Inside big ships, jets, rockets, hospitals, factories, oil-drilling rigs and many other operations, a type of internal combustion engine called a gas turbine reliably generates power. But routine maintenance comes with a steep price tag. Over a typical 10-year life span, keeping a gas turbine healthy may run as much as $30 million, says Reamonn Soto, whose startup business, Sensatek Propulsion Technology, offers a way to reduce those costs significantly while also increasing the efficiency of power generation.

Meet Brent Terwilliger, whose expertise will help define best practices for the safe, responsible operation of future unmanned aerial systems.

When Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle makes its next launch into space from West Texas, it will have a little bit of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on board: a payload designed by students in Pedro Llanos’ Spacecraft and Satellite Systems class. The Cell Research Experiment in Microgravity (CRExIM) suborbital payload will be the first of what he hopes will be many payloads to fly through Embry-Riddle. “It’s a multidisciplinary effort between various colleges at Embry-Riddle and other universities nationwide,” Llanos says. “Spaceflight operations and aerospace/mechanical engineering students – along with Embry-Riddle’s Department of Applied Aviation Sciences – are working together with a science team comprised of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the Medical University of South Carolina.”

Could the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Costa Rica set off a hurricane in California? The question has been scrutinized by chaos theorists, stock-market analysts and weather forecasters for decades. For most people, this hypothetical scenario may be difficult to imagine on Earth – particularly when a real disaster strikes.

Farmers earn extra income by hosting wind turbines on small tracts of land, but the large, spinning blades change meteorological conditions near the ground. Those changes can affect crop yields – for better or for worse. A wind turbine might inhibit crop disease, for example, or it could speed moisture loss during a drought.

The promise of flying cars has been “right around the corner” since we watched George Jetson commute to work in his “aerocar” in the 1960s.