Technology

By Alexandra Witze James Carpenter just needed some fake Moon dirt. Carpenter, a lunar-exploration expert at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, works on a drill designed to hunt for buried ice on the Moon. His team recently ordered half a tonne of powdery material to replicate the lunar surface from a commercial supplier in …

By Shannon Hall An invisibility cloak has been used in the lab to hide the metallic strips used in solar panels, making the devices more efficient at using the sun’s energy. Invisibility cloaks are made of materials that can bend the path of light around them and so hide anything under them from view. Martin Schumann …

By Adrienne LaFrance The Golden Record was never meant for this planet. Yet it has remained an object of curiosity on Earth, even after decades of hurtling through the void of outer space. In fact, the Golden Record has had something of a revival lately. For years, there’s been talk of making a modern, internet-crowdsourced follow-up to the …

By Jesse Emspak Need to send a message across interstellar space? Use the sun for a signal boost. A new proposal suggests that the sun’s gravity could be used to amplify signals from an interstellar space probe, allowing video to be streamed from as far away as Alpha Centauri. Better still, the technology to do it …

By Jasmin Malik Chua From inefficient grids, shortfalls in policy, and even the occasional eclipse, solar-energy collection faces no shortage of hurdles. Scientists have discovered another stumbling block: air pollution. Published last week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, the study revealed that the regions most susceptible to this challenge also have the heaviest solar investments. …

By Davide Castelvecchi Europe’s gravitational-wave hunters are celebrating. On 1 July, a satellite will wrap up its mission to test technology for the pioneering quest to measure gravitational ripples in the stillness of space. Over the past year, the craft has performed much better than many had hoped. That success has convinced the European Space Agency …

By Leah Crane SpaceX just did a double-header. Two of the firm’s Falcon 9 rockets were launched within 49 hours of each other, one from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and one from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. That’s a first for SpaceX and provides a proof-of-concept for efficiently reusing rockets in …

By Sam Wong People who have had amputations can control a virtual avatar using their imagination alone, thanks to a system that uses a brain scanner. Brain-computer interfaces, which translate neuron activity into computer signals, have been advancing rapidly, raising hopes that such technology can help people overcome disabilities such as paralysis or lost limbs. …

By Alexandra Witze Jerry Paros is worried about the geological time bomb ticking away just off the coast near his home in Washington state. But unlike the millions of people who fear the earthquake and tsunami that will one day rock that region, Paros is doing something about it. His company made millions of dollars building …

By Leah Crane LISA is a go. After decades of development and delays, the European Space Agency has given the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna mission, designed to study gravitational waves in space, the official green light. The triplet spacecraft are now slated for launch in 2034. “I think there’s a mixture of super-excitement and ‘at last’,” says …

By Jordan Pearson Craig Venter thinks that sending living organisms to other galaxies on spaceships is “definitely” science fiction. It’s much more realistic, he thinks, to print them on-site using digital representations of their genome. He calls this “biological teleportation.” Essentially emailing medicine and organisms back and forth between Earth and other planets is just one of …

By Fred Pearce Dams are supposed to collect water from rivers and redistribute it to alleviate water shortages, right? Not so fast. It turns out that in most cases they actually create water scarcity, especially for people living downstream. Almost a quarter of the global population experiences significant decreases in water availability through human interventions …