Helium

The race to achieve the extreme cold that quantum technologies demand may have a frontrunner. Chinese scientists have developed an alloy that almost reaches absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature, without using the scarce isotope, helium-3.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin quietly founded LTA Research in 2015, and its massive rigid airship prototype is preparing for its first outdoor flights, with a view to speeding up disaster response and starting zero-infrastructure cargo flights.

Zero-emissions long-distance aviation is absolutely possible... Provided you're not in a hurry. Solar Airship One will take 20 days to fly all the way around the equator, some 40,000 km (~25,000 miles), in a single zero-emissions hop.

Pierpaolo Lazzarini is no stranger to pushing the envelope when it comes to design concepts. His latest effort, the Air Yacht, is designed to travel the sea or the skies in style, buoyed by twin helium-filled airships.

HGST has unveiled the Ultrastar He12, its latest helium-based hard drive. Cramming 12 TB of storage space into the standard 3.5-in form factor, the new drive is also faster, more energy efficient and more stable, to help businesses and data centers manage ever-increasing loads of data.​

A team of scientists led by Diveena Danabalan of Durham University conducted a new study that indicates that there may be vast new sources of helium in the western mountain regions of North America.

Deep sea diving is a complex operation that's incredibly wasteful when it comes to the helium/oxygen gas mixture that the divers breathe. That's why US Navy scientists at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City have developed a new prototype deep-diving system that goes easy on the helium.

Have you ever wondered how many helium-filled balloons it would take to lift you up and let you fly among the clouds? Extreme sports enthusiast Erik Roner recently found out. Roner attached 90 helium-filled balloons to a sun lounger and rose to 8,000 ft (2,438 m).