Meet UpRope: A fitness and route tracking system for indoor rock climbers
Climbing gyms are on the rise and one Seattle...
MSNW’s magnetoshell aerobraking system gets in on NASA’s way-out research fund
A system that would use magnetic fields to ease a spacecraft into orbit after an interplanetary journey has won a $ 500,000 grant...
Hyperloop company “exclusively licensed” passive magnetic levitation system
Hyperloop Levitation
On Monday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced that it had “exclusively licensed” a technology that could help it bring the transit system idea, popularized by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, to fruition.
The licensed technology, called passive magnetic levitation, departs significantly from the system that Musk theorized back in 2013. Musk’s Hyperloop design involves a low-pressure...
Commercial Hyperloop race heats up: Maglev system revealed, and more to come
This is a big week for the Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation concept that was laid out three years ago...
Hacking group “PLATINUM” used Windows’ own patching system against it
Platinum mass & well-formed crystals from Russia. (public display, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) (credit: James St. John)
Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team works to track down and identify hacking groups that perpetrate attacks. The focus is on the groups that are most selective about their targets and that work hardest to...
Mile-long “Band of Holes” in Peru may be remains of Inca tax system
The Band of Holes in a photograph taken by drone. The road stretches for a mile up a mountain top, and may be the remains of a structure used for collecting and measuring food tributes for the Inca state. (credit: Charles Stanish)
The Inca Empire covered vast parts of South America, uniting distant cities in Chile,...
BluHaptics wins $747,000 grant to create 3-D piloting system for underwater robots
BluHaptics has received a $ 747,197 grant from the National...
The diversity-generating benefits of a prokaryotic adaptive immune system
Prokaryotic CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems insert spacers derived from viruses and other parasitic DNA elements into CRISPR loci to provide sequence-specific immunity. This frequently results in high within-population spacer diversity, but it is unclear if and why this is important. Here we show that, as a result of this spacer diversity, viruses can no longer evolve to overcome CRISPR-Cas by point mutation, which results...
Quantum hydrogen-bond symmetrization in the superconducting hydrogen sulfide system
The quantum nature of the proton can crucially affect the structural and physical properties of hydrogen compounds. For example, in the high-pressure phases of H2O, quantum proton fluctuations lead to symmetrization of the hydrogen bond and reduce the boundary between asymmetric and symmetric structures in the phase diagram by 30 gigapascals (ref. 3). Here we show that an analogous quantum symmetrization occurs in the recently...