Technology

Archive Gallery: 138 Years of Architectural Landmarks

Popular Science - September 3, 2010 - 5:00am
The Pentagon, 1943

PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more

We've heard it said that Rome wasn't built in a day. And while Popular Science isn't old enough to have witnessed the Colosseum going up, we have covered in our pages some of the 20th century's most important architectural achievements rise from nothing but a dream and a blueprint.

We've combed the archives to gather some of our most important first looks at the buildings and structures that went on to define skylines around the world. Read more »

Back to the future

Still Life with Cat - September 2, 2010 - 10:17am

I've just written an email to my very oldest friend saying 'I see from your daughter's Facebook page that you've hurt yourself -- are you okay?'

However we may have imagined the future, back in 1967 as we lolled around in our school uniforms on the lawn at lunchtime, we could never have imagined the possibility of formulating a sentence like that.

Undergrads at Colorado Crash a NASA Satellite Into The Ocean

Popular Science - September 2, 2010 - 2:56am

Call it a crash course. A group of undergrads at the University of Colorado at Boulder got to participate in an unusual and awesome classroom activity on Monday, the culmination of a weeks-long process to decommission a NASA science satellite: they crashed a satellite into the atmosphere, sending it to a fiery death.

The Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) spent seven years aloft under the careful guidance of professionals and their undergrad protégés at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The satellite gathered key data on polar ice, ice sheets and sea ice dynamics that have informed nearly a decade of climate research, but on Monday -- low on fuel and out of time -- ICESat's number was up. Read more »

Technological Tracking of Free-Range Felons Could Make Incarceration Obsolete

Popular Science - September 2, 2010 - 1:01am
Locked Up Andrew Bardwell via Wikimedia

Americans have a prison problem -- namely, we've got a whole lot of people in prisons and that's a huge drain not only on hard money in our public coffers, but on man-hours lost by both the inmates and the people who spend their productive hours keeping an eye on them. But Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, describes a new prison paradigm that would take the economic - and, for the inmates, psychological - duress out of our penal system: let most of the inmates go free. Then use technology to monitor their every move. Read more »

Tiny, Five-Nanometer Silicon Oxide Switches Could Create Single Chips With Terabyte Storage

Popular Science - September 1, 2010 - 5:12am
The Silicon Oxide Chip Jun Yao/Rice University

Even with great strides being made regularly in the realms of nanotech and materials science, Moore's Law - the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on a given integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months - has for several years been bearing down on engineers who have shrunk conventional chip technology about as far as material limitations will let them. But a graduate student at Rice University has demonstrated that a well-known insulator - silicon oxide - may just be the minuscule digital switches of the very near future. Read more »

In Demonstration, Laser-Powered UAV Charged From the Ground Stays Aloft For Hours

Popular Science - September 3, 2010 - 2:58am
LaserMotive's Laser-Powered Helo New Scientist

An unmanned aerial surveillance drone is only as good as its power source, and as such many technologies are being considered that could drastically extend the duration of drone missions - for instance, DARPA's Vulture program has helped develop a giant solar plane that, theoretically, could fly for five years straight. But Seattle-based LaserMotive thinks laser power is the answer, and to prove it they recently kept a tiny 22-gram helicopter aloft for hours by beaming power to it via a laser. Read more »

DARPA's Cyber Insider Threat Program Is the Agency's Great Hope for Ending Leaks

Popular Science - September 2, 2010 - 7:27am
Protecting Military Networks Thinking about WikiLeaking? Think again. U.S. Navy

The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn't lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER - Cyber INsiDER Threat - the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen. Read more »

When Drones Go Rogue In Friendly Skies, How Do We Bring Them Home?

Popular Science - September 2, 2010 - 2:00am
Wing Ejected A shrunken F/A-18 target drone equipped with a new, advanced fly-by-wire system was able to return home safely after losing up to 80% of one wing.

Rockwell Collins

An advanced fly-by-wire system capable of landing grossly damaged unmanned aircraft-demonstrated on video saving a plane missing 80 percent of one wing-is key to solving one of unmanned flight's biggest problems

Word spread last week that a rogue MQ-8B Fire Scout copter drone entered restricted airspace just 40 miles shy of Washington D.C. after losing contact with its operators. The revelation occurred smack in the middle of AVUSI 2010, the world's largest UAV tradeshow. And it served as a poignant reminder that all the game-changing technology on display here at the Denver Convention Center still has some innovating to do, especially when flight crews lose control of their unmanned craft.

But to lose control of a flying robot over a warzone is one thing; things get much more complicated in crowded domestic skies. One remarkable system, capable of bringing a plane missing most of one wing safely home, aims to make losing control a more palatable proposition. Read more »

Loud Video: NASA Test Fires Largest-Ever Solid Rocket Motor

Popular Science - September 1, 2010 - 6:01am
The DM-2 Awaits Its Test Fire NASA

In Utah today, NASA completed a successful test of the world's largest, most powerful solid rocket motor, the DM-2. For two minutes, the motor, designed to provide up to 3.6 million pounds of thrust, roaringly fired a column of flame, while some 760 instruments monitored its every aspect. Best to turn down your speakers before the countdown in this video hits zero.

Before the motor was fired, the engineers chilled it to 40 degrees below zero, for additional stress testing. It reportedly passed every test. The motor is intended to be used in the heavy-lift rocket segment of the Constellation program that NASA has slated for 2015. Read more »

China Executes Mysterious, Secret In-Orbit Satellite Rendezvous

Popular Science - September 1, 2010 - 2:59am
The Current Orbits of China's Six SJ-06 Series Satellites

Satellites may be docking together in orbit -- are they building Voltron?

Though the world found out about it through a Russian media outlet, China has been conducting complicated space maneuvers with two of its science satellites over the past few months, directing two of its "Shi Jian" (practice) satellites to rendezvous some 370 miles above the Earth, and possibly even touch. But the fact that China has been so hush-hush about the close encounter has some wondering what it plans to use such technology for. It could be used to build a peaceful space station, but also for interfering with other nations' satellites. Read more »