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Media Platforms Design TeamLAS VEGAS — After a one-two punch at the New York auto show, Chip Foose and Funkmaster Flex are back at it, now putting their signature touches on the 2009 Ford Flex for SEMA 2007.Foose took a rather elegant approach with his Flex Concept. It features custom front and rear fascias, appliqué door handles and a wraparound chrome beltline that accentuates the two-tone blue and cream pearl paint job....

France and Germany will work together to build a new fighter jet set to enter service in the mid-21st century. The unnamed fighter will enter service around 2040 and is set to have advanced capabilities including the ability to command swarms of drones. The collaboration between the two countries and long lead time is largely a function of the growing complexity of modern military equipment, which can take billions of dollars and a decade or more to develop....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen people think of how technology is changing the art of cinema, they rarely think of the soundtrack. Yet you’ve been experimenting with different technologies for a while now, right? There are definitely horrible things you can say about Hollywood, but two of the good things you can say is that it pushes technology forward and that it commissions classical music on a daily basis. Pushing technology forward is one of the things that I’ve done previously on movies such as The Dark Knight and Inceptionwhere rather than just releasing soundtracks, we released apps, so it would become a completely different experience....

There are just so many stars. With around 300 billion stars across the entire Milky Way, making a detailed map of our entire galaxy is nearly impossible. But Europe’s space agency, the ESA, is doing it anyway. On Wednesday, the released the largest map of the stars ever made. Their map, compiled over the past few years by the Gaia project, contains the precise locations of more than a billion stars....

Spotted in 2017, the mysterious space traveler ‘Oumuamua remains the first and only interstellar object we’ve seen passing through our solar system. There’s been plenty of speculation on what ‘Oumuamua (which means “a visitor from a great distance” in Hawaiian) could be, but a new study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has some answers. For starters: it’s pretty small. And the reason NASA knows this is because it honestly can’t get a good look at ‘Oumuamua....

Imagine you’re visiting your doctor for a checkup. Your doctor takes all the usual measurements like your height, weight, heart rate, and blood pressure, and then tells you she’s going to sequence your DNA.The doc swabs your cheek to get your DNA and uses a small handheld device to get the results in a flash. With this data, your doctor can identify any genetic problems, determine your risk of cancer or heart disease, and prescribe you medications tailored specifically for you and your genes....

• The crash occurred in rural Mississippi late Monday night, starting a ferocious fire.• 16 passengers were killed, with no survivors.• The cause of the crash has not been released.A KC-130 operated by the Marines crashed in Mississippi Monday night, killing 16 and starting a fire amid the wreckage in a rural field. The bodies have been recovered but the exact cause of the crash has not yet been made public....

The U.S. Marines rely on defensive grenades in offensive situations, leading to friendly fire injuries.A new grenade by Nammo could become the Marines’ next offensive grenade.The Marines are interested in trying out the new grenade, which they’ve designated Mk. 21.A novel new hand grenade system allows multiple grenades to connect to one another, creating a more powerful weapon. The Mark 21 Mod 0 grenade system, developed by Norwegian defense contractor Nammo, is designed for use by attacking troops against enemy positions, blasting them with concussive overpressure while posing less of a danger to friendly forces....

Media Platforms Design TeamHawaii will play host to NASA’s new laser communications system, built on the grounds of the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems. The tech will also allow easier communication with the International Space Station.Highly focused beams of light, lasers can carry more information and without the loss of signal strength that happens with radio waves. This will come in handy when NASA wants to communicate with satellites or with the new Orion spacecraft during demonstrations....

This boomerang-looking wing design may be decades old, but NASA’s wind tunnel testing using a modern twist on the technology has revealed some surprising results.Earlier this year, NASA completed successful flight tests of the low-drag Prandtl-m drone, a design that could fly in the thin, cold atmosphere of Mars. For the recent wind tunnel tests, Al Bowers, NASA Armstrong chief scientist and the Prandtl-m program manager, teamed up with a group of student interns to manipulate the shape of the wing and record flight data....

At the edge of the solar system, right before reaching interstellar space, robotic probes are still finding undiscovered mysteries. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which is speeding on from its 2015 encounter with Pluto to study an object in the distant Kuiper Belt, appears to have detected what scientists are calling an interstellar “hydrogen wall.“The space barrier was detected with New Horizons’ instrument Alice, a compact ultraviolet imaging telescope and spectrometer. Alice’s main goal on the New Horizons mission was to gather information on the atmospheric conditions of Pluto....

View full post on TwitterAn aircraft in Siberia has reportedly lost millions of dollars of gold, diamonds, and platinum after a door blew open after takeoff, scattering the cargo across the landscape. While some of the cargo was recovered from the runway, much of it was lost as much as 16 miles from the airport.According to Russian officials, the door malfunction was caused by strong winds on takeoff, although the excessive weight of the cargo or the quality of the plane may have played a role....

A tiny house can be great for people looking for a cheap home or a lower environmental footprint. The tinier the better, according to some. But there’s one tiny house that’s unlikely to ever see a single resident: This microscopic home, fit no one but a microbe.A group of researchers built this tiny home out of extremely tiny membranes of silica. These membranes were carved, etched, and painstakingly assembled by the researchers using an electron microscope....

Indiana UniversityIn an effort to better understand how evolution and genetics work with each other, scientists at Indiana University have intentionally grown a third eye into a common dung beetle.“We’ve also learned that evolving a novel physical trait is much like building a novel structure out of Legos, by re-using and recombining ‘old’ genes and developmental processes within new contexts,” says Armin P. Moczek, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biology, in a press release....

Reining in the effects of a changing climate before they become truly catastrophic will require monumental, collective effort. But exactly what that effort will entail is still a matter of debate. Many different groups and organizations have proposed strategies for combating climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and it’s both difficult and crucial to determine what’s best. On Monday, the Royal Dutch Shell oil company published its own strategy....

Satellite operator Iridium’s nearly decade-long effort to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites, one that would foster better broadband and mobile connectivity on Earth, has finally reached its culmination. On Friday, SpaceX delivered the last ten Iridium Next satellites into low-Earth orbit, completing the 75-unit constellation, reports CNN. A number of launches over the last few years have slowly pieced together a robust constellation meant to replace Iridium’s older satellite phone network, which has since languished after the company hit financial trouble....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage. Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club....

Six years after decommissioning USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy is still figuring out how to safely dismantle the ship. The General Accounting Office estimates the cost of taking apart the vessel and sending the reactors to a nuclear waste storage facility at up to $1.5 billion, or about one-eighth the cost of a brand-new aircraft carrier.The USS Enterprise was commissioned in 1961 to be the centerpiece of a nuclear-powered carrier task force, Task Force One, that could sail around the world without refueling....

An event on Facebook is making the news, calling for an army of social media users to crash the gates of the legendary Area 51 complex in Nevada. Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us has attracted nearly three million people, with 1.6 marking themselves as “attending” the event and 1.2 million interested. While the activists may not see any UFOs, the top secret base has seen its share of unusual aircraft over the years....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat do you do when you’re a professional welder with an artistic bent? Make little people out of scrap metal. What do you do when you lose your job? Make little people out of scrap metal for a living.Media Platforms Design TeamSteve Appel starting making the “Bolt People” as his full-time job after getting laid off from the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in 1989. He’d initially picked up the skill of making the little doodads from a co-worker, though Appel has long since perfected the art....