Cutting Edge

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--The shuttle Atlantis is poised for launch Friday on its 32nd and final planned mission, a three-spacewalk flight to the International Space Station to install a new Russian module, a backup Ku-band dish antenna, and six massive batteries to replace aging power packs in one of the station's solar arrays.

The shuttle's six-man, all-veteran crew also will deliver needed supplies and equipment as NASA stages its final three shuttle missions to complete the assembly of the lab complex by late this year or early next.

"Twelve days, three EVAs, tons of robotics, we'… Read more

An out-of-control satellite is drifting into the orbit of another satellite that transmits cable programming to the United States, the Associated Press is reporting.

According to the news service, a satellite known as Galaxy 15 broke contact with its owner, Intelsat on April 5. Although the exact cause is unknown, the satellite's owners believe it could have been "knocked out by a solar storm."

Normally, losing contact with a satellite wouldn't be cause for much concern, since in most cases, satellites stop transmitting signals. But Intelsat has confirmed that Galaxy 15 is still transmitting signals to … Read more

Royal Philips Electronics unveiled on Wednesday an LED bulb that will be mass-produced as a replacement for the common 60-watt light bulb.

The 12-watt Endura LED, which is the fruition of the LED prototype bulb the Dutch electronics giant unveiled in 2009, looks very similar to its historic predecessor in size and shape. But the bulb cuts energy use by 80 percent and lasts 25 times longer than the common 60-watt incandescent bulb, according to Philips.

The LED bulb will last 25,000 hours compared with the 1,000 hours that consumers normally get out of the average 60-watt incandescent … Read more

Smaller, faster gadgets may be cool, but keeping them from getting too hot poses challenges.

Consumer electronics, of course, contain many sources of heat, including interconnecting wiring and millions of transistors. In the past, bigger and bigger fans have been employed to keep chips from overheating, thus expanding a gadget's lifespan. But as electronics continue to shrink, so does the space where fans can be placed.

Enter graphene, a sheet of densely arranged carbon that's just a single atom thick and boasts strong heat-conducting properties. Researchers at UC Riverside's Nano-Device Laboratory have discovered a way to layer … Read more

NASA's plans to visit the moon may be shelved for the time being, but that doesn't mean that you can't take a trip to the lunar surface. And you won't even need to get fitted for a space suit.

NASA and the Citizen Science Alliance on Tuesday announced Moon Zoo, a project to essentially crowdsource the examination of a large set of high-resolution images of the moon in a bid to answer some of the most burning scientific questions about the big rock orbiting us every 27.3 days.

Moon Zoo users will view new images … Read more

Boeing will put its Phantom Ray flying wing into the air before the end of the year.

The aerospace giant says that the unmanned aerial vehicle, unveiled at Boeing's St. Louis facility on Monday, is on track to make its first flight in December. The Phantom Ray will be a testbed for unspecified "advanced technologies," and in a press release Monday, Boeing rattled off an array of potential missions for the aircraft, from the now standard UAV tasks of recon and surveillance to aerial refueling, electronic attack, and the menacingly vague "strike." (A separate Boeing feature … Read more

You've got to admire Sami Haddadin. This researcher from Germany's Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics is not only crazy enough to arm an industrial robot with a kitchen knife in the name of science, he offered it his own arm.

In a study for IEEE ICRA 2010, Haddadin, along with Alin Albu-Schaffer and Gerd Hirzinger, equipped a robot arm with various sharp instruments, such as knives, a scalpel, and a screwdriver, to see what would happen if a robot accidentally struck someone.

The researchers had a DLR Lightweight Robot III strike, stab, and slice a leg of ham, … Read more

Hewlett-Packard makes 65 million devices every year that sport a glass display.

That--the glass part, at least--is coming to an end in the next decade, according to Carl Taussig, the head of HP Labs' Information Surfaces Lab.

"In 10 years, glass will be as much a memory of displays as cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are today," Taussig said during a tour of his lab Friday.

So why plastic? Because plastic substrates--and their manufacturing process--are cheaper than the glass substrates currently used to make your laptop display or monitor. The thin films of plastic they're using are 40 … Read more

We've seen robots being deployed to help stop the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and now workers have lowered a huge containment dome over the gusher. But environmental groups and local residents are helping out with a much lower-tech solution--using hair, pet fur, and pantyhose to clean up the mess.

Some 400,000 pounds of hair and fur are heading toward the Gulf Coast, where locals are set to gather for "Boom-B-Qs." Residents in Alabama and Florida are collecting cut hair and stuffing it into pantyhose to make oil-absorbing "hair booms."

Apparently, … Read more