America’s New Maritime Spy Drone Program Is Finally Getting Off the Ground

The world’s oceans are massive, easily big enough to hide a whole fleet of surface ships if not carefully monitored. That’s why the Pentagon’s newest Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) platform will keep its eyes peeled for enemy carrier groups from 60,000 feet up. More »

This Supersonic Jet Has Trained 50,000 of America’s Best Pilots

The US Air Force’s armada are among the most advanced aircraft on the planet. As such, the USAF isn’t going to let just any schmuck fresh out of basic training take to the skies in an F-35. Instead wanna-be Top Guns must first prove their mettle in a less expensive plane that’s trained more than 50,000 pilots since the Eisenhower administration. More »

This $2B Cosmic Ray Detector Is Unravelling the Secrets of the Universe

Finding the Higgs Boson particle is a revolutionary scientific discovery, sure, but CERN isn’t the only scientific body rewriting our understanding of elementary physics. An international team of researchers have just announced that the massive cosmic ray detector protruding from the ISS may have at long last detected dark matter. More »

North Korea’s Nuclear Reactor: Everything You Need to Know

After its third nuclear test in February drew a harsh rebuke from the international community and further tightened economic sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea has once again doubled down on its nuclear rhetoric. The country announced today that it will soon restart the Yongbyon reactor, Pyongyang’s primary plutonium processing plant. More »

The World’s Biggest Jet Engine Is Brawnier Than Alan Shepard’s Orbital Rocket

The Wright Flyer took off in 1903 powered by a measly 12 horsepower straight-four. Little did Orville and Wilbur know that just 110 years later, their pokey engines would eventually lead to a power plant with more horsepower than The Titanic and Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone 3—combined. More »

DARPA’s Spleen-on-a-Chip Solves Sepsis

Blood poisoning is the number one cause of death among critical care patients in the US, killing more than 200,000 people annually. However, a radical new treatment option could transform the way we treat sepsis and save thousands of lives every year. More »

This Millimeter Wave Radar Will Give Everybody TSA Vision

Millimeter wave radars have been saddled with an unfairly negative public perception ever since the TSA’s bumbling body scanner program began. But, the technology itself is immensely useful for more than peeping under clothes and this miniaturized prototype from the Fraunhofer Institute aims to prove it. More »

OMG These Images of the Sub-Microscopic World Are Amazing

Optical microscopes are limited by a phenomenon known as the diffraction barrier, wherein the microscope can’t differentiate two objects separated by less than half the wavelength of light used—roughly 200 nm on average for the visible spectrum. But by combining powerful optics and cutting-edge rendering algorithms, GE’s new DeltaVision OMX Blaze is bringing this hidden realm’s drama to light. More »

This SoCal Water Treatment Plant Is Powered by Poop

The Inland Empire’s cadre of water treatment plants clean millions of gallons of waste water every day. But what to do with all that left over poo? Normally it’s unceremoniously dumped in a local landfill but at Regional Water Recycling Plant No. 1, that massive pile of crap is put to a better use—making electricity with the largest biogas fuel cell generator in America. More »

No Supersonic Tennis Balls Will Be Sneaking Up on the World’s Most Advanced Radar

The modern Naval battlefield is a cacophony of electromagnetic energy with active and jamming signals competing for dominance amid the din. This new 3D radar system however, cuts through the static of war to accurately track nearly a thousand tennis ball-sized incoming threats. Which might be moving at Mach 3 from 15 miles away. More »