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So while just one Zumwalt sails the ocean America’s naval fleet—unlike the Russian one—continues to grow. The above timelapse shows the latest warship to join the fleet, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer the USS Ralph Johnson. The video shows final three days of work before the ship was set into the water—the Johnson won’t officially be christened until 2016.The USS Ralph Johnson (named after a Vietnam-era Marine who saved two comrades by jumping on top of a grenade) is the 30th active-duty Arleigh Burke-class missile destroyer to built by Huntington Ingalls Industries, by far the largest manufacturer of U....

The U.S. Army and Marines have placed an order for 768 Barrett MRAD rifles.The MRAD is a multi-caliber sniper weapon capable of serving in a wider variety of environments than previous weapons.One of the most useful features of the new rifle is the ability to change barrels with a single tool. The U.S. Army, Marine Corps are placing orders for a new sniper rifle designed to operate in a variety of conditions against different types of targets and at different ranges....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat was your inspiration for the movie? I think being a teenager, you’re always surrounded by this vampire crazemostly from Twilight. I really wanted to make a teen vampire movie from a real teenager’s perspective, and I’m a really geeky kid, so I put a lot of that into my story. Why set it at a convention? As a dork, I’ve been to sci-fi conventions, and my first movie played at a convention in Minneapolis called Convergence....

The southern United States is a vast expanse of fields and undeveloped land, much of of which has been used for growing tobacco for hundreds of years. Tobacco is a terrific cash crop, and tobacco farmers make lots of money selling it but a new analysis from Michigan Tech finds that these farmers could make even more money harvesting sunlight.The Michigan Tech researchers looked at tobacco farms in South Carolina, where much of the country’s tobacco is produced and calculated the point at which farmers could make more money farming energy given the falling rates of tobacco use in the United States....

View full post on VimeoMeet HitchBot. It’s Canadian, about as tall as a six-year-old, and has a serious travel bug. It’s on a mission to hitchhike across our neighbor nation to the north, relying on the kindness of Canadians the entire way.Professors at McMaster University and Ryerson University developed HitchBot as a collaborative art project. “Usually, we are concerned whether we can trust robots,” they said in a statement. “But this project takes it the other way and asks: Can robots trust human beings?...

Nothing fills a person with dread quite like a misbehaving refrigerator, whether the appliance is humming but not cooling or has started mysteriously leaking water. Buying a new fridge is expensive, but some repairs can cost more than the appliance is worth, and all the while it can be hard for a homeowner or DIYer to know just how serious the problem is. Terry Spencer is a licensed service technician with RepairClinic, which sells appliance parts online and features thousands of how-to videos for repairing appliances....

An Indonesian teenager has been rescued from the ocean after spending 49 days adrift at sea. The 19-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang was rescued by a passing cargo ship and taken to Japan, where he’s made a full recovery and returned home to Indonesia.Related Story9 Fortunate Souls Who Survived Being Lost at SeaAldi works as a ‘lamp keeper,’ a type of fisherman common in southeast Asia. For months, Aldi and other lamp keepers would live on small rafts called rompongs, lighting lamps to attract and catch fish....

Okay, it happened again. A buddy of mine is a contractor and spends his spare time buying houses and flipping them for a profit. He’ll do all of the wiring, plumbing, heating and air-conditioning work on a house. He’ll even tackle the framing, drywall and finish work, too. He’s got some nice old stuff in the garage, and he has no problem ripping into the engine of his 30-year-old muscle car or his vintage Norton motorcycle....

On Monday, the Juno spacecraft will enter Jupiter’s orbit for its first pass around the giant planet, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait three days for some cool Juno science. Over the past week, Juno crossed two thresholds that mark the official boundaries of Jupiter’s space. On June 24, Juno crossed Jupiter’s bow shock, and the next day, Juno crossed the magnetopause.Because Juno has a suite of onboard sensors, it recorded the sound of these transitions, and sent them back to Earth where NASA has helpfully put them in a video for your viewing pleasure....

Squeezing experts have put lead under pressure and found it grows 250 times stronger.Potentially useful materials like liquid hydrogen are the result of extreme and pressurized environments in space.Studying extremes in all materials can reveal hidden strengths and applications.Science News reports that researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been putting lead under pressure, and the results are stronger than steel. Sorry, spider silk—this time it’s for real. Lead is dense and super heavy, but it’s also easily malleable and soft....

Iran (and Russia) back one side of the ongoing Yemen Civil War. Saudi Arabia (and the United States) back the other.Houthi rebels in Yemen fired missiles at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in November. The U.S. accuses Iran of violating a 2015 embargo against allowing arms to reach Yemen.In November, missiles coming from Yemen bombarded the airport Riyadh, rattling Saudi Arabia and upping the ante in this explosive little war....

In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA two powerful spy satellites it no longer needed. The agency spent several months figuring out what to do with them. And now, finally, work is underway to bring the WFIRST fleet into reality. The mirror in the telescopes are the same size as the one in Hubble, but adaptive optics and a wide field imager will give WFIRST 100 times the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope....

Over the holiday break, I was asked by family and friends if they should give Star Trek: Discovery a shot. After explaining the stupidity of CBS All Access, the exclusive and terrible streaming site for the show, I was having a difficult time expressing full-throated support. Yes, Star Trek was right there in the name. The Federation. Klingons. All of it. But that’s all window dressing. It was the heart of Discovery—the characters and the story—that I was concerned about....

Want a job? The demand for most trades is strong and getting stronger. The U.S. Department of Labor forecasts healthy growth in the neighborhood of 8 to 9 percent over the next decade. Jobs associated with building and rebuilding roads, bridges, water, and the power grid are expected to grow by double-digit percentages—faster than the overall economy. Jobs for plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters are projected to grow 16 percent during this same time period....

UPDATE: The scheduled launch of the LISA Pathfinder mission has been postponed due to a technical issue and is likely to launch tomorrow. At 11:15 p.m. tonight, you can watch the launch of the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder mission. The craft will launch from a Vega rocket out of the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana. The mission involves a launch vehicle with two free-falling masses inside placed about 15 inches apart....

This image of the star called π1 Gruis (or Pi1 Gruis, from an early 19th century naming scheme) is perhaps the most detailed image of the surface of a star that’s not the sun.“The record keeps getting overthrown,” says Fabien Baron, co-author of a new study about π1 Gruis and assistant professor of astronomy at Georgia State University, in an email to Popular Mechanics. “It’s basically a function of how fine the details you can see are… A very large star on which you can get high spatial resolution will be the most detailed....

Buzzfeed got the President to use a selfie stick.The video, made in conjunction with Obama’s interview with Buzzfeed’s editor-in-chief, is called “Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About,” and features the man who commands the world’s most powerful military making silly faces at himself in a mirror, trying on sunglasses while doing finger guns, drawing a “Napoleon Dynamite”-ish picture of Michelle, and, of course, using a selfie-stick. The leader of the free world also fails at dunking his cookie in milk and shoots imaginary basketballs into imaginary hoops in the Oval Office....

Turkey has unveiled a new drone, the Songar.Songar is Turkey’s first armed drone and is equipped with an onboard machine gun.The drone is advertised as a defensive weapon but could be used offensively.Turkey has unveiled the country’s first armed drone, a small tactical unmanned aerial vehicle designed to provide fire support for convoys or defensive positions, day or night, to ranges of up to six miles. The drone is not only armed with cameras but a light machine gun....

We’re standing on a cliff. If we don’t act fast to reduce our carbon emissions, we could see extreme temperature rises over this century. The Paris Agreement sets a limit of around 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming. Any more risks severe climate change effects, like flooding and droughts.So how long do we have until that 3 degree warming threshold is reached? Well it all depends on how much carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere, but at our current emissions rate we have until 2021....

Aerion Corporation announced this week that it is expanding its partnership with Airbus Group to construct a supersonic passenger jet. If all goes smoothly, Aerion’s AS2 program will formally launch in mid-2016 when the company selects a location for a new manufacturing plant somewhere in the U.S. They will break ground on the assembly site in 2018, with the goal of completing the first flight of the Aerion AS2 in 2021, and the first commercial flight with FAA certification in 2023....