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A truck-mounted, multiple-barrel rocket launcher can send 48 missiles flying toward a target all in a minute. Such a launcher is highly mobile, very fast, relatively cheap, and easy to operate. No wonder a weapon like that is popular in conflict regions.But the launcher’s questionable quality can cause the missiles to occasionally misfire, which is why they often litter the ground in targeted areas. The problem, then, is finding them. Now scientists think they have the tech to easily track and retrieve them....

Yes, the microwave oven was invented accidentally, when a test for a magnetron melted an engineer’s snack in 1946.Raytheon engineer Perry Spencer “knack for finding simple solutions to manufacturing problems,” a current engineer at the same company says.Today, more than 90 percent of American homes have a microwave.The dull halogen light. The spinning glass plate. The humming that terminates in a “BEEP.” Today the sights, sounds, and smells of the microwave oven are immediately familiar to most Americans....

The Titanic is rapidly corroding, with some structures—such as the captain’s bathtub—already completely gone.Researchers are working to determine how much time the wreckage has before the Titanic disappears forever. It’s no surprise that the RMS Titanic is deteriorating at the bottom of the Atlantic. After all, it’s been hanging there since 1912 and has endured violent currents, salt corrosion, metal-eating bacteria, and James Cameron. But divers with the Deep Submergence Vehicle (DSV) Limiting Factor recently found that some structures within the ship have completely rotted away as the ocean continues to claim pieces of the wreckage....

Media Platforms Design Team Las Vegas– In the grandest days of the Consumer Electronics Show, meaning the last few years, the excess was kind of funny. Sharp releases the world’s largest LCD panel, and Panasonic fires back with a 150-in. plasma. When asked, both companies admitted that the target market is the millionaire, billionaire, NBA star or owner of a sports franchise, since the price tag was well past $100,000. CES let journalists glimpse the lives of the truly gadget elite, like crashing a party whose wealthy host you’ve never met....

If you were a Facebook friend of Dr. Daniel Pastula around 2014, you might have started to wish you’d gone to medical school. In one photo he posted, he was drinking a frozen cocktail on an island in Micronesia called Yap, where giant stones were once used as money. In another, he was wearing sunglasses on the beach in Fiji. At the time, Pastula was an officer in the Centers for Disease Control’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a two-year training appointment often called the “disease detective program....

Over the next few years, a new generation of telescopes are going to come online. Collectively, they will reveal new things about the universe we could only imagine, and they will surely challenge conventional wisdom in the fields of physics, astronomy, and cosmology. It’s an exciting era for science.Among the first of the next generation of powerful telescopes is China’s FAST radio telescope, which was completed last year. FAST is a gigantic radio dish built into a natural depression in China’s Guizhou province, and is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world....

If you’ve still got an Apple II computer, you’d better install the new software update.The Apple II launched in 1977, and went on to sell over 5 million units over the next two decades. The success of the Apple II singlehandedly transformed Apple from a hobbyist electronics company to a global tech powerhouse. By the time the Apple II was discontinued in 1993, it had spawned six different variations and revolutionized the computer industry....

Since the volcano Kilauea erupted on Hawaii’s Big Island on May 3, 36 structures in a nearby residential neighborhood have been destroyed by lava flows. The molten rock is pouring from at least 14 fissures in the volcano’s East Rift Zone, miles away from the summit. But the residents who were forced to evacuate now face a new threat: the sulfur dioxide gas that the volcano is releasing into the air....

Everyone talks about the weather, but it falls to civil engineers to actually do something about it. Weather and temperature affect everything we use, from car batteries to bridges. When temperature causes changes in structure, it’s referred to as thermal expansion or thermal contraction, and it’s a phenomenon. you have to carefully control for if you’re building a bridge or a sidewalk. Practical Engineering took a look at how the weather affects everything, even something as simple as walking down the street....

A rare form of cancer that mostly affects children can be detected through a cellphone camera, thanks to a telltale pupil glow.Retinoblastoma is especially aggressive, and if left untreated, it can be fatal. Even when non-fatal, it results in blindness and the patient often has to have the eye removed. One way to catch it early, though, is with a camera: Usually it shows up in photos as a whitish glow on the pupil—often reflected light emitted by the camera flash....

The first time you set your phone on a wireless charger might feel like magic, but it’s a technology that actually goes back 130 years.➡ You love badass tech. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.Despite its long history, however, this tech is just now becoming ubiquitous. In fact, the wireless power market is expected to exceed $40 billion by 2027, according to Allied Market Research.So, how does this sci-fi like technology work, and why is it suddenly everywhere?...

Media Platforms Design Team DETROIT — The Mazda RX-8 is the world’s only mass-produced rotary-powered passenger car, and has been refreshed for 2009. It will now be available in four trim levels—Sport, Touring, Grand Touring, and a new R3 package catering to hardcore enthusiasts. The all-out R3 boasts a sport-tuned suspension with Bilstein shocks, and urethane foam-filled front suspension crossmembers intended to make the ride more compliant. 19-in. forged aluminum alloy wheels with sticky rubber should satisfy most weekend autocrossers, and the R3 appears more aggressive thanks to a rear spoiler, side sills, fog lights, and a sportier front bumper....

For the first time ever (officially, anyway), human sperm is headed to space. NASA is launching a mission to the International Space Station to study how fertilization could happen in space. The mission, called Micro-11, will bring frozen human and bull sperm samples aboard the space station. “Studying reproductive biology in space is useful because the unique environment of microgravity can reveal processes and connections not visible in gravity on Earth,” NASA writes....

On February 15, 2013, a massive explosion rocked the Russian province of Chelyabinsk. Felt for hundreds of miles and causing considerable property damage, the explosion was caused by a meteor that had entered the Earth’s atmosphere seconds before. But surely such an event couldn’t happen again in our lifetime, right?According to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, these sorts of meteor impacts could happen much more frequently than we might realize. In a statement made at the annual Planetary Defense Conference on Monday, Bridenstine quoted a paper estimating that a Chelyabinsk-type event could happen once every sixty years....

For the most part, Android users have it pretty good. Android users get to chose from a bevy of phones far more diverse than Apple’s offering, and enjoy a level of freedom that Apple users can’t even imagine. But a crucial missing feature has been something like Apple’s iMessage, which turns mere texting into something much more functional, letting you seamlessly send messages from a laptop or any other Apple device....

A massively gigantic ouija board, handmade by Rick ‘Ormortis’ Schreck, a tattoo artist and member of the Talking Board Historical Society (TBHS), was on display this weekend in Salem, MA.The board—which weighs a whopping 9,000 pounds—had to be disassembled and reassembled to make the trek from Schreck’s home in New Jersey down to Salem.Schreck received a certificate from the Guinness World Record organization making his creation officially the largest ouija board in the world....

Six years ago, a tsunami triggered a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Three of the plant’s six reactors experienced malfunctions in their cooling systems, and with these systems down, the reactor cores overheated and melted. The melted nuclear material escaped the reactors’ containment chambers, releasing radiation into the surrounding area.In the past six years, cleanup crews have been trying to locate these melted radioactive deposits and begin the process of removing them....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamFourth of July and fireworks. You can’t have one without the other. Fireworks have been an Independence Day tradition since 1777 when fledgling Americans blasted thirteen sparkling stars over Boston and Philadelphia to represent the thirteen colonies. In honor of the Fourth, Popular Mechanics has all your fireworks-related questions covered. For the science behind all kinds of fireworks from weenie-sized firecrackers to hardcore artillery shells, read With a Bang: The Science of Fireworks....

Nebulae are beautiful structures, often spanning dozens of light-years, but much about them is still a mystery. Specifically, how the gas and dust create those unique nebula shapes is difficult to understand. To learn more about how these nebulae form, researchers from the European Southern Observatory used the Very Large Telescope to peer inside one.The researchers chose the Saturn Nebula, which is named because of its resemblance to the planet Saturn....

Germany’s space research program, the German Aerospace Center (known as the DLR), is looking for a woman with the right stuff to stay in bed for 60 days to study weightlessness. Commissioned by NASA and the European Space Agency, the study will simulate weightlessness with sleep. Using what’s been deemed a “short-arm human centrifuge,” scientists hope to test two-thirds of study participants in the best ways to counteract the negative effects of zero-gravity....