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A Russian naval reconnaissance ship has sunk in the Black Sea after colliding with a Togo-flagged freighter on Thursday at about noon local time, according to the Associated Press. The incident occurred off the coast of Istanbul, and Turkey’s coastal safety authority told the AP that all 78 crew members of the Russian vessel Liman were safely evacuated. The crew of the Togo freighter Youzarsif H., which was carrying livestock, are also safe....

Linux may be the operating system of choice for some computer snobs, but there is apparently one giant flaw in it: you can break into it really, really, really easily. All you have to do is hit the backspace key enough times, something on the order of 28. Wait, what?Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Motherboard does a pretty good job unpacking this. Essentially, the backspace bug causes the system to bring up a Grub rescue shell....

In 1971, the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga was launching and recovering aircraft when a freak accident occurred: a S-2E Tracker anti-submarine aircraft accidentally flew right through a wave. The incident, which was recorded on video, surfaced on YouTube more than forty years later. View full post on YoutubeThe USS Ticonderoga was an Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II. By the 1950s she was on the small side, as the larger, more powerful Forrestal-class aircraft carriers rolled out of shipyards....

The U.S. Army already fields tens of thousands of pairs of night vision goggles.The service is also pushing into using virtual reality for training.A single pair of goggles that could do night vision and virtual reality training would streamline things, ensuring the troops only needed one pair.The U.S. Army wants a single pair of goggles for the troops, one that allows soldiers to conduct realistic training during the day and hunt their enemies at night....

Media Platforms Design TeamMy Bloody Valentine 3D Two-Disc Special Edition (2009)Media Platforms Design Team2009 is quickly becoming a banner year for 3D: The eye-popping technology is taking over our multiplexes, home theaters and computer screens. Earlier this year, gorehounds stood in line for a ticket to Lionsgate’s 3D remake of the grossly underrated Canadian splatter classic My Bloody Valentine. The plot–masked killer stalking a town with a dark secret–is standard slasher fare, but provides a jaw-dropping showcase for all the 3D effects....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Treat Email More Like MailBy statute, law enforcement can’t open domestic communications through U.S. mail without a court order. But under the federal law covering email—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which dates back to 1986—they can obtain many of your emails without a warrant, merely by subpoenaing the email provider. Texas has passed, and Gov. Rick Perry has signed, a state law requiring a warrant for access to email content....

Alan Turing is best known for cracking the German Enigma machine during World War II and developing the foundations of modern computer science (along with his namesake test). But one of the man’s final contributions to science—a chemistry paper he published just two years before he died—is finally being put to use to develop a new method of purifying water.Turing’s paper, published in 1952, addresses a strange principle of chemistry: In certain rare conditions, two chemicals that are mixed together can spontaneously separate and create a unique striped pattern, commonly called a “Turing pattern....

A Greek attack helicopter crashed into the ocean while participating in military exercises. The incident, caught on camera by nearby civilians, left both crew members unharmed.According to The Aviationist, the AH-64D Longbow Apache of the Greek Army was participating in the SARISA 2016 exercises. The pilot appears to have pulled out of a dive too late, making a collision with the water inevitable. Rescuers in inflatable boats are on the scene less than a minute later....

There’s an old story in the whiskey world: Before trucks and bottling lines, all American whiskey was aged and shipped in barrels, soaking up flavor as it sloshed down the Mississippi River. Eventually, people took a particular liking to the barrels marked “Bourbon County, Kentucky.” They started clamoring for “bourbon.” And that’s how that whole thing got started.Trey Zoeller, the cofounder of Jefferson’s Bourbon and a man with an experimental streak as wide as a barn door, wondered if something had gotten lost in the decades of progress that followed....

This Lego mini-go kart is a massively scaled up model of a classic ’80s toy, the Technic Go-Kart. Matt Denton wanted to build a go kart big enough for his nephew, but to 3D print the lego for something that size would have taken forever, and larger pieces wouldn’t fit in his Lulzbot Taz5 printer. So instead, he settled on a go kart big enough for a toddler, or maybe a small dog....

Tom Colella gets bonus points for ingenuity, at least.Colella, an electrician from Australia, wanted to get away from work and hit the links. Just one problem: The GPS-equipped, company-mandated device he was supposed to carry with him during business hours, which would tattle on his whereabouts. Not to be denied, Colella put his electrician know-how to work by turning a bag of chips into a makeshift Faraday cage. A Faraday cage, named after the 19th century electromagnetism pioneer Michael Faraday, blocks electromagnetic waves....

Scientists have set a record by extending the longest cracked encryption from 232 digits to 240.These numbers are still far smaller than the values used in real cryptography, making this a computing rather than hacking victory.Multiplying gigantic prime numbers together is the secure backbone of RSA encryption.Scientists in France have cracked the most complex cryptography algorithm attempted to date. The algorithm they solved is still much, much weaker than the practical cryptography used in real security, but to solve even this smaller algorithm is a big accomplishment in computing....

When the poet Robert Frost once contemplated if the world would end in fire or ice, he forgot a third option: a gamma radiation burst (GRB) explosion. PBS Space Time took a look at the cosmic event and how it would destroy life on Earth, slowly yet surely.View full post on YoutubeA GRB is a short-lived burst of gamma-ray light, the most energetic type of light. A GRB shines at levels brightness impossible to comprehend with the human eye, a million trillion times as bright as our Sun....

Black holes are mysterious objects predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. They are the remains of massive stars that have collapsed under the force of their own gravity, generating gravitational fields so strong not even light can escape. But if no light can escape, how can we possibly know that they’re there at all? In other words, how can astronomers find black holes?YouTube channel MinutePhysics takes a look at all the ways we know black holes really do exist, even though we’ve never actually seen one:View full post on YoutubeEssentially, we know that black holes exist because even though they don’t emit light, they do have lots of gravity....

You’ve probably seen this x-y graph on your camera or some photo editing software. It shows the data of your photo’s color range. It’s not as intimidating as it looks. Here’s how to master it.The vertical axis shows the number of pixels at each light level. (A nighttime photo of a candle’s flame will have high spikes to the left, since most of the image is in darkness, and a sunny beach shot will be shifted all the way to the right....

Media Platforms Design TeamKickstarter used to be the idyllic startup. It was the embodiment of the American dream, supporting everyday people with big ideas by leveraging the small contributions of other everyday people who believed in good ideas. This year, Kickstarter had its first million dollar campaign. Quickly thereafter, it had its first $8 million campaign. Suddenly, the scrappy startup was raising and investing funds with the powerful savvy of a venture capital firm....

Lamborghini has a problem with electric cars. A few problems, actually.There are engineering issues—batteries are heavy, range is still limited, recharging is slow. But there are also emotional challenges, major philosophical hurdles for a company that pins its identity on screaming V10s and V12s. Electric motors don’t scream. And their character is relentlessly homogeneous. How would an electric Lamborghini of the future differentiate itself from electric Ferraris—or anything else, for that matter?...

Media Platforms Design TeamA couple months ago that he might back out of a NASA program to deliver astronauts to orbit if the space agency didn’t change the restrictive rules of a traditional request for proposal (RFP). The RFP featured common caveats of government contracts—the kind that introduce delays and micromanagement. Musk and spokespeople for his company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), made it plain that they’d rather do business the nontraditional way that NASA handled earlier cargo contracts....

Finding a habitable planet in the nearest star system is an ongoing quest. But the overall habitability of the Alpha Centauri system based on its three stars, just over 4 light-years away, could be murkier than thought in some respects, and much brighter in others. It all boils down to stellar weather. Tom Ayres, a senior research fellow at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, presented his findings on the radiation coming from each of the three Alpha Centauri stars at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe next ship in line to deliver cargo to the International Space Station is undergoing final checkouts on a launchpad at Wallops Island in Virginia. If all goes well, the Orbital Sciences Cygnus, an unmanned, pressurized cargo ship, will lift off on its first demonstration flight to orbit in late February or early March, reach the station in early April with a payload of about 1800 pounds of cargo, and begin regular cargo service to the ISS some time after that....