Science

I'm sure your gaming PC is astonishingly powerful and some of you probably have some pretty incredible custom built water cooling solutions, but they don't stand a chance next to the water cooling system currently being installed at the Los Alamos' Strategic Computing Center for the new Trinity supercomputer. Previous supercomputers at the …

Although NASA has continued to wow the world with its efforts in sending robots to Mars and planet discovery, it's Elon Musk's Space X that has captured many people's imaginations this year, with the continued push for a re-usable first-stage Falcon rocket using an automated drone platform. While the last effort didn't …

Considering how relatively close – in space terms – the Moon is, you would think that getting a look at the back of it wouldn't be that complicated – especially since it spends all of its time rotating around us. However due to tidal-locking, looking up into the night's sky …

While our silicon chips are generally fast enough at the moment, as we have to pack more transistors into them the manufacturing process has to get smaller and smaller. With most chips made today being fabricated at nanometre lengths between 45nm and 14nm, this process of getting transistors to work correctly at smaller scales is …

Space is becoming a far more commercial venture these days, with the likes of SpaceX, Boeing and Virgin Galactic all developing new, more efficient and cheaper ways to take people and cargo into orbit. However it's also been more commercial for NASA over the past few years, as since the …

On Monday in a joint press conference with NASA, SpaceX and Boeing announced their plans for flight tests of their Commercial Crew Programs, that will eventually lead to commercial manned missions to the ISS. With both companies launching manned test flights in 2017, we are still in for quite a wait. …

The Google Lunar Xprize, like the Ansari Xprize that gave rise to Spaceship One and ultimately Virgin Galactic, exists to challenge and incentivise small, privately funded teams to do amazing things in space. In this case, that challenge is to get a robot to the Moon and travel across the surface while …

Microsoft and Intel have placed in the top two spots for the Environmental Protection Agency's annual Green Power use ranking, both using clean energy sources for 100% of their power needs. This is all the more impressive when you see that combined, they use almost 5,600,000,000 kWh of electricity per year. …

The New Horizon's probe has been sailing through the murky black of space for almost a decade, with little to report but some atmospheric and magnetosphere tests when receiving a gravity assist from Jupiter. That was all part of the plan though, to bring the space-craft into a nearby encounter …

At todays Windows 10 event Microsoft announced, among many other things, its new plans for the future of computer interaction with Windows Holographic and Microsoft Hololens. Together these blend the real world around you with overlaid interactive holograms that can be controlled with gestures and voice, in ways only seen previously …

Tech giant Google and investment management firm Fidelity, have together invested a billion dollars into Elon Musk's Space X company, bringing its value to over $10 billion and helping to kick-start the project which Musk himself talked about recently: the plan to build a network of miniature satellites to offer …

One of the pipe dream projects that appears on Imgur, Reddit and a number of other sites occasionally is the idea that sending hundreds of miniature satellites into space would allow for the proliferation of cheap, sustainable internet that wouldn't be controlled by any centralised organisation. That's a nice idea, …

With a population of almost 65 million people (and rising) to look after, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) needs a significant revamp if it is to cope over the next 100 years. There are many ways to maintain and improve the service, but none really make better sense that a …

The development of a real, thinking AI, will perhaps be – when achieved – mankind's most crowning achievement. The true creation of an artificial life form. While we're still a way off from that, development of something akin to what we see in any of the many new and upcoming movies …

Commercial space organisation, Space X, attempted a frequently delayed unmanned mission to the International Space Station on Saturday, delivering supplies and important cargo to the orbiting station for the first time in months. While the launch itself went off without a hitch, the big scientific experiment with it was to see …

Anyone who has used a digital camera and some editing software, will have tried to create a panorama by combining two or more photos together. It's a technique that can be easily accomplished – with a product like Photoshop – for half a dozen photos or so. The folks at …

Even though the private industry looks set to overtake NASA in the race to dominate the endless blackness outside of our own little world, here's hoping that the space agency and its international counterparts continue to push the boundaries of what's possible, rather than resorting to more commercial ventures. Still, …

MakerBot, the desktop 3D printing company, has revealed four new materials that you can now use to print your creations with. A little more exciting than the plastic that's been used so far, they're actually composites that contain real metal, stone and wood making this all the more impressive. These materials are mixed …

Chances are we're going to colonise inhospitable environments in our own solar system long before we look to do so anywhere else, but that doesn't mean we can't dream of landing craft on worlds where much more acceptable gravity and temperatures won't make it such a pain to get up …

A monopoly that you can't get in trouble for, is just about the golden dream of every giant corporation out there. If you have no competition, you have free reign with release schedules, pricing and many other aspects of development. However, a monopoly is useless if the market isn't there …

One of the biggest reasons that rocket launches are so expensive, is that most parts of the initial boost stages aren't recoverable. They separate in our atmosphere as the next engines engage, and fall back to earth – but not so on Space X's Falcon 9 craft. Today, at 11:20 …

The last generation consoles may still be useful after all as scientists have configured 200 PlayStation 3 consoles together to create a low cost super computer, which is being used to help research black holes. The console array was first created all the way back in 2007, featuring just 16 …

If you are a fan of potential failure and large explosions then tomorrow could be a good day for you! SpaceX, the US rocket company owned by Elon Musk, is planning to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a sea-based floating platform known as the “autonomous spaceport drone ship”. …

In a paper released in the Science academic journal a few days ago, a group of NASA scientists has confirmed the existence of methane gas on Mars. This is a good indicator of life, as 95% of methane here on Earth is generated by Microbes. While this is in itself impressive, some of the other …

As smart as humans like to think they are, we have only been kicking around this planet in our current form for 200,000 years or so. When compared with the age of the universe, or even our own little rock within it, that's not even a minute on the cosmic …

Someone get the moon base ready, as we have a “laser” finally worthy of an evil genius. The United States Navy has just posted a video showing the test firing of it's Laser Weapon System (LaWS). In the video, you can see the LaWS weapons platform engaging both waterborne and airborne targets …

This year has been an exciting one for technology. We've seen much more realistic virtual reality in the guise of the DK2, we've seen maglev-technology hoverboards and now we might be set to (finally) get access to jetpacks. The New Zealand company behind the technology, Martin Aircraft, isn't just showing off …

The Orion capsule that could one day carry humans to the surface of Mars, is set to be tested today by NASA and its developers, Lockheed Martin, sending it almost 6,000KM (3,700 miles) from Earth, to make sure critical components work when confronted with heavy radiation and high re-entry temperatures. …

Around a hundred human brains, bottled and preserved in formaldehyde, have gone missing from the University of Texas and nobody seems to know exactly why or how. However, it is possible that  group of undergraduates or other parties took them for “living rooms or Halloween pranks” over the years, according …

A UK man has made plans to wear a virtual reality headset 24/7 for a month in an effort to experience life through another person's eyes. Mark Farid is currently calling the project ‘Seeing-I' and labels it as a social artistic experiment to seek out how much of a person is …