Developed by NASA, a large heat shield inflated with nitrogen has successfully completed a re-entry trip through Earth’s atmosphere while travelling at speeds of up to 7,600 mph. The purpose of the Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) test was to show that a space capsule can use an inflatable outer shell to slow and protect […]
Physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of an exotic type of material that could provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips. Recently-predicted and now confirmed, bismuth telluride allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and […]
