Porsche and Boeing have partnered to leverage their unique market strengths to study the future of premium personal urban air mobility vehicles.

NASA and U.S. industry are exploring electrified aircraft propulsion as a fuel- and- cost-efficient alternative to traditional jet engine-powered airplanes. But to make electric commercial flight possible, the aircraft must be able to produce and operate safely with at least a megawatt (MW) of power.

As part of an effort to address the gap the U.S. Army faces in its need for long-lasting power and batteries for warfighters, an Army-funded research team has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that officials say identifies a promising material for creating more-efficient fuel cells. Researchers said the system, developed at Cornell University, is a potential breakthrough in both materials science and machine learning. It relies on a collective of algorithmic bots, each performing a distinct task and sifting through hundreds to thousands of combinations of elements to create a map of phases—arrangements of atoms in relation to each other—that humans can then use to determine which might work as a new material.

How do weapons inspectors verify that a nuclear bomb has been dismantled? An unsettling answer is: They don’t, for the most part. When countries sign arms reduction pacts, they do not typically grant inspectors complete access to their nuclear technologies, for fear of giving away military secrets.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has developed liquid metal systems which autonomously change structure so that they become better conductors in response to strain. Conductive materials change their properties as they are strained or stretched. Typically, electrical conductivity decreases and resistance increases with stretching.