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Over the weekend, Brazil suffered a devastating loss to its scientific history. Brazil’s National Museum caught fire on Sunday, quickly burning almost to rubble in the span of a few hours. Millions of irreplaceable artifacts and specimens are feared lost.Brazil’s National Museum was founded in 1818 by King João VI, and moved to its current location in 1892. It was one of the oldest museums in the Americas, and contained a collection of around 20 million objects from the fields of natural history and archaeology....

Being an electrician is hard. It means spending a large part of your workday with your hands over your head as you wrestle with conduit and cable. Picture doing that in a hot attic or a crawlspace filled with spider webs while carrying a heavy tool bag.That explains Klein Tools’ constant drive to lighten the load for electricians by improving their tools. The company’s beefy new long-nose plier (J207-8CR) is a good example....

Baidu, the Chinese internet search giant, is looking to match its American competition with an ambitious new project: self-driving cars. And it might even beat Google, because Baidu is promising the cars later this year.The company’s collaborators are unknown, though Baidu has previously worked with BMW on similar projects. The car will be a combination of user-controlled and driverless, and will include the option for drivers to take control of the pedals and steering wheel....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow did the idea for this study come about?We started more than a year ago, just before the 50th anniversary of the original demonstration of the laser. People have made many advances with lasers, but all materials they’ve been using were synthetic. Nobody had looked [extensively] into using natural materials for lasers laser light doesn’t seem to exist in nature. We wondered whether we could actually generate laser light in a living system, and, it turns out, we can....

It’s a tough balancing act between trying to read a too-dark phone screen in broad daylight, and squinting to protect your eyes from what feels like the rays of 40 suns beaming out at you from your screen at night. 🧑🏽‍💻 Tech can be tricky. We’ll be your support—join Pop Mech Pro.Luckily, there’s a quick fix for every kind of screen brightness issue you encounter. Here are some simple solutions to three of the most common problems....

Google’s got a new time-consuming game, but this one helps artificial intelligence learn. Quick, Draw! learns about your drawing patterns the more you play, and should be able to better guess what you’re drawing as time goes on.Games have become an important standby for training artificial intelligence. Many researchers have set their AIs towards playing video games in hopes that they’ll understand the somewhat complex mechanics of their actions better. With simple win-lose paradigms, AIs can understand when they’ve failed and when they’ve succeeded in games....

NASA’s next flagship space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, has been pushed back again, this time to an estimated launch in May 2020. The delay, caused by development taking longer than anticipated and a few technical setbacks, pushes the space telescope back about a year from the previous targeted launch date of spring 2019. That date was already a delay from a 2018 launch date scheduled back in 2011 when the JWST program was reorganized....

Media Platforms Design TeamJamHub TourBusPrice: $699Give even the head-bangingest metal band the 85-knobbed JamHub TourBus and it can quiet down. The semicircular $700 device acts as a studio—complete with effects and personal monitor controls—and one that’s silent to anyone who’s not plugged in. Seven people, each with his or her own settings, can connect to the device and listen to the group through headphones, each adjusting his or her own settings to duplicate those of on-stage playing or to avoid volume-related arguments....

Jessi Combs, the vehicle builder, racer, and “fastest woman on four wheels,” was tragically killed in a land-speed record crash on Tuesday.Combs, 39, was attempting to break her own record while piloting her jet-powered land-speed car.Driving at speeds above 700 miles per hour presents a host of difficulties.Automotive legend Jessi Combs’ tragic death has sent shockwaves through her industry. Combs, who was a professional racer, television personality, and metal fabricator, died on Tuesday while attempting to beat her own women’s land speed record (398 mph) using a jet-powered car in southeast Oregon, a record she first captured in 2013....

Let’s say you want a cool skateboard, but all you have is a laser cutter, some wood, and too much time on your hands. What to do?Well, for starters you could get a job and buy a real skateboard but in the meantime you can build one out of laser-cut wood, just like Youtuber William Osman. Check out Osman’s build process:View full post on YoutubeOsman built the skateboard out of a number of laser-cut pieces....

Footage of two moose fighting on a suburban street in Alaska has resurfaced with a new, hilariously NSFW voiceover. In the video, the moose are duking it out on a street while onlookers—who are way too close to the tussle—whip their phones out to record the surreal scene.It’s not uncommon to see moose in residential areas, especially in locations such as Alaska, Canada, and Maine, where the animals live in large populations....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn one of the buildings of the sprawling Illinois Science & Technology Park in Skokie, Illinois, tucked away in his black briefcase, are the drugs that Dean Hart hopes will change the world. As I take a seat at a conference table in the offices of NanoGuardian, Hart, the company’s chief commercial officer, gets busy setting up a microscope to show me what makes his drugs so special....

The New Horizons spacecraft got famous for its Pluto flyby in 2015, but here in 2019, it’s been making discoveries that are just as fascinating. On New Year’s Day, New Horizons flew past a distant asteroid orbiting far beyond Pluto, which NASA is calling Ultima Thule. The day after the flyby, NASA released an image of the asteroid that revealed it to be snowman-shaped. Now they’re releasing an even higher-quality image showing all of Ultima Thule’s tiny details and explaining some of its mysteries....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Stardust landed in the Utah desert in January 2006, it was already a scientific triumph—during its seven years in space, the craft used a gravity assist from Earth to intercept comet Wild-2, collected gas and dust surrounding the comet’s icy nucleus and returned the samples intact after nearly 3 billion miles of travel (earning it a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award). But it was after scientists had the chance to examine the findings that this mission became even more groundbreaking....

If you work in the oil or gas industry, and you wear a hard hat for even part of the day, you’ve probably heard of H2S. Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless, flammable, and overall dangerous gas produced at petroleum refineries, tanneries, natural gas plants, and waste treatment facilities. The first indication of the gas is usually a smell, similar to rotten eggs. Even in low concentrations, it will irritate the eyes and throat, or cause a headache and balance problems....

Less than 100 feet away from the site of this year’s Super Bowl—Houston’s modern, retractable-roof NRG Stadium—sits the father of all indoor stadiums, ugly and modern. As thousands of screaming football fans stroll right past the aging Astrodome to see the Patriots take on the Falcons on Feb. 5, the venue’s storied history will be the only thing protecting its future.David Bush, executive director of Preservation Houston, says the big building has defined a city for more than 50 years....

Russian aerospace forces conducted test earlier this month of a new anti-satellite weapon system. Once it works, the weapon would be capable of targeting American military satellites, disrupting the Pentagon’s satellites for navigation and communications.The test, conducted on December 16, was the fifth test of the PL-19 Nudol, according to the Washington Free Beacon. The test did not involve an intercept and may have just been to test the capabilities of the lofting rocket instead....

Just because a vehicle isn’t a tank doesn’t mean it can’t kill tanks. Thanks to guided missiles and anti-tank warheads, vehicles such as the new Bumerang fighting vehicle can stop tanks dead in their tracks—even if they have to use two missiles instead of one to do it.The video below was taken at the Russia’s Army-2018 expo held every year outside Moscow. (Yes, it’s the same event that featured the giant, golden egg-shaped robot mockup....

On Wednesday, news outlets reported the death of Rutger Hauer, an Dutch actor well-known for his role as Roy Batty in 1982’s Blade Runner (and many other roles). He had succumbed to a short illness at his home in the Netherlands. He was 75.Oscar Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro, among many others, paid respects on Twitter, describing Hauer as “an intense, deep, genuine and magnetic actor that brought truth, power and beauty to his films....

Small self-driving cars will act as mobile surveillance units for the Dubai police by the end of the year.First reported by the Gulf News, the vehicle is about the size of a children’s toy car and is built by Singapore-based start-up OTSAW Digital. They’re officially known as O-R3, and the company says that the Dubai police will use the robots to “fulfill low-level order enforcement tasks,” which include scanning an area “for wanted criminals and undesirables....