Train fans have experienced the speed of super-fast maglev trains, during test runs for members of the public in central Japan. One hundred passengers whizzed along a 42.8km (27 mile) route between the cities of Uenohara and Fuefuki, reaching speeds of up to 500km/h (311mph). The Central Japan Railway Company is running eight days of testing for the experimental maglev Shinkansen train on its test track in Yamanashi Prefecture.

When entrepreneur Michael Toutonghi and his son wanted to make a rocket in their family basement, they went about it in a thoroughly modern way: though the duo wasn’t gearing up to produce their rockets by the hundreds, the production and assembly processes were still too tedious to be done entirely by hand. Well-versed in using 3D printers to assist rapid prototyping, the two Toutonghis set about automating as much of the process as possible, but their efforts hit a wall when it came time...

Born with a left arm that ends just below his elbow, 9-year-old Aidan Robinson has had his share of prosthetic arms. As a baby, he wore a passive arm, plastic and immovable like a doll’s arm, which trained his brain to develop motor skills equally on both sides. As he grew, he graduated to more complex prostheses.

Last month, Procter & Gamble decided that it wanted out of the battery game, and was selling Duracell to the highest bidder. Today, a surprising figure has emerged as the buyer: America's richest man, Warren Buffett. According to the release, Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett's company) will spend around $1.7 billion in cash and will swap stock worth around $4.7 billion in order to own the power outfit.

A car powered by its own body panels could soon be driving on our roads after a breakthrough in nanotechnology research by a QUT team. Researchers have developed lightweight "supercapacitors" that can be combined with regular batteries to dramatically boost the power of an electric car.

Which is the more amazing feat: Switzerland's Francois Gissy leaving a Ferrari 430 Scuderia sitting still at the dragstrip as he recorded 3.1gs of inline acceleration on his way to a top speed of 207 mph, or that he did this on a BICYCLE? That bicycle, incidentally, was equipped with a rocket engine supplying 4.2 kN (944 pounds) of thrust.

Chinese material scientists have created the world's lightest material: A graphene aerogel that is seven times lighter than air, and 12% lighter than the previous record holder (aerographite). A cubic centimeter of the graphene aerogel weighs just 0.16 milligrams -- or, if you're having a problem conceptualizing that, a cubic meter weighs just 160 grams (5.6 ounces). The graphene aerogel is so light that an cube inch of the stuff can be balanced on a blade of grass, the stamen of a flower, or the fluffy seed head of a dandelion (see pictures below).

Researchers at the University of Maryland have invented a single tiny structure that includes all the components of a battery that they say could bring about the ultimate miniaturization of energy storage components.

Corn Gear is a gear-design exercise. The teeth of the gears are wound in a helix around a cylinder at a 13:5 angle. Two mirror-image corn gears can roll over each other at 0 degrees, like normal gears, but at 90 degrees as well. The corn gears can also roll over a flat gear bed.

If you ask any of the highly skilled and trained engineers and test pilots who worked on SpaceShipTwo or its predecessors what they work on, I sincerely doubt that any of them will tell you that they are working on a “millionaire boondoggle thrill ride.”

A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater ...

The world's first cycle lane made from solar cells produces enough energy to power three households. Installed in Krommenie, 25 kilometres from Amsterdam, the pilot project is 70 metres long, and will be extended to 100 metres by 2016. The bike path is made from rectangular concrete modules that contain solar cells, and is encased in a one-inch thick layer of glass strong enough to withstand a truck.

Arthur Lih would do anything for his daughter. So when he heard of an 8-year-old child her age, choking to death on a grape, he couldn't help but think what if the same thing happened to his daughter.

A team has developed micro-rockets that can neutralise chemical and biological weapons.

A Columbia scientist and his startup think they have a plan to save the world. Now they have to convince the rest of us.

Should we add more humour and humanity to robots, cars and drones? David Robson reports on a new breed of machine designed to make us love them.

Helping the future arrive is what we do. We solve the great problems of our times. We create the innovative technologies that define eras. While no one knows what's going to change the world next, we're probably already working on it.

Those minuscule windows on aeroplanes could soon become a thing of the past, with a UK developer working on windowless fuselages that instead house giant, flexible OLED screens.

A fallen pole is blocking the Garden State Parkway in Clifton causing severe delays.

The Space Exploration Technology rocket factory is a large, white hangar-like building near Los Angeles international airport, with a parking lot filled with late-model motorcycles and Tesla electric cars. The vast metal structure once churned out 737 fuselages for Boeing. When you get through the front doors, past security and a cubicle farm stretching the width of the building, there it is: Science fiction being wrought into shape, right in front of you.