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Scientists discovered a strange, tall, humanoid wooden figure under four meters of peat in a Russian bog. The figure, dubbed the Shirgir Idol (after the bog where it was found), is more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Gold miners stumbled upon pieces of the wooden figure in 1894. 100 years later, radiocarbon dating helped researchers trace the sculpture back some 9,900 years, which made it the oldest monumental sculpture in the world....

A longtime advocate for time travel is back in the public eye with his theory of looping time using lasers.Some experts theorize that technology, like extreme acceleration, will enable time travel.Ronald Mallett is held up by the funds required to do a feasibility study of his prototype device.Ronald Mallett, one of the world’s leading authorities on the arguments for the possibility of time travel, will celebrate his 45th anniversary as a University of Connecticut physics faculty member this year....

The viability of a renewable energy future relies on the ready supply of REEs, or rare-earth elements. There are 17 REEs in the periodic table and, though the name suggests otherwise, they are actually plentiful in the earth’s crust. The challenge is that these elements are not often concentrated in ore deposits, which makes them expensive and unreliable as an extractable resource for domestic use or export. This in part explains the shortage of these materials being extracted in the United States....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe painful, if brief, Chapter 11 bankruptcy GM endured earlier this year was apparently not enough to change the face of General Motors. Nor was the White House’s ouster of CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr. last March. The new chairman of GM, Ed Whitacre, and its newly minted board of directors moved to replace CEO Fritz Henderson Tuesday, Dec. 1, the day before the CEO was to deliver the keynote speech at the Los Angeles Auto Show....

Media Platforms Design TeamBuild a Battery TesterAn Arduino can be used to test the life of any battery with less than 5 volts, Boxall says. So, for a quick way to see how much juice your AAA, AA, C, or D batteries have left, build this Arduino-based battery tester, which can display battery life via a string of LEDs.Roll the DiceThe next time you’re playing Monopoly, take a technological steup up from rolling plastic cubes by making Boxall’s Arduino electronic die, which chooses a random number between 1 and 6 and displays it via a corresponding LED....

During just two weeks of diving in September, a team of American and Greek archaeologists discovered the sites of 22 ancient shipwrecks in a single 17-square-mile area near the Fourni archipelago in the eastern Aegean Sea. In an area as big as the ocean, that’s an awful lot, awful fast. The find’s an unprecedented cluster, and an archeological gold mine. Local fishermen and sponge divers tipped off the archaeologists to the locations of the wrecks....

When IBM released its729 Magnetic Tape Unit in 1959, Eisenhower was the sitting president. Alaska and Hawaii had just been admitted to the union as full-fledge states. No human had yet been in space. And debugging computers was very, very different than it is today. IBM’s 729 storage device kept its data on half-inch-wide strips of tape that could be nearly half a mile long, queued up for read-write access by no less than eight internal motors and the help of a few vacuum tubes to cushion rapid jolts that would threaten to snap the ribbons in half....

Facebook (and its subsidiary Instagram) have a rather bizarre hidden feature. It only seems to work on public photos, but it’s something like this: if you go into the code and find the image address, and it isn’t garbled with a bunch of stuff after “.jpg,” then you should be able to add .txt or .html after that image address to get either black and white or color ASCII art of that photo, respectively....

As surely as time passes or clouds float through the sky, Facebook is embroiled in self-manufactured scandal. Less than a week after the social network disclosed a bug that made millions of user photos accessible to third-party developers, the New York Times published a bombshell report outlining more of the alarming ways Facebook abused trust to shovel user data to advertisers and corporate partners. Bubbling up from the revelations that are so routine as to become boring is that increasingly unavoidable fact: Facebook isn’t for you....

There’s a technological revolution brewing in warfare. Silent and invisible, it relies on high intensity pulses of light to kill or incapacitate, all at the speed of light. After decades of promises and false starts, lasers are at last finally entering military service. And warfare will never be the same. The first laser was demonstrated by Theodore Maiman in California’s Hughes Research Laboratory in 1960. But it’s taken over 50 years to make them practical battlefield weapons, overcoming numerous technological hurdles along the way....

It’s already being called the Great American Eclipse, and it’s coming on August 21, 2017. For the first time in 38 years, the shadow of a total solar eclipse will cross the lower 48 of the United States.If you have seen a partial solar eclipse and think there is no reason to see a total one, think again. In a partial eclipse, you must use those little cardboard pinhole viewers to see the sun’s disk projected onto a piece of paper so as not to hurt your eyes....

Bridgestone Tires is partnering with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to develop a special tire that can withstand harsh conditions on the moon. Along with JAXA, the tire company is working with Toyota, which is developing designs for the rover itself. Bridgestone revealed updated designs for its lunar tires at the Commercial Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.If you think driving on beach sand is bad, try rolling around on the moon....

Media Platforms Design TeamOne of the greatest things about Solar Decathlon is the chance to learn new housing concepts from college students with a preternatural grasp of the homebuilding industry they’re preparing to enter. At Penn State’s Natural Fusion house, the word of the day was–apologies to the solar gurus well familiar with the term–albedo. The albedo, also known as the extent to which surfaces reflect sunlight, is essential to Penn State’s round solar photovoltaic panels from Solyndra....

Q: I live in Wyoming and have a 1999 Ford F450 dually with a 460 engine. Every summer as soon as the temp gets above 80 degrees, I cannot drive this truck because of vapor locking. I have determined that the gas is getting hot from the engine and outside temp. As the fuel goes to the tank, in the return lines, and then is pumped back to the engine it eventually gets to the stage of vaporizing ....

Stratolaunch, a gigantic twin-fuselage aircraft built by Scaled Composites for Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems, is inching closer and closer to first flight. On February 26, Paul Allen tweeted out a video of the biggest airplane in the world by wingspan, 385 feet from tip to tip, conducting taxi tests at the Mojave Air & Space Port that brought the mothership up to 40 knots, or about 46 mph. This represents an increase of about 15 knots since Stratolaunch rolled down the taxiway under its own power for the first time in December....

Sure, springs seem simple, and in essence they are. What’s not to get about coils of wire that compress under tension and story energy through their tendency to re-expand and return to their original shape? But if you actually go and make some of your own, for whatever reason, turns out there are a few things you’d want to know. As this surprisingly in-depth overview from YouTuber This Old Tony explains, they require a little bit of special equipment....

Model: Protel XP1230
Produced: Lakeland, FL Number of Parts: 453Time to Disassemble: 4 hours, 45 minutesNotes: For years,if you were away from home and wanted to make a phone call, pay phones were your only option. Even now that most of us have phones in our pockets, pay phones aren’t going anywhere. The FCC suggests having them in certain places for the sake of public safety or welfare (such as out- side a police station, where you might need to make a call after being arrested)....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: John de Cristofaro)Keep your Moto 360 and keep your Apple Watch. I have seen the watch for me and it runs on a AA battery.Brooklyn-based electrical engineer John de Cristofaro invented this cyberpunk wristwear. The centerpiece—that old-school cool display—is a Soviet surplus VFD display tube that de Cristofaro found on eBay, Motherboard reports. The rest of it is made from brass tubing an a circuit board....

There really is no other way to put it: using your phone while driving will always be dangerous. Even if you only use its GPS capability to help you with navigation, having to glance over the screen periodically still takes your eyes off the road. According to the NHTSA, getting distracted for even a mere 5 seconds is like blindly driving the length of an entire football field at 55 MPH....

The United States Air Force has deployed six B-52H bombers to Europe, where the heavy strategic bombers are conducting exercises that take them close to Russia. The exercise appears to be a tit-for-tat gesture for recent Russian bomber flights in the Arctic near Alaska. Russian fighter jets have performed intercepts of the bombers as they fly over international airspace, with Moscow posting the videos on social media.The bombers, six B-52Hs from the 2nd Bomb Wing in Barksdale, Louisiana, arrived at RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom on March 14th....