Researchers at Georgia Tech have identified a way to teach robots how to fall with grace and without serious damage. The work is important as costly robots become more common in manufacturing alongside humans. The skill becomes especially important, too, as robots are sought for health care or domestic tasks working near the elderly, injured, children or pets. These machines are expensive to make and typically take months, if not years, to complete meaning every time they fall they can become da...

Astronomers have discovered a previously unknown link between the way young stars grow and the way black holes and other exotic space objects feed from their surroundings. The study, 'Accretion-induced variability links young stellar objects, white dwarfs, and black holes,' which is published in the journal Science Advances, shows how the 'flickering' in the visible brightness of young stellar objects (YSOs), very young stars in the final stages of formation is similar to the flickering seen fro...

As NASA gears up for a mission to Mars, planning a route to the Red Planet is important. Now, researchers have found that to save on weight and have concluded that a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars. Previous studies have suggested that lunar soil and water ice in certain craters of the moon could potentially be mined and converted to fuel. With the assumption that this tech exists at the time of a Mars mission, taking a detour to the moon to refuel actually reduces the mass of a mis...

Mafic Mound, a distinctive and enigmatic feature near the Moon’s South Pole, is a volcanic structure unlike any other found on the surface of the Earth’s only natural satellite, says a team of planetary geologists at Brown University. It stands about 2,600 feet tall and 47 miles across and lies in the middle of a giant impact crater known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin. “If the scenarios that we lay out for its formation are correct, it could represent a totally new volcanic process that’s ne...