One recent grey, rainy morning outside Munich, Ernst Mauch showed a visitor around his office, which sits next to a suburban shopping centre. A conference table was arranged with coffee, plates of cookies and product samples – in this case, pistols. Mr. Mauch, 58, has spent his entire working life designing deadly weapons. His creations include handguns, machine guns and grenade launchers. The assault rifle he developed is used by elite U.S. special-forces units and is credited...

Founded by futurists to engage in truly long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is best known to many for Long Bets or its recent placement of a Rosetta Disk on a comet, but the organization has an array of amazing projects designed to last hundreds of generations, including a 10,000 Year Clock. Something to consider before we go any further: civilization as we know it is arguably only around 5,000 years old – we are talking here about an technologically sophisticated endeavor aiming to span

Work begins today on the $50 billion Nicaragua Canal after the Nicaraguan government and the Chinese investment firm, HKND, held a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday. The ceremony was held away from the construction in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, amid protests against the canal.

We’ve seen the future of architecture and design, and it’s at the intersection of biology, computing, and engineering.While many architects these days put up buildings loaded with energy-saving features and attractive, sustainable design, one company is taking its approach to being green to another level: growing fully biodegradable building materials. Known as The Living, the small, New York-based architecture firm has pioneered mixing biological technologies with...

No one needs a 300-horsepower motorcycle. And we doubt anyone was asking for one. But that doesn't mean we're unhappy Kawasaki took on the challenge of creating one, giving us the Ninja H2R. Beyond its awesomely insane (insanely awesome?) looks, the most powerful production motorcycle on the planet is the first to use a supercharger. That supercharger was designed by the branch of Kawasaki that spends most of its time building jet engines.

This is a semester project in mechatronic control systems at SJSU.The 6 DOF platform is a proof-of-concept prototype that we created for our senior project (motion simulator). Here, we are using 2 axes of the platform as the output from a PID controller that uses a resistive touch panel mounted on the platform as input. All processing is being done on an Arduino Uno that is controlling 6 R/C servo motors.

Japan is working on doing for the hydrogen fuel cell what it accomplished with computer chips and cars in the last century, slashing costs to make them more appealing to consumers. As fuel-cell technology finds its way into factories and commercial buildings, Japanese manufacturers including Panasonic Corp. are working to make them small and cheap enough for the home. The country has set a goal of installing them in 5.3 million homes by 2030, about 10 percent of all households.

During a Dec. 16 launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, SpaceX will try to bring the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back to Earth in a controlled landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

Casting concrete is as old as the Roman Empire—the Romans poured concrete to create their aqueducts—and even now it remains among the strongest, cheapest ways to erect a structure. But it isn’t without limitations. Creating complex concrete forms requires building an exact mold, complete with a non-stick mold medium and a cleaning agent. Reusable molds make constructing uniform buildings efficient enough, but if architect wants to...

Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap. That’s Illan Kramer’s (ECE) hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

What has a jet engine, a rocket booster and travels on a set of aluminum wheels? It's the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC) and it has plans to hit the world land speed record at 1,000 mph. Made of titanium, carbon fiber and, like superman, is designed to go faster than a speeding bullet, the Bloodhound SSC has been painstakingly put together and tested over the better part of six years.

Here’s why something as basic as a battery both thrills and terrifies the U.S. utility industry. At a sagebrush-strewn industrial park outside of Reno, Nevada, bulldozers are clearing dirt for Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA)’s battery factory, projected to be the world’s largest. Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, sees the $5 billion facility as a key step...

he US space agency's new Orion crew capsule has completed its maiden, unmanned voyage with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico. Drone video sighted the ship descending gently on its parachutes, shortly before it hit the water. US Navy support vessels, with the help of divers, moved in swiftly to recover the floating spacecraft.

ThyssenKrupp, the German steel and engineering giant, has created what it calls “the holy grail” of the elevator industry: a system that isn’t dependent on ropes or steel cables. If the technology, named Multi, does well in tests beginning in 2016, the elevators of the future could be powered by the same magnetic levitation (maglev) technology that floats the world’s fastest trains above their tracks.

The cardiologist sits in the control room next to the operating theatre and uses a joystick to steer a catheter through the patient’s blood vessel into the heart’s chambers to treat the cardiac arrhythmia precisely. With this robot-controlled surgical system, Phocus, the ETH spin-off Aeon Scientific won over a panel of 15 judges at this year’s Swiss Technology Award, presented last Thursday at the Swiss Innovation Forum in Basel.

In 1980, only 30,000 people lived in Shenzhen, China. Today the population is over 15 million, and Shenzhen is the most crowded city in the country, with more people per square mile than famously packed Hong Kong. And it's still growing. That's why, in a recent project, architects laid out one vision for a future neighborhood that could fit everyone sustainably.

Elon Musk's latest twitter announcements are the stuff of SciFi: He's just tweeted out images of the company's latest achievement— a drone ship that will be a self-stabilizing landing pad for rockets — even in rocky seas.

As the space community counts down the days to the long-awaited Dec. 4 uncrewed launch of the Orion spacecraft — that vehicle that is supposed to bring astronauts into the solar system in the next decade — NASA is already thinking ahead to the next space test in 2017 or 2018.

Big engines like the 707-horsepower monster Dodge put in the Challenger Hellcat or Volvo’s little four-cylinder that makes 425 ponies get all the attention these days. But there are millions of tiny engines doing tiny things (think garden trimmers, leaf blowers, that sort of thing) that we never give much thought to. But just as there are engineers pondering how to make big engines more powerful, so too are there engineers pondering how to make tiny engines more powerful.

The European Space Agency and Airbus have signed a contract that will see the aerospace giant build the "back end" of America's new manned spaceship.