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Boeing’s mammoth, aviation-industry-changing 747 flew its last fight for a U.S. airline back in 2018. But while the jumbo jet’s service days might be over, not every 747 is headed for the boneyard. Corendon Hotel & Resorts acquired a 747-400 all its own, not for flying but rather to serve as an attraction at the Corendon Village Hotel in Amsterdam. It’s currently in the midst of its final trip, by land, from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport....

The modern solider is overburdened, so defense researchers have been trying to invent new ways to lighten the load, such as wearable exoskeletons that shoulder some of the weight. Now, here comes the latest possible solution, a tracked robot designed to operate with Army ground forces, carrying important, heavy gear. The Grizzly, developed by Textron Systems, could carry extra small arms ammunition, anti-tank weapons, mines, medical equipment, and other gear. Having a rugged robot carry this cargo could make ground forces more heavily armed but more agile on the battlefield....

Media Platforms Design TeamSupercars and snow are usually an ill-advised, YouTube-bound combination, but Lamborghini’s Winter Driving Academy mines that unlikely pairing by showing off the cold weather hoonability of their all-wheel drive exotics.The program is held a several times a year and attracts global participants-some of whom are Lambo owners, others simply hunting for new driving experiences; I sampled the program in the Italian town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, nestled in the Dolomite mountain range, alongside speed hungry guests from Russia and Singapore....

According to a new survey of the Earth’s biomass, plants make up 80 percent of all carbon stored in living creatures. Bacteria make up 13 percent, and fungus comes third at 2 percent. And as for humans? All 7.6 billion of us account for just one ten thousandth (1/10,000th) of the biomass on Earth. “The fact that the biomass of fungi exceeds that of all animals’ sort of puts us in our place,” Harvard evolutionary biologist James Hanken told AP News....

The National Transportation Safety Board today confirmed to PM that the agency is dispatching a crash investigator to the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. (The FBI is also sending a representative.) But at this early stage just one thing is certain: This probe will be unlike any other in the annals of aviation history.Already the NTSB is proceeding on the assumption that this will be a criminal—not civil—probe, an agency spokesman says....

When your toilet breaks at home, at least you can call a plumber. On the International Space Station, sitting about 250 miles above the surface of the Earth, the solution is a bit more complicated. Last week, while trying to upgrade their toilet facility, the ISS crew accidentally caused a water leak on the station.The toilet onboard the ISS was installed in 2008, during one of the last space shuttle missions....

LEGO bricks performed well in a heat tolerance test at extremely low temperatures.Applications like superconducting and quantum computing require near-absolute-zero temperatures in order to work.Scientists say the special LEGO shape is part of why the bricks did so well.Gizmodo reports that some whimsical scientists have supercooled their Lego bricks in order to test for heat tolerance. They were surprised how well the bricks performed in their tests.Superconducting and quantum computing are both enabled by materials that perform best at extremely low temperatures....

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will investigate the planet’s history.The rover will be powered and survive cold nights with help from a nuclear battery.The rover will replicate how a human geologist would investigate Mars.NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will make history on the red planet as it explores the body’s geological history and attempts to make an assessment on past habitability, or even the chance that there was once life. And two recent announcements show that preparations are rolling along....

There’s always an increasing need for materials that can show both strength and flexibility. Scientists have discovered one that can significantly change shape at small temperature variations without breaking.The team hopes that, with further control, the material’s crystals could be used in medical devices. When organic materials repeatedly change shape, they usually do so through breaking. So a material that can alter its shape and remain whole has a number of potential advantages and uses....

Media Platforms Design Team"It’s hard for me to find earphones that fit me well; I have weird ears.“If you’ve ever uttered these words, Normal CEO and founder Nikki Kaufman has a solution for you. In fact, it’s the very reason she’s named her company “Normal”—from her perspective, everyone’s ears should be considered normal. It’s earphones that should conform to your ears, not the other way around.But when Kaufman looked into getting a custom-made pair of her own, she found that her options weren’t great: The process involved a visit to the doctor’s office, uncomfortable silicon molds, a wait that could last up to three weeks, and (worst of all) getting saddled with a $2,000 price tag....

When Ready Player One reached its climactic moment, you might have noticed a familiar choice. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)The game is over. Wade Wilson has won. Wilson (aka the avatar Parzival) has thwarted the forces of evil and solved the elaborate VR scavenger hunt full of Atari games and bad 80s references that drives the plot of Ready Player One. In this moment of triumph, he meets a representation of James Halliday, the tech titan of this world who built the OASIS virtual reality platform where humanity now spends his time....

Russian armed forces seized three Ukrainian warships in the Black Sea after it claimed that the ships intruded into Russian territorial waters. Ukraine for its part claims Russian forces attacked the ships before they were captured. The incident comes after years of on-again, off-again fighting between the two neighboring countries. The incident started on Sunday when, according to Russia, three Ukrainian warships, the military tug Yani Kapu and two small artillery boats Berdyansk and Nikopol (see above) strayed into Russian territorial waters in the Kerch Strait, which connects the smaller Sea of Azov with the larger Black Sea....

One of Russia’s most powerful submarines ripple-fired four long-range nuclear-tipped missiles in a matter of seconds. The exercise this week was an important reminder of how Russia, the United States, and other nuclear powers test and maintain large numbers of nuclear weapons at sea.View full post on YoutubeFrom a submerged position in the White Sea, the ballistic missile submarine Yuri Dolgoruky launched four Bulava missiles in just 15 seconds. According to a statement by the Russian Ministry of Defense, missiles were pointed east at Russia’s Kura missile testing range on the Kamchatka peninsula....

Public urination is a problem in a number of major cities. There’s typically fines already on the books, but they rarely seem to deter the drunk and disorderly. That’s why cities like San Francisco have begun testing a coating that reflects urine, but it might not actually do that job so well.A (gross but enlightening and mostly SFW) video from the folks at Mission Local shows a few fellows testing 17 anti-pee walls outside BART stations....

The car you drive is serious business under a Detroit sky. And this Detroit sky roils, August weather set to sweep east over Lake Erie—hot gusts of dry wind, little pellets of rain, intermittent patches of blue visible behind the moving clouds, a nascent Rust Belt rain, bound for Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester.All that hanging over the Chrysler–Jeep assembly plant on the southeast side of Detroit. The facility is banded on the outside by various parking lots, separated by high chain-link fencing....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the Exxon Valdez was wrecked off the coast of Alaska in 1989, cleanup crews were able to recover only about 14 percent of the spilled oil. Twenty-one years later, when the Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico, recovery efforts had improved shockingly little: Responders were still burning, skimming, and directly trapping the oil coming out of the wellhead, and they captured just one quarter of the oil that spilled....

An exploding e-cigarette killed a 24-year-old Texas man after debris from the device sent shrapnel into his neck, resulting in a massive stroke after severing off blood to his brain. William Brown was pronounced dead on January 29 after undergoing a medically induced coma at a Fort Worth hospital, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s office confirmed to CNN. The incident occurred right outside of a vaporizer store two days before Brown died....

John Collins holds the record for longest flight by a paper airplane. In 2012, he broke the previous record of 207 feet, 4 inches with a glider thrown by the quarterback Joe Ayoob. Collins’ plane landed after 226 feet, 10 inches. In this video from Wired, Collins explains how he did it. View full post on YoutubeInstead of using a “ballistic dart”, a paper airplane with a very narrow wingspan, which was thrown very high and crashes in a simple parabolic dart, Collins’ wide-winged glider climbs after the initial throw and then falls and levels out to cross the finish line....

Lightning Car CompanyMedia Platforms Design TeamTake TVR’s eccentricity and mix it with a high-tech all-electric drivetrain and the result would be something like Britain’s Lightning Car Company. It seems like the whole world is trying to build an electric sports car, doesn’t it?The proposed Lightning GTS is a relatively large GT built around a tubular space frame and propelled by four 120-kilowatt brushless wheel motors (one for each wheel) that double as generators during braking to recharge the battery pack....

Media Platforms Design Team(Published in the March 2004 issue)More: Learn how to survive a plummeting elevator.We live in a vertical world. Despite suburban sprawl, most of Earth’s population is packed into cities that have nowhere to go but up. With skyscrapers climbing to ever-greater altitudes, the challenge is not only how to scale these heights, but how to do so safely, comfortably and conveniently.The elevator system installed in Taiwan’s new Taipei 101 tower–the world’s tallest building–pushes the limits of people-mover technology....