Lifeboat Foundation

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NASA Wallops Flight Facility is scheduled to launch a rocket tonight that will be visible to the DMV as it climbs into the sunset sky.

The facility hopes to launch the 13th Northrop Grumman resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) at 5:39 p.m. near sunset. The Cygnus cargo ship (spacecraft) is the S.S. Robert H. Lawrence, named for the first ever African American selected as an astronaut.

The launch and mission will be carried live by NASA.

Thanks to an experimental new brain implant, a blind woman gets her first glimpse of lights, shapes, and people in 15 years.

Challenges face the up-and-coming drone delivery system industry. Concepts such as ownership and data logging need to be addressed.

An artist’s rendering shows Blue Origin’s future New Glenn rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and landing on a ship.

Blue Origin

There’s a space double feature in store for rocket fans today, with two launches to some very different places off Earth. Here’s how to watch them online.

Small Robot Company aims to take its crop-monitoring robot through to an initial production run, and beyond.

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Circa 2017

The Middle Ages certainly were far from being science-friendly: Whoever looked for new findings off the beaten track faced the threat of being burned at the stake. Hence, the contribution of this era to technical progress is deemed to be rather small. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), however, were inspired by medieval mail armor when producing a new metamaterial with novel properties. They succeeded in reversing the Hall coefficient of a material.

The Hall effect is the occurrence of a transverse electric voltage across an electric conductor passed by current flow, if this conductor is located in a magnetic field. This effect is a basic phenomenon of physics and allows to measure the strength of magnetic fields. It is the basis of magnetic speed sensors in cars or compasses in smartphones. Apart from measuring magnetic fields, the Hall effect can also be used to characterize metals and semiconductors and in particular to determine charge carrier density of the material. The sign of the measured Hall voltage allows conclusions to be drawn as to whether charge carriers in the semiconductor element carry positive or negative charge.

Continue reading “Metamaterial: Mail armor inspires physicists” »