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There’s a reason they’re used in everything from jet engines to Formula 1 race car brakes: Ceramics are tough. They can withstand an absurd amount of heat and pressure without warping or breaking, all while brushing off many of the physical and chemical assaults that would rust metals and wear away plastics.“The problem is that ceramics are just notoriously difficult to process,” says Zak Eckel, an engineer at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California....

Media Platforms Design TeamBoeing today sent its new 787 Dreamliner on her maiden test flight, marking the first time a mostly composite airliner has taken to the air. Plagued by design and construction delays, the milestone comes over two years after the twin-engined, more fuel-efficient aircraft was originally scheduled to fly.“Boeing 001 Heavy Experimental” lifted off from Runway 34L at Paine Field (PAE), the airport adjacent to Boeing’s massive manufacturing facility in Everett, Wash....

Building aircraft fuselages may not sound like a big deal, but this video will change your mind. The use of advanced materials such as carbon fiber, composites, and exotic metals, combined with different types of joining processes, complicates the manufacturing process. This video below, uploaded to Northrop Grumman’s YouTube account, shows how the company uses high technology to help workers speed through production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s center fuselage....

While their actual targets are classified, Space CHOP teams use common hardware to find ways to disrupt communications satellites.It’s a mission MacGyver would love. Three or four times a year, small groups of junior officers gather at an Air Force Research Laboratory facility in New Mexico and try to figure out how to take down an American satellite using nothing more than sweet talk and off-the-shelf gear.The U.S. military relies on satellites to relay orders, guide precision bombs and direct flying drones....

Cherrington Beach CleanerMedia Platforms Design TeamGrand Isle, La., is a beach town typically packed with tourists, but since May the beach has been laced with oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. While an army of Tyvek-suit-clad workers with shovels still braves the near 100-degree heat each day to scoop oiled sand, cleanup efforts have been accelerated by the Cherrington Beach Cleaner. The machine, which has been nicknamed the sandboni for its resemblance to the beloved smoother of hockey rinks, roves the beach at a crawling 3 to 4 mph....

Scientists at the University of Sydney’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering have come up with a way to use durian fruit waste to create energy stores for rapid electric charging. Turns out the extremely stinky durian fruit—which primarily grows in southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand—can synthesize supercapacitors with its biowaste. Their results were published this month in the Journal of Energy Storage. The durian, a husked tree fruit from Southeast Asia, may smell unspeakably terrible, but it still tastes sweet and delicious like its closely related cousin, the jackfruit....

While Elon Musk’s SpaceX has made a name out of reinventing space travel and exploration, one of its long-term plans is to fill the sky with satellites transmitting high-speed Internet to every point on the globe. Last year, the company launched a pair of test satellites into orbit, and now, for the first time, we get a look at 60 of the final versions loaded up and ready to launch.View full post on TwitterThe satellites form a network that SpaceX is calling Starlink, which will consist of 7,000 total satellites when finished....

Boeing delivered the first operational Boeing 787-10 to Singapore Airlines on Sunday, March 25, marking the beginning of service for the largest Dreamliner aircraft. With room for 330 passengers, the twin-aisle jet airliner is expected to be the most efficient aircraft of its size in terms of fuel efficiency per seat. The 787-10, made largely of composite materials like the other Dreamliner models, has a range of 6,430 nautical miles (11,910 km), which is about 1,000 miles less than the 787-8 and 787-9....

SAN DIEGO – The annual Comic-Con geekfest here is as good a place as any to set the high-tech record straight on NBC’s new Knight Rider series. After all, fans of the original cult hit still needed to be sold on the concept after objecting to February’s two-hour movie, which upgraded KITT from a Pontiac Trans Am to a Mustang Shelby but overlooked many of the notoriously gadget-loaded car’s key features–most egregiously its trademark car-jumping device....

Northrop Grumman, the original builder of the B-2 Spirit bomber, is building the new B-21 Raider bomber with the lessons of the old jet in mind. The B-2, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, experienced a long and expensive development process that both the manufacturer and the customer, the U.S. Air Force, are hoping to avoid when building the big bomber’s replacement.An article in the Los Angeles Times describes the status of the B-21 Raider bomber....

The exact point that humans and Neanderthals diverged from each other has long been a matter of intense debate among scientists. But thanks to an extensive dental analysis recently published in Science Advances, the split-off now looks like it happened at least 800,000 years ago. That’s according to Aida Gómez-Robles, a paleoanthropologist at University College London, who examined nearly 1,000 teeth from humans and related species, like Neanderthals, to reach the conclusion....

Airplane wheelie world record setter Christopher Freeze is a flight instructor and author.Typical airplane landings (and most atypical ones) involve a “wheelie” stage.A previous record existed, but Freeze knew this would be a great way to get noticed.In his eerie video about Victorville’s miles and miles of parked and dormant airliners, YouTuber and pilot Bryan Keith mentions offhand that the Southern California Logistics Airport was recently home to the new world record for longest airplane wheelie....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the week running up to the July 4th weekend, the average price of a regular gallon of gas is $2.75. The cost of fuel has been on a steady downward slope since May, when the average price was nearly three bucks a gallon. And if we adjust the price of fuel for inflation, the cost of gas is as cheap as it was five years ago. Compared to the summer of 2008, when the price spiked to $4....

An emerging body of evidence is pointing to fracking causing earthquakes. And now the U.S. Geologic Survey has unveiled a mapto show where those are turning up. The runaway “winner” is Oklahoma, which outranked quake-prone California in terms of sheer number of quakes. Other Great Plains states saw an uptick in seismic activity, including Kansas and Texas, which have also seen fracking booms. New Mexico and Ohio have also seen more quakes....

NASA has unveiled a timeline for its suddenly-silent Opportunity rover: 45 days. That’s when the craft, which has explored Mars for more than 14 years, will be put on “listen only” mode, effectively shutting down operation of the spacecraft. However, according to anonymous sources within NASA, there is dissent in the ranks over whether that window is too short and could sacrifice a real change to reawaken Oppy, and former Opportunity project leaders tell PM the window is too short....

Synthetic biologists are turning yeast into microscopic chemical factories that manufacture cannabinoids found in the marijuana plant (Cannabis sativa). Unlike the typical fermentation process during which yeast converts sugar into alcohol, the process described in a Nature study published this week transforms galactose—the sugar found in brewer’s yeast—into THC and CBD, as well as other cannabinoids that don’t naturally occur in the plant. Berkeley postdoc Xiaozhou Luo and grad student Michael Reiter, who led the project, initially set out to produce “the mother of all cannabinoids, CBGA (cannabigerolic acid),” according to a Science Daily article reporting on the findings....

Update 4:20 p.m. EDT: The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch carrying NASA’s TESS space telescope has been scrubbed for today. SpaceX is now targeting Wednesday, April 18 for the launch. View full post on Twitter*The following post has been updated with the current launch schedule. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is vertical on the pad at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Atop it is NASA’s newest space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Aviationist blog has found a great series of images of the U.S. Navy salvaging one of its own aircraft from the Arabian Sea. On May 12, 2015 a F/A-18F Super Hornet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt crashed into the Arabian Gulf. The two crewmen ejected and were safely rescued. The Super Hornet and the Roosevelt had been participating in anti-Islamic State operations as part of Operation Inherent Resolve....

For the third time, a Tesla Model 3 has crashed with its semi-automated Autopilot mode still on, according to a preliminary report from the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).Early in the morning of March 1, 2019, at 6:17 a.m., a 50-year-old man named Jeremy Banner was driving a 2018 Tesla Model 3 southbound on State Highway 441 (US 441) in Delray Beach, Palm Beach County, Florida. Banner was driving at a speed of 65 mph when he struck an eastbound 2019 truck-tractor in combination with a semitrailer....

The U.S. Army wants a robotic “wingman” for manned tanks and armored vehicles.The Ripsaw M5 is a descendant of the original Ripsaw tank of TV television fame.The M5 is not just a weapons carrier, it carries its own drones for surveillance missions.A new robotic tank designed to operate as a “wingman” was unveiled yesterday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference. The Ripsaw M5, originally featured on a reality TV show, has been transformed into a heavily armed combat drone equipped with an autocannon and two drones of its own....