Flying cars once seemed like the stuff of science fiction. But Tesla's recent demonstration, which showed the company's Rocket Roadster model briefly flying, has reignited the conversation about whether flying cars could soon become a reality.

The technology behind flying cars is continuing to advance, with companies developing vehicles that combine elements of traditional cars, helicopters, electric aircraft, and — in Tesla's case — rockets. Many of these designs use electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing technology, which allows them to lift off and land without a runway by using multiple rotors or propellers to generate lift. Advances in battery technology, autonomous flight systems and computer-assisted navigation are helping to make these vehicles seem more feasible. But challenges remain, including questions surrounding passenger safety, affordability, and the need for regulations and laws and infrastructure for the widespread use of these vehicles.

Tesla says production of its new "flying car" is scheduled for 2028, but the company is notorious for not meeting its proposed deadlines. So do you think flying cars could actually be available to the public within the next five years? Or are we still a long way from turning this science fiction fantasy into reality? Cast your vote in our poll, and share your thoughts in our comments section.

'> Will Tesla's 'flying car' ever hit the market, or is it a load of compressed air?

The magnitude 7.7 quake hit on March 28, 2025, near the city of Mandalay and shook buildings as far away as Bangkok, 830 miles (1,330 kilometers) away. The death toll was at least 3,700 people. New research that used detailed satellite data and a one-of-a-kind video of the ground rupturing reveals that the fault had a twisty, almost helical shape, which affected the shaking.

The Sagaing Fault in Myanmar that triggered the quake is analogous to many strike-slip faults worldwide that threaten population centers, said Alice-Agnes Gabriel, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the new research, which was published Oct. 14 in the journal Nature Communications. This includes California's San Andreas Fault, which is similarly tilted and likely capable of generating a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. Studying what happened as the ground ruptured near Mandalay can reveal what might occur in future earthquakes on similar faults, Gabriel told Live Science.

"The idea is, we cannot predict when and where an earthquake might happen" along a particular fault, she said, "but we may be able to predict certain aspects of it."

Gabriel uses powerful supercomputers to model earthquake scenarios, but these scenarios are only as good as the data that goes into them. In the case of the Myanmar quake, the researchers had a unique piece of data to ground-truth their model on: a security video of the ground cracking as the fault ruptured. This phenomenon had not been captured on video before.

The researchers' models revealed that the fault is not a vertical plane under the ground. Instead, the surface dips west on the northern end of the fault, becomes vertical in the middle, and then dips eastward at the southern end, they found.

In general, more shaking occurs in the direction in which a fault line dips, Gabriel said. In the case of the San Andreas Fault, the dip is inland, toward California's high desert — an area that's less populated than coastal regions on the other side of the fault. This means that, if the Big One acts similarly to the Myanmar quake, the high desert side of the fault will experience more intense shaking than the coastal side. The San Andreas Fault has also built up strain for over a century, so the researchers believe it could act in a similar way to the Sagaing Fault.

However, everyone near a dangerous fault should still prepare for major shaking, Gabriel warned, because small local variations, like how much sediment has accumulated over the bedrock in an area, can make a difference in how bad the ground movement gets. Los Angeles, for example, sits on a sediment-filled basin that would jiggle like jelly in a large quake.

The researchers also investigated whether they could have predicted aspects of the Mandalay quake from monitoring data they had available from before the quake. They knew that the Sagaing Fault had been "locked" in certain segments, meaning that while the two tectonic plates on each side of the fault were moving, the rocks at the fault line were jammed against each other. These locked segments had been accumulating strain for 186 years.

The researchers found that they could predict the path, shape and speed of the rupture on the Sagaing Fault in Myanmar with details available prior to the quake, such as the detailed shape of the fault deep underground and how long sections had been locked. Similar predictions could be made for the San Andreas and other important faults. Previous studies have also shed light on other aspects of the fault, such as its simplicity and maturity, that could inform what might happen at other faults around the world.

Researchers are currently working to update their model of what the Big One would look like on the San Andreas. The results of the update will be shared to help the public prepare, inform building codes and educate emergency managers.

"This really shows how we can use this long-term fault-monitoring data," Gabriel said.

'> Devastating 2025 Myanmar earthquake sheds light on how the 'Big One' could play out in California

The supernova, named AT 2026abck, dates to around 1.15 billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was less than one-tenth of its current age and bursting with massive stars flickering into life. The massive exploding star violently released its light over 12.5 billion years ago, according to the researchers — so long ago that the distance between us has effectively ballooned sixfold due to the expansion of the universe.

The discovery was described in a paper that was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv Sept. 29 and has not yet been peer reviewed. According to the study authors, this ancient speck of light is stupendously bright.

"At its peak, the supernova is about 8 billion times the brightness of the sun … almost as bright as the whole Milky Way Galaxy," study co-author Xiaohui Fan, an observational cosmologist and professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told Live Science via email. "Over the course of the explosion, it radiates the energy that the sun will radiate over about 2 billion years."

A beacon from the beginning of space-time

The newly discovered supernova shines brilliantly at over 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit (16,000 degrees Celsius). Its incandescent shell of ejected material has billowed to a radius of approximately 46 astronomical units ‪—‬ about 46 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or about as far as Pluto swings at its farthest point from the sun.

The supernova's host galaxy, designated ID101411, holds about 6.3 billion solar masses and is "forming new stars more than ten times faster than our Milky Way," first author Mingyang Zhuang, an observational astrophysicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science via email.

As with other early galaxies, ID101411 is deficient in metals, meaning any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, because not enough time had passed to create those heavier elements in the forges of massive stars and their apocalyptic explosions.

The study authors estimate that they observed the supernova as it would have looked just four to 10 days after it exploded. Although this is relatively common, spotting one at such an incredible distance "is extremely rare," Zhuang emphasized. "You have to observe the exact same tiny patch of sky repeatedly with [JWST], and the explosion has to happen at the right moment. We were lucky."

There's another layer of luck that made the discovery even more remarkable: It was observed without the aid of a cosmological quirk called gravitational lensing — a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in which the gravity of a massive object in space bends and magnifies the light emitted by objects behind it.

"Most supernovas this far away were found with help from a massive foreground galaxy cluster acting as a natural magnifying glass," Zhuang explained. "It's the most distant one we've actually seen appear."

This supernova was discovered as part of the NEXUS Treasury program, in which JWST intermittently scours patches of the sky for ancient explosions. It had previously observed the explosion's host galaxy over the past few years and finally witnessed the supernova on Aug. 7 of this year.

An explosion in slow motion

Intriguingly, the star had not yet exploded in JWST's previous viewing, on May 28, 2026, meaning that 71 days passed on our Earthly clocks, even though only about 12 days passed in the supernova's own time frame.

This highlights a mind-bending cosmological effect: The universe's expansion doesn't just stretch space; it slows down time from our perspective.

"Because the universe has expanded since this light was emitted, everything about this explosion appears to us in slow motion, about six times slower than it actually happened," Zhuang said. "Changes that took one week at the supernova take about six weeks to unfold from our point of view."

Mysteries still remain about the nature of this ancient explosion that shone so brilliantly we can observe it across nearly the entire universe.

Rather than a conventional core collapse supernova ‪—‬ in which a star between approximately eight and 50 times the mass of the sun exhaust its nuclear fuel and suffers a rapid core collapse and subsequent explosion ‪—‬ the recently discovered supernova may be one of the universe's rarest, most powerful explosions, the study authors said. Known as a superluminous supernova, this type of explosion releases tens or hundreds of times more energy than conventional supernovas. Whether the explosion continues to heat up or starts to cool could reveal exactly what is happening in its environment and what caused it, the team said.

"Our interpretation is still preliminary," Zhuang concluded. "Follow-up observations will tell us more about exactly what kind of explosion this was."

How well do you know our home galaxy? Find out with our Milky Way quiz!

'> The James Webb telescope is watching one of the earliest supernovas in the universe unfold

The Voynich manuscript is a medieval codex made up of leaves of parchment carbon-dated to the early 15th century. Its 240 pages are covered with about 38,000 words of a unique script called "Voynichese" along with illustrations of people, plants and astrological symbols. Also known as the Beinecke Cipher manuscript, the document was initially owned by a Holy Roman emperor and was purchased by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Since 1969, the manuscript has been in the collection of Yale University's rare book library. Experts have unsuccessfully tried to decipher the manuscript for more than a century.

"We don't know if it's a code," Lisa Fagin Davis, study co-author and executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, told Live Science. "But there are some odd characteristics of the Voynich manuscript in terms of its physical structure."

When doing research on the number of scribes who copied the document, Davis realized from the handwriting that the manuscript's pages alternate in ways that don't make sense. In addition, she said, "there are several examples where the image goes off the page in the middle and comes out on the other side, even though there are a bunch of pages in between."

In a study published Monday (Oct. 19) in the journal Digital Medievalist, Davis and co-author Colin Layfield, an information systems researcher at the University of Malta, suggested that the inconsistent structure of the enigmatic manuscript is the result of someone mis-binding a manuscript they were unable to read.

Medieval manuscripts were made up of rectangular sheets of parchment (animal skin), typically folded in half to produce what experts call a bifolium. Around five bifolia would typically be nested together, creating what experts call a quire. Then, a stack of quires would be bound together along the spine to create a book. However, Davis and Layfield suggested that the Voynich manuscript was intended to be a stack of singulions — a series of loose bifolia never meant to be bound together as a quire or a book.

This is not the first time a researcher has suggested the Voynich manuscript has pages out of order. But Davis and Layfield analyzed the graphic properties of the untranslated document to see if their hypothesis made sense.

"We're viewing it as a text and assuming it has a message," Layfield told Live Science, which means it should be possible to statistically compare blocks of text to see if they're similar or disconnected. Layfield used a technique called latent semantic analysis (LSA), which is a natural language processing technique invented in the late 1980s to find hidden patterns in texts.

LSA is particularly useful for small sets of data, Layfield explained. "Modern AI techniques need ridiculous amounts of data to train on, which we just don't have. We've got just 35,000 or so words. That's it." The researchers' LSA analysis of the Voynich manuscript revealed that some pages had low similarity, suggesting they may not have gone together, while others had high similarity, bolstering the idea that they were supposed to be read together.

By looking at the Voynich manuscript as a collection of singulions, Davis and Layfield solved some of the nagging issues with the document.

"When you start to think about it in the context of the other strange features of the manuscript, all of those problems are resolved," Davis said. "It solves the problem of each scribe writing one sheet. It solves the problem of the images crossing the gutter."

This means that any previous work on the Voynich manuscript that assumes it was ordered correctly now needs to be reconsidered, she said, but it also means there is new progress on the book.

"This work helps us think about whether there's actual meaning underneath it all," Davis said. "It doesn't get us there," she said about a definitive translation, "but it moves the ball because you can't make sense out of a book where all the pages are mixed up."

Davis is optimistic that someone will crack the Voynich mystery, in part because a similar modern puzzle known as Cain's Jawbone has been successfully deciphered by a handful of people. This devilishly difficult linguistic puzzle from the 1930s consists of 100 pages of a murder mystery arranged in the wrong order. Due to the unique nature of the text and its vague, stylized language, even AI has failed to solve it.

"We have some ideas for other work we want to do," Davis said. For example, there's a large water stain in the upper margin of some of the pages of the Voynich manuscript. "The stain should be symmetrical from one page to the next but it's not. That also supports the idea that the manuscript is bound out of order."

Davis and Layfield are thinking about ways to compare the stain shapes across the pages, as that may help them reorder the incorrectly organized pages.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!

'> Undeciphered Voynich manuscript may have been bound out of order, study finds