NASA hasn’t had a lot of luck lately with its Mars rovers. For the past few months, a global dust storm has threatened the agency’s Opportunity rover, and now the Curiosity rover has suffered a setback as well. According to a recent mission update, the rover has experienced some kind of bug that prevents it from sending back some of its data.According to the update, the mission team noticed something was wrong on Saturday night....
North Korea has struck a tentative deal to begin nuclear disarmament after its test last fall, the U.S. envoy negotiating the agreement has said. But what about Kim Jong Il’s chemical and biological arsenal?The Chinese are marketing sweet potatoes grown in space. Talk about keeping a space program’s focus back here on Earth.After forcing YouTube to pull 100,000 of its clips from the video-sharing temple, Viacom is shifting clips from the likes of “The Daily Show” and MTV to its own websites....
Media Platforms Design TeamKaveh Kamooneh was waiting for his son to finish soccer practice at a suburban Atlanta middle school when he decided to give his car a little bit of a fill-up. So, he plugged his Nissan Leaf into an exterior outlet. Shortly thereafter, a police officer came to the car to tell Kamooneh he was violating the law. The crime he would be charged with: stealing about 5 cents’ worth of electricity....
According to anonymous sources in the Pentagon, Russia is planning to expand its arsenal of so-called tactical nuclear weapons. The Kremlin is also modernizing several underground nuclear command and control facilities for protecting the military and civilian leadership in a nuclear war. The alleged expansion exploits a loophole in existing arms control agreements that only address strategic, city-busting weapons and not smaller tactical nuclear weapons meant to be used on armies....
Two U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors experienced emergencies this month, the separate incidents occurring just a week apart from one another. On April 6th 2018, a F-22 Raptor of the Alaska-based 3rd Wing, flying out of Tyndall Air Force Base, experienced an engine failure but the fighter landed safely. A week later, another Raptor from the same squadron experienced a mishap during landing, damaging the belly of the aircraft.“We can confirm that a 3 WG F-22, assigned to the 90th Fighter Squadron, recently experienced an in-flight engine failure while operating out of Tyndall....
(Image: The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B unmanned spaceplane that orbits for hundreds of days at a time on classified missions, 2014.)The House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) yesterday, including legislation that would require the Air Force to create a new branch of the military called the ‘Space Corps’ by the beginning of 2019. The Space Corps would replace the Air Force’s current space departments and receive more funding as well as its own command....
This post was originally published on November 6, 2018. It’s been updated with new information following San Diego Comic-Con 2019.Whether you’re a forever fan or a newcomer, it’s a great time to love Star Trek. Short Treks, a series of Trek-centric short films, is working on second round of bite-sized Trek. Discovery is hard at work on season three, and the Jean-Luc Picard series is starting to take shape. Now Star Trek is getting its first animated series since 1974 in the form of Star Trek: Lower Decks, and we’re learning more and more about it....
The U.S. Air Force will hold a “final flight” ceremony tomorrow, December 21, to commemorate the end of the F-4 Phantom II fighter’s service. The fighter, which was first introduced in the late 1950s, performed virtually every combat aircraft role imaginable during a storied career that stretched from Vietnam to the Middle East and beyond.The F-4 Phantom II was originally conceived as a heavy, all-weather fleet air defense fighter. Yet with its two powerful General Electric J79 engines and a two-man crew, the large, fast aircraft proved endlessly adaptable....
The legend appears like a ghost one afternoon, a long way from anywhere.Deep in a valley that looks a lot like every other spruce- and poplar-filled valley sprawling hundreds of miles south from Dawson City, Yukon, a mineral-staking crew slogs up a creek humping chainsaws and smartphones. This is far-flung subarctic wilderness—no roads, no people, just a lot of bears and buckbrush. It’s late fall 2016, and the crew is fanning out across boggy moose pasture, crossing icy creeks just deep enough to soak their boots....
The U.S. Army is inspecting its entire fleet of attack helicopters in an attempt to detect a “critical safety issue.” The service has detected a number of defective nuts that keep the main rotors attached to the helicopter. The issue has already caused at least one recent accident, which resulted in the death of two pilots.According to Task & Purpose, the part in question is the strap pack nut, which is “the component that keeps the rotor blades from separating from the airframe....
Venus is a hellish planet with a toxic, oppressive atmosphere. What few spacecraft we’ve sent to its surface have survived for a few minutes before being crushed by the intense pressures or corroded by poisonous gases. If fact, the atmosphere on Venus is so thick that it even affects the planet’s rotation, according to a new discovery.In 2015, the Venus orbiter Akatsuki spotted something strange in the planet’s atmosphere: a giant bow wave that stretched across almost the entire surface of the planet....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn the mid-1980s, about 3.5 million people were infected with guinea worm—a gruesome, painful disease. In 2014, the number was just 126. That stat comes courtesy of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose organization, the Carter Foundation, may be on the cusp of making guinea worm just the second human disease (after smallpox) to be completely eradicated. Yet years of painstaking work remain to get from 126 to zero....
We have been waiting for truly hassle-free, wireless file transfer (without the Web browser or e-mail program) to grow up and come home since Microsoft’s Surface gave a compelling picture of what such technologies could look like. The new Sony TransferJet technology, announced today, brings effortless file sharing one step closer to the consumer by wirelessly transferring photos between digital cameras–no cables necessary. For now, the wireless transfer only works with certain Sony cameras; the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX7 (available in February for about $400)–a high-end point-and-shoot with 10 MP, 4x wide-angle zoom and full HD movie resolution–and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V (available in March for about $350), which will have similar resolution as well as built-in GPS capability....
A U.S. Air Force F-15C jet fighter on a routine training mission crashed earlier today off the coast of Japan. The pilot ejected and was quickly picked up by search and rescue forces, who transported him to a local hospital. In a public affairs release posted on Twitter, the U.S. Air Force’s Kadena Air Base stated that on June 11, 2018 at 6:26 AM local time, a F-15C belonged to the 44th Fighter Squadron, 18th Wing crashed about 50 miles south of the Japanese island of Okinawa....
Media Platforms Design TeamYour Facebook likes can tell a lot about who you are. So much so that computers can use them to decipher your personality. A Cambridge University study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that computers outperformed humans at judging personality based just upon where people have clicked the little “like” button on Facebook.The trial had people take 100-question personality tests based on the OCEAN traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism....
A Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London broke an unlikely milestone (and nearly the sound barrier) when it reached a screaming ground speed of 801 mph while traversing the skies some 35,000 feet above central Pennsylvania. No, this wasn’t the rebirth of the Concorde or the dawn of a new era of supersonic jets: The aircraft merely flew into a furious jet stream that propelled its flight way faster than usual on Monday night....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe arrival of March means we can finally look forward to fledgling signs of spring, as well as South by Southwest Interactive—the technology-focused event that’s inspired a yearly cultural pilgrimage for early adopters and technophiles. PopMech will be on the ground at Austin, Texas, from Friday onwards to report on the chaos and bright new ideas that we see at the startup-swamped festival. This year, the VIP lineup includes science celebrities Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and Adam Savage, along with some more surprising personalities, such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange....
Media Platforms Design TeamI’ve just spent a week driving the Infiniti G37S, a car that’s due for a major update early next year. But during that drive, I kept thinking about another car—the G35, the G37’s predecessor—and what an act of sheer hubris it was for Infiniti back in 2003. The original G was aimed squarely at BMW’s 3-series. And I, and a lot of the automotive press, figured Infiniti stood precisely zero chance....
The grid is down. Your battery-powered drill is waning. Maybe you can find enough fuel to keep a generator going to power power tools. A better way would be investing the hand tools that were common a century ago, like the classic hand drill that will never run out of juice.12-gauge shotgunUse this to scare off potential mischief-makers, or to dispatch rabbits digging up your vegetable patch and eat ’em for dinner....
Name: Harlan GreenfieldPatent Number: 10,023,447Patent: Wheelchair Accessible Forklift, a forklift with a flat platform that allows a person using a wheelchair to operate it and incorporates additional control mechanisms for disabled drivers.I was a teacher for ten years at the James Rumsey Technical Institute in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I taught materials, distribution, and warehousing. We were very involved in a program called SkillsUSA that encourages education of a skilled workforce.We had the opportunity to go to Washington, D....
