Posts

The robots are coming for your job, but they’re also coming for your tomatoes. Specifically, they’re coming for your tomatoes while they’re on the vine so they can pick them and give them to you, while also taking your job picking tomatoes. Panasonic recently unveiled a new robot that can pick tomatoes from a vine as fast as a human worker:View full post on YoutubeAccording to Nikkei Technology, the robot is designed to pick up to 10 tomatoes per minute, rivaling the speed of most human workers....

An American aircraft carrier that fought in World War II and was then used as a target during postwar atomic testing has been located and explored. The carrier, sunk off the coast of San Francisco, was largely forgotten…until now.The USS Independence was a U.S. Navy light aircraft carrier and veteran of World War II. It was the lead of its class, designed to operate fewer airplanes while being faster and more economical to build....

NASA’s Mars Opportunity rover was supposed to last 90 days on the red planet. That was 11 years ago, and it’s still roving. The Mars Odyssey orbiter had a stated two-year mission, starting in 2002. Today it still collects data and acts as a communications hub for the rovers on the ground—and took the photos that proved near-conclusively that there’s seasonal water on Mars. It’s not just that the missions last beyond their expiration dates....

How can it even survive? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask about the Parker Space Probe. After all, its traveling into the outer layer of the sun, known as the corona, which is going to be closer to a star than any manmade object in history. The answer is that Parker has an amazing heat shield that will be handle just about anything, not to mention autonomous systems that will be constantly monitoring the Probe’s environmental conditions....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s no secret that the airline industry is in trouble. Surging energy costs and a global recession are taking their toll: The Air Transport Association, an industry trade group whose members include United, Delta and Jet Blue, reports that passenger revenue plummeted 21 percent in July 2009, compared to a year earlier. Furthermore, the association predicts that 1 million fewer people will fly during the travel-heavy week of Labor Day this year compared with last....

A new defense startup has invented a drone recover and launch system that uses vertically mounted pins to trap and release unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The system, which looks like a medieval torture device, can nab a drone from a moving platform and send it back out again—all without involving a person.The Talon device, developed by Target Arm, solves the problem of having to stop a vehicle in order to launch or deploy a fixed wing drone or quadcopter....

The Lilium Jet has completed a successful unmanned test flight. The small German company behind the jet hopes it will usher in the next great mode of transportation: urban flight.The company hopes to accept passengers in some capacity by 2025, but it will have stiff competition.Lilium, a Munich-based startup focused on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) flight for public use, has released a new video that shows its jet completing what the company calls its “first phase of flight testing....

At twilight on a clear November evening, CBP-104 rolls onto the tarmac at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., revs its 900-hp turboprop engine and takes off into the ruby desert sky. Banking left, it straightens and climbs on a southerly heading, leveling off at 19,000 ft. For the next few hours, CBP-104 will patrol a 30-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, its video and infrared cameras trained on the rugged landscape below.In some ways it’s a normal border patrol flight, much like the hundreds conducted every day by Custom and Border Protection (CBP), which maintains a fleet of 243 aircraft....

Monitoring productivity of laborers isn’t exactly a new idea. But monitoring construction workers using drones… That’s a new one.As the new stadium for the Sacramento Kings is being built in California, self-described “aerial media services” company Image in Flight is capturing video of its progress which is then processed using software developed by a University of Illinois team. Turner Construction, the company in charge of the stadium project, uses this analysis to better understand how different parts of the project are progressing (or aren’t)....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe 92nd Street Y’s lecture series, one of most distinguished public forums in New York City, has featured such notables as Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel addressing important issues of the day. On Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 7 pm, PM editor-in-chief Jim Meigs takes the stage to deliver a lecture titled “9/11 Conspiracies Rebuffed.” Conspiracy theories about the coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11 have persisted for the past decade, with hundreds of books and thousands of web pages devoted to idea that the U....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe all get the Facebook we deserve. But it might not be the Facebook that we want.In a feature for Wired yesterday, tech writer Mat Honan outlined the horrible fate that befell him following a two-day experiment to Like everything he saw on Facebook. No, this wasn’t just a project to find out how people would respond to his newly all-positive attitude. It was about seeing how Facebook works....

The middle of January isn’t the best time for braving the outdoors, but it is the best time to save big on camping and hiking gear for when those warmer days arrive.REI’s discounting several thousand items up to 50 percent off as part of its January Clearance Sale. Here are the things we’re personally adding to our carts.Coats/Jackets/ShirtsBUY NOWCotopaxiREI Stratocloud Down Hoodie: $94, down from $190.REI Vaporrush Windstopper: $79, down from $180....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a brilliant new social networking feature that will blow you away. With just a few clicks, you can see a complete history of your online interactions, view photos and videos you took years ago, and even check long-forgotten messages from friends and family.It may sound like I’m talking about the new Timeline feature in Facebook, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed. Instead, the company I’m talking about is i-Postmortem, a small startup in Palo Alto, Calif....

Mako sharks don’t make things easy on scientists. They’re pelagic, for one thing, which means they live in the open sea. And they’re fast. Faster than any other shark, believed to hit burst speeds of sixty miles per hour. Those factors have kept the mako largely unstudied, so much so that no one had seen live footage of a mako in its natural habitat. Paul Matusheski changed that. Matusheski is the executive producer of Monster Mako: Lightning of the Deep, a show that premieres as part of Discovery Channel’s cult phenomenon, Shark Week (starting July 5)....

In an ideal search, whether for a missing person or a plane, the discovery of new information narrows the search area until investigators zero in on the target. And then there is the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, now in its sixth fruitless day. New, unreliable information trickles in, and the search area expands and jumps around the globe.Today’s big development: The Wall Street Journal reported, based on anonymous sources in the aviation world, that 370 might have flown for four hours after the plane lost radio contact....

You’re not going to believe this, but the pie-in-the-sky plan to colonize Mars via a kooky reality show is dead. Mars One, the ill-fated for-profit project to take humanity to the Red Planet and pay for it by turning the whole affair into a TV show, has met its ill fate. The plan died with a whimper last month in Swiss bankruptcy court. A reddit user noticed the court filing. Mars One began with a splashy launch back in 2012 by founder and Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp....

The 2020 Mercedes-Benz GLE 450 doesn’t look too crazy. It’s a crisp redesign that looks broad and big-tired, in the style of the original ML55 AMG or the more agro BMW X5s. (And indeed, the 315-width rear tires are huge for something that’s non-AMG.) But under the skin, this is the craziest, most tech-forward internal-combustion car I’ve driven in a long time. It’s full of surprises, the GLE 450. You’re on cruise control, doing 60 mph in a 55 zone, when the limit drops to 45 mph....

For the first time, scientists have directly observed bacteria living in polar ice and snow. Long considered sterile, the finding in both the Arctic and Antarctic speaks to the hardiness of life and calls for a reconsideration of the Earth’s climate history.There’s a ubiquitous microbial presence in polar regions, Redeker and his team note in their paper, but finding metabolically active microbes—meaning that they have enzyme-catalyzed reactions occurring in their cells—inside the snowpack is a challenge....

I’m rolling toward the chain-control checkpoint outside Truckee, California, snow falling hard, when the Toyota Highlander arcs into my peripheral vision. It’s a first-gen model, painted in that noncommittal gold-beige that adorns so many of them, and it’s having what’s known as a tank-slapper: The driver overcorrected a skid, and now the rear end is coming around back the other way. It’s coming right at the driver’s side rear door of the car I’m driving, a 2019 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited....

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, alongside the bombing of Nagasaki days later, one of the deadliest military actions undertaken in human history. A new study has been able to use human tissue samples to understand precisely how much radiation victims absorbed in their bones. It’s nearly twice the lethal amount.A weapon drastically different than any other ever used in war, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima instantly killed over 100,000 people and left thousands more dealing with radiation fallout....