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SpaceX believes it has gotten to the core of what caused the Falcon 9 explosion on September 9, 2016, that sent the rocket and the $200 million Facebook satellite it was carrying up in a fiery blaze. The Hawthorne-based spaceflight company also announced that it will return to launching payloads on January 8. SpaceX explains in a statement that a pressure vessel containing cold helium ruptured when liquid oxygen (LOX) outside the vessel worked its way in between the aluminum tank and its carbon fiber liner....

There’s a lot riding on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.The ninth (and supposedly final) episode of the saga will be following up the disappointing Solo: A Star Wars Story and the continually controversial The Last Jedi (though we were big fans). And it will finally put to rest what’s known as The Skywalker Saga, the story of that famous force-sensitive family that’s defined Star Wars cinema for decades. But the movie doesn’t arrive in theaters until December 20, 2019, which means we’ve got plenty of time for more rumors and theories before we finally find out what’s what....

Scientists at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida have created what they believe to be the world’s strongest continuous magnetic field ever produced in a laboratory. Described in a letter to the journal Nature, the magnet reaches the strength of 45.5 teslas.Teslas in this case refer to neither the car nor the inventor Nikola, but rather the SI unit of measurement that measures magnetism named after him. A typical fridge magnet is 5 microTeslas, while an MRI machine usually has 3 Teslas....

The latest version of the F-16 Fighting Falcon, the F-16V, just concluded its first test flight successfully. This latest iteration of the iconic fighter includes a new radar system, stealth detection capability, and electronics designed keep the fighter, which debuted in 1974, up-to-date and flying for the next 20 years. The F-16 began as part of a drive to create a low-cost, lightweight fighter for the U.S. Air Force. And 41 years later, it’s still flying in countries around the world....

Let’s get this out of the way: England’s King Edward I was an ass. You may remember Longshanks from his villainous turn in Braveheart. Tall, forbidding, and bad-tempered, the 14th century monarch stomped his Welsh neighbors in submission, taxed the Irish into poverty, and stole money from his Jewish subjects, killing many of them and expelling the rest. When he was done with that he engineered a takeover of Scotland using tactics that would make Machiavelli blanch, including inflicting an unbelievably cruel death upon the leader of the Scots, William Wallace, that’s familiar to movie fans....

Europa is the best bet for finding alien life in the solar system. Mounds of visual evidence suggest that Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon has a subterranean ocean with at least twice the amount of liquid water as Earth’s oceans. Likely geysers have been spotted spouting from the surface of the moon. What’s more, Europa—along with Saturn’s moon Enceladus—is thought to have a rocky core, creating an ocean floor for the subsurface water that could provide minerals and salty compounds critical to life....

The U.S. Air Force has announced a round of upgrades to the world’s largest conventional bomb, the GBU-57. The GBU-57 weighs more than an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and is designed as a “bunker buster.” The upgrades reportedly enhance the bomb’s ability to penetrate concrete structures and deliver a high explosive payload.Known officially as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), the GBU-57 was designed to attack hardened concrete buildings, particularly those underground....

What’s the worst a software developer should be able to do to you if you pirate their application? One bit of add-on software for Microsoft Flight Simulator—a downloadable version of the Airbus A320X produced and sold by FlightSimLabs for $100—was found to be bundled with malware capable of rifling through user’ web browsers to harvest usernames and passwords in retaliation for piracy. The malware was analyzed by Andrew Mabbitt of Fidus Information Security, who was alerted by several Reddit threads and tipped off Motherboard to the situation....

Miss slamming cartridges into the top of your old SNES. And then taking them back out, blowing on them, and slamming them back in? So do the folks behind the Pico Cassette evidently, and they plan to bring that same tech to your phone, sort of. The Pico Cassette, debuted at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, is simple in theory; it’s a game cartridge for your phone that plugs in through the headphone jack....

Tyrannosaurus Rex has become one of the most notorious predators that ever walked the earth, thanks to in part to movies like Jurassic Park. The T. Rex you know and fear was a monster with teeth as long as a person’s forearm. But Tyrannosaurs haven’t always been so gigantic. According to a new fossil discovery, early Tyrannosaurs were much smaller.When and how quickly tyrannosaurs went from wallflower to prom king has been vexing paleontologists....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast week, India suffered two huge blackouts. Tuesday’s cut power to 370 million people; another one on Wednesday blacked out 670 million people, making it the worst blackout in the history of humanity.Talking about this with a colleague, I said, “Don’t worry. That can’t happen here.” “Why not?” she asked. “Because we don’t have 670 million people,” I replied. This wasn’t the comfort she was looking for.The specific causes of India’s blackouts aren’t likely to be a problem in the United States....

The U.S. Coast Guard has released dramatic video of the moment it captured a drug smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific. The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Munro boarded the semi-submersible cargo ship and detained its crew. The capture spotlighted the extent to which drug smugglers will go to remain undetected, building ships designed to barely peak out over the wavetops.View full post on YoutubeThe incident took place on June 17, 2019, in the Eastern Pacific (likely off the coast of South or Central America....

London’s Gatwick Airport, one of the biggest transportation hubs in the United Kingdom, was effectively shut down for nearly 36 hours due to drone interference near its runway. The airport has slowly emerged from the paralysis, with a small number of flights embarking on Friday morning, but the drone and its operators still remain at large. (Per the latest reports in the UK, the airport temporarily suspended airfield operations again on Friday evening after yet another drone sighting, but later resumed them)....

“Star Trek: Discovery” has announced its production in a tweet short on specifics and heavy on the history of the storied franchise. The tweet is an optimistic one, in light of previous delays which culminated in January with an announcement that the show had been delayed indefinitely.View full post on TwitterThe show is set in the traditional Star Trek universe, between the events of the show “Enterprise” and the classic original series....

We’re always looking for innovative ways to organize our workshops, as well as to gain a peek at what tools our favorite makers use. Check out the the following workshop tours from a few popular DIYers and woodworkers, and turn envy into inspiration for your next project.Suso Caamanho hails from Spain and has filmed a beautiful tour of the workshop where he builds projects for his YouTube channel, Paoso Woodworking. There is no narration, but the tools he uses are all labeled and you’ll find links to them in the description of the video....

Update 4:48 p.m.: The first Falcon 9 Block 5 successfully launched at 4:14 p.m. EDT, carrying the Bangabandhu-1 satellite to a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). The first stage of the rocket returned for a successful landing on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean. Bangabandhu-1, the first geostationary communications satellite for the nation of Bangladesh, was successfully deployed in GTO where it will continue to fly up to an altitude of roughly 35,000 kilometers....

Essam Heggy and other researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have used radar to study Mars for eight years, trying to find signs of water that could be beneath the surface. But recently, the researchers realized that this technology built for Mars could be put to use here on Earth. “Mars is a desert,” Heggy said. “There are many similarities that we saw between the geophysical properties of Mars and here on Earth....

I’ve tried hundreds of smartphones, but personally keep coming back to the iPhone, both for my own personal use and for recommending to other people. Why?Intuitive user experience: There’s a reason toddlers can use iOS.Customer service: I don’t like Apple’s aversion to DIY repair either, but show me another company with a network of stores that will fix your device. They don’t crash: I have yet to own an Android phone that doesn’t require the occasional restart....

Media Platforms Design TeamAtima Sabiel’s life had been a struggle from the beginning. She gave me the broad outline of her story while I sat on a woven mat in her small thatched hut in northern Darfur. Sabiel’s father died before she was born, leaving her mother to raise Atima and her siblings alone. When Atima was a teenager, the Darfur conflict began and the Janjaweed militia attacked the village next door....

When we sought him out for some hard-charging advice, Scott Langford of Big Dog Demolition rattled off his favorite job-site hand tools about as quickly as he knocks out a sheet of drywall: “We got hammers, Wonder Bars, pry bars, crowbars.” The Georgia-based safety director then delved into some obscure regional taxonomy (“the burp bar, the mutt”), but the basic gist of his deconstruction armada remained clear: These are the tools to pry, pull, pulverize or just plain break stuff up....