China launched its ninth navigation satellite on Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported, citing sources at the launch centre. A rocket carrying the "Beidou", or Compass, navigation satellite orbiter blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launching Centre in southwestern Sichuan Province at 5:44 am (2144 Tuesday GMT), it said. The satellite is one of 35 that China is putting into orbit to form the Beidou navigation system, a global …

On March 23 scientists at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spent the day destroying perfectly good metal in the name of rocket science. The engineers watched as a giant machine crushed a 20-foot-tall 
hollow metal can with nearly a million pounds of force over the course of about five hours. The point? To simulate the extreme forces that can bend and compress the surface of a rocket as it plows through the atmosphere into space. The “can crusher” …

IT MAY be grey but it is not as old as you might imagine. A rock thought to date from the moon's formation points to the satellite being about 200 million years younger than previously calculated, suggesting its history may need to be rewritten. The moon is generally considered to have formed following a collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body in the early solar system. Once the molten debris coalesced into the moon, the theory goes, its crust …

Female animals flock to the ridiculous: the gangly antlered moose, the blue-bottomed baboon, and the garish peacock. But a new study suggests that túngara frog (Physalaemus pustulosus) females from Latin America keep that machismo posturing from turning too bizarre. Males of this species serenade their would-be mates late into the night, mixing high-pitched "whines" with short "clucks." Females, in turn, prefer the suitors that cluck the most but …

The Canadian rock band Rush knows its astronomy. In a lengthy 1977 song, the musicians proclaimed Cygnus X-1, an x-ray emitting object thousands of light-years away, a black hole where voyagers venture "through the void to be destroyed"—even though physicist Stephen Hawking had bet against the black hole's existence. This year, astronomers proved Rush right by establishing that Cygnus X-1 does indeed harbor a black hole, a dead star whose great gravity …

TWO robots named Rosie and James are making pancakes. It's a tough task that requires coordination, planning and a fine touch with a spatula. Midway through the process, Rosie slides the spatula under the half-cooked cake, lifts the pancake from the heat and carefully flips it over. The crowd breaks into cheers. Rosie and James aren't quite the accomplished cooks they appear to be, however. As far as robots go, they are as flexible as they come, …

How can any organisation detect the onset of an attack on its computer network, giving it time to respond quickly and block any intrusion or compromise of its data? The answer could lie in game theory. Modern firewalls and other technology are already in place, but these have not prevented major attacks on prominent networks in recent months. Now, information technologist Heechang Shin of Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, has used game theory …

NASA will somehow have to accomplish its most ambitious mission – landing on an asteriod within 15 years, after a presidential directive. The challenges are manifold, but NASA nerds are delirious at tackling the nitty gritty of such an inconceivably challenging project – though Hollywood has already done it in “Armageddon” 13 years ago. An asteroid is a gigantic rock orbiting the sun, like Earth. One of them, just 16 km across, devastated the earth …

Computer science students have come up with an innovative way to help children learn to read — a software that acts as a virtual reading coach. Ashley Steel, Luke Bjerring and Andre Meister of Waikato University worked with a curriculum coordinator in Switzerland and primary teachers in New Zealand to develop software, called BookieMonster, which acts as a reading coach. The software computerises a proven method of learning tuition, dubbed “repeated …

If you are an expert in computers and can decode a programme without much effort, give a thought to working with the Indian government or a multinational company to secure their websites from cyber attacks. As internet hacking has in recent years become a common occurrence, nervous government agencies and corporates are seeking ethical hackers in large numbers to secure their critical data, thus opening a lucrative career opportunity for youngsters …