Europe has launched the Lisa Pathfinder satellite, an exquisite space physics experiment. It will test the technologies needed to detect gravitational waves, the warping of space-time produced by cataclysmic events in the cosmos. Having such a capability would make it possible to detect the merger of monster black holes, a marker for the growth of galaxies through time. Lisa Pathfinder went into orbit on a Vega rocket from French Guiana. The satellite is being sent in the direction of the Sun, t...

Invented by Dr. Wayne B. Hayes, a professor at the University of California and a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the "Cold Shoulder" calorie-burning vest apparently is based on hard science, rather than science fiction. According to info on Kickstarter, scientists have spent decades studying how mild cold exposure can enhance calorie burn, and the results seem to show that it works. Hayes works with NASA scientists who purportedly study ice, so he ...

Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines are developing a new aerospace engine class that combines both jet and rocket technologies. They call it the greatest advance in propulsion since the jet engine which will help potentially revolutionizing hypersonic flight and dramatically reducing the cost of space access. SABRE, which stands for Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine, is designed to enable aircraft to operate from a standstill on the runway to hypersonic flight in the atmosphere, and then tra...

There are more jeans in the world than people. That sparked an idea in the mind of University of Sheffield chemist Tony Ryan. Why not use people’s penchant for wearing denim to help purify the air? With thoughts of reducing pollutants such as the nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds emitted by vehicles, power plants, residential heating, cooking and various consumer products, Ryan, in partnership with former fashion designer Helen Storey, came up with the concept of “Catalytic Clothing...

A garnet crystal only one micrometre in diameter was instrumental in a University of Alberta team of physicists creating a route to “lab-on-a-chip” technology for magnetic resonance, a tool to simplify advanced magnetic analysis for device development and interdisciplinary science. “To most, a gem so tiny would be worthless, but to us, it’s priceless,” says Mark Freeman, University of Alberta physics professor and Canada Research Chair in condensed matter physics. “It was the perfect testbed for...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are looking to take human intuition out of big data analysis by letting computers choose the feature set used to identify predictive patterns in the data. This effort is called “Data Science Machine”. Big Data represents a huge, complex ecosystem that brings together innovative processes from across the spectrum of data analysis, storage, networking, curation, search,...