Cutting Edge

Soyuz rocket blasts off with three bound for space station

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying a Russian commander, a NASA flight engineer, and a Japanese astronaut -- all veteran space travelers -- blasted off and streaked into orbit late Saturday (U.S. time), the first leg of a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

Under a partly cloudy sky, the Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:40 p.m. EDT Saturday (GMT-4; 8:40 a.m. Sunday local time) and quickly climbed away atop a rush of fiery exhaust.

The launching came on the 37th anniversary of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project that … Read more

Ford is now a 'personal mobility' company: How the comeback kids are riding tech to a new destiny

Every innovator is thinking about what's next. But it's the ones who are thinking about what's after what's next that are the true visionaries and disrupters.

Bill Ford is one those.

In the 1980s and '90s, when most of the auto companies were building bigger and bigger vehicles and the public was gobbling up huge SUVs, Bill Ford was trying to convince Ford Motor Company to build more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars and trucks. He was almost completely stonewalled by the executives at Ford.

However, he's now the executive chairman of the company that his … Read more

Russian Soyuz ferry craft prepped for station flight

Engineers are making final preparations for launch of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft this weekend to ferry an all-veteran U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew to the International Space Station to boost the lab's crew complement back to six. The launch will kick off a "fantastically busy" timeline, with nine space station "visiting vehicle" operations and two spacewalks over the next six weeks.

"The mission is going to be action packed," Soyuz flight engineer and eventual space station commander Sunita Williams told CBS News. "I think we're really up for the pace, we're … Read more

Watching a pilot crash-land, from his point of view

I would no more pilot a plane than I would wear a lampshade on my head to dinner.

This remarkable -- and, as it turns out -- very instructive footage is a case for my defense.

It was posted to YouTube by Larry Hockensmith, who takes full responsibility for everything that happens in it.

This includes his sailplane's wing crashing into someone's mailbox.

I am grateful to Gadling.com for directing me to this beautiful and very slightly disturbing footage, which, I suspect, may not disturb regular pilots at all -- or even regular people with mailboxes.

Hockensmith'… Read more

TechnoSensual expo tries on far-out future fashion

It's 2020 and you've a party to go to. What do you wear? If the techno-garments on display at the TechnoSensual exhibition in Vienna are any indication, you might strap on some backbreakingly high 3D-printed shoes and a dress that lights up when you blush, and top it all off with a feathered hat that reacts to medium-wave radio signals. (Or you could just go in jeans and your usual "I heart R2-D2" T-shirt, but what fun would that be?)

TechnoSensual -- which runs through September 2 at the MuseumsQuartier Wien art and culture center -- … Read more

At Farnborough, SpaceShipTwo and a Brit UAV

All this week in the pouring British rain, people in suits have been gathering at a biennial trade show in Farnborough, England, to ogle the latest aircraft -- and sometimes buy a few. There's plenty on display for aviation geeks to get excited about, such as the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, but I was mainly there to take a look at the tech that BAE Systems is hawking out to its mostly military customers.

The main attraction was the first public showing of a plane that flies itself -- a 1983 Jetstream once used by a Scottish distillery that's … Read more

Rare footage captures real sound of 1953 A-bomb blast

Odds are that not many folks out there have seen a nuclear explosion up close. And it turns out that most of the films we've seen are dubbed or contain stock blast sound effects, a point I wasn't aware of before coming across a blog curated by Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics.

Most films of nuclear explosions got dubbed. If they do contain an actual audio recording of the test blast itself (something I'm often suspicious of -- I suspect many were filmed silently and have a stock blast sound … Read more

Screen yourself for skin cancer with this free iOS app

Got a new mole? A bad sunburn? A family member with a skin cancer diagnosis?

UMSkinCheck, a free new app for iPhone and iPad developed at the University of Michigan, includes a risk calculator that will help you determine your individual risk. If you have any concern at all, it guides you through taking a series of 23 photos that cover your entire body to develop a baseline for future photo comparisons.

"Whole body photography is a well-established resource for following patients at risk for melanoma," Michael Sabel, lead physician in app development and associate professor of surgery … Read more

When Telstar met JFK

When you're watching the London Olympics later this month on your big-screen TV, you probably won't give a second thought to how those images got to you from across the ocean. Hit the Power button on your remote, and presto -- the 4x100 relay, live, and in the moment.

It wasn't always so.

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, watching faraway events as they unfolded was an exotic thing, a rarity marked by the phrase "Live, via satellite." Look back just 50 years, and you'll find the satellite that got it … Read more