Engineering, features and articles | Educational Science

Jun 23, 2017

Customizable 'Smart' Exoskeleton Learns from Your Steps

In experiments with 11 able-bodied people, the so-called human-in-the-loop algorithm took about an hour to optimize the exoskeleton, and afterward, reduced the amount of energy participants needed to walk by 24 percent, on average, said research team member Rachel Jackson, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at...

Jun 28, 2017

Tiny, Lens-Free Camera Could Hide in Clothes, Glasses

The device, a square that measures just 0.04 inches by 0.05 inches (1 by 1.2 millimeters), has the potential to switch its aperture among wide angle, fish eye and zoom instantaneously. And because the device is so thin, just a few microns thick, it could be embedded anywhere. (For comparison,...

Jun 30, 2017

Nanotech's Big Ideas: From Tumor Zappers to Space Elevators

Some of today's biggest science innovations are happening at the smallest scales. Nanotech — nano is short for nanometer, referring to length scales in billionths of a meter — describes technologies that are built to perform complex tasks, but at the scale of molecules or even atoms. To put that...

Jul 25, 2017

Butterfly Wing Optics Help to Cheaply Create Bright, Realistic Holograms

Holograms have long captured the public's imagination. Whether it's Star Wars fans dreaming of holographic messages and chess games, concertgoers standing in awe before a resurrected Tupac Shakur, or the holographic future envisioned in the upcoming Blade Runner 2049, the hologram concept seems to offer something for everyone. But despite...

Aug 8, 2017

Disney's 'Magic Bench' Puts You in the Picture with Animated Figures

A new Magic Bench designed by Disney Research lets you interact with endearing animated characters — and no special glasses or headsets are required. Instead, the complete environment — the seat, the sitter and the cartoon humanoid animals — is mirrored on a screen opposite the bench, making it possible...

Aug 8, 2017

Here's What It's Like to Be the Planetary Protection Officer at NASA

If you want a job protecting Earth from threats from outer space — or even protecting Mars from us — NASA has an opening for you — sort of. The job of planetary protection officer generated quite a bit of buzz last week, when the public learned that a role...

Aug 28, 2017

Pod Traveling at 201 MPH Wins Elon Musk's Hyperloop Competition

A team of students from Germany sent a carbon-plastic pod whizzing through a tube at 201 mph (324 km/h) last weekend, securing the top spot in Elon Musk's second Hyperloop competition. Musk, the founder of SpaceX, Tesla and brain-interface company Neuralink, aims to revolutionize transportation with his Hyperloop concept, which...

Aug 29, 2017

Elon Musk's Neuralink Gets $27 Million to Merge Humans and Machines

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, perhaps the world's most famous futurist, has made a career of pursuing far-fetched projects that have one leg planted firmly in science fiction. SpaceX aims to colonize Mars. The Boring Company wants to dig tunnels to transport cars at high speeds along sliding electric skates. And...

Sep 22, 2017

World's Largest Aircraft Starts Engine Tests

For the first time, the private spaceflight company Stratolaunch tested all six of the engines on a colossal airplane with the largest wingspan of any aircraft in the world. In these initial tests, each of the six engines operated as expected, Stratolaunch, which is led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen,...

Oct 11, 2017

'Beam of Invisibility' Could Hide Objects Using Light

Once thought of as the province of only Star Trek or Harry Potter, cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a beam of invisibility, according to a new study. Theoretically, most invisibility...

Feb 23, 2018

Chinese Scientists Unveil Plans for Weird Hypersonic Jet with Extra Wing

Building a useful plane that's faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, is a difficult engineering challenge, but a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a plan to pull it off. The trick to making these faster-than-Mach 5, or hypersonic, vehicles is...

Mar 2, 2018

Pollution from Ships Creates Massive Clouds Visible from Space

NASA's Aqua satellite was orbiting over Portugal back in January when it snapped the above photo. It shows a thin film of clouds above the brilliant blue of the North Atlantic, slashed with white lines of thicker clouds that look like scars or etchings. Those thicker clouds, NASA officials explained...

Mar 13, 2018

The Science Websites That We Read Every Day

There's a lot of junk on the internet, but the web is still a wonderful place to share and discover knowledge. For science enthusiasts and news connoisseurs who don't want to waste time searching out the most interesting and legit conveyors of this knowledge, Live Science editors and reporters put...

May 31, 2018

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented reality is the result of using technology to superimpose information — sounds, images and text — on the world we see. Picture the Minority Report or Iron Man style of interactivity. Augmented reality vs. virtual realityThis is rather different from virtual reality. Virtual reality means computer-generated environments for you...

Jun 4, 2018

Scientists Figured Out How to Make Ceramics That Bend and Mush Instead of Shattering

A team of scientists has figured out how to make ceramics that bend and mush instead of shattering (though under enough pressure they will still crack). That's a potentially lifesaving discovery: Heat-resistant ceramics are critical materials in machines that run hot, and they also coat the metal parts inside airplane...