In early 2014, DARPA released video of a .50-caliber round curving mid-flight to chase a target that had moved after the shot was fired. Watched cold, it looks like something out of a movie trailer. It wasn’t. The footage came out of a real program called Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance, EXACTO for short, and it…
A robot flying a passenger airplane sounds like science fiction to most people. Pilots spend years learning the job. They read changing weather, talk to air-traffic control, watch a dozen systems at once, and improvise when something goes sideways. So why would anyone want to hand that over to a machine? The honest answer isn’t…
For as long as people have imagined the future, they’ve imagined cars that leave the road behind. Finish work, lift off above the traffic, land at home without an hour lost to the highway. Sounds like science fiction. The engineering problem underneath it, though, is very real, and researchers have been chipping away at it…
Back in 2014, a handful of companies promised New York to London in four hours, within the decade. That decade’s over. Nobody’s selling tickets. This isn’t a rerun of that old prediction, thankfully. It’s a look at what actually happened to those companies, what changed in the underlying tech, and whether this new wave has…
Professional-quality 3D printing used to mean one of two things. A machine that cost more than most cars, or a service bureau you shipped your files to and waited on. Designers and engineers who wanted real precision on their own desk just didn’t have that option. Formlabs was one company that decided to close that…
Call the Mercury Cougar a rebadged Mustang and you’re only half right. Mercury borrowed the bones, sure. But the Cougar was trying to pull off something the Mustang never bothered with: be quick and still feel expensive. That combo wasn’t a given back then. Plenty of folks assumed you picked one or the other. The…
A cancelled American upgrade program. That’s where the JF-17 Thunder starts. Not with Pakistan. Not with a clean-sheet design. A Chinese design team kept working after its Western partner walked away. A Pakistani air force had just lost its main supplier. Twenty years of upgrades later, you get a single-engine fighter now flown by four…