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Contrary to what a viral Twitter video may have you believe, barn owls are not aliens. Or ghosts.The incredible birds have a series of spooky-looking adaptations that help them survive and thrive in the wild.Many researchers believe the silent-flying hunters, with their bright-white plumage, may be the inspiration for early ghost stories.View full post on TwitterYou’ve probably seen this viral video circulating on Twitter. The camera pans up through a hole in the ceiling to reveal … creatures of some kind....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow did you judge the two parties positions on space?Those particular responses Democrats; GOP were geared totally at the party platform. The candidates themselvestheir responses to the science debate were a lot more encouraging.It seems like you werent particularly impressed by the Democrats or the Republicans. Why?We were not impressed by either party platform. You look at these party platforms and they dont seem to reflect either party at their best....

Boats don’t fundamentally change that much. If you compare a 2019 model to an equivalent from 20 years ago, the two biggest differences will be four-stroke power (or an Evinrude E-TEC) and probably more seating. Nobody’s really blowing up the formula. Except Yamaha, that is. The 210 FSH is a wild reimagining of how to build a boat. Or, more precisely, how to propel one.Instead of an outboard motor with a propeller, the 210 uses twin inboards with jet drives....

When audiences joined the crew of the Nostromo in 1979, they were taken along a two-hour descent into unimaginable horror. A horrible creature, with acid for blood and thirst for human lives, quite literally burst into our sci-fi consciousness, and for nearly 40 years it’s remained as the preeminent example of space horror done right. Now, in 2017, audiences will take a similar adventure with one key difference. Where Alien dazzled with inventive storytelling, Covenant retreads familiar ground, delivering two-hours of entertaining spectacle without the genre-defining gravitas of its namesake....

Before the summer is out, one of America’s stealth fighters will head across to pond to be stationed in Europe. But so far the Air Force is being coy about whether the F-35 or the F-22 is taking the job. Military.com reports that on Wednesday, Gen. Tod Wolters, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe-Africa, said USAF would be “welcoming back U.S. fifth-generation assets into the European theater later this summer. … The integration of fifth-generation assets allows the coalition to maintain the air superiority advantage by complementing the capabilities of our powerful fourth-generation fleet....

Tabby’s Star, a mysterious dimming star that has puzzled astronomers so completely that the wildest of explanations for its behavior have been proposed, turns out to be a natural astronomical phenomenon after all. The same team that first proposed the idea that the star’s fluctuations were evidence of an alien civilization has officially put the kibosh on the theory, instead concluding that the dimming is caused by dust. The story of the star began sometime in 2015, when a mysterious Kepler catalog star, KIC 8462852, showed a startling 20 percent dip in its light emissions when something passed in front of it....

Two U.S. Air Force B-1B bombers flew from Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam to a bombing range in South Korea, in a thinly veiled message to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. On July 7th, the bombers unleashed an inert satellite-guided bomb on a simulated North Korean target before returning to their base in the Northern Mariana Islands.The two B-1B strategic bombers flew nearly 2,000 miles from the island of Guam to the Pilsung bombing range in South Korea, and were escorted by South Korean F-15K Slam Eagle fighters and U....

Just when you thought military drones couldn’t get any scarier, now they don’t even need to land. As Discover reports, Boeing was just granted a patent it applied for in 2013 covering technology that would allow aerial refueling for blimp-like drones. These forever drones may never need to touch the ground:When the batteries are low, Boeing’s drones would unfurl a tether, much like a butterfly proboscis, and link up with a power tower on the ground....

It’s been twelve-and-a-half years since the Concorde retired, and we haven’t seen a viable supersonic passenger jet since, though not for want of trying. Many outlandish concepts have been proposed, and some feasible designs supported by major aerospace companies like Airbus are also in the works. And now there’s this. Boom, a small operation out of Colorado, might be able to succeed where others have failed. The company hopes to build a prototype plane that can fly at Mach 2....

If you’re a car company trying to build a better car than your competitor, often you’ll want to pick up one of your competitor’s cars to see just how good they are. Maybe you’ll just test it, or maybe you’ll even disassemble in order to learn their secrets.It seems like Mercedes’ parent company Daimler didn’t think this strategy all the way through. According to a report published in German magazine Der Spiegel, Daimler picked up a Tesla Model X to put through the paces....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen you see a thin layer of metal—on anything from chrome car parts to drill bits to jewelry—electroplating probably has been at work. The process is simple: Send current through a metallic salt solution to coat a conductive surface with metal ions. In this project, we’re coating graphite (in the form of a pencil drawing) with copper, the material in electric wiring. This turns the image into a circuit that can supply an LED with power....

Israel has become the first country to fly the F-35 into combat.Other countries in the Middle East have Russian-built air defenses intended to spot the F-35 despite its stealth profile.This war between American-made planes and Russian-made defenses has been brewing ever since the F-35 was on the drawing board.We don’t know exactly what the F-35 is up to in the Middle East, where Israel says it just became the first country to fly the Joint Strike Fighter into combat....

Google’s internet balloons are about to blanket Sri Lanka, and Facebook is putting its zany internet scheme into action as well. Meet Aquila, Facebook’s first solar-powered laser-internet drone. Powered by the sun and driven by propellers, Aquila has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 and according to Facebook it can stay in the air autonomously for months at a time. But aside from the difference in form factor, Facebook’s internet drone is actually a lot like Google’s Project Loon....

Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-1) the morning before its first launch, April 12, 1981.Roger Ressmeyer//Getty ImagesThis weekend legendary astronaut John Young succumbed from complications with pneumonia. The fighter pilot turned astronaut leaves behind an amazing legacy as an astronaut on the first crewed flight of the Gemini program in 1965. Four years later he was flying around the moon in a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, and in 1972 Young walked on the surface as commander of Apollo 16....

There’s nothing better than enjoying a summer evening while lounging on patio sofa, but pre-made patio furniture is anything but cheap. Still, don’t let a lack of funds stop you: You can build your own outdoor sofa in a day for less than $100 in materials. Here’s how.Ben Uyeda of HomeMadeModern, had previously built a similar sofa for indoors, but for this outdoor version he beefed up the size of the wood and connected everything using lag screws instead of biscuits and glue....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s something about cracking open a science-fiction book from the 1960s—feeling the coarse paper under your fingertips and inhaling that special, musty smell that only well-worn paperbacks exude. Sci-fi books of decades past are more than literary excursions. They are connections with our forebears formed by experiencing their predictions, meeting their heroes, and plumbing their invented mythologies. But these reservoirs of cultural history are drying up. Books don’t last forever, and when they die, the ideas inside them die as well....

Media Platforms Design TeamAnother auto show, another high-profile car leaked ahead of schedule. This time, rather than leggy Italian models pulling the wraps off an ultra-limited production Lamborghini, the Sant’Agata Bolognese manufacturer’s prized pre-production car debuted prematurely on– you guessed it– the internet.So it’s only fitting that we give Lamborghini’s latest a fitting online introduction: please welcome the Veneno*, a 220 mph wedge whose 6.5-liter V12 has been tweaked to churn 750 hp....

A new machine models the human body, allowing livers to survive for a week.Logistics, patient health, and surgery times all squeeze donor livers, making transplants a race.Almost all the major organs are involved in keeping the nutrient-greedy liver going in the body.New Atlas reports that scientists have a new way to keep livers alive for a week—and maybe to bring unfit livers back to life. The solution is a machine that mimics human body functions, which lets the liver continue to work like usual....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph Courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA)The scientific impact of confirming the presence of water on Mars is hard to overstate. Forget the occasional discovery of a new, earthbound species—the so-called “hobbits” of Indonesia, or the recent, mysterious “monster” that supposedly washed up in Montauk. If the chain of evidence on Mars bears out, and NASA’s ongoing robotic experiments on the Red Planet eventually yield proof of life, it could open an entirely new field of research for biologists....

I’ve built a few structures in my life that have turned out less than perfect. The best thing you can say about the floor of my kids’ treehouse is that it’s a parallelogram. And while an off-kilter Pee Wee’s Playhouse look is OK for a treehouse, it’s not what you’d want on a deck. Related StoriesHow to Build a Deck5 Materials That Make a Modern DeckSo when I embarked on a DIY deck expansion project, I recruited someone who knows what they’re doing: my brother-in-law, Louis....