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Media Platforms Design TeamThe 2011 B-Class F-Cell by Mercedes-Benz.These days automakers are teaming up to develop the next wave of zero-emission tech: hydrogen fuel cells, which generate power by combining hydrogen gas with oxygen. Just last Thursday, Toyota and BMW finalized their alliance to co-develop a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) powertrain—cell, hydrogen, tank, motor, and battery—aiming for completion by 2020. Today, Daimler AG, Ford, and Renault-Nissan penned an agreement to do the same thing, but with a more ambitious 2017 completion date....

Is there really a connection between mathematics and music?A serial kidnapper has a habit of snatching only those who are masterminds in their respective fields, from engineers to astrophysicists. This kidnapper had abducted two very different people–Ben, a child piano prodigy who is composing a piece of music, and Dashiell, a now-institutionalized genius struggling to complete a mathematical equation–for a singular purpose. It doesn’t take long for the link between music and math to build....

Media Platforms Design TeamA flimsy metal hut bursting with rusty shovels, bent rakes and unused badminton sets doesn’t do much to solve a storage problem. On the other hand, a well-designed, carefully built garden shed can be more than a place to keep birdseed and lawnmowers. It can be the perfect spot to grow plants, make crafts, or simply find some peace and quiet away from the daily clamor.“For better or worse, a building in your yard is going to be a focal point,” says Portland, Ore....

IBM will be making a super-powerful quantum computer available for commercial use. Quantum computers operate on the atomic level, which allows them to process data at speeds unimaginable to classical computers like the one you’re using to read this article. IBM has announced that its 14th quantum computer, its most powerful to date, will be available to customers starting in October. At its core, the system has 53 qubits of processing power....

As of right now, astronomers have discovered 1,827 confirmed exoplanets, and they have their suspicions about 4,604 additional candidates. Not bad considering we’ve only known for sure there were other planets around ordinary main sequence stars since 1995. But we’ve only just begun the hunt for new worlds, as this new map shows.JPL released this map of our galaxy that shows where we’ve discovered exoplanets. It’s easy to forget amid the haul of new discoveries, but we’ve only taken a small sampling of the stars that are out there....

A giant penguin fossil indicating that the bird reached an impressive height of more than 5 feet tall has been found near Christchurch, New Zealand.Additional penguin species have been found in the same area and are currently being analyzed.Scientists have discovered fossil evidence of a giant penguin (Crossvallia waiparensis) in New Zealand. The “monster penguin,” as the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch affectionately calls it, was the size of a human, standing at 5'3" and weighing a mighty 176 pounds....

A Richard Nixon deepfake created by MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality shows the former president giving a speech about the moon landings—and noting that all astronauts on board the Apollo 11 had died. The video, released in Amsterdam in late November, illustrates how dangerous deepfake technology truly is in an era of internet-based misinformation.MIT will make the video available online in spring 2020. Deepfake technology makes the impossible, possible—well, at least visually possible....

Russia’s Ministry of Defense has unveiled a short video showing the launch of the new Kinzhal hypersonic weapon system. The missile, based on a land-based tactical missile, is designed to penetrate American defenses and deliver a tactical nuclear warhead. The video includes some strange moments, including mysterious blurred sections that may or may not be hiding something important.The short video was uploaded to YouTube and features two pilots rushing to their MiG-31 Foxhound jet fighter, inspecting the attached Kinzhal missile, and taking off....

Media Platforms Design TeamCarroll Shelby wasn’t an engineer, never went to college, and, if he’d had it his way, likely would have made a living racing high-performance cars instead of designing and building them. But his simple philosophy on how to build a fast car influenced many designers: “Put a big, powerful engine in a little car,” he once told Popular Mechanics. “That’s where you start.“Shelby, the larger-than-life automotive legend, died Thursday evening at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, reportedly of pneumonia....

Media Platforms Design TeamHelp! Someone has hijacked my Facebook account and is posting nasty things about me. How can I regain control and get rid of the embarrassing lies?Anyone with malicious intent and a little bit of tech savvy has a frightening number of options at his disposal if he is interested in taking over a Facebook account. In 2010 Seattle software engineer Eric Butler developed Firesheep, a Firefox extension that made it easy to hijack unencrypted browsing sessions on a public network....

Stephen Hawking, the legendary physicist and author of popular science books such as A Brief History of Time, passed away in the early hours of Wednesday morning at his home in the U.K. Says the AP: The best-known theoretical physicist of his time, Hawking wrote so lucidly of the mysteries of space, time and black holes that his book, A Brief History of Time, became an international bestseller, making him one of science’s biggest celebrities since Albert Einstein....

Flying laser weapons are coming. The U.S. Air Force is on track to test its first airborne laser weapons by 2021. Lasers attached to fighter jets, drones, or even cargo planes will attack targets on the ground and in the air at the speed of light, making the assaults nearly impossible for enemy forces to dodge. The Air Force has long had an interest in making laser weapons a reality. Lasers are ideal weapons for combat aircraft—in theory, anyhow—because the number of “shots” is limited only by the weapon’s power supply....

The Marine Corps’ long delayed F-35B jet is ready to fly. Somewhere. Sometime. The Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 is the first unit with the F-35 variant in its fleet, and the military branch ordered 10 of the jets.Of course, after $400 billion, it still can’t win in a dog fight against other, older jets. (Although F-35 proponents would point out that the F-35’s long-range strike capabilities ostensibly mean it would never be in one in the first place....

Early Saturday morning, an Atlas V rocket is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California carrying NASA’s next mission to the surface of Mars, the InSight lander. InSight’s main body is very similar to the Phoenix spacecraft that landed on Mars in 2008, and it will carry two primary science instruments to the Red Planet: a high-sensitivity seismometer to measure “marsquakes” (sensitive enough to detect the oceans from Colorado) and a heat probe attached to a self-hammering “mole” that will burrow 3 meters below the surface....

The U.S. Navy is developing an underwater charging station for its unmanned undersea vehicles. The technology, which does away with cables, will make it easier for drones to recharge at sea.Wireless charging technology, also known as inductive charging technology, was pioneered commercially for smartphones and tablets. It involves simply setting your phone down on a flat charging mat. Wireless chargers emit an alternating magnetic field, which induces an alternating current in a receiver coil in the device....

The folks at Periodic Videos recently filmed a couple of experiments where a small amount of metallic potassium was suddenly introduced to water with explosive results. Where this differs from your usual high school chemistry experiment is the fact that they did so underwater.View full post on YoutubeAlkali metals react rather explosively with water, producing hydrogen and a hydroxide. Essentially it makes otherwise stable water molecules, er, unstable. Thus the sudden, energetic reactions....

How does one study the formation of a galaxy? Or the formation of the oldest thing known to exist, the universe? There are many ways, including powerful telescopes both on land and in space. But Peter Behroozi, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Steward Observatory, and his team, came up with a different method: generating millions of different universes on a supercomputer.Examining all the generated universes together, Behroozi’s team hoped, would show the likelihood of different physical theories of universal and galactic formation....

We’ll be the first to admit it: The mere idea of offering your ladyfriend a technological doodad on the most sacred day of the romantic calendar might seem to miss the point of the holiday altogether. After all, love can’t be stored on a hard drive, or soldered to a circuit board. And many ladies have come to expect standard-issue Valentine’s presents from chocolate to flowers and jewelry–gifts that are sweet, pretty and, if possible, sparkly....

The U.S. Marine Corps is replacing its existing sniper rifles with a newer model that fires a heavier, longer-range bullet. The new Mark 13 Mod 7 sniper rifle, a favorite of Navy SEALs is replacing the older M40 series of rifles. The result is a more accurate rifle with the potential to hit targets at nearly three quarters of a mile.The M40 series of sniper rifles has served the Marine Corps for more than 50 years....

Recovering from surgery is a feat enough on its own so you can only imagine the additional shock of a Welsh man who woke up from surgery to find that his car had been completely destroyed after “maladministration” from the local government.As reported by the BBC, in November 2016, a man known to the media as Mr. G went into Wrexham Maelor Hospital in northern Wales for ankle surgery. When he returned to his apartment in Flintshire, also in north Wales, he found that his BMW 323 wasn’t in his designated parking space....