Category Archives: Innovation

Amazing photo of attempted landing of SpaceX rocket

Posted on May 5, 2015 by

From space.com, a nice post recapping the last attempt to land a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster on an ocean-going drone platform: Over at io9.com there are some other interesting comments, too.

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NASA’s New Horizons Probe Detects Surface Features & Possible Polar Cap on Pluto

Posted on April 29, 2015 by

For the first time, images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft are revealing bright and dark regions on the surface of faraway Pluto – the primary target of the New Horizons close flyby in mid-July.  The images were captured in early … Continue reading →

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SpaceX Rocket Booster Landing — Close, But Not Quite

Posted on April 15, 2015 by

Yesterday’s landing attempt for the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster almost succeeded.  The rocket came down on the robotic recovery ship, but had too much lateral velocity and tipped over. Meanwhile, the main mission to resupply the International Space Station is on track for … Continue reading →

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History of Camera Sales, with Smartphones Included

Posted on April 11, 2015 by

From Michael Zhang, writing at PetaPixel: A few months ago, we shared a chart showing how sales the camera market have changed between 1947 and 2014. The data shows that after a large spike in the late 2000s, the sales of … Continue reading →

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Fully Automated Airline Flights Are Already a Reality

Posted on April 10, 2015 by

Apparently, large commercial airline pilots already spend less than 7 minutes actually controlling their plane, according to a recent survey.  Fully automated flight is pretty much already in place, including examples like the Centaur Optionally Piloted Aircraft. The military has … Continue reading →

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3D-Printed Bionic Ants Work as a Terrifying Team

Posted on April 1, 2015 by

From Popular Mechanics, an article about 3-D printed bugs that work toward a common goal: Ants are known for their selflessness, working collectively for the greater good of the colony in order to move giant crumbs up giant anthills. That’s also … Continue reading →

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3-D printer for small molecules opens access to customized chemistry

Posted on March 16, 2015 by

As reported on the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s web site: Scientists led by Martin Burke, an HHMI early career scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used a single automated process to synthesize 14 distinct classes of small molecules … Continue reading →

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SpaceX comes close, but doesn’t quite accomplish soft landing of booster rocket

Posted on January 10, 2015 by

SpaceX successfully navigated its Falcon 9 booster rocket back to a floating platform Saturday, but the landing was too hard to count as a success.  However, “it bodes well for the future” says Elon Musk. The rocket “ran out of hydraulic fluid … Continue reading →

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First robot to fly as a paying passenger on an airline

Posted on December 17, 2014 by

“Athena”, flying from Germany to Los Angeles.

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CRISPR Genomic Editing Patent Disputes Heat Up

Posted on December 7, 2014 by

MIT Tech Review has a good article about the brewing intellectual property battle over CRISPR-Cas9 DNA editing.  The ease with which human DNA (or that of any eukaryotic organism) can be edited with the genetic engineering technique is astonishing, and will undoubtedly … Continue reading →

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