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Written by Celia Berrell A small steel ball in a short smooth tube held in place by a spring, is the kind of switch that works in a twitch and starts an exploding thing.

If you want to fly, you’ve got to move, right? Birds flap, propellers whirr, and if you’ve ever watched the spiral painted on the middle of a jet engine, you’ll know they spin too. But recently, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States created a plane with no moving parts at all.

Built more than 4500 years ago, you’d think there was nothing left to discover inside Cairo’s Great Pyramid of Giza. Think again. Scientists have recently discovered a new chamber deep in the heart of the tomb, all with the help of starlight.

It’s been really busy at Double Helix headquarters in the last few weeks. We’ve moved office, to the CSIRO Discovery Centre in Canberra. There are lots of cool things at our new workplace, including a whole museum of CSIRO science!

Written by Azmina Hossain The crown-of-thorns is a venomous starfish that lives in the Great Barrier Reef. Growing up to massive lengths of 80 centimetres and having a body entirely covered in toxic spikes, the starfish is almost indestructible and is a vicious predator. They eat coral, the building blocks of the Great Barrier Reef….

Written by Beth Askham Imagine if your touchscreen had texture. Pages, pictures and games would all come to life under your fingertips. Researchers are finding out ways that we can trick out brains into thinking a flat touch screen is a world of texture.

Written by Beth Askham Researchers have made sticky hand pads that let you climb walls like Spiderman. Inspired by gecko feet, a research lab at Stanford University in America developed the climbing device. This technology recently allowed a person weighing 70 kilograms to climb a sheer glass wall. The team have also used the structure…

Written by Julia Cleghorn Researchers have found a better way to study penguin behaviour – send in a remote-controlled rover! Compared with researchers collecting data themselves, rovers were found to be less disruptive to the colony, less stressful for the penguins, and sometimes a whole lot cuter to watch!

To boldly go out of the airlock, astronauts need to look the part. Donning a spacesuit protects astronauts from the dangerous conditions just beyond our atmosphere. The outer layer of NASA’s Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit is built tough from a blend of three fabrics. One fabric is the same stuff used in bulletproof vests. It…

One of our readers requested an article about time keeping devices, and it’s a great time for the topic. Scientists set a new record in clock precision early this year with an atomic clock that ‘ticks’ 430 trillion times in a single second. Vibrations on your wrist Most wristwatches and wall clocks today use a…