When firefighters have to enter a burning building, much of their job still involves blindly feeling their way through dense plumes of toxic fumes in search of those trapped inside. However, a novel new helmet design could one day give firefighters the ability to see through the smoke and hear beyond the roar of the flames.
Beijing is one thirsty city. Its population of 22 million consumes barely 100 cubic meters of water per capita—one fifth the international water-shortage level—thanks to a chronic drought in the nation’s north. But this massive desalination plant could help supply a third of the city’s water singlehandedly.
The human lower leg is a marvel of biological engineering—it lets you have a long, strong stride while minimizing exertion and joint strain. But conventional spring and hydraulically-driven prosthesis worn by amputees offer no such benefit and can cause osteoarthritis-inducing skeletal strains. The BiOM T2 system aims to rectify that.
War drives technological innovation like little else. No proposal is too ambitious, impractical, or downright foolhardy for consideration if it provides a strategic advantage. This school of thinking has led to atomic bombs, autonomous vehicles, and, in 1945, a short-lived fighter prototype that could cut through enemy aircraft in midair.
It’s no subspace transceiver but this prototype communicator bound for the ISS could revolutionize how we share data over the vast expanses of solar space. It will deliver Gigabit speeds through deep space.
NASA has a plan to better explore how our own local star system, and life within it, got started. It wants to intercept, study, and sample a passing asteroid. The only thing more impressive than this mission’s astronomical level of precision is how the space agency somehow shoehorned "Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer" into a functional acronym.
Iran’s previous attempts at creating an indigenous UAV fleet have been rather, well, comical
U.S. ground forces are about to get an awesome new whip from Boeing’s Phantom Works: a petite combat support vehicle combining power, speed, and all-terrain traction to deliver soldiers to just about anywhere on Earth—without all the hiking.
Despite their generally overwhelming combat prowess, many large US naval vessels remain vulnerable to small, fast-moving speedboats. But with the latest iteration of Raytheon’s multi-role precision missile, that won’t be a problem for much longer.
The MQ-8 Fire Scout
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