NASA, and plenty of private individuals, want to put mankind on Mars. Now a team at the University of Washington, funded by the space agency, is about to start building a fusion engine that could get humans there in just 30 days and make other forms of space travel obsolete.

AMD claims that the delay in transitioning from 28nm to 20nm highlights the beginning of the end for Moore’s Law.

When the world’s largest defence contractor reportedly paid $10 million for a superfast quantum computer, the Burnaby, B.C., company that built it earned a huge vote of confidence.

Two years after Lockheed Martin acquired the first commercially viable quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, the American aerospace and technology giant is once again throwing its weight behind a technology many thought was still the stuff of science fiction.

A team of researchers has made a major breakthrough in measuring the structure of nanomaterials under extremely high pressures. For the first time, they developed a way to get around the severe distortions of high-energy X-ray beams that are used to image the structure of a gold nanocrystal. The technique, described in April 9, 2013, issue of Nature Communications, could lead to advancements of new nanomaterials created under high pressures and a greater understanding of what is happening in planetary interiors.

Lead author of the study, Wenge Yang of the Carnegie Institution’s High Pressure Synergetic Consortium explained: “The only way to see what happens to such samples when under pressure is to use high-energy X-rays produced by synchrotron sources. Synchrotrons can provide highly coherent X-rays for advanced 3-D imaging with tens of nanometers of resolution. This is different from incoherent X-ray imaging used for medical examination that has micron spatial resolution. The high pressures fundamentally change many properties of the material.”

A tent that blocks light on a sunny day and becomes transparent and waterproof on a dim, rainy one could be an outcome of work by US scientists.

The U.S. Navy announced Monday that it is preparing to deploy a new weapon that can disable a hostile boat and even destroy a surveillance drone overhead — all without dispensing any expensive ammunition.

Not since last year’s TacoCopter fiasco has there been such a vague and ominous potential use for multicopters to hit the web. Last week, the golf company Titleist tweeted a photo of a rather monstrous multicopter with a camera hovering over the shoulder of pro golfer Scott Stallings. It looks a bit makeshift and draws more similarity to War of the Worlds than intended, no doubt, but the point of it is clear: even more camera angles to watch golfers in action.

Add one more to the list of career paths that are being obviated by robots: news delivery.

In Auvergne, a province in central France, residents get their daily news the old-fashioned way: through newspapers. But the delivery of said newspapers, apparently, will soon be executed with the help of high tech — because it’ll be done with the help of drones.

My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We’re outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we’re having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle’s computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve’s sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he’s seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle’s laser.

The dragonfly is quite the show off when it comes to flying. It can hover in mid-air, maneuver in all directions, and glide without so much as a beat of its wings. After succeeding in capturing the essence of a herring gull with the SmartBird, the folks over at German pneumatic and electric automation company Festo challenged themselves with the creation of a robotic addition to the dragonfly family – the BionicOpter.

Five years ago, an IBM-built supercomputer designed to model the decay of the US nuclear weapons arsenal was clocked at speeds no computer in the history of Earth had ever reached. At more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second (that’s a million billion, or a “petaflop”), the aptly-named Roadrunner was so far ahead of the competition that it earned the #1 slot on the Top 500 supercomputer list in June 2008, November 2008, and one last time in June 2009.

Quantum computing — widely called the holy grail of tech research — has taken another step towards reality, thanks to a group of researchers at Yale University. The team recently developed a new way to change the quantum state of photons, the elementary particles researchers hope to use for quantum memory.