The ion propulsion engine is the first non-chemical propulsion to be used as the primary means of propelling a spacecraft. The first flight in NASA’s New Millennium Program, Deep Space 1 is designed to validate 12 new technologies for scientific space missions of the next century. Ion propulsion was first proposed in the 1950s and NASA performed experiments on this highly efficient propulsion system in the 1960s, but it was not used aboard an American spacecraft until the 1990s
The largest complete fossil of a cockroach has been found in the United States. The insect, about the size of a mouse, lived 55 million years before the first dinosaurs walked the planet
Researchers from Queensland’s Griffith University have developed a smart image sensor which may provide the base technology for the development of artificial eyes
A clash of the mammoths could have taken place in what is now southern England thousands of years ago. Fossils found in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk suggest that two types of mammoth lived side-by-side in prehistoric times. Scientists believe herds of more advanced mammoths moving south from Siberia encountered primitive European ones
Scientists have confirmed that cyanobacteria, one of the most ancient forms of life still living on Earth, have the genetic capability to synthesise cellulose, the polymer that gives plants their stiffness. The information could eventually lead to genetically modified bacteria being employed to make paper and other wood-derived products, reducing the need to cut down forests
Nearly a century ago, something exploded in the skies over the Tunguska region of Siberia with a force rivalling an atomic explosion. It left in its wake a scarred landscape littered with tens of thousands of felled trees, and a mystery that has plagued scientists for decades, defying explanation
A new Backyard Bugs Guide will familiarise young Australians with the insects in their backyard
Australian scientists, led by Dr Allan Paull from the University of Queensland’s centre for hypersonics, will attempt to fire a rocket at hypersonic speeds this week. If successful their scramjet will be the fastest air breathing engine ever built, capable of pushing aircraft along at more than 10 times the speed of sound
Peter Fromherz and Gunther Zeck, from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, have succeeded in melding together living nerve cells and silicon to create the world’s first neuronal chip
Red and green lights dance in the sky above the North and South poles. The two lights — the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis — appear to be a mirror image of each other. This picture was taken by a spacecraft during a recent space weather storm. It is the first time Northern and Southern Lights brightening at the same time at opposite ends of the Earth have been captured on film
Scientists have released new details of a giant super-crocodile which lived around 110 million years ago and grew to the length of a bus. Sarchosuchus imperator specimens were first discovered in the Ténéré Desert in Niger in 1964, but new finds in the Sahara have made it possible to form a clearer picture of the giants
Researchers in Seattle are getting closer to growing living heart muscle outside the body, a technique that could one day make heart transplants and artificial hearts obsolete
Australians will continue to increase their appreciation of the goods and services that they get from the natural world, says Dr Steve Morton, Chief, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems
Scientists have puzzled for years how insects manage to fly. The bumble bee, for instance, has the aerodynamics of a tiny brick and it has been theoretically proved several times it’s impossible for it to fly. Now we’ve found out the secret of insect flight — it’s all to do with complex tiny air vortices produced from their wings
A brief history of Ulughbek, a 15th-century Afghan astronomer-prince whose quest for knowledge led to his overthrow by religious extremists
Scientists believe it may be possible to halt and even reverse the progress of multiple sclerosis by targeting key chemicals of the immune system
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch is currently advocating the creation of a voluntary federal database of brain fingerprints, a record of a person’s brain wave activity when shown images with which a terrorist would have a strong personal connection, and correlating these to iris scans
Charles Darwin could not have known he might one day improve mobile phone communications and help win wars. But a new computer-based genetic algorithm based on Darwin’s ideas about how the fit survive may do just that
Top British scientist Stephen Hawking has warned that the human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before this millennium is out unless it starts to colonise space
Centuries ago it was commonly believed that comets carried disease in their tails. Nowadays we know the only disease
you can get from a comet is a cold — if you stay out too long at night watching it! But these old beliefs were not completely wrong: comet tails do contain an extremely poisonous chemical compound — hydrogen cyanide. Now a team of Dutch and German astronomers using the European Space Agency’s Infrared Space Observatory and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii have discovered that this poison can help them to understand the birth of massive stars. Its presence is a sign that a massive baby star has begun to warm up
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