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Four times can’t be a fluke. Within the first four episodes of its second season Star Trek: Discovery has pulled a near-180, shrugging off its messy first season and warping into a much more focused and much better direction. It now feels appropriate to finally welcome Star Trek back to television with this week’s episode, “An Obol for Charon.” A Familiar FaceCBSMoving on from last week’s Klingon-heavy family drama, Michael Burnham and Captain Pike refocus their attention on finding Spock....

Scientists have successfully used nanoparticles to allow mice to see near infrared light.The researchers say they’ve made progress on similar nanoparticles to confer this ability onto humans, letting people see in the dark in the future.The nanomaterial in the eyes of the mice did not cause any notable side effects. Want superhero powers that let you see in the dark just like your cat? In the near future you may be able to—as long as you’re not too squeamish to get injections right into your eyeballs....

A decommissioned Swiss bunker, like those where Xapo houses its vaults. FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP//Getty ImagesBitcoin is a digital currency, but it still has a physical presence. Private, cryptographic keys need to exists as ones and zeros on actually computer memory. So what do you do if you’re a newly-minted Bitcoin billionaire? Maybe you store those crucial codes in a Swiss bunker. As reported by Bloomberg, bunkers run by a startup known as Xapo, are filled with computer servers that are entirely disconnected from the internet and any other sort of computer network....

Scientists have created a flying fish-like robot that jumps into the air from water.The first of its kind, the vehicle is powered by a chemical reaction between water and calcium carbide.The researchers hope the small glider could be used by marine biologists to collect water samples in hard-to-reach regions.Roboticists at Imperial College London and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology have developed a new type of glider that swiftly jumps from sea to air like a flying fish....

After ending the Intermediate Range Forces Treaty (INF), the U.S. tested a new ground-launched cruise missile.The missile was once banned under the INF treaty and looks like a tomahawk cruise missile.The test was likely a response to U.S. accusations that Russia as been flouting the treaty for some time.The U.S. has tested a new ground launched cruise missile just weeks after a treaty banning them expired. The new missile, previously banned under the Intermediate Range Forces Treaty (INF), was launched yesterday, August 18th, 2019, off the coast of California....

The legendary Grumman F-14 Tomcat is widely considered the best fleet air superiority fighter the U.S. Navy ever put to sea. But the Navy wasn’t the only one to fly F-14s, NASA had two of the formidable fighters too, and together the planes helped provide valuable flight test research that helped fix a dangerous problem vexing the Tomcat fleet.View full post on YoutubeThe video above shows NASA 991, an F-14 assigned to the space organization’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, California....

U.S. Army Rangers reenacted this week the famous scaling off the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, one of the most famous missions in Ranger history. The cliffs, scaled on the morning of June 6th, 1944, were the only way to a German artillery battery Allied commanders believed could wreck the D-Day invasion. More than a hundred Rangers were killed or wounded during the fighting in and around the guns.View full post on YoutubeIn the months leading up to the Normandy invasion, targets up and down the French coastline were bombed and strafed by allied airpower....

Dungeons & Dragons is the oldest tabletop roleplaying game of sword and sorcery—emphasis on the sorcery. Because without magic, D&D wouldn’t be very exciting, unless you like wargaming the Battle of Agincourt while rolling constitution checks to not contract the plague. Magic, and its evolving rules, gives D&D its storytelling power, letting players’ minds wander beyond the real world. It makes sense that, in the game’s first edition, D&D creator Gary Gygax borrowed mythical races and monsters like Ents, Orcs, and the Balrog from J....

Paper is usually the material of choice for the blueprints for a bridge, not the bridge itself. But in Cumbria, England, a bridge made of 22,000 sheets of paper arced over a small creek until it was dismantled yesterday.Artist Steve Messam based the bridge on the same principles used to make dry-stone walls and packhorse bridges for millennia. Nothing holds the paper together other than itself—the force of the 4.5 tons of sheets compressed against one another....

The towering legacy of Star Wars is also the franchise’s greatest curse. Ever since the credits faded on Return of the Jedi 35 years ago, Star Wars films have been doomed to constantly reference its roots. Where novels and video games have explored plenty of creative storylines, the films haven’t been so lucky. [Warning: Major spoilers ahead]Solo: A Star Wars Story is the latest expression of this curse. While it is a competent film compared to most mindless blockbusters, Solo becomes obsessed with explaining every last detail we’ve ever known about Han Solo, destroying the mythos that made Harrison Ford’s character so memorable in the first place....

This week Boeing revealed the first design details of a demonstrator aircraft that would go faster than Mach 5. Boeing hopes to build the hypersonic concept around a combined-cycle engine that incorporates elements of a turbine and a dual ramjet/scramjet. The unveiling came at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech forum in Orlando, Florida, as reported by Aviation Week Aerospace Daily.Boeing’s model design is similar to one Lockheed Martin is working on....

Airborne InternetA subsidiary of Branson’s TV-laden Virgin Atlantic empire across the pond, Virgin America features an In-Flight Entertainment system (IFE) with a 9-in., 1024 x 600 seatback touchscreen–for every passenger. JetBlue-esque live satellite TV meets over 3000 MP3s and 25 pay-per-view movies in this Linux-based but in-house-developed system, affectionately termed “Red.” And, just like its next-generation competitors, Virgin will tap into the Internet, with a wireless signal transmitted via file servers and ADRs (Airborne Decoder Receivers) hidden in the belly of the craft....

NASA launched Robonaut 2 into space in February of 2011. This was a big deal: the humanoid robot would be the first of its kind in orbit. Robonaut was intended to help the astronauts aboard the ISS complete mundane tasks and free up their time for activities that made better use of their human faculties. When Robonaut arrived on the ISS, it was a torso, head, and two arms that could be used to pull itself around the station....

Media Platforms Design TeamFritz Henderson has been the CEO of General Motors since Rick Wagoner was forced to leave by the Obama administration last spring. And now he has joined the list of former GM CEOs. In a press conference today in Detroit, the chairman of the board, Ed Whitacre, announced simply that Fritz would be leaving and did not provide reasons for the sudden departure. “Based on the pace of change within the company,” Whitacre said, “It was determined that it’s best to initiate a change in the leadership....

Update 10/15: NASA has attempted to bring a backup gyro online, but it appears to have a problem that makes it impossible to use. According to a press release, the backup gyroscope consistently overestimates how much it’s moving the telescope, which makes it impossible to use, particularly for finer adjustments. NASA’s engineers are working to see if there’s a fix, but if they fail the telescope will switch to running on a single gyro from this point on....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn Men in Black III, out May 25, Agent J (Will Smith) has to travel back to the 1960s to save Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). And the only way to make the time jump is to jump—off the top of the . As J freefalls from the iconic skyscraper, the city of New York beneath him transforms back to its 1960s appearance. It was up to visual effects supervisor Jay Redd to make this temporal transition happen....

This just in, for some reason: One morning over the summer, a bunch of children and teenage instructors at a sailing camp near Stockholm looked up and saw a giant unidentified submarine surface in the waters not far from where they were practicing their tacks, then disappear about 20 minutes later. This was on June 28, 2018, off the Boson peninsula on Lidingö island. Inexplicably, it has only been publicly reported just now....

Several private organizations and non-profits have announced a partnership with NASA towards the research and development of drones on Mars. Now, their headed to the Arctic to explore the unique engineering challenge of designing a copter for a planet such a thin atmosphere. The Mars Institute, the SETI Institute, and FYBR Solutions Inc. will be working with NASA at one of the most Mars-like places on Earth, Devon Island in Canadian Arctic....

At the center of our galaxy is a massive black hole. This black hole, called Sagittarius A*, is approximately 6 million times the mass of our sun, and the gravitational field it generates is enough to keep our entire galaxy orbiting it. But Sagittarius A* is not the only black hole at the center of our galaxy: New research from Columbia University suggests that the galactic center could hold thousands more....

Deep beneath the surface of Earth lies an entire landscape of mountains possibly rougher and taller than any on the surface. So say Princeton geophysicists Jessica Irving and Wenbo Wu, who published a study last week in Science in collaboration with Sidao Ni from the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics in China. The researchers used scattered seismic waves registered during an epic magnitude 8.2 earthquake that struck Bolivia in 1994 to map the topography of a boundary layer 660 kilometers (410 miles) “straight down....