Air hockey was developed in the late ’60s and early ’70s by a group of American billiard engineers. When in play, the puck floats on a thin cushion of air, propelled by players on each end. Stream Full Episodes of How It’s Made: https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows/how-its-made/ Subscribe to Science Channel: http://bit.ly/SubscribeScience Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScienceChannel Follow
Ninety-six million. That’s how many black plastic ‘shade balls’ it takes to cover the Los Angeles reservoir. Why, you ask? Well, despite what has often been reported as the main purpose of these balls, the idea didn’t actually start with just protecting the reservoir from evaporation. In a new episode from Veritasium, Derek Muller investigates the story behind
A new ‘biological glue’ developed by Chinese researchers could one day stop hearts and arteries from uncontrollably bleeding. Placed on an open wound and activated through UV light, this life-saving sealant rapidly morphs into a non-toxic hydrogel, capable of withstanding both slippery surfaces and the pulsing of heart tissue. The adhesive sealant hasn’t been tested
This visualization of Lee Lincoln scarp is created from LRO photographs and elevation mapping. The scarp is a low ridge or step about 80 meters high and running north-south through the western end of the Taurus-Littrow valley, the site of the Apollo 17 moon landing. NASA/Goddard/SVS/Ernie Wright The moon is still tectonically active and has
The legislation restricts funds for the SDA and provides $15 million to further study the establishment of a Space Force. WASHINGTON — House appropriators would block funding for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency until 90 days after the secretary of defense submits a detailed plan for the new agency. The language is included in the
The grand, sprawling palace built by the Roman Emperor Nero nearly 2,000 years ago has been keeping a secret. While working on restorations, archaeologists found a secret chamber – a large underground room decorated with murals depicting both real and mythical creatures. In red and ochre hues, with traces of gilding, centaurs dance across the
What happened to Hiroshima? Everybody thinks they know the answer, and yet, strangely, nobody does. History tells us Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb deployed in war on 6 August 1945. But what happened to the actual city when it was consumed in its awful, unforgettable fire? Where did Hiroshima go? We might
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The moon may be dynamic and tectonically active like Earth – not the inert world some scientists had believed it to be – based on a new analysis disclosed on Monday of quakes measured by seismometers in operation on the moon from 1969 and 1977. FILE PHOTO: Astronaut James Irwin, lunar module
Long exposure of a Falcon 9 launch shows trajectory. SpaceX SpaceX is targeting 10:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 15, 2019 for the launch of 60 of its own Starlink satellites from Pad 40 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. If it’s successful, it will begin to offer global internet coverage from space. So what is Starlink?
VICTORIA, British Columbia — The Canadian government has selected MDA to design, build and deliver 10 search-an- rescue repeaters for its Medium Earth Orbit Search and Rescue system to be hosted on the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation GPS satellites. The Medium Earth Orbit Search and Rescue (MEOSAR) system repeater contract is worth 39 million Canadian ($28
Amber from Myanmar in Southeast Asia is turning out to be an incredibly rich resource for examining the natural world of 100 million years ago. In the last year, it’s turned up frogs, snails, a snake, weird feathers, and some pretty wacky bugs. What do all of those have in common? They’re land-dwellers. But now
Warning: Full spoilers below for Game of Thrones Season 8, episode 5, “The Bells.” What do you do if you’ve named your baby after a genocidal maniac? That’s the question facing thousands of parents in America this morning after last night’s Game of Thrones took a very dark turn in the story arc of one
We tend to think of the Moon as the archetypal “dead” world. Not only is there no life, almost all its volcanic activity died out billions of years ago. Even the youngest lunar lava is old enough to have become scarred by numerous impact craters that have been collected over the aeons as cosmic debris
Bill Nye frolicked in a ball pit to explain how the planet’s populations compete for resources. He took a chain saw to a loaf of bread, comparing it to Earth’s crust, and he was nearly blown away in a wind tunnel while shouting “science!” But he’s talking about global warming now – and he’s in
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration asked Congress on Monday to increase NASA spending next year by an extra $1.6 billion as a “down payment” to accommodate the accelerated goal of returning Americans to the surface of the moon by 2024. FILE PHOTO: Astronaut James Irwin, lunar module pilot, gives a military salute while standing
Businesses need to make it easier for consumers to support the environment – it’s a win-win. Shirley Hirst from Pixabay If you live in the U.S. and relish grabbing a morning coffee on your way to work, the sleeve that stops your hand burning may well have been created by a manufacturing plant that recycles
WASHINGTON — The White House and NASA announced May 13 that they will seek an additional $1.6 billion in funding for the agency in fiscal year 2020, a “down payment” on efforts to achieve a human lunar landing by 2024. In a tweet late in the day, President Trump announced the additional funding to support
On a recent evening, Elizabeth Ewens was in the middle of an intense run workout. Her coach told her to kick it up, so she did and received encouragement from a fellow runner. She finished the workout feeling good. While Ewens’ evening workout sounds like what running groups around the world do several nights a
Scientists have measured the accuracy of two-qubit operations for the first time in silicon, bringing the world a big step closer to reliable quantum computing. The great promise of quantum computers is that they will enable a vastly more powerful and faster way of making calculations than the computing power we’ve had until now. The
We live in an age when envy comes easy. Most of us walk around all day with a device in our hand that can show us the best of people’s lives with just a swipe and a click – we even sleep next to it at night. It’s almost impossible not to compare our own
This article originally appeared in the May 6, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s future satellite constellations are likely to look far different from the current ones, particularly in low Earth orbit where small satellites of various sizes could gather targeted observations. That is one of the conclusions leaders
For most of us, the jump from meat-eater to vegetarian is a big one. For the giant panda, the switch was all too easy. Despite a long family history of meat-heavy meals, this large bear now feeds almost exclusively on tough bamboo – a change its ancestors made more than 2 million years ago. For
Elon Musk just gave us the first look at his rocket company’s bold plan to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the entire world. Musk tweeted out an image of 60 satellites packed into SpaceX’s Falcon rocket on Saturday, along with fresh details about the global satellite networking gambit. SpaceX currently plans to launch the rocket on
Yet another alarming milestone of humanity’s damaging effect on the environment has now officially been reached – crossing a barrier into a hot, polluted future like the planet hasn’t witnessed in millions of years. This weekend, sensors in Hawaii recorded Earth’s atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) passing 415 parts per million (ppm) for the
Papanikolauos was born on this day in 1883. Google Monday’s Google Doodle celebrates the 136th birthday of pathologist Georgios Papanikolaou, who developed the cancer screening test we know today as a Pap smear. Moving to the U.S. in 1913 must have been a drastic change for Papanikolaou and his wife Andromachi at first. Only two
There’s no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there’s one animal humans like to eat that would fare poorly in farms. Octopuses, scientists have argued in a new essay, should never be farmed – not just because of
We learn about some awesome science in high school – like Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Periodic table, and DNA replication. The knowledge we pick up there sets the foundations for all the other amazing things we go on to study. But science definitely doesn’t end at high school, and it’s once you take your
Nothing says “Happy Mother’s Day” quite like pancakes. That’s probably what IHOP had in mind when it tweeted about the holiday this morning. But things quickly got a lot weirder. “If you have pancakes in your tum tum, does that make you a pancake mum mum? Happy Mother’s Day to ALL the mums out there!”
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers with the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group (ECG) are currently working on ways to achieve the dream of interstellar flight. Under the leadership of Philip Lubin, the group has dedicated a considerable amount of effort towards the creation of an interstellar mission consisting of directed-energy light sail and
Researchers may have just found the devil’s maternity ward… devil rays, that is. While taking a marine conservation field course in the Gulf of California as an undergraduate at Duke back in April 2014, Leo Chan Gaskins saw gillnets full of dead giant devil rays being hauled out of the ocean. Based out of a
WASHINGTON — An incident involving a test of parachutes for one commercial crew vehicle has heightened awareness of the challenges involved in developing those systems, as well as determining what constitutes an anomaly. During a line of questions at May 8 hearing of the House space subcommittee, a top NASA official said that the parachute
Almost 15 years ago, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson made a bet on launching tourists into space from the scrublands of southern New Mexico. Now, he’s about to move the headquarters of his space venture to the so-called “Land of Enchantment.” Virgin Galactic’s move into its permanent headquarters at Spaceport America, north of Las Cruces,
The sun has two planets in its Goldilocks zone: the Earth and Mars. The crucial difference: a magnetic field that protects us from the sun’s radiation and makes liquid water – and life – possible on Earth. | For more How the Universe Works, visit http://science.discovery.com/tv-shows/how-the-universe-works/#mkcpgn=ytsci1 Catch all new episodes of HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS
In recent years, it’s emerged that some dinosaurs – considered scaly and reptilian for many years – were actually wearing feathers. But a newly discovered species of scansoriopterygid dinosaur sports a different style. This tiny creature had bat-like wings: leathery, not feathery. It’s called Ambopteryx longibrachium, and it was just 33 centimetres (13 inches) long.
Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington state, seen here on a tour of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation bus depot in Los Angeles, California on May 3, 2019, has been dealing with measles outbreaks in the state of Washington. (Photo: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images) Getty Welcome to 2019. On Friday, when Washington Governor Jay Inslee (D)
NROL-68 is the second of three missions awarded to ULA under the Launch Vehicle Production Services contract. WASHINGTON — The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center on Thursday awarded United Launch Alliance a $149 million contract modification for a Delta 4 Heavy launch of the National Reconnaissance Office mission NROL-68, the second of three
When you’ve been surviving in all sorts of environments for billions of years, you pick up a few tricks for harvesting light as efficiently as possible – and now long-living, light-emitting microalgae could be about to help us develop the next generation of solar panels. These fluorescent algae are able to capture up to 95%
For 1,400 years, an underground burial chamber lay untouched in the British countryside, hiding its long-dead denizen and his royal secrets. Then, in 2003, construction workers in the town of Prittlewell (about 40 miles from London) were expanding a roadway when they stumbled upon the remarkable tomb. Over time, researchers unearthed a lyre, gold coins,
If you want to know how far radioactive particles can travel, here’s the answer: all the way to the Mariana Trench, which at 10,994 metres (36,070 ft) is the deepest natural trench in the world. A new study shows that radioactive carbon from Cold War nuclear bomb tests is still present in the crustaceans living
Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers in
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Distinct from the more typical phenomenon of the aurora borealis and aurora australis, found near the poles, a separate optical phenomenon in the sky known as STEVE can occasionally be seen. For years, scientists were puzzled as to what caused it, but that mystery has now
This op-ed originally appeared in the May 6, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. Satellite communications are everywhere, but all too often remain invisible to the general public. This is both an indication of their successful integration into the overall telecommunication market, and sometimes an obstacle to a proper understanding of their vital importance for an
Today the Australian Koala Foundation announced they believe “there are no more than 80,000 koalas in Australia”, making the species “functionally extinct”. While this number is dramatically lower than the most recent academic estimates, there’s no doubt koala numbers in many places are in steep decline. It’s hard to say exactly how many koalas are
There are few things that tether us more to Earth than the food we eat and the air we breathe. Today, humans have the engineering willpower to travel to the Moon and possibly beyond, but when our planet recedes behind us and we slip beyond the reach of human aid, then what? In the absence
As the content of Earth’s atmosphere changes over time, the course of animal evolution itself might change. An international team of researchers now thinks that swinging oxygen levels somehow orchestrated the boom and bust of our planet’s fauna, like the conductor of a living symphony. For the first time, their research has linked the rapid
China should get rid of the 996–a work schedule of 12 hours a day from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week (72 hours in total) — and replace it with a new work system where people work smarter, not harder. There was a time China was a poor country. Its people had
FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia — The majority of Inmarsat’s shareholders voted May 10 in favor of a $3.3 billion acquisition offer by a consortium of buyers. Some 77 percent of London-based Inmarsat’s shareholders voted in favor of the takeover proposed by private equity firms Apax and Warburg Pincus and Canadian pension firms CPPIB and OTPP. Those shareholders
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