Cafe Technology

Engineering tons of metal to fly straight up is no easy feat. Here's how helicopter blades make vertical flight a reality.

Airplane technology has come a long way, but it has limits. Lucky for us, there are teams of people whose job it is to find those limits.

China has more than 230 million senior citizens. To keep them company, it's encouraging nursing homes to buy companionship robots.

We live in an era of self driving cars, autonomous drones, deep learning algorithms, computers that beat humans at chess and go, and so on. So it's natural to ask, will artificial superintelligence replace humans, take our jobs, and destroy human civilization? Or will AI just become tools like regular computers. AI researcher Max Tegmark helps explain the myths and facts about superintelligence, the impending machine takeover, etc.

The universe is bustling with matter and energy. Even in the vast, apparent emptiness of intergalactic space, there's one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. But is there such thing as a total absence of everything? Is it possible to make a completely empty space? Rolf Landua and Anais Rassat explain the science behind vacuums.

They are hugely useful of course but in many ways, we buy the advantages our phones give us at a subtly high price we don't entirely recognise. Some reflections on how to live well around phones.

What's Actually the Plane of the Future looks like?

This sustainable initiative is helping to save Haiti's forests.

College can be stressful with all the classes, exams and social events to balance. Now, imagine doing all that while building a Hyperloop pod that will be judged by Elon Musk... no pressure. A scrappy group of students from Wisconsin boldly took on that challenge, and they learned that no matter how many all-nighters you pull, there's always more work to be done.

Trains require a lot of people to operate.

Is teleportation possible? Could a baseball transform into something like a radio wave, travel through buildings, bounce around corners, and change back into a baseball? Oddly enough, thanks to quantum mechanics, the answer might actually be yes... sort of! Sajan Saini explains.

Scientists have discovered how to create a real life 'superlaser' using an ultra-pure diamond. How exactly does it work?2

China is building the world's largest airport, the Beijing Daxing International Aiport, to serve the Jing-Jin-Ji megalopolis.

MIT's self-folding origami technology that could change how we design everything from airbags to wearables.

South-to-North Water Transfer Project: The huge populations filling China's northern megacities have a shortage of the single most necessary resource for life: water. To solve that problem, the Chinese will soon be moving 44.8 billion cubic meters of fresh water each year from the wetter South to the dryer North.

Jing-Jin-Ji: China is in the midst of a construction spree unparalleled in human history. These are the Megaprojects that will lift China into the future. China wants to make its capital, Beijing, the center of the world's largest supercity, by merging three provinces into one continuous megalopolis of 130 million people.

This video is about why it's harder to successfully land spacecraft and landers and rovers on Mars than on Earth, or Venus, or the Moon, or Titan, or asteroids. It all comes down to atmospheric density! When there's no atmosphere, you can do a powered descent in a flimsy tinfoil spacecraft like the Lunar Module, and when there's plenty of atmosphere you can do an unpowered descent via heat shield and parachutes like the space shuttle, Apollo command module, Soyuz, Huygens, etc. But on Mars with its thin air, you have to do both powered & unpowered descent, getting the worst of both worlds.

Swiss researchers have come a step closer to building a better artificial heart. It's a squishy prototype that's 3D-printed from silicone.

Chris Atkeson, the creator of Big Hero 6's Baymax, wants to bring soft robots to the world.

Researchers at Stanford University developed a soft, squishy robot that "grows" like a vine and can squeeze through tight spaces. It can also lift heavy objects, which makes it potentially ideal for search-and-rescue operations.

The Microsoft co-founder imagined much of the tech we use today before it even existed. He shared his thoughts in a 1999 book called "Business @ the Speed of Thought." Here's a quick look at 6 of his predictions that eventually came true, including a device you are probably holding in your hands right now.