move

‘The Crawler’ is on the move ahead of Artemis 1 rocket rollout

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Everybody’s favorite giant rocket truck is back in action.  Today (March 11), NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 (CT-2) vehicle began to slowly “crawl” its way to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will pick up the agency’s Space Launch System megarocket and Orion spacecraft. The pair are set to launch … Read more

The Push to Move Past the Pandemic: COVID Quickly, Episode 25

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Tanya Lewis: Hi, and welcome to COVID, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series. Josh Fischman: This is your fast-track update on the COVID pandemic. We bring you up to speed on the science behind the most urgent questions about the virus and the disease. We demystify the research and help you understand what it really … Read more

‘Moonfall’ pulls scenes from space shuttle Endeavour move 10 years ago

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Hollywood has finally taken inspiration from the decade-ago move of a NASA space shuttle through the streets of Los Angeles and it only took the moon falling out of the sky for it to happen. “Moonfall,” which opened in theaters on Friday (Feb. 4), is the first major motion picture to use the 2012 delivery … Read more

A Harvard Mathematician Has Basically Solved an Epic, 150-Year-Old Chess Problem

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On one level, chess seems like a simple game: 64 individual black or white squares, 16 pieces per side, and two competitors striving for conquest. Dig a little deeper though, and the game offers incredibly complex possibilities, posing challenges to chess theorists and mathematicians that can go unsolved for decades or even centuries.   In … Read more

This Robotic Hand Is Precise Enough to Move a Microchip With Tweezers

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Innovators at South Korea’s Ajou University have created a robotic hand that is capable of holding fragile objects like eggs. It can also crush cans and work with tools like tweezers and scissors.   An article published in Nature Communications explained all the details of the new technology. It weighs just under two and a half pounds … Read more

Let the space games begin! Ideas for off-Earth sports move to center court

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An alliance of experts in space, sports and the entertainment industry are designing and developing original games exclusively for low or microgravity playing fields.  The group, known as the Space Games Federation, has already identified a number of prospective game concepts, from guiding a magnetic ball through hoops in space to space dodgeball, as well … Read more