In recent years, Aston Martin has become the vehicle of choice for fictional secret agent James Bond. And now the British carmaker is taking its 007 reputation into the deep end. On Thursday—in Monaco, of course—Aston Martin announced it is partnering with Triton Submarines LLC to build a limited edition, luxury submarine that will have even the wealthiest of the wealthy playing catch-up with the Jones’s. The endeavor is codenamed Project Neptune and it will build upon Tr ...read more

The Apollo lunar landing missions had limitations. The personal life support system backpacks moonwalking astronauts wore didn’t have replenishing stores of consumables. Once their power and oxygen supplies were low, there was no choice but to return to the lunar module, which itself could only support two men for three days. But in early 1969 NASA was already thinking ahead to longer duration missions, and to get the most out of these lunar stays, the agency commissioned two studies into ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Drones have the ability to do a lot of good, and recently they’ve been proving useful to rescuers in the United States by helping with hurricane recovery efforts. But what if they could do more than just document damage or survey areas? What if they could actually detect life? Researchers from the University of South Australia conducted a study published in Biomedical Engineering Online that shows drones can successfully measure heart and respiratory ...read more

These Asian amur sea stars (Asterias amurensis) were found ~5,000 miles from home on the Oregon coast.Image provided by Oregon State University March 11, 2011, 2:46 PM, 45 miles east of Tōhoku, Japan. Fifteen miles beneath the waves, a magnitude-9 megathrust earthquake strikes. The Pacific and Eurasian tectonic plates suddenly shift, shaking the surrounding crust for six minutes and creating a tidal wave almost 40 meters high, which races towards the coast of Japan. In the h ...read more

Research findings on three early Native American cultures from the southwestern United States show how each responded to environmental challenges in different ways that dramatically altered their people’s futures. (David Williams/SAPIENS) Along the cottonwood-lined rivers of southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, the Mimbres people did something unique: By the year 1000, these farmers were producing stunning ceramics decorated with naturalistic images of fish, people, and rabb ...read more

(Credit: Rubin Huang) Who hasn’t, at some point, wished they could exist in two places at once? Today, you certainly can do that, but in practice, it’s far less sexy than cloning yourself or traveling back and forth through time to simultaneously exist in overlapping timelines. Instead, duplicating yourself entails beaming your face through a tablet device that’s mounted atop a moving pole. Indeed, telepresence robots on the market today are essentially Skype on wheels; they& ...read more

The total solar eclipse as seen from McMinnville, Oregon. (Credit: Bud Ellison/Flickr) As you may recall, we had a solar eclipse last month. It was kind of a big deal. After almost 40 years without a total solar eclipse, the United States got pretty lucky on Aug. 21, with the moon’s shadow crisscrossing the country and at least a partial eclipse visible in all 50 states. About 12 million people lived within that “path of totality,” and 47 million were within 100 miles. But ho ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock/Alexey Stiop) The discovery of a biomarker for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) could lead to diagnosis of the disease in living individuals, something not currently possible. CTE is a neurodegenerative brain disease thought to be caused by repeated blows to the head, resulting in brain damage that accumulates over time. A recent study of 111 NFL players who donated their brains after death found CTE in all but one of them. Tests Possible In new research p ...read more

A NASA image depicts what planet Earth may have looked like some 4 billion years ago when it was getting pummeled with space rocks. (Credit: NASA) Earth’s first life evolved in hell. The earliest lifeforms emerged at least 3.95 billion years ago, at a time when a near constant barrage of comets and asteroids were bombarding our still solidifying planet. That’s the implication of new research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A group of Japanese scientists journeyed into ...read more