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Researchers subjected military helmets from World War I and today to primary blast testing.Helmets for military use have focused on preventing artillery and striking injury, not primary blast. The force wave generated by an explosion itself is the primary blast, where moving air strikes the body.In a new paper, researchers compare 100-year-old military helmet technology to what soldiers use today, and the results may surprise you. These researchers wanted to study how helmets endure primary blast neurotrauma, which is a little-considered aspect to what helmets can do to protect soldiers....

While magnets can take all kinds of forms, like the ones that hold up papers on refrigerators or the electromagnets that are made of copper and wire, they’re usually solids. But for the first time, scientists have created a permanently magnetic liquid.And they did it by accident.The discovery, made at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, allows for scientists to manipulate the magnetic matter. Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was a senior author on the paper, told LiveScience that scientists could “make magnets that are liquid and they could conform to different shapes—and the shapes are really up to you....

A man who has been paralyzed for 5 years has, with the help of an implanted stimulator and years of physical therapy, walked across the distance of a football field.The 29-year old man, named Jered Chinnock, was injured in a snowmobile accident in 2013. The devastating injury to the middle of his back meant a total loss of function below the point of injury. Now, extensively working with the Mayo Clinic, Chinnock has been able to take 331 steps, walk with assistance for 16 uninterrupted minutes, and move at a speed of 13 yards per minute (0....

Media Platforms Design TeamPittsburgh’s Greenfield Bridge had connected Schenley Park to the neighborhood of Greenfield for 94 years by the time city planners decided it was time to topple the bridge to make way for a new one. In a video of the demolition by Pennsylvania’s Trib Total Media, you can hear a worker yell “fire in the hole!” just before the charges are set off. View full post on YoutubeA local 47-year-old cafeteria manager won a community raffle that gave her the right to press the plunger and detonate the 1,400 pounds of dynamite that brought down the bridge....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design TeamAs reported by The New York Times, a ring of Russian hackers has stolen 1.2 billion unique username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses. This is the largest known haul of private Internet data to date.Hold Security, a company based in Milwaukee, made the discovery, but will not say which websites were attacked....

Ever since the invention of penicillin, doctors have used antibiotics to kill hostile bacteria and end infections, but over the past few decades we’ve seen strains of bacteria that are resistant to all the antibiotics doctors use. These so-called ‘superbugs’ present a serious threat to patients and to the public because we have nothing that can really counter them.Researchers from Case Western Reserve University may have found a solution to this problem, and it doesn’t involve antibiotics at all....

Little things add up. Look no further than the Arctic: A new study shows that ice samples from the Arctic Ocean contain 12,000 microplastic particles per liter of sea ice, the highest measurement ever taken.“During our work, we realized that more than half of the microplastic particles trapped in the ice were less than a twentieth of a millimeter wide, which means they could easily be ingested by arctic microorganisms like ciliates, but also by copepods,” says Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) biologist Dr....

Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs division, also known as Skunk Works, is proposing a stealth tanker for the U.S. Air Force capable of flying over defended airspace and passing gas to friendly aircraft. The so-called “KC-Z” would allow short-ranged U.S. fighters like the F-35 the ability to fly farther, penetrating deeper into enemy airspace to hold more targets at risk.Lockheed Martin, which lost the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray unmanned carrier refueling contract to Boeing, appears to be pitching its entry for the Stingray program for the U....

Using solar power and what they refer to “super sponges,” a team of engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a neat, and potentially life-saving, magic trick: pulling water out of thin air. The sponges are actually hydrogels, gel-polymer hybrid materials that are designed to hold and contain substantial amounts of water. The Texas team focused on combining the abilities of an especially absorbent hydrogel known as hygroscopic polypyrrole chloride with one that is reacts to heat called isopropylacrylamide....

The country that brought you the Spanish Armada is having hair-tearing problems with the latest submarine to join the fleet. The Isaac Peral, the first in class of a new generation of Spanish Navy attack submarines, is too large to fit in its future port. The submarine was enlarged after a design flaw introduced doubts it could reliably rise to the surface.The Spanish Navy ordered four S-80 diesel electric attack submarines in 2003, to replace the aging, Cold War-era Agosta class....

Bed bugs have been annoying—for a very long time. A study published in Current Biology shows that bedbugs are nearly 100 million years old—nearly twice as old as bats which were previously thought to be the first carriers of bedbugs. In fact, bedbugs were around during the same time as the T. rex though it’s unlikely that the blood-sucking critters fed on dino DNA. This is due to the fact that bedbugs glom on to animals that live in stationary homes (nests, burrows), which was a habit that dinosaurs—who were roamers—never adopted....

For Floridians fleeing Hurricane Irma who happened to own Teslas, the car company had some unusual news: Their cars could suddenly drive further. The automaker has remotely unlocked the full battery pack capacity of Model S/X 60/60D vehicles, giving them the power of 75 kWh battery packs.As with any new car purchase, Tesla owners are presented with a series of options when they buy. Among these are the distances their batteries will take them....

The Pentagon is building a pilot’s little helper. A new AI under development, called Skyborg, would act either as a robotic co-pilot or drone wingman, performing important tasks while the human pilot flies and fights the aircraft. Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, says the Air Force Research Lab is currently building a “completely game-changing” technology. According to C4ISRNET, Roper compared Skyborg to R2-D2 of Star Wars fame, Luke Skywalker’s trusty droid that nestled behind the cockpit in a X-Wing fighter....

The United States Navy wants a new “ambulance” ship that would have just enough medical facilities to treat lightly or moderately injured troops. The service included a funding request to convert an expeditionary fast transport ship typically used to move troops and equipment around to instead harbor medical facilities and personnel. The proposal to create such an ambulance ship is in the Navy’s Unfunded Priorities list for fiscal year 2020. Unfunded priorities lists, forwarded to Congress every year by each of the services, consist of “nice to have” items that the service didn’t officially request in the annual budget but would still like to have if Congress is feeling generous....

Media Platforms Design TeamDesigning the Team USA bobsleds for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics took an interesting turn when BMW got involved. The American arm of the Bavarian automaker has created six new autoclave, carbon-fiber sleds with a reimagined shape, weight distribution, and approach to aerodynamics.Michael Scully, creative director at BMW Group’s DesignWorksUSA in California, who has designed multiple BMW racers such as the Formula BMW FB02 race car, tells PopMech that BMW first got involved simply as a Team USA sponsor but then met with the team to find out whether the company’s advanced manufacturing techniques could improve the sleds....

A group of scientists have created the world’s first computer simulation of an entire gene. Their simulation features over a billion atoms and could help revolutionize our understanding of how genes operate.At the fundamental level, genes control everything about us. Your genes are the blueprint behind your entire life. They control what you look like, but they also control every minute detail of your body’s functions. Everything from digesting food to replicating cells is dictated by your genes; specifically, whether and how they are activated....

Seismic, a new clothing company, revealed its first line of what it calls “powered clothing,” aiming to help wearers with ailing muscles and joints. And it’s first product, which debuted today at TechCrunch Disrupt and will be available later this year, is underwear.“Our first product is integrating what we call intelligent wearable strength, focused on the core,” says CEO Rich Mahoney, speaking to TechCrunch. “It symbiotically provides assistant to the hips and lower back to support mobility and posture....

Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology are worried about the future of U.S. weather satellites, which may include a gap in coverage that could leave the U.S. without crucial satellite data for over a year.NOAA (the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) maintains two types of satellites: Geostationary (or GOES series), which provide continuous images of the earth from a fixed point about 22,000 miles up, and Polar-orbiting (or JPSS series), which circle 500 miles above the planet and provide the images used in long-range forecasting....

Astronomers may have finally cracked the enigma of why the universe’s brightest galaxies are so incredibly luminous. Over the past 50 years or so, astronomers have observed certain galaxies in our universe—called submillimeter galaxies (SMGs)—that outshine other galaxies by hundreds of times over. These rabid, glowing galaxies also give birth to stars thousands of times faster than our own Milky Way does. But ever since their discovery, exactly what exactly causes these ultra-bright galaxies to become so radiant has been a longstanding mystery....

Jupiter has had its share of visitors. The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, as well as Voyagers 1 and 2, flew by the gas giant in the 1970s. Ulysses, Cassini, and New Horizons all passed by the planet for gravity assists to get to their ultimate destinations. The Galileo probe orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, and Juno has been there since 2016.“Valetudo is like driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road....