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The 1970s were a different time. Shirt collars were enormous. Scott Baio was a lovable and promising actor. People carried firearms disguised as hand luggage?In response to a surge in kidnappings and murders from terrorist groups such as West Germany’s Red Army Faction, the Basque ETA group in Spain and France, and Greece’s November 17 organization, in the early 1970s politicians and other prominent figures started hiring bodyguards. Those bodyguards needed weapons, but they also needed to be discreet....

The Army has awarded contracts to ten companies to submit submachine guns for the service to evaluate. The service has not purchased a new submachine gun for more than seventy years, and is reportedly considering them for units tasked with protecting senior Army leaders.The U.S. Army has awarded approximately $200,000 to ten companies for evaluation weapons under the Sub Compact Weapon (SCW) program. The service posted a Request for Information (RFI) in May 2018 for a SCW that will fire 9x19-millimeter (9mm Luger) ammunition, fire full automatic, and have a Picatinny rail for attaching lights and optics....

Media Platforms Design TeamFull instrument (left) and top-down view.The Planck: A horizontal seven-stringed instrumentTime: 40 hoursCost: $80 to $150, depending on what tuning keys are used As a guitar player for more than two decades, Seven Sexton always wanted to teach himself to play a Chapman Stick–a vertical, touch-style instrument that can have as many as 12 strings. Like any true innovator, Sexton decided to build his own instead of shelling out upwards of $1500 to buy one....

To kick off 2018, President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traded nuclear threats. But among the very real hazard of a nuclear alternation were some inaccurate details. Yes, the President alone has the authority to send nukes flying, but he doesn’t do it with a button.“The U.S. should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table," Kim Jong Un said in the a New Year’s speech, which was translated by the Associated Press and quoted by CBS News....

Kacper Kowalski is a man who loves to fly. He is also a photographer—but he’s not one of those photographers, with an impenetrable artist statement. At an artist meet-and-greet at the Curator Gallery in New York City this week, for his show “Above & Beyond” that runs through the end of the month, the artist was remarkably easygoing about what fans think of his work.As long as he’s communicated his enthusiasm for the act of soaring over the world, Kowalski says, he doesn’t care if a viewer sees industrial wastelands, pristine landscapes, psychedelic flags, microscopic cells, or shirt stripes in his aerial shots....

As a boy, Mark “Forger” Stucky dreamt of being an astronaut. As the lead test pilot for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, he’s about as close to that dream as he can be to without actually leaving Earth’s atmosphere. The career pilot graduated from the US Navy Fighter Weapons School (you know it as Top Gun) and spent three decades flying more than 170 different models of aircraft for the US Marine Corp, the US Navy, the US Air Force, United Airlines, and other outfits....

Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the President of Turkmenistan, is a dictator who often uses stunts to distract from the abuses of his totalitarian government. Out of a rating of 100, with 100 being “most free,” the non-profit Freedom House gives Turkmenistan a paltry 2, making it one of the least free countries on Earth. But during a recent stunt, Berdimuhamedov utilized one of Turkmenistan’s most interesting features: the Darvaza Gas Crater, otherwise known as “The Door to Hell....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe live in a world where robots learn by watching TV. But, so far at least, they haven’t learned compassion—or how to operate automatic weapons—unlike the titular character of Neill Blomkamp’s new movie, Chappie.“What interests me is a machine that can think and feel,” Chappie’s designer Deon (played by Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel) says in the new trailer for the upcoming science fiction film by the director of District 9 and the less impressive Elysium....

For more than two decades, forensic photographer Nick Marsh has been taking pictures of grisly crime scenes all over the United Kingdom. This video below gives people a glimpse of what his job truly entails. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot more complicated than what it appears on CSI.Given how long Marsh has been tuned into finding and shooting small fragments of evidence, it’s no surprise that he sees it everywhere he goes....

If you dig deep into BMW’s list of features, you’ll find that you can add a lot of luxury to a scooter, of all things. Pick out the heated seat and grips, anti-theft system, and Ocean Blue Metallic Matte paint, and BMW’s luxury scooter, the C650 GT, prices out at a cool $12,585.That’s nearly 13 grand for a scooter, and it treads awfully close to the base price of the company’s stripped-down street and dirt cruiser, the R nineT Scrambler....

Science has proven that domesticated animals have significantly smaller brains than wild animals. Whether it’s a dog versus a wolf, or even farmed trout compared to wild trout, the brains of human-bred animals are just tinier. The statistics are dramatic: Domestic pigs have brains 35% smaller than wild boars, while domesticated cats have 30% less brain mass than their wild counterparts. The first variable to rule out when explaining this difference is the size of the animals themselves—within species, smaller animals tend to have smaller brains than larger animals....

Working in Haiti, Shawn Frayne, a 28-year-old inventor based in Mountain View, Calif., saw the need for small-scale wind power to juice LED lamps and radios in the homes of the poor. Conventional wind turbines don’t scale down well—there’s too much friction in the gearbox and other components. “With rotary power, there’s nothing out there that generates under 50 watts,” Frayne says. So he took a new tack, studying the way vibrations caused by the wind led to the collapse in 1940 of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge (aka Galloping Gertie)....

Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti didn’t set out to become the Internet’s designated animal fart experts, and certainly didn’t expect to write the book on the subject, but you can’t shake destiny. In January 2017, Rabaiotti’s teenage brother asked her if snakes fart. She tweeted at a scientist hoping to get an answer. View full post on TwitterBuy It She got one, but also a sigh, from a Phd student at Zoological Society, London....

Media Platforms Design TeamThree-digit weight loss is the automotive game du jour, and the benefits of spunkier performance and thriftier fuel economy are but a few of the upsides sought when engineers shed ballast in redesigned rides. After all, every 220 pounds of weight loss translate to an approximately 2 percent improvement in mpgs, and everybody loves a sprightlier drive.Land Rover’s nearly three-ton Range Rover was a prime candidate for slimming down when it faced a fourth-gen redesign, and no weld went unturned in the effort of lightening the hefty Landie....

Here’s a way to allay your fears about AI: despite the presence of neural network powered Lt. Cmdr. Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, real neural networks are no good at watching the show. Developer Ville-Matias Heikkilä took an image recognition neural network and had it run its algorithms on the opening credits to TNG. The results are … hilariously off-base, to say the least. Perhaps it’s because none of the planets shown exist, and the Enterprise itself looks nothing like a Soyuz, a Gemini capsule, a space shuttle, or anything else we’ve sent up into space....

Back in a April, one of the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptors belly-flopped right after takeoff and skidded down more than a mile of runway. Now the service has revealed what went wrong: the pilots were given the wrong takeoff airspeed. On April 13 of this year, an F-22 fighter jet took off from Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada for a TOP GUN exercise. The Raptor pilot, part of the 90th Fighter Squadron at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, took off at 120 knots....

An attack plane designed to provide support to troops on the ground has crashed, killing one pilot and injuring the other. The A-29 Super Tucano was participating in the Air Force’s Light Attack Experiment when it went down at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The pilot killed in the crash was identified as U.S. Navy Lieutenant Christopher Carey Short. A second pilot aboard the aircraft was airlifted to a local hospital with minor injuries....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe current MacBook Air, with multiple ports.They’ve denied it for years, but it seems that Apple may finally be making the jump into the cheap notebook market. At least if new rumors are true.The company reportedly wants to bring down the overall cost by using just one port: a USB 3.0, which would double as the place where a charger would plug in. 9to5Mac is reporting that the new notebook will have a 12-inch screen, a radically redesigned keyboard, and a higher resolution display....

People living in the Seattle suburbs are having to deal with a unique nuisance: Residents are reporting that bald eagles have been dropping trash into their yards, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it.The main issue is the open-air landfill in the area, the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill in King County. That landfill was supposed to have been closed years ago, but a proposed expansion has kept it open....

Even food trucks and bodegas take credit cards now. You can’t remember the last time you got stuck behind someone writing a check at the grocery store. And we all pay back friends instantly (thanks, Venmo and Splitwise!). With all that digital currency moving around in so many channels, it’s harder than ever to track your spending. You need a budget app that works digitally, too. Here are our favorites.MintFor Fully Appraising Your Financial Health: Mint(iOS & Android; free)Mint is one of the oldest budgeting apps, and is the establishment player....