Nasa says the most difficult test yet of the parachute system for its Orion spacecraft has gone without a hitch.

Israel has announced ambitious plans to ease traffic congestion in Tel Aviv with a network of hover cars that will speed above congested streets at 150mph.The technology will be tested with a 500-metre loop of magnetic-levitation tracks that will propel two-person pods at just over 40mph, the BBC reports. The prototype track, built on the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries, is due to be completed next year.

Scientists at USC have developed a water-based organic battery that is long lasting, built from cheap, eco-friendly components.

The Kremlin won’t sell us more of the rockets we use to power our satellites? No problem—Congress is about to prohibit us from buying them. But both sides need to keep playing the game.

Harley-Davidson debuted an electric bike called the LiveWire.

An MIT team has turned a multi- million-dollar NASA contract into the most advanced rethink to date of the classic passenger jet. The design, nicknamed the Double Bubble, calls for an extra-wide fuselage and rear-mounted turbo­fan engines. The configuration would allow the craft to burn 70 percent less fuel than a Boeing 737 while producing significantly less noise and nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that causes acid rain. So when can we board?

A team of engineers has built a prototype tracker for a different kind of football than what's in the news right now. The tracker overcomes one major difference between American football and soccer—the fact that in football, sometimes you have a half-dozen big guys pile on top of the ball.

In 1976 Sony introduced the Betamax video cassette recorder. It catalyzed the "on demand" of today by allowing users to record television shows, and the machine ignited the first "new media" intellectual property battles. In only a decade this revolutionary machine disappeared, beaten by JVS's version of the cassette recorder. This video tells the story of why Betamax failed.

If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are spinning in their graves, they may be due for a break. Their namesake company is cooking up some awfully ambitious industrial-strength computing technology that, if and when it’s released, could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine.

American engineers are designing and testing more new manned spacecraft than at any other time in history. Here are 7 vehicles that will change how we work and play in space.

An electric car may soon be able to cruise the highway all day without stopping or recharging — new technology demonstrated in Montreal this week can extend the range of an electric car by 1,600 kilometres, its inventors say.

Small, vertical axis wind turbines are the right size for residential and urban areas, but so far, they have lived in the shadows of their larger, horizontal axis counterparts. The power output is significantly lower (although a study has suggested that for the space they take up, they're more efficient) and the noise they produce is louder than most homeowners can deal with.

Red tape and a moderate earthquake did not deter a private group from meeting its goal of making contact with a 36-year-old NASA spacecraft that has been slumbering in deep space since 1997.

An incredible new breakthrough in graphene production could, just maybe, give some pause to the graphene skeptics who have been getting so vocal of late. Despite growing cynicism about the super-material’s chances of ever actually being used in the real world, here we have a startlingly simple approach that offers a very promising window into its future in our everyday lives.

As the post-conflict cleanup from the first Iraq War demonstrated, oil well fires are nearly impossible to put out without taking extraordinary measures. Luckily, this extreme measure is both super effective and totally badass.

North Korea has deported or executed several officials and engineers over the deadly collapse of a new high-rise apartment building in Pyongyang, the Tokyo Shimbun daily reported Sunday.

Wearable technology is proving to be hugely beneficial to people with a variety of disabilities and health conditions. In Berkeley, a group of engineers is developing smart sunglasses that can help color-blind people identify and better discriminate between colors. The startup, called EnChroma, initially received funding for its research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

If the Solar Wind Downdraft Tower is ever built in the Arizona desert, it truly will be a wonder of the modern world. At 2,250 feet, it would be taller than the new Freedom Tower in New York, and higher than the Empire State Building. It would have 120 huge turbines at its base, and enough pumping capacity to keep more than 2.5 billion gallons of water circulating. And it would have colossal power output: the equivalent of wind turbines spread over 100,000 acres, or as big as the Hoover Dam.

A team of engineers at the University of Texas at Austin recently created the world's smallest, fastest nanomotor. Designed to power microscopic machines that could deliver medicine or fight cancer, this thing will fit inside of a human cell. And boy can it purr.

After swingeing budget cuts at Nasa, a loose agglomeration of private companies – including Elon Musk's SpaceX – have revived the dormant dream of colonising other worlds