cars, you don’t get much choice in tech options beyond hoping the USB jack comes standard and Bluetooth is available. All you can really do is pick the car that’s the most fun to drive or has a lot of room on the inside. The Honda Fit in its final year wins on both ...

Intel has broken ground on its first dedicated facility for 450mm wafer production. The new foundry — D1X Module 2 — is scheduled to come online in 2015, with Intel committing to roughly $ 2 billion in bring-up costs through the end of the year. Foundry costs have continued to balloon in recent years; the 450mm facility will likely set ...

Providing us with a delightful glimpse of the future of humanity and bionic implants, Second Sight — the developer of the first bionic eye to receive FDA approval in the US — is currently working on a firmware upgrade that gives users of the Argus II bionic eye better resolution, focus, and image zooming. The software update even provides users ...

The brain is a deviously complex biological computing device that even the fastest supercomputers in the world fail to emulate. Well, that’s not entirely true anymore. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Technology Graduate University in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany have managed to simulate a single second of human brain activity in a very, very powerful computer. This ...