Posts

When it comes to telescopes, unless you’re a pirate trying to fit your spyglass back in your shirt after spotting land, bigger is always better. A larger telescope means more collected light, which means better resolution and the ability to see fainter and further objects. For most telescopes, though, even a slightly bigger size means an exponentially larger cost. But that’s not the case with radio telescopes, which collect radio light waves instead of visible light....

X-Plane flight simulator creator Austin Meyer has built an iPad app that can take over during an emergency and land a real-live plane safely.Meyer recently tested the app, called Xavion, with the help of pilot Andrew Barker, CEO of TruTrak Flight Systems. Meyer landed a small four-seat airplane using the app. They even simulated an engine failure and Xavion guided the plane to the ground by adjusting propeller pitch.Xavion interfaces with the autopilot system, gaining control over certain critical functions of the airplane....

A new graphic shows just how many flights come in and out of some of the world’s busiest passenger airports. An interactive graphic from Addison Lee compares 10 different global airport’s daily take-offs and landings, calculated by a breakdown of their latest seasonal data.From New York’s JFK to London’s Heathrow, the graphic shows off the flight traffic of major airports by condensing 30 seconds of real time down to just one second....

ANAHEIM, Calif. – In theory, DARPATech 2007 is crawling with robots. Stanford University’s Grand Challenge winner, Stanley, squats in the lobby of the Marriott Anaheim. The first thing you see upon walking into the exhibit hall is Big Dog, the four-legged robotic jogger from Boston Dynamics. There are videos of robotic surgeons and scale models of giant unmanned ground vehicles and a snake-like bot encased in glass. But for the most part, these robots are static props, the machine equivalent of stuffed Siberian tigers, frozen mid-leap, in a natural history museum....

Briny, liquid water may form in the shadows of large boulders during Martian winters.Scientists created computer simulations to better understand the conditions in which this salty water ice melts.Over the course of a day, they found that the water ice could warm from -262 degrees Fahrenheit to -50 degrees Fahrenheit.Boulders strewn across the surface of mid-latitude Mars may be the key to finding liquid water on the red planet. Scientists calculated that water ice could have the ability to form in the shadows of some of the boulders during the winter months....

What’s so special about your stove? Give me your elevator pitch.Radiating heat is a cozy feature delivered by a tile stove. It is the same feeling of warmth the sun gives your skin on a cold winter’s day. In the Alps we’ve enjoyed that kind of heating for many generations. However, we have developed this kind of technology further into something that can be controlled manually or automated. The key feature of our tile stove is that it has a combustion chamber that has earned the eco-label of Austria....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamFINAL REPORT - November 2008Media Platforms Design TeamOur Wrangler has proven far easier to live with than we’d first imagined. While previous versions of the Jeep’s rugged off-roader abused their occupants with wild head tosses and headache-inducing wind roar, the new one’s ride and road manners are acceptable by everyday-car standards. And it’s downright impressive considering what this mud monster can do in the dirt....

The U.S. Army, using Microsoft’s Hololens, has developed new goggles to help soldiers on the battlefield.IVAS will put data in a soldier’s field of view, allowing wearers to maintain situational awareness while interacting with the system.The system will eventually allow soldiers to fire their weapons without seeing the enemy. The U.S. Army is planning to buy 40,000 pairs of ‘mixed reality’ goggles, enough to outfit nearly one in ten soldiers. The IVAS goggles, derived from Microsoft’s Hololens program, will allow soldiers to identify friendly and enemy forces and aim their weapons without directly seeing the enemy....

Media Platforms Design TeamAaron Mihaly/FlickrIn the world of table saws, prices can range dramatically, from about $100 for a portable homeowner-grade saw all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars for professional shop saws. Most of us do our shopping at the lower end of that scale, which means we often end up with saws that have limited power and features. But having an entry-level tool shouldn’t hinder your work....

Bosch power tools always do well in our tests, particularly its jig saws, corded drills, and miter saws. So when the company announced its newest 12-in. saw a couple of days ago, we sat up and took notice. It’s not the first time that we’ve directed extra attention to a Bosch saw. We even presented one of the company’s machines with a Breakthrough Award a few years ago.The new Bosch machine is a lot of saw—65 lbs....

Small drones are the ultimate smart bombs: They can become portable, personal cruise missiles weighing five pounds or less able put a warhead on target miles away. Some, like the Israeli Hero-30, are already being deployed. But the next generation of such U.S. weapons will have advanced warheads that can hit targets from tanks to buildings. These will be based on a railgun weapons technology descriptively known as MAHEM. There has been much excitement over the prospect of railguns replacing heavy artillery....

When it comes to weird quantum effects, none is weirder than quantum teleportation. Scientists can—and have—used the unique and complicated physics of quantum mechanics to instantaneously teleport small particles across great distances. Now, a Chinese team has broken the distance record by teleporting particles to a satellite in space.When we talk about teleportation, we should be clear about exactly what that means. Nobody’s beaming people to space like in Star Trek....

Okay, so I thought this column was going to be about something else. When I arranged to take a 2019 Mazda MX-5 Miata and a Genesis G70 3.3T AWD to a Ferrari club track day at Virginia International Raceway, I hoped to prove a thesis that those two cars aren’t the rolling roadblocks you’d expect. Instead, I got a lesson in the concept of automotive evolution and the quantifiable value of history....

Media Platforms Design TeamDuring the past few decades of personal computing, moving files onto our computers has been a fairly straight forward process. We’ve stashed them on a drive—be it floppy, zip or USB—and then plugged the drive into a computer. The machine recognizes the drive and, a few drags and drops later, the files are copied.But Apple’s iPad is a different sort of beast, with remarkably few gateways for files to pass through....

It’s Monday morning so what better to do than to waste some of your time on a video game? Lucky for you a Redditor has stumbled across an amusing little text adventure that’s baked into the background code of Google’s iconic homepage. Discovered by Redditor attempt_number_1 and surfaced by Rock Paper Shotgun, the previously unknown Easter egg is buried pretty deep into Google.com, so who knows how long it has been waiting undiscovered....

Bees see what we don’t. Their eyes are adept at seeing in ultraviolet, so much so that flowers have evolved colorful patterns visible only in UV to attract bees’ attention. The vision of these buzzing insects is just one example of what lies beyond the limits of our naked eyes. In the bands beyond what we can see, there’s lots of data that can be used to identify objects. But a new breed of man-made sensors is, like the eye of a bee, plucking information from a wider part of the spectrum than a camera or eye can see....

On anything that moves, from vehicles to rolling office chairs, you need to be wary of bolts rattling loose over time. Thread-locking fluids and tapes are a great way to make sure your suspect bolts stay where they should, and nyloc nuts can also keep components snug and secure.Northrop Grumman might need to look into something along these lines, because apparently “screws and washers” are falling off the spacecraft and sunshield it is building to carry NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope....

Lufthansa is suing a man who intentionally failed to board a connecting flight from Frankfurt to Oslo, but the lawsuit has nothing to do with the passenger’s tardiness. The passenger was using a clever travel hack, often referred to as the “hidden city” scheme which involves booking a journey with a stopover and staying in the stopover city, instead of traveling to the ultimate destination. Flights with connections are largely far cheaper than direct routes, which are preferable if you prefer minimizing your time in cramped airplane cabins and busy airports....

View full post on TwitterA woman in China got an unwelcome surprise after giving her iPhone to her toddler in January. According to a media report cited by the South China Morning Post, she grabbed it back to find that it was disabled for some 25 million minutes—roughly 47 years—presumably due to a truly heroic number of incorrect PIN attempts. As a result, she was stuck having to wait for the timer to tick down, or with the alternative of wiping her phone....

A new explanation of the “alien megastructure” KIC 8462852, otherwise known as Tabby’s Star, has come forward: It could be an orbiting Saturn-like planet, with similarities including a full-bodied ring system.That may not be the answer some, like the Russian billionaire teaming up with Berkeley to study the star, were hoping to hear, given the rampant speculation that Tabby’s Star has bred. When Tabetha Boyajian, then of Yale University, discovered the object in 2015, she and her group weren’t quite sure what to make of it....