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BAGHDAD, July 4 — It starts out traditional and easy, with Liberty cakes and holiday decorations, but today will end with hard surprises.Around midmorning, an awful, heavy stench thickens the morning air just outside the E.R.’s doors. A few medical techs and Lt. Col. Clayton Simon, the only American military pathologist in Iraq and Afghanistan, are working on three corpses in the baking heat underneath a canopy. The victims, all Iraqis, died of gunshot wounds or blunt head trauma, and the British and U....

South Korea plans to build a stealthy unmanned aerial vehicle capable of destroying North Korean weapons systems on the ground. The drone will be used during crises to attack Pyongyang’s long range artillery and missile systems. North Korea has tens of thousands of artillery systems—from 240-millimeter rocket artillery to 170-millimeter long-range howitzers. It also has an arsenal of ballistic missiles, from the short-range Scud to the long-range Nodong and Musudan missiles, which has an operational range of nearly 2,500 miles....

Update May 7, 4:20 p.m. EDT: SpaceX is now targeting Thursday, May 10, for the Bangabandhu-1 mission. Update 7:40 p.m. EDT: SpaceX conducted a static fire test of the first Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, targeting a launch window on Monday, May 7, between 4:06 p.m. and 6:23 p.m. EDT for the Bangabandhu-1 mission to loft a Bangladeshi communications satellite. View full post on TwitterOriginal Post:SpaceX is poised to launch the maiden flight of a significantly upgraded Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida....

Early this month, Elon Musk sent out an email saying that Tesla was producing 2,000 Model 3’s a week, an improvement over previous rates but still short of the ambitious goal of 2,500 per week by the end of the first quarter of 2018. Right now, its producing no Model 3’s due to a production halt at its Fremont, California factory first reported by Buzzfeed. The halt is expected to last four or five days and workers, who have reported poor working conditions during the production ramp up, are reportedly expected to take vacation time or forgo pay during the stall if Tesla cannot reassign them in the interim....

On the heels of releasing the first of its much-awaited Model 3s, Tesla motors is looking into a new arena: self-driving trucks. According to Reuters, the California-based car company is developing long-haul, electric semi trucks that can drive themselves and move in “platoons.“Reuters has seen email discussions of potential road tests being negotiated between the company, which for a brief period this year was named the most profitable car company in America, and the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)....

The official launch countdown for Saturday’s launch of Space Shuttle Discovery and STS-121 began today at 5 p.m. EDT, with the launch clock set at T-43 hours. But for many at NASA, the countdown has been running since last July, when a piece of foam fell off Discovery’s external tank (ET) during launch. NASA managers quickly grounded the entire fleet, including Discovery, barely into her first day in orbit. Since then, engineers have been struggling with how to best re-engineer the Space Shuttle’s ET to avoid the type of catastrophic impact damage doomed Columbia....

While space is a vast void, scientists now say that it could also be quite greasy. An international team of scientists have recreated materials with the same properties as interstellar dust, and they found that the composition is strikingly similar to grease. Moreover, they contend that “space grease” is common across the Milky Way.In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (UNSW) and Ege University in Turkey focused on the fourth most abundant element in the universe: carbon....

Believe it or not, consumer flamethrowers exist and are legal in almost every state. A $1,600 model called the X15 is one of the market leaders, and while it is understandably very dangerous, it can also be incredibly beautiful. If you need proof, the Slow-Mo Guys have it. The Slow-Mo Guys are no stranger to pyrotechnics having already filmed fire tornados, match head volcanoes, and match stick rockets. As it turns out, fire in slow motion is even prettier when you have more of it....

Goldblatt: Blade RunnerMedia Platforms Design TeamWhat it is: One of our favorite tools at the show also had the coolest name. The Blade Runner is a drywall cutting tool with two halves held in place with powerful rare earth magnets. Each half sits on one side of the drywall panel, so they move in tandem. As you push the pieces, embedded circular blades score both sides of the sheet at once....

WASHINGTON – After spending the weekend here with the elite minds of research and exploration for the next generation in space, I’m confident that several frontiers are making steady progress. Beyond China and the globalization of government space agencies, there’s movement on everything from asteroid defense (which is about more than just 99942 Apophis) to the Google Lunar X Prize (which now has four more teams competing) and space-based solar power (which we’ll see some action on, bringing tremendous energy-independence benefits)....

A number of companies are exploring ways to launch a rocket not from a launchpad, but from a plane in flight. Now Richard Branson wants to do it, too.Virgin Orbit, part of Branson’s aerospace business, has successfully attached a rocket to a 747 jet. The first-ever 747 converted to carry rockets is called Cosmic Girl, and the rocket is called LauncherOne. By carrying the rocket to 35,000 feet before launch, Cosmic Girl can release LauncherOne to deploy small-scale satellites without relying on—and paying for—the traditional ground launch....

Scientists have found exoplanets and protoplanets during their search for worlds beyond Earth, but here’s a new first: A young planet still in the end stages of formation has been spotted by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Best of all, it’s been directly imaged – not discovered indirectly or inferred by seeing its star’s light dip as the planet passes in front. The planet is believed to be between 1 and 10 million years old....

A plane’s black box—which is rarely actually black—serves an very crucial service. Though it obviously can’t help the plane that already went down, the data it contains can save countless other lives. So it is very important that one can survive even the most brutal crash. So what is inside these things that makes that possible? The vast majority of a flight recorder’s innards, as the guys at Whats Inside found out first hand, is not actually related to recording the flight at all....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe unyielding, ultracold winter across much of the Northeast and Midwest has plenty of us complaining bitterly, but there’s an upside: Cold kills bugs dead. Gypsy moths, hemlock woolly adelgids, emerald ash borers, and other arboreal assassins have been hit hard, according to entomologists’ early estimates. In Minnesota, some 80 percent of ash borers may have frozen to death, according to U.S. Forest Service biologists. In Appalachia, perhaps 95 percent of hemlock adelgids have ....

I love Thanksgiving. It’s great as a day devoted to giving thanks, but also—I’m a turkey guy. I love turkey and turkey leftovers, particularly sandwiches. Over the course of the weekend, I’ll crave a few quiet minutes to savor a turkey sandwich for lunch, either hot or cold, a cup of coffee and a ridiculously large piece of pie for dessert. I might even bring the lunch down to the shop, pull up a seat at my workbench, turn on the radio, and feast undisturbed....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubeToday, Adobe updated its Creative Cloud suite with a surprise for 3D-printing enthusiasts. The company’s flagship program, Photoshop, now has 3D printing integration with MakerBot, Shapeways, a New York-based company that will print your creations and ship them to you, and other popular desktop printers.Photoshop isn’t exactly known for CAD modeling. Although you can create basic 3D models in the program, Adobe sees Photoshop as a go-between that allows users to tweak and polish designs before printing....

Clear out the mothballs, because this Cold War relic has a new mission: to serve the people of Cleveland as delightful 50-seat bistro and lounge.The Boeing KC-97G Stratofreighter dates back to the aftermath of World War II. The United States built the B-47, a strategic turbojet bomber built to fly at high subsonic speeds. The B-47 had one purpose, never carried out: to drop a nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union....

Deep-sea jellyfish have inspired the design of robots and reveal insight about how life evolved in the ocean. But the blobby, bulbous creatures are difficult to study because they easily out-maneuver the scientists trying to inspect them.Maybe not for much longer. In a new paper published today in Science Robotics, mechanical materials engineer Nina Sinatra of Harvard University and her colleagues have developed a new robot with finger-like tentacles soft enough to snag the slippery sea creatures without hurting them....

The big bicycle manufacturers are always trying to seize the next advance in materials science and electronics to build a lighter, stiffer, more efficient, more comfortable, better bike. The next major advance may be in the rubber of the tires—the only part of a bike that actually touches the road.By adding layers of graphene (a one-atom-thick layer of carbon) to bike tires, Vittoria has developed new tires, called G+ or Graphene Plus, that they claim are superior in pretty much every facet....

The more you drive your car, the more it costs to keep up and running. Besides just endless re-fueling, cars also burn through engine oil, brake pads, spark plugs, and timing belts, too. As your car racks up these miles it can fall victim to even more problems, like a bad starter motor, leaky radiator, or cracked engine mounts.But how much does it cost to keep a car on the road?...