Science

NASA indicated on Tuesday that it plans on moving forward with its deep space exploration goals by announcing plans for a 2014 unmanned flight test of its Orion spacecraft.

In a release, the U.S. space agency said that it would add the new flight test to its existing contract to build the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle (MPCV) with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. NASA said it expects to conduct the new test in early 2014.

According to NASA, the flight test will "fly two orbits to a high-apogee, with a high-energy re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. Orion will make … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For people like Sarah Reinertsen, one of the many downsides of having a prosthetic leg is that there's never been a fashionable way to dress it up.

But for Reinertsen, a record-setting triathlete, and others including a growing number of combat veterans, a startup called Bespoke Innovations is forever changing the way they feel about themselves and how the world looks at them.

Bespoke was founded by industrial designer Scott Summit and orthopedist Kenneth Trauner. The company's initial products are what are known as fairings--3D printed prosthetic leg covers that are each one-of-a-kind and designed for and … Read more

There are corn mazes, and then there are NASA-themed corn mazes.

Over at Universe Today, there's a great piece on SpaceFarm 7: To celebrate 50 years of manned spaceflight, the U.S. space agency has teamed up with the creators of corn mazes in seven regions across the country on SpaceFarm 7, a set of special crop circles that represent each area's efforts on behalf NASA.

"Seven 'Space Farms' around the country have chosen to honor NASA and the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight with their 2011 corn maze designs," NASA wrote on its Web site. &… Read more

You could be going into orbit and in one of the official snazzy NASA spacesuits, no less. That's if you are one of the elite group that the space agency chooses as its next cadre of future astronauts, of course.

NASA said today that beginning in early November, it will be accepting applications (PDF file) for its next class of astronaut candidates. These are the people who "will support long-duration missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and future deep space exploration activities," the agency said in the release announcing the upcoming application period.

If you have … Read more

Popular Mechanics magazine on Monday unveiled its seventh-annual Breakthrough Awards winners, calling out 10 products and 11 innovators its editors feel are tackling longstanding problems in medicine, space exploration, technology, environmental engineering, and automotive design, in all-new ways.

Leading the list of this year's winners is "Avatar" director James Cameron, to whom the magazine gave its 2011 Breakthrough Leadership award.

The products honored by the editors include a hot new smartphone, an all-new kind of seat belt, a genre-shattering video game, highly efficient solar cells, smog-eating roof tiles, a new kind of LED lightbulb, and an automatic … Read more

I don't know what kinds of things you see inside your head, but I do worry about it.

As for the things I see inside my head, well, if only I could show you. Actually, there are scientists at UC Berkeley who believe that they can show you.

I haven't let them into the house yet. But I can show you video of their work. I am grateful to the inner brains at Gizmodo, who first revealed this footage to me.

You will, naturally, be wondering whether the scientists created this footage, well, naturally.

In a way. They … Read more

European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul.

The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary … Read more

MOJAVE, Calif.--"We build spaceships."

That's the motto--perhaps the coolest ever?--of The Spaceship Company, the partnership between Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, builder of the X-Prize-winning SpaceShip One and its younger sister ship, SpaceShip Two.

And on Monday, The Spaceship Company (TSC) formally opened what it calls FAITH, the final assembly facility for SpaceShip Two and the aircraft on which it piggybacks, WhiteKnight Two. At the celebration, Virgin Galactic showed off, for the first time at a public event, a replica of SpaceShipOne, as well as the actual WhiteKnightOne, SpaceShipTwo, and WhiteKnightTwo (… Read more

Raytheon this morning said that it has passed a major milestone in its bid to win a multi-billion dollar U.S. Navy radar contract.

The Tewksbury, Massachusetts military contract is currently competing against Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the lucrative contract to provide next-generation Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) technology for the Navy's Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. As part of its efforts to win the deal, Raytheon has just surpassed 1,000 hours of degradation-free testing on its Gallium Nitride transmit/receive modules. Completing the 1,000 hours of testing, during which the modules were said to have … Read more