Daniel Riley, the genius behind the YouTube channel rctestflight, loves to build things that break the laws of physics. His latest creation, a remote controlled plane with a blown wing, doesn’t just fly – it hovers, drifts and defies expectations with a design so crazy it’s like a magic trick. This foam board and carbon fiber contraption, powered by electric ducted fans, redefines what a plane can do at low speeds.
Deep in the misty rainforests of North Queensland, where tree canopies stretch like green cathedrals, a monster has been found. A stick insect, 40cm long and as heavy as a golf ball, has been discovered in the high altitude forests of the Atherton Tablelands. Named Acrophylla alta, this is likely the heaviest insect ever recorded in Australia, a find that sounds like something from a prehistoric tale but is very much real today.
Photo credit: IDSSE/CAS
A submersible called Fendouzhe dove six miles into the northwest Pacific’s dark depths, where pressure could crush a tank. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences expected a lifeless void in the Kuril-Kamchatka and Aleutian trenches. Instead they found thriving ecosystems, teeming with creatures that laugh in the face of the impossible.
MIT’s team, led by physicist Wolfgang Ketterle, unveiled a modern take on the double-slit experiment, a quantum mechanics classic, using single atoms and photons to show light is both a particle and a wave. Published in Physical Review Letters, this experiment settles a century old debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and gives us a clear view of the quantum mystery.
Among the cacophony of car horns and screeching tires in Zurich, a material from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) is making noise reduction a whole lot quieter. This mineral foam is four times thinner than conventional sound absorbers but just as effective. For architects and builders it’s a sleek and efficient way to dampen city noise without sacrificing space.
A spaceship-like vessel glides silently through the Arctic’s icy heart but it’s just the Tara Polar Station, a floating laboratory that will spend the next 20 years to discover the Arctic Ocean’s secrets. Built to withstand temperatures as low as -52°C and the crushing pressure of shifting sea ice, this platform will change how we study one of Earth’s most isolated and critical ecosystems.
Deep in the heart of our galaxy, where chaos reigns and temperatures are millions of degrees, scientists have found clouds of cold gas that defy our understanding of the Milky Way’s core. They’re called Fermi bubbles which stretch 25,000 light-years above and below the galaxy’s center, glowing like a cosmic hourglass with gamma rays.
Columbia University’s latest engineering project is straight out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s based on a simple idea: what if robots could grow, heal and adapt by absorbing parts from other robots? They call it “robot metabolism” and it flips traditional robotics on its head, from stiff, electricity-driven machines to robots that act like living organisms, using materials from their environment to evolve.
