The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is an enigma. It makes up around one third of the entire Antarctic continent and will play a pivotal role in the next few decades because it’s melting, and fast. It’s also unpredictable, which makes it tough for scientists to get a handle on exactly how fast that melting is happening. That’s why a team of scientists decided to drill a hole more than a mile into the ice to figure it out....
Researchers have developed a polymer that disappears in an instant when you push a button to trigger an internal mechanism or the sun hits it.The polymer has specifically been developed for the Department of Defense.Scientists are regularly looking for better ways to hide materials, like invisibility cloaks. While a polymer that self-destructs might not have uses in the practical world, the concept of a sturdy material that can instantly dissolve itself without a trace is of extreme interest to groups invested in spycraft, like the Department of Defense or the C....
Tomorrow afternoon, if all goes according to plan, the Falcon Heavy will fly at last. But Elon Musk knows you cannot wait, and so this afternoon SpaceX released an animation of the launch.In the glossy video clip, you can see Falcon Heavy blast off from Cape Canaveral. Once it leaves the planet, two booster stages fall away, turn around, come back to Earth and land on a launchpad. The third follows shortly thereafter, setting down on a drone ship at sea....
Media Platforms Design TeamA new study says that out of 81 common compounds used in fracking, there’s very little known about the potential health risks of about one-third of them. This research was presented this week at the .248th National Meeting of the American Chemical SocietyWilliam Stringfellow of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and his team searched through public databases for the most common compounds used in fracking around the U....
Media Platforms Design TeamDouble-Decker DisksI’m interested in a new DVD burner and I’ve noticed that many new burners are dual-layer drives. How do these things work and will the discs play in nondual- layer drives and DVD players?A standard single-layer recordable DVD can carry 4.7GB of data, which may seem like a lot, until you notice that a standard store-bought movie DVD has up to 8.5GB of data on it. That’s because Hollywood has been pressing movies onto high-capacity dual-layer discs for years....
U.S. military forces are testing a new, lightweight one-person electric vehicle. The DSRaider all-terrain vehicle has the advantages of traditional ATVs in a smaller, more compact package. Ridden upright like a Segway and capable of carrying more than three hundred pounds across rough terrain, the DSRaider is aimed at soldiers, first responders, and outdoorsmen.View full post on YoutubeDSRaider, an Israeli company, is marketing its EZRaider series of personal all-terrain vehicles as a sturdy, quiet transportation tool for commandos and other troops....
Editor’s Note: This story originally stated that the Navy budget killed funding for its railgun project. This was in error—actually, the railgun was moved to a different part of the budget. The full correction follows at the end of the original article.The U.S. Navy is seeking nearly $300 million for research into a family of laser weapons for the fleet. First pointed out by Aviation Week & Space Technology reporter Lara Seligman on Twitter, the so-called Navy Laser Family of Systems is meant to get laser weapons to sea in the near term, giving the U....
When presented with the idea of traveling across the Atlantic in a giant orange barrel, most people might have a few questions. Like, for example, “Why?” But for Jean-Jacques Savin, a 72-year-old former military parachutist and pilot who just completed the voyage from the Canary Islands (off the coast of Morocco) to an island in the Caribbean, the question is an easy one to answer: to prove that man could survive the trip....
Media Platforms Design TeamBREAKTHROUGH WHO National Audubon Society, New York City FIELD OrnithologyACHIEVEMENT A study that shows how climate change could affect future bird populations.When Gary Langham, Chief Scientist for the National Audubon Society, set out to predict how warming temperatures would affect the fragile climate zones, or ranges, that hundreds of North American birds live within, he was not prepared for the results: For 314 of the 588 species studied, those livable zones would shrink by more than half by 2080....
Media Platforms Design TeamIt was a multibillion-dollar competition marred by corruption, greed and political intrigue. Who would have thought that aerial refueling tankers—essentially flying gas stations—could create so much drama?Certainly not the Air Force, which in September 2001 saw an opportunity to push through a fast-track lease-to-own deal for 100 tankers based on Boeing’s 767 aircraft. The Air force figured that an aircraft lease, like leasing a car, would allow it to buy something that it couldn’t immediately afford: a fleet of new aircraft to replace its Eisenhower-era KC-135 tankers....
Uber’s self-driving cars are having a little trouble getting down the road on their own. During the week of March 8, the 43 active self-driving Uber cars on the road only drove an average of about 0.8 miles before the safety driver had to take the wheel, according to internal documents acquired by Recode.Uber uses a metric called “miles per intervention,” and according to Recode, it records every single time a driver has to take control of a self-driving car for any reason....
In just eight minutes, the Mario video below can provide for you one of those universal human experiences, the one we call “pure nameless dread.” It belongs to that genre of masochistic customized levels floating out there, in which the mods take the familiar physics of a Mario game and twist them into a nearly impossible form that only the most insane of gamers could tame.YouTube user PangaeaPanga built this, their version of the Lament Configuration, over the course of three years....
Media Platforms Design TeamBuild a plane that’s as heavy as a car, but uses only as much energy as a scooter. And stay aloft with just the energy of the sun—even after sunset. That, pilot André Borschberg says, is the challenge facing the Solar Impulse team as it stares down its biggest challenge yet: flying around the world in a solar-powered plane.You might have heard about Solar Impulse when the sun-powered plane project made its maiden flight in 2009, or in 2010 when Borschberg set the endurance record by piloting the aircraft for 26 consecutive hours, running on stored solar energy from on-board batteries after the sun went down....
America was transfixed by the hunt for Dzhokar Tsarnaev, one of two accused Boston Marathon bombers who killed three people and wounded more than 170. The images of heavily armed personnel sweeping the town of Watertown, Massachusetts, captured one of the largest, most complex operations of its kind in U.S. history.Jack Schonely knows a lot about manhunts. After 30-plus years as a police officer, he now teaches perimeter containment tactics to other law enforcement agencies and wrote the book Apprehending Fleeing Suspects: Suspect Tactics and Perimeter Control, so we asked him how the Boston police executed their manhunt....
Here’s a question that’s been bothering me for a while. How much driving would you save on a given highway trip if you took the inside lane on every corner? Simple math tells us that a car travels a shorter distance to round the inside of a curve than the outside. Could that fact make a marked difference in mileage on a road trip? Not if you’re driving cross-country on a mostly straight road like I-80....
A lot of coding that happens on TV is complete and utter malarky. Look no further than the classic (and self-aware) double keyboard scene from NCIS. But that doesn’t mean it’s all bunk. In fact, as YouTuber Behind the Screens points out, code shown in an episode of the 1980s TV show Airwolf is completely functional, in fact it even has its own bug. The episode’s story pits a computer programmer against her late colleague’s code, leaving her in a race to disable a ’logic bomb’ her cohort had programmed to be activated by a dead man’s switch upon his demise....
Media Platforms Design TeamA man wakes up on the train with no idea where he is—or, as it turns out, who he is. With the help of a mysterious computer program called source code, Army pilot Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) has accessed the last 8 minutes of a stranger’s memories in order to accomplish a daunting mission: Find out who placed a bomb on the commuter train he’s currently riding....
Talk about a self-inflicted wound. A Dutch F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet was reportedly damaged by its own gunfire back in January. The jet suffered “considerable damage,” but the pilot escaped injury and landed the plane safely. On January 21, two Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16s engaged a practice target on the ground at Vliehors training ground. One pilot fired his M61 Vulcan 20-millimeter Gatling gun, the F-16’s built-in weapon. The jet was struck on the outside by one of the rounds, and the airplane’s engine intake swallowed at least some part of a 20-millimeter round....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhether you are looking to prep your car for sale, get it clean prior to mechanical surgery, or merely don’t want to cringe when you open the hood, a little DIY cleaning will make a world of difference. Here are step-by-step pictures of how to clean an engine. Note: Keep in mind that it is illegal to dump untreated wastewater into sewer gutters. Be sure to clean your engine somewhere you can collect the wastewater and dispose of it properly....
Google’s Nest Secure home security device is meant to do what its name suggests: make homes safer. But, in a completely unsurprising turn, the device is now sparking privacy concerns. The tech giant failed to notify users that its home security device came equipped with a microphone, an oversight Google has called an “error,” per Business Insider. The discovery was made sort of by accident. Earlier this month, Google notified users that Nest Guard (the alarm, keypad and motion-sensor component of Nest Home Secure) was now compatible with the company’s Home Assistant voice-control function....
