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The stars are aligning for this year’s Geminid meteor shower to be particularly magnificent. The Geminids produce visible meteors in the night sky from about December 4 to December 16, though the peak of the shower, with as many as 120 meteors visible per hour, is during the night of December 13 and early morning of December 14. The best time to view a meteor shower is in the hours just before dawn....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis book-sized box (inset) contains the cell-phone and computer that operates the Mbrace system now being installed on all new E-class Mercedes Benz vehicles. The system is fundamentally different than other telematics systems,a nd promises to let you interact with your vehicle from anywhere, anytime.Telematics for the PeopleMost people know someone who has driven cars equipped with GM’s OnStar and Ford’s Sync, the current high-waters in telematic interactions with your vehicle....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Navy’s latest, biggest and baddest unmanned aerial vehicle has just been unveiled. Yesterday in California, Northrup Grumman showed off a completed X-47B Navy Unmanned Combat Air System, the first of two fighter-plane-size UAVs that the company will produce for the U.S. Navy. The second will follow in 2009. The Navy hopes to start flying the X-47Bs next year. The UAV is expected to have the ability to take off from and land on an aircraft carrier, and the Navy plans to start those trials in 2011....

Let’s just take a deep breath and set some rules about how to judge monster movies (which we’ve talked about before.)There are suspensions of disbelief that are necessary to even hope to enjoy the spectacle. The biggest example is, of course, that massive monsters exist and can emerge to flatten cities, either for fun or as collateral casualties of violent Kaiju politics. But when it comes to fighting back, there is a certain expectation that audiences will witness some sort of realism related to how militaries could face off against such irradiated beasts....

A chemical oscillator in a vat can test whether or not character strings are correct.The Turing test is more famous, but the Turing machine is fundamental to all of computer science.Researchers believe this shows that chemical computers are capable of much more complex things.Vice reports that scientists have created the first known “chemical Turing machine,” meaning a liquid that can do the calculations that define a classic computer science standard.Juan Pérez-Mercader of Harvard University’s Origins of Life Initiative leads this research, which uses “one-pot computation”—you know, for easier cleanup—and a chemical oscillator that runs a Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction....

The U.S. Navy announced the next carrier in the Ford-class of supercarriers will be USS Doris Miller.Miller was a cook on December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked.Miller manned a machine gun and fought back. He was killed in action two years later.The U.S. Navy will name an aircraft carrier after Cook First Class Doris Miller. Miller received the Navy Cross for his actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, helping move wounded soldiers to safety and manning a machine gun to repel Japanese planes....

A whale has washed up on a beach in the Philippines on Sunday with 88 pounds of plastic inside it. The whale did not survive.Plastic pollution is an increasingly serious problem, and the oceans are suffering the most. In the Pacific, there are billions of tons of plastic floating around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There’s so much plastic in the ocean that some of it is even washing up on the world’s most remote beaches or lurking at the bottom of the Mariana trench....

Forget about Car Play compatibility or having a car with its own data connection. Chevrolet is bringing a whole new kind of smart feature to many of its 2016 cars: a little pocket that both charges your phone and cools it with air conditioning. Officially called “Active Phone Cooling” that little wireless charging dish (which will only work with phones that support that feature) doesn’t have its own AC; it just has a vent that feeds of the car’s main AC when its on....

A Chinese newspaper claimed the country has a laser rifle that can burn people and ignite explosions.The U.S. is working on similar tech, but these weapons are so big they must be mounted on vehicles.There’s good reason to believe China is exaggerating what its gun can do.China allegedly has a “laser assault rifle” that can fire a thousand shots at a time, “carbonizing” human skin and tissue. The ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle, profiled in the South China Morning Post, is described as a laser wonder weapon....

Disney and MIT have teamed to design a VR jacket that will deliver a full variety of tactile sensations, through the use of sensors and airbags. The Force Jacket, detailed in a recently published paper, can give you the sensation of a hug, a “friendly” snake crawling across your body (because who doesn’t want to experience that in VR?), the transformation into a bulky, muscled superhero, or the feel of a punch to the gut....

Media Platforms Design TeamTuesday’s “Unearthed” was the first of the Fringe double-episode week and dove into the paranormal with a brain-dead teenager, a murder victim and a Russian invasion of the mind. Agent Olivia Dunham, along with ex-mad-scientist Walter Bishop and son Peter, is called in after a young girl wakes from the dead. The girl, Lisa, was pronounced brain dead after suffering an aneurysm, but wakes up on the operating table, just before her kidneys were to be harvested as donations....

Google and Janelia, a research campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia, have created “the most complete map of the fly brain ever created.“Their research was published earlier this week in the biology pre-print journal bioRxiv.Connectomes, the maps illustrating connections in the brain, have been criticized by some scientists in the past because so far, they haven’t led to any major breakthroughs.Drosophila melanogaster, otherwise known as the fruit fly, has a pretty impressive dome for being so small—as in, its brain contains over 100,000 neurons, or brain cells....

Soldering to a PC board can be tricky: Too much heat can make the copper trace lift right off the board substrate. Use a soldering pencil rated at 15-25 watts, no more. (Watch the video; story continues below.) Start by lightly scrubbing the board surface with a typewriter eraser to clean the copper until it’s bright and shiny. Like any electrical connection, use only 60-40 rosin-core solder, preferably in a gauge close to the size of the lead you’re attaching....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe workhorses of NASA’s last few decades in space are showing their age.Last week the space shuttle Discovery took a victory lap around Washington D.C. as it enters retirement. And it was 22 years ago today that Discovery carried with it into orbit the Hubble Space Telescope, which has now spend two decades-plus sending back piles of data and amazing images from space.Indeed, the 22nd birthday is a tough one....

Two of the dudes behind The Hangover are going to try to take on one of the most complex science fiction novels out there for a television event miniseries. Bradley Cooper and Todd Philips (director of like, 50 bro comedies or whatever) are teaming up with producer Graham King (The Departed) on an adaptation of Hyperion.Hyperion, written by Dan Simmons, is a sort of trans-galactic Canterbury Tales, featuring seven travellers coming together on the eve of galaxy wide catastrophe....

Ending a debate that began more than a decade ago, NASA announced today that water does indeed flow on Mars. The agency is calling the discovery one of its most significant to date.“We had evidence that water had flowed across the surface of Mars billions of years ago,” said Ken Edgett of the Malin Space Sciences System. “But we can say that liquid water is present on Mars right now.“Scrutinizing before-and-after photographs obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor (see below), NASA identified evidence of new deposits in two of Mars’ tens of thousands of gullies–formations that scientists say have formed over the last seven years and could have only been formed by a flowing liquid....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhy replace the old Saffir-Simpson scale with an entirely new one?A number of us have been watching the big storms that have come through in the past 10 or more years, looking at both the surge and the wind levels. Then [we looked] at… popular expectations based on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and realized there was a real disconnect [with the] expanded Saffir-Simpson scale (originally it was just wind speed; they added storm surge in there as well)....

Engine: 6.7-liter I6, 400 hp and 1,000 lb-ft of torque / Transmission: Six-speed automatic / Fuel economy: not rated, but if you get 17 mpg you’re doing well /Transfer case: part-time four-wheel-drive / Max Payload: 7,680 pounds / Max tow rating: 35,100 pounds / Base price: $36,540Allow me to get up on my soapbox for a moment. I need it, you see, to peer over the tailgate of the Ram 3500, which is 40 inches from the ground—when it’s down....

The British motorcycle company Triumph has a new program for producing an electric bike. It’s calling the research and development plan TE-1, and says that we can expect a powertrain in about two years, presumably with a production bike to follow. Rumors had been building that Triumph would be the next of the major motorcycle manufacturers to go electric, following Harley-Davidson’s push with its LiveWire model, Buell’s shift into an electric mobility company, and Ducati’s confirmation that it’s working on one as well....

Comet 97P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko got a special guest in 2014 when a little spacecraft from Earth called Rosetta showed up to study the cosmic ice ball for a few years. The probe gathered a tremendous amount of data about the comet, enabling scientists to build an extremely accurate simulation of how Comet 67P formed:View full post on YoutubeComet 67P has a curious shape that was likely the result of a collision of two smaller comets....