Going to Mars? Expect to stay a while. Because of the relative motions of Earth and Mars, the pioneering astronauts who touch down on the Martian surface will have to remain there for a year and a half. For this reason, NASA has already started experimenting with a habitat fit for the long-term exploration of Mars.

Last year, students at the University of Wisconsin won the XHab competition to design and build an inflatable … Read More → "The challenges of building a house on Mars"

The Etruscan shrew, one of the world’s tiniest mammals, measuring around 4 centimetres long, is the inspiration for a ground-breaking new robot developed to use sophisticated whiskers to find its way around.

The Shrewbot is the latest in a series of robots which use “active touch” rather than vision to navigate their environment. via Read More → "The shrew’s whiskers inspire ground-breaking robot design"

We’re really not supposed to start a feature like this; but this hack is awesome. It’s a game of Snake implemented by an FPGA dev board. It uses a 16×16 LED matrix as the display and an SNES controller for input. So far it sounds like a very normal version of the game. But as you start to hear how it works in … Read More → "FPGA Snake game uses no VHDL at all"

An eight-minute film by Richard Garriott shot during his time as a paying civilian aboard International Space Station (ISS) will be release for public viewing after all. Release ofApogee of Fear was in jeopardy of becoming an expensive vacation video until NASA recently lifted their ban and has committed to work with Garriott on it’s completion.

Garriott had shot the short film based on a screenplay written … Read More → "Apogee of Fear: first sci-fi film to be filmed in space to release"

Some of the best innovations occur when people take something generally considered to be creatively exhausted, and then re-invent it. 

A good example is Zynga’s casual mobile game, Words With Friends, which is similar to Scrabble. You might think that after 60 years under the focused attention of some highly competitive players, the rules and design of Scrabble were pretty much locked down, but as Mark Anderson describes … Read More → "How Zynga re-engineered Scrabble"

Whether or not you believe we actually put a man on the moon, there’s about to be a whole gaggle of’em bouncing about the place and mucking things up in the name of Science. Taking that whole “one giant leap for mankind” motto a few baby steps further, is an in-development initiative that would see our former,space race frenemy Russia teaming up with the ESA and NASA to develop a Moon base.
via < … Read More → "Russia in talks for Moon base timeshare with European Space Agency, NASA"

In order to do things such as building microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) or grabbing individual stem cell spheres for analysis, scientists use extremely fine-tipped tools known as microtweezers. While such devices aren’t a brand new innovation in and of themselves, researchers from Indiana’s Purdue University have developed a new type of microtweezers that are said to be easier and cheaper to manufacture than their conventional counterparts. Not only that, but unlike most similar devices currently in use, they … Read More → "Simple, cheap microtweezers could be used to build new MEMS devices"

A digital picture lets you preserve an image of something indefinitely, thanks to the resilience and longevity of digital data. Digitally preserving a whole object is an entirely different kettle o’ fish, but the OrcaM reconstruction sphere makes the process fast, simple, and flawless.

The OrcaM Orbital Camera System will take any object placed into its maw and create a submillimeter accurate 3D model, complete … Read More → "Reconstruction sphere makes a flawless digital copy of anything"

It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to … Read More → "Could a robot print your next home?"