Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamThis week’s Fringe episode begins with a seemingly joyous pre-wedding party, until the groom’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, glimpses a man she recognizes as a former Nazi soldier. Before she can really voice it to those around her, she begins to choke and collapses–as do about a dozen other members of her family around her. As Agent Olivia Dunham arrives on the scene with Peter Bishop, and Peter’s peculiar father Walter, only one thing is clear about the mass slaying: The cause of death was asphyxiation....

Media Platforms Design TeamLas Vegas—General Motors unveiled an expansion of its OnStar system at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, by way of an aftermarket rearview mirror that would provide most of the service’s features to nearly any vehicle on the road, including non-GM models. The $299 mirror taps power from the car, but is otherwise a self-contained unit, using its own accelerometers and GPS, cell and Bluetooth connections for automatic crash detection, stolen vehicle tracking, hands-free calling and turn-by-turn directions (which GM says is the most-used OnStar feature)....

Despite America’s growing interest in motorcycles, Harley-Davidson is in a tough spot. The brand has not resonated with younger riders, and Harley’s first-quarter sales this year were down 12 percent over the same period in 2017. The American bike-builder have also been hit hard by recent E.U. tariffs placed on U.S.-made motorcycles—a retaliatory response to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. Harley badly needs a home run, something to capture the hearts of new riders, different from their usual variations on the classic iron cruisers....

Researchers have discovered the natural collision-avoidance systems that allow birds to avoid constantly crashing into people, other birds, and things they encounter in the sky. They simply move to the right.Three scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia were studying how drones, as they become increasingly common in airspace, will steer clear of one another. While militaries around the world have struggled with the same question regarding planes, commercial drones are small enough that the scientists felt they might find the answer by studying the birds....

Media Platforms Design TeamAnyone who changed carriers or updated a calling plan in the last six months probably noticed that the cost of service has gotten more expensive. The major U.S. carriers now charge $70 or more per line for a basic smartphone plan with minimal data and nearly $100 for a standard data allowance.If you’re looking to save some money on your monthly plan, you have options. Follow these small tips to save big over the course of the standard two-year contract....

LEGO makes a lot of new sets every year, but none approach the kind of detail and quality of its Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series. LEGO has constructed some of the films’ most iconic ships, like the Millennium Falcon. Now, it’s adding one more behemoth to the list an Imperial Star Destroyer, and it’s the longest LEGO set the company has ever made.And this isn’t just any Star Destroyer. LEGO modeled this set after the very first ship, called the Devastator, that graced screens back in 1977 during the opening minutes of A New Hope....

A Russian online mapping company was trying to obscure foreign military bases. But in doing so, it accidentally confirmed their locations—many of which were secret. Yandex Maps, Russia’s leading online map service, blurred the precise locations of Turkish and Israeli military bases, pinpointing their location. The bases host sensitive surface-to-air missile sites and facilities housing nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists reports that Yandex Maps blurred out “over 300 distinct buildings, airfields, ports, bunkers, storage sites, bases, barracks, nuclear facilities, and random buildings” in the two countries....

If you’ve done a lot of highway driving, you’ve likely driven over the speed limit once or twice. It’s easy to think that it’s not actually a big deal to drive 10 or 20 mph over the limit, but in reality, the difference in speed can be the difference between life and death.Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate the point. Imagine two cars speeding down the road, one at 70 mph and one at 100 mph....

NuScale’s modular nuclear reactor owes a debt to decades of small nuclear reactor design.They’ve improved on a legacy of innovation, from breaking the thick ice of Russia to populating tiny islands in China.The smallest operational reactor will be shut down soon, replaced by Russia’s new floating nuclear power plant.Last week’s news of NuScale’s modular nuclear reactor, which can fit by the dozens into the space of one traditional nuclear plant cooling tower, resonated because of its tiny size and safety in numbers....

The ocean has been getting more dangerous recently. According to a recent study, both extreme winds and wave heights are increasing across the globe. Winds have risen by as much as 1.5 meters per second (3.3 mph), or 8 percent, over the past 30 years. Waves have grown by 30 centimeters, or 5 percent, over the same period.“Although increases of 5 and 8 percent might not seem like much, if sustained into the future such changes to our climate will have major impacts,” says Professor Ian Young of the University of Melbourne, who co-lead the study showing the rise with Agustinus Ribal, in a press statement....

When the second of four reaction wheels broke in the Kepler Space Telescope broke, it looked like the planet-hunting machine was toast. The reaction wheels were needed to stabilize the imagers, which pend long, long periods of time staring at the same expanse of space waiting for planets to blink past. Still, it had a good run, discovering more than 1,000 planets and hinting at more than 4,000 more. It could have safely retired....

As the CRISPR technology gets better and more widely available, more people are experimenting with hacking their own genes, to the point that the Food and Drug Administration has begun to voice its concerns.Anew piece in the most recent issue of scientific journal Nature highlights the issue. Companies including Ascendance Biomedical of Singapore and The ODIN of San Francisco are offering gene therapies that you could assemble at home and inject into yourself, in a wild preview of the gene-hacking future to come....

Bad news, Earth: At this point, a rising ocean is inevitable. Because melting polar caps cause even more melting via feedback loop, we’re likely to see a sea-level rise of up to 10 feet in the next two centuries, that’s even if humanity bands together to stop global warming at 2 degrees Celsius. And this rising tide has many scientists considering massive geoengineering projects that might prevent a future Earth from looking like a bad Kevin Costner movie....

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced it has pulled off a technological feat: one of its ground stations transmitted signals to two different deep space spacecraft at once. Technicians used a backup frequency to send signals to the Mars Express orbiter.ESA has three deep space ground stations which it uses to communicate with spacecraft exploring the farthest reaches of the solar system. The European Space Agency (ESA) is celebrating a technical achievement....

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have built robots that can build custom carpentry projects with expert skill. Robot’s could eventually prove as vital helpers, especially for new hands on the job. View full post on Youtube“If you’re building a deck, you have to cut large sections of lumber to length, and that’s often done on site,” says CSAIL postdoc Jeffrey Lipton, who was a lead author on a related paper about the system, in a press statement....

Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster has been set free to drift around the solar system for the next billion years, or until the solar radiation makes it disintegrate. But according to a recent paper, it might not stay in space forever: a group of researchers give Starman a 6 percent chance of crashing back down to Earth sometime in the next million years.Making exact predictions of where an object in our solar system will end up is not easy....

MilwaukeeNeed some extra help with some summer projects you have lined up? Well good news—Home Depot is discounting a bunch of tools from DeWalt and Milwaukee all the way up to 50 percent off in some cases. There’s Milwaukee’s M18 Fuel 18-Volt Lithium-Ion Circular Saw Kit. It’s brushless motor provides 3x longer live and its part of the M18 power tool system, which has more than 150+ tools in its arsenal....

If you’ve even been stumped by a tavern puzzle—those physical tests of intelligence that require moving around a few pieces of string or metal—you know how frustrating the experience can be. Most of us give up after a long bout of failure, but not everyone. This man, for instance, was perplexed by the a version of the African Ball Puzzle for around 10 years.Eventually, he got so frustrated that he asked for help from a TV host and in a staged (but very entertaining) video, the pair ask a physics teacher and a magician, both of whom declare the puzzle impossible....

Studying the effects of climate change on sea levels isn’t exactly new, but a recent study provides a much better look at what it’s doing to Antarctica. The prognosis? Not good.A study published by The Cryosphere, a journal from the European Geosciences Union, used “a high-resolution, large-scale computer model” to look at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and how its depleting ice could add to the rising sea level over the next couple centuries....

This month, the Earth is being visited by a comet that is nearly close enough to see with the naked eye. If you do manage to spot it, you might notice that it gives off a green hue. A green color is pretty uncommon in space, so where does the comet get this color from?The answer, unsurprisingly, is chemistry. Comets are made of a whole lot of different chemicals, and each comet gets its own unique mixture....