Nautilus

5 Ways NASA Enabled Today’s Super Bowl

The shiny silver cloaks athletes now don to keep warm on the sidelines are actually aluminized mylar, which NASA’s Echo I, the agency’s first communications satellite, sported.NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Getting us into space is NASA’s raison d’etre. But the agency’s innovations don’t always stay inside NASA. They have a tendency to affect fields like medicine, communications—even football.

This Sunday, the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers take the field at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium for the 2016

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus8 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Consciousness, Creativity, and Godlike AI
These days, we’re inundated with speculation about the future of artificial intelligence—and specifically how AI might take away our jobs, or steal the creative work of writers and artists, or even destroy the human species. The American writer Megha
Nautilus7 min read
The Feminist Botanist
Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o
Nautilus7 min read
A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci

Related Books & Audiobooks