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Media Platforms Design TeamOn January 1, 2014, the top Wikipedia viewed was Cher, who needs no introduction. On December 31, it was the Feynman point—a string of numbers at the 762nd decimal point in pi where six 9s in a row appear. Such are the oddities you discover when you map out the most-viewed article for every day of 2014, as Quartz has done.Although Shirley Temple Black died on February 10, she had to wait until the day after to be the top-viewed page....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou may know the story of how President Teddy Roosevelt was shot just before a speech, but the 50 pages of paper in his pocket helped slow the projectile enough that he managed to orate for over 90 minutes before going off to the hospital. How thick would that packet of paper need to be if it had been a .50-cal headed his way at point-blank range? A lot thicker....

It’s time to get started on building a deck, so you’ll have it ready in time to enjoy spring and summer weather. There are a few steps that every homeowner, contractor, and designer need to ensure they build a safe and beautiful deck. Licensed contractor Robert Robillard of A Concord Carpenter has many years of experience building decks, stairs, and balconies on a variety of homes. Here, he offers his expert advice for building a deck....

Media Platforms Design TeamQ: How low can I set the thermostat in the winter when no one will be in the house for an extended period? What else should I do before locking up?A: I recommend a thermostat setting of 50 F for houses left for long periods. This conserves energy while providing a comfortable margin of safety against frozen plumbing. It’s also high enough, in most cases, to prevent condensation from forming and doing damage to furnishings and appliances inside the house....

Let Me InView full post on YoutubeRelease Date: Oct. 1, 2010When it was announced that Cloverfield director Matt Reeves would remake the beloved—and creepy—Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In, fans were horrified. But the footage that Reeves and stars Richard Jenkins, Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee showed at Comic Con put their fears to rest. The film still tells the Romeo and Juliet story of a brutally bullied boy (Smit-McPhee) and the young girl (Moretz) he befriends when she and her father (Jenkins) move in next door....

It only takes one archaeological discovery to constantly challenging the story of human evolution we thought we knew. Just a few days ago, fossils found in Israel indicated that humans left Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years earlier than previously believed. Now, a new discovery in India further confuses the timeline. This week, a study published in Nature, and reported in the Washington Post, details a wealth of ancient tools found in the southern Attirampakkam area of India....

A paralyzed man was able to walk with an exoskeleton after two years of training. The man trained using both video games and a virtual avatar, training his thoughts to work with an algorithm.Scientists want to caution patience on this. The next step is getting a patient to walk unassisted.Using only his brain signals, a paralyzed French man was able to operate, maneuver, and walk in a whole-body robotic exoskeleton. While the four-limb system isn’t ready for clinical applications yet, and will require improvements before that point, researchers call the early results “promising” in a press release....

I really ought to know better by now. A couple months ago I was trying to assemble a home pull-up bar, which came with its own 3/8-inch wrench and hex key to “help” with the installation. The tools, if one can even call them that, were such garbage that within minutes I’d rounded off a key nut and stripped a hex or two, rendering the rest of the assembly pointless. Granted, even if I’d successfully assembled the pull-up bar, I probably would have ripped apart an interior doorway the first time I tried to use it....

Earth is 26,000 light-years away from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. For those who don’t have the time to make the trip, researchers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes have made a 360-degree visualization of what it looks like at the center of the galaxy. It’s not the friendliest real estate in the universe, filled with volatile massive stars and the powerful gravity of a monster black hole....

Hall’s Patent Clock Gun is pretty much all in the name. Inside its rectangular metal frame, is both a clock and a gun—a twelve-barreled monster designed to fit pin-fired 12-gauge shells. In practice, it operates a bit like a Rube Goldberg Machine. First, you load the twelve barrels. Next, you suspend a series of metal weights in tubes above the barrels using a series of strings that attach to a small clock below....

Juggling is math. Follow me on this one.The connection between the two came out of juggler’s attempts to develop a kind of notation for their tricks. That notation, called siteswap, can be used to describe nearly any juggling pattern, and it turns out that standard mathematical tricks can be used to develop new patterns nobody has ever seen before.Here’s mathematician and juggler Colin Wright describing the math behind juggling on Numberphile:View full post on YoutubeThe basic unit of siteswap is the throw....

Is the universe symmetric? It’s a really useful question to have the answer to when doing calculations, because symmetries tend to make the math much easier. Most of the physics discovered over the last century, including general relativity and quantum mechanics, is based on three main symmetries: charge, parity, and time.Charge symmetry means that we could swap all the universe’s positive charges for negative charges and vice versa without changing anything important....

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulated mass of trash in the ocean, is 16 times bigger than we once thought—and it’s not getting smaller.According to research published today in Scientific Reports, the giant mass may be up to 46 percent fishing nets as well. The findings have big implications for marine life, as plastic particles in the patch of waste can break down and contaminate the ocean’s food chain.Though often thought of as a mass of plastic, the researchers also reported glass, wood, rubber, tar, and other materials in the Garbage Patch....

The United States Army is looking into a way to carry heavy weapons that will definitely look familiar to science fiction fans. The Army is testing a weapons mount straight out of the movie Aliens, one capable of taking the weight of a light machine gun.The Army Research Lab, located at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is working on a waist-mounted, articulated arm that can carry a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. The device consists of an articulated arm connected to a wearable harness, with a total weight of 3....

(Image: A laser guide star cast on the night sky from the William Herschel Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.)When astronomers look for parts of the galaxy that could contain life, they generally search for elements like oxygen and carbon. But another element essential to life could be the key to finding systems in the Milky Way that have the right conditions for living organisms....

The tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey got a chance at redemption last year when a dozen deployed to Iraq with the Marines. But a government report released yesterday casts some doubt on the ability of the $100 million aircraft, which takes off like a helicopter, usually from Navy ships, and flies like an airplane, to fill the shoes of the Navy and Special Operations choppers. Many have tried to kill the Osprey, including Dick Cheney, and this new report is bound to fuel critics of the program....

Mariah Carey shared an Instagram video of a very Mariah Carey take on the viral #BottleCapChallenge.The footage shows Carey allegedly using only her voice to send a bottle cap shooting away.Experts believe that the footage is merely an illusion and not physically possible.It would seem that Mariah Carey has won the Bottle Cap Challenge. For the uninitiated, the internet’s latest viral challenge has people kicking loosened caps off of bottles and some are coming up with creative ways to one-up each other....

This week the Russian ministry of defense showed pictures of what it claimed to be remains of U.S. cruise missiles used during the recent airstrikes on Syria. “They are now being examined by our experts,” said Col. Gen. Sergey Rudskoy. “The results of this work will be used to improve Russian weapons.”The debris shown is far from conclusive evidence, so we can’t take Rudskoy’s claim at face value. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume the Russians did capture significant parts of a long-range cruise missile including Tomahawks....

Media Platforms Design TeamSo now we know for sure that the will come power-packed with real GPS functionality. Sure, can roughly tag your location on a map through the clever use of cell tower triangulation, but most people already know where they are at any given moment. The true power of is finding where you’re going . And if Steve Jobs’ demo today was any indication, stand-alone nav unit makers like Magellan and TomTom really do have every reason to be "" new iPhone 3Gyour old iPhonea GPS devicenextscared [expletive-]less....

UPDATE: The Voyager team has hired internally for Zottarelli’s replacement, and the retirement is not anticipated until next year. “I go down the hallway and I meet people and I say, ‘Wow, Voyager was the best project I’ve ever worked on. I wish I could get back on it again.’ Those are the kind of people that I seek out when I have to replace people,” Dodd said in the previous interview....