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A dog’s nose may be able to pick up heat signatures through thermal radiation. The researchers published the results of their experiments in the journal Scientific Reports. Only a few other animals, such as vampire bats and pit vipers, are known to have this ability.If you’ve ever booped the snoot of a good boy—and I sure hope you have—you likely noticed his nose was smooth, wet, and cool. But it turns out the tip of a dog’s slobbery, nerve-packed nose—called the rhinarium—may do more than sniff....

Idiots who shine lasers at helicopters and airplanes are becoming increasingly and troublingly common. Fortunately, they’re also getting what’s coming to them. Last night, NBC New York’s Chopper 4 was among several aircraft accosted by a laser-wielding dimwit. And from that birds-eye view, the crew inside helped police find and arrest the culprit. Related StoryWhy You Don’t Shine a Laser At a Police HelicopterChopper 4 had been heading to Brooklyn to catch footage of a stolen Greyhound bus when the green beam blasted their cockpit....

Speed Square Saw Guide For a lot of basic carpentry chores, especially framing with construction lumber, perfectly square cuts aren’t crucial. Mark a square line on a board and make the cut with your saw. If you’re reasonably careful, you’ll get a decent, serviceable cut. But lots of times close isn’t good enough. Siding joints and trim joints are just two examples that come to mind. One great way to get square cuts easily is by using a speed square as a saw guide....

Humongous fruits and vegetables are not so much for eating (though some are actually delicious). They’re for bragging. For showing that something can be done better and bigger than ever before. And no matter your level of gardening experience, you can grow them too.Your gourd or onion or radish may not become a record holder—unless you think you can top the 2,624-pound pumpkin grown by Belgian Mathias Willemijns—but you can certainly grow awesomely large produce and flowers in your home garden....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Horsehead Nebula, the number 1 seed in the Hypatia Division and a favorite to take the whole thing.In the Fleming Division’s craziest upset so far, top-seeded Nebula NGC 5189 suffered a crushing first-round defeat to Galaxy M74. Look for more insanity tonight as the Pillar in Carina is set to take on Gas Jet HH 110 in what promises to be a tightly contested matchup.It’s Hubble Madness 2014, where space nerds break out hot wings and beer to watch the Hubble telescope’s most stunning images compete in an elaborate bracket....

In January of this year, a robot set the record for fastest Rubik’s Cube solve at just under 1.2 seconds. In Feburary, the same team with the same machine was able to move the speed down to under a second. But now, there’s another new machine on the block, and its new record-setting run is a mere 0.887 seconds. How much faster can we get? You can watch the bonkers 0....

Distracted driving killed almost 3,500 in the United States in 2015. We know it’s dangerous, and yet for many of us the urge to look at our phones when we’re behind the wheel is too great. To that end, Nissan is adding Faraday cages to its cars.View full post on YoutubeCalled a Signal Shield, the cage is based on the room coated with metal foil by Michael Faraday in 1836. Faraday was able to prove that no electrical charge had entered the room, and the Faraday cage has only been improved upon and made smaller since (your microwave oven includes a version)....

Toolmaking is crucial for human survival, and our mammalian cousins have apparently picked up on its necessity. Orangutans surprised a group of human researchers recently when they were far more adept at creating fishhooks than previous studies indicated: The orangutans surveyed were nearly flawless, assembling the fishhooks correctly on their first attempts and besting a group of human children.A team of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from Scotland’s University of St....

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been in orbit around the near-Earth asteroid Bennu for about a week now, and it’s not wasting any time. On Monday, NASA announced that OSIRIS-REx had found water on the surface of the asteroid.During OSIRIS-REx’s two year-long approach to Bennu, the spacecraft took a lot of pictures. Most of those showed the asteroid as a tiny dot against the backdrop of space. But in recent months, the pictures have started to show features....

Are parachutes worthless? Most people would answer no—assuming the airplane in question was in flight. And that’s the rub: That knee-jerk conjecture takes place out of context. Through a different lens, parachutes don’t do anything at all because jumping from a plane on the ground is 100 percent harmless, and there’s a study to prove it. A group of professors of medicine conducted a satirical “PARACHUTE trial”(PArticipation in RAndomized trials Compromised by widely Held beliefs aboUt lack of Treatment Equipoise) to illustrate the dangers of interpreting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) out of context....

Taiwan thinks it needs new long-range weapons to keep China at bay, and now it has an innovative (if weird) solution. The nation is reportedly pulling engines out of old fighter jets to figure out how to make one for a cruise missile.The J85 turbojet engines in question come from Northrop F-5E/F jets, called the Tiger II. Produced in the 1970s, the Tiger II was a low-cost multi-role jet in the same vein as today’s F-16....

After a few weeks with a Tepui Kukenam tent on top of my truck, I want one. Real bad. Once you stay in one, or look in one, or even just see one on top of a truck driving down the road, you’re probably going to want one too. It may seem ridiculous to spend more than a grand on a tent that only works when tethered to your vehicle. It may be ridiculous, but if the Tepui fits your life, it’s hard to imagine anything better....

Scattered across the U.K. today are huge concrete blocks with concave divots cut out of them. Most people who see them don’t know their true purpose: A hundred years ago, the British government built these monumental structures as a way to pick up the sounds of approaching airships and know the Germans were coming. If you think of sustained air raids against London, you probably think of the Nazi blitz of World War II....

Nearly 2000 years ago, the Romans constructed a temple of a size and design that engineers still look upon with awe. It was a massive circular building, 143 ft. in diameter, covered by a monolithic dome. The building still stands. It’s called the Pantheon–and it’s made of concrete.While mortar had been used in stone construction by the Egyptians, Roman concrete was something new. It relied on a paste made of ground limestone, water and volcanic ash, or pozzuolana, that was poured into forms where it hardened and bound together a rock filler, or aggregate....

The U.S. Navy’s last F/A-18 Hornet flew for the very last time from NAS Oceana on October 2, 2019.Originally designed for the U.S. Air Force, the F/A-18 served for 36 years. The fighter was replaced by both the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the F-35C.The U.S. Navy marked the end of an era last week when the last active duty F/A-18C Hornet flew for the last time. The strike fighter, the first to be anointed with both Fighter and Attack designations, flew for nearly four decades before being replaced by its bigger brother, the Super Hornet....

It takes an innovative company like ReadyMax to come up with a product like this: a heavy-duty pair of safety glasses with concealed hearing protection. It’s obvious that usually when you need one, you need the other.The industrial design of the ReadyMax SoundShield glasses is remarkable. The earplugs are neatly stowed in the pods on the end of the temples. Flip open the hinged end of each pod with your thumb and inside you find a high quality, three-flange earplug attached to a retractable lanyard....

A new solar-powered town in Florida has already built a restaurant, a school and a community gathering space. Now in 2018, Babcock Ranch is adding something even more important: residents. Below Tampa and Orlando, about half an hour northeast from the tourist attractions of Fort Myers, Babcock Ranch is built on and 18,000-acre expanse and hopes to have 19,500 homes and 50,000 residents within 20 to 25 years. Its first residents moved in January 4th....

The best way to study martian rocks and soil would be to do it on Earth. While spacecraft-mounted instruments—such as the Curiosity rover’s ChemCam that vaporizes surface material with a laser and then uses a spectrometer to determine the chemical composition—are invaluable to planetary scientists, they are no replacement for a sample in the lab. The amount of compositional and absolute age data that scientists can obtain with a laboratory full of state-of-the-art equipment and chemicals to test sample materials is unparalleled, as evidenced by research conducted on meteorites (including from Mars) and Apollo moon samples....

Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo model, the VSS Unity built by Scaled Composites, was dropped from the carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo at 50,000 feet for its seventh glide test today. Virgin will review data from the flight, but the company is hopeful that this will be the VSS Unity’s last glide test before the first powered flight with its hybrid rocket engine. The flight saw the pilots put VSS Unity into a dive immediately after being released from the mothership, hitting Mach 0....

Media Platforms Design TeamDan Templeton stands on the nacelle of a 2-megawatt DeWind turbine in Sweetwater, Texas. Four of the world’s five biggest wind projects are in Sweetwater’s Nolan County.Driving along Broadway in Sweetwater, Texas, one could justifiably assume the city is on its way down, not its way up. Cobwebs crowd the windows of abandoned storefronts, and peeling signs hang from cracked facades. It is only after I pull up to the mayor’s office, pausing to study the street more carefully, that I notice a real clue to the city’s changing fortunes: The blond stone building is neatly sandwiched between Craig A....