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At the dawn of the Cold War, former Soviet soldier Mikhail Kalashnikov, 26, led a team in the design of a lightweight assault rifle, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947. Now, 65 years later, some 100 million AK-47s have been produced—10 times the number of U.S. Army M16s. The original weighed roughly 10 pounds and married the best features of a submachine gun and a long-range rifle. “The AK-47 is often said to be poorly made, but many of its features were well-matched to the conditions of war,” says C....

NASA broke a big announcement today in a teleconference: A new Earth-like planet has been discovered with some striking similarities to our own. It orbits its star (which is the same size as our Sun) in 385 days, and sits well within the habitable zone. Its surface is likely rocky. In fact, a whole lot of it lines up to look a lot like Earth.There are a few differences, of course....

Beneath Antarctica’s millions of square miles of ice, beneath the snow thousands of feet thick, sits dirt and rock like every other continent. In fact, scientists now say they’ve discovered a collection of hidden continents under Antarctica left over from millions of years ago. The researchers from Kiel University in Germany and the British Antarctic Survey who made this surprising find were relying on data from the European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite....

Sayid’s last encounter with a dart gun left him comatose for almost 42 hours; this week, he was prepared, taking out an orderly with two well-aimed darts to the chest. But are tranquilizer guns routinely used on humans as they appear to be on Lost? “One drug (ketamine) that we frequently use to anesthetize chimps and gorillas can be used in humans, so the scenario is plausible,” says Randy Junge, a vet and Director of Animal Health at the St....

John RaceLeavenworth, Wash.Age: 41Years on Job: 22 After he graduated from college, John Race considered law school—but an expedition to the Himalayas’ Shishapangma Mountain changed the course of his career. Since then, the alpine guide has led trips up Denali and Everest and retraced explorer Ernest Shackleton’s route across South Georgia Island on skis. Race plans all the trips he guides and provides medical care en route. He advises novice climbers to take it one day at a time....

There are less dramatic ways to assassinate someone.The U.K. is now convinced that Russia was behind the attempt on the life of Sergei Skripal, an ex-Russian spy living in London. Skripal and his daughter were victims of a rare nerve agent called Novichok, a weapon that seems to point to Moscow as the perpetrator. Skripal is a former double agent working against the Kremlin. He was living in London after a spy swap with Russia, but the choice of weapon hints at a message larger than revenge....

We’ve heard plenty of bombastic claims about new Russian weaponry in the past few years. But U.S. intelligence believes that the development of new arms—many of them nuclear-capable—is experiencing decidedly mixed success. According to MSNBC, the Avangard and Kinzhal hypersonic weapons could be operational by 2020, but the Buresvestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile won’t be ready for at least a decade. These weapons were announced in May 2018 as part of a package to modernize Russian tactical and strategic nuclear forces....

While the world was focused on the incredible rescue of a soccer team in Thailand, another daring rescue was happening right here in the United States. On Friday, six rescue climbers from the Army National Guard saved a man trapped on the peak of Oregon’s Mt. Hood and descended from the mountain via Chinook helicopter.The man trapped on the peak is reported to have called emergency services after climbing the mountain to commit suicide....

Media Platforms Design TeamEven as SpaceX becomes the first private company to provide cargo delivery service to the International Space Station—a mission that could be furthered this weekend as the company launches its second trip to the ISS—it’s already at work on its next giant leap: a reusable orbital spaceship.Last month, SpaceX tested a “hopping” Falcon 9 rocket as part of its Grasshopper program. It was a standard first stage with a single Merlin-1D engine in its tail instead of the usual 9, and landing legs added on....

André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard have set all kinds of world records for solar-powered flight in the Solar Impulse. Now they want to fly all the way around the world on sun power aboard the new Solar Impulse 2, and they just released their flight plan for circumnavigating the globe. This won’t be a continuous flight—the pair will fly around the world in legs, making occasional pit stops. The trip starts in March in Abu Dhabi....

At 12:30 p.m. EST today, January 24, more than 5 million pounds of thrust erupted into the ground of historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center as SpaceX conducted a static test fire of the Falcon Heavy rocket. “This hit you like a wave,” said reporter Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceflight.com who posted a livestream of the test from Florida. Gebhardt, who has witnessed multiple space shuttle missions, said the test was “like nothing I have ever experienced before....

A few weeks ago, when I went on local TV to chauffeur a news anchor who didn’t have a license and explain why the Tesla Model 3 won our magazine’s Car of the Year award, I screwed up in two ways.First, I failed to say “Popular Mechanics” on air, which I’m told I should do whenever possible. Second, I talked about the car like a car salesman on his first day....

Today, Google announced “Google Fi,” the grown-up version of its experiment in being a wireless service provider. It’s compatible with all sorts of phones, including iPhones, and if you’ve got one, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Back in 2015, Google announced the beta version of this program, “Project Fi.” Like the plan you would buy from Sprint or Verizon or T-Mobile, it would give you phone service, text, and internet capabilities....

Waze, the popular hivemind traffic app, has a new enemy: the NYPD. Police are upset that the app is warning drivers about upcoming checkpoints where cops are checking for drunk drivers, and they’re asking the Google-owned app to knock it off. CBS New York has obtained a letter from the NYPD to Waze’s developer, Google, demanding that the app no longer identify DWI (driving while impaired) checkpoints. Ann Prunty, acting deputy commissioner for legal matters for the NYPD, said this:“This letter serves to put you on notice that the NYPD has become aware that the Waze Mobile application, a community-driven GPS navigation application owned by Google LLC, currently permits the public to report DWI checkpoints throughout New York City and map these locations on the application....

While all the hype is swirling around self-driving cars, self-driving trucks, self-driving trains, and self-driving vacuums but there are so many other important tasks the robots can learn to do for themselves. Fortunately, endeavoring engineers are busy exploring this area of development and one, who goes by Human Controller, has found the pinnacle of autonomous engineering: a Rubik’s cube that solves itself. Related StoriesYou Should Finally Learn To Solve a Rubik’s CubeRobot Solves a Rubik’s Cube in 0....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen you turn on a high-definition broadcast, you assume that your TV will come to life with the crispest, sharpest picture imaginable. But the fact is, hi-def doesn’t always mean high quality.The standards for what qualifies as HD—the ones that go into effect with the big digital TV changeover in February—were set by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) back in the 1990s, and really only involved one major qualification: having a whole lot of pixels....

For decades, astrophysicists have pondered the odd movements of galaxies across the cosmos. The visible matter of the universe appears to be tugged around by an invisible counterpart, material that does not interact with surrounding matter in any observable way save gravity: dark matter. Refined measurements have since led scientists to hypothesize that 85 percent of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, while only 15 percent accounts for you, me, the planet, the stars, and everything else we can see....

A salt flat in the Meridiani region of Mars may be the remnants of one of the last salty lakes on the Red Planet before it became a dry, cold desert. Located near the equator, the region is being compared to areas like the Bonneville Salt Flats on Earth, where bodies of water once evaporated, leaving behind salt formations.At most, the region is 3.6 billion years old and the depth of the remaining salt deposits lead the researchers to estimates on its salinity....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on VimeoLumberjacks and limberjills worldwide made the annual trek to Hayward, Wis., this summer to compete in the Lumberjack World Championships, striving for new heights, records, and personal glory. They brought with them an arsenal of axes, hot saws with snowmobile engines, and cleats for quick footwork on wood climbing and running. “This is truly the Olympics of the Forest,” said Diane McNamer, the biggest cheerleader and organizer for the event....

WhatsApp launched in 2009 and quickly became one of the most-popular messaging apps in existence—it’s now up to 1.5 billion monthly users from over 180 countries, with 60 billion messages sent every day. WhatsApp is free and allows you to sidestep international calling rates by making audio and video calls over Wi-Fi or data. For ease-of-use and security, it’s hard to beat. If you’re new to the app, here’s a few things to keep in mind....