Technology

By Jeff Foust WASHINGTON — A NASA Earth science satellite whose mission is ending this week will remain in orbit through the middle of the century, far longer than the limit set by orbital debris mitigation guidelines. NASA announced earlier this month that it was shutting down the Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) spacecraft on March 30. NASA …

By New Scientist staff and Press Association A quadriplegic man in the US has been able to use his right arm and hand again after eight years of paralysis. Bill Kochevar, who was paralysed below his shoulders in a cycling accident, was able to do this thanks to a neuroprosthesis. Electrodes implanted under his skull …

By Henry Fountain SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge. It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, …

By Matt McFarland Google announced Friday that it has achieved state-of-the-art results in using artificial intelligence to identify breast cancer. The findings are a reminder of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence, and its potential to improve global health. Google used a flavor of artificial intelligence called deep learning to analyze thousands of slides of …

By Jane Wakefield IBM has made its quantum computing system commercially available to businesses and beefed up an existing system used by the research community. The firm is hoping to boost the numbers of people able to use such computers. The machine, based in New York, has been available via the internet since May last …

By John Markoff In the coming age of robotics, many of those autonomous machines will be internet-connected and mobile. What could possibly go wrong? Significant security flaws were found in an examination of six home and industrial robots, according to a report to be released Wednesday by IOActive, a computer security consulting firm with headquarters …

By Colin Dwyer To paraphrase an age-old saying: If at first you don’t succeed, well, dust off the historic launch pad and try another liftoff. Not as catchy as the original, perhaps, but certainly fitting for SpaceX, which succeeded Sunday on its second launch attempt at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in …

By Annie Sneed Predicting earthquakes is the holy grail of seismology. After all, quakes are deadly precisely because they’re erratic—striking without warning, triggering fires and tsunamis, and sometimes killing hundreds of thousands of people. If scientists could warn the public weeks or months in advance that a large temblor is coming, evacuation and other preparations …

By Kenneth Chang NASA will be heading to a metal world. The space agency announced on Wednesday that a spacecraft named Psyche would visit an asteroid named Psyche, one of two new missions it will be launching into the solar system in the 2020s. “For the purpose of simplicity, and out of our initial excitement, …

By Agence France-Presse in The Hague All Dutch electric trains are now powered by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said . “Since 1 January, 100% of our trains are running on wind energy,” said NS spokesman, Ton Boon. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and …

By Joel Achenbach The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it’s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency’s human spaceflight program. That’s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don’t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there’s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat …

By Carl Zimmer Leah H. Somerville, a Harvard neuroscientist, sometimes finds herself in front of an audience of judges. They come to hear her speak about how the brain develops. It’s a subject on which many legal questions depend. How old does someone have to be to be sentenced to death? When should someone get …