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Seaplanes come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes: Some are small as Cessnas, others are as large as 737s. But regardless of size, seaplanes all require ‘floats’ to keep their heads above water. So what’s inside the floating parts? The YouTube channel What’s Inside took a look and found, among other things, spiders.View full post on YoutubeThere’s mostly nothing inside a seaplane’s float, save for good engineering. The FAA requires that all seaplanes have compartments that are kept separate from each other in case of flooding, that separator is referred to as a chine....

There’s something deeply frustrating about the fact that the world’s fastest airplanes are not carrying passengers. Airliners flying at supersonic speeds can cut 11-hour trips to five hours, and five-hour trips to just two. Yet none have flown in service since the Concorde retired in 2003. Now, it seems a new era of supersonic flight may be upon us. If things go as planned, the skies could see supersonic airplanes leaving U....

Kim Davids has been a freight conductor for 39 years. Within those four decades, he’s witnessed 16 grade-crossing accidents, and every year around Christmastime he remembers one in particular. On a winter day in Utah 38 years ago, a woman in a car stuck on the tracks was clamoring out of a window to escape the oncoming train, but she was too late. As the train clipped the vehicle, it flipped onto her....

Ford isn’t afraid to tinker with its thoroughbred. Four years ago, it gambled that truck lovers would embrace an aluminum-bodied F-150, and they did. More recently, it pledged to develop a hybrid version of the best-selling vehicle in America. Now, Ford finally has confirmed that an all-electric F-150 pickup is in the works.This move may feel like an eventuality, given how the big car brands have pledged to make their whole lineups hybrid or electric in the 2020s....

A Bell 525 prototype helicopter crashed outside of a Bell Helicopter test facility in Arlington, Texas on Wednesday, killing two crew. According to a statement from the company: On July 6, 2016, a Bell 525 was involved in an accident while conducting developmental flight test operations south of our Xworx facility in Arlington, Texas. Unfortunately, the accident resulted in a loss of two crew members. This is a devastating day for Bell Helicopter....

NASA has released a simulation of the Mars Curiosity rover that allows folks to drive around the Red Planet as part of the three-year anniversary of the rover’s landing. You can also drill into a rock, manipulate instruments, and even take a selfie. Yes, you can take your own (simulated) selfie on (simulated) Mars.The simulation itself is fairly robust. Users can point the rover in a variety of directions and watch it crawl across the dirt, watching what it sees from a number of different devices like the front hazard camera all the while....

The Environmental Protection Agency recently moved to ban mouse poisons that are the most toxic, as well as most loose bait and pellet poisons. Why? These pesticides resulted in thousands of calls to poison control centers annually, and because they weren’t contained in tamper- and weather-resistant bait boxes, pets and wildlife were also killed.Research has shown that pesticides used in and around the home can linger for years.In addition to banning the use of loose baits, the EPA is banning the use of poisons called “second generation anticoagulants” that kill by causing internal bleeding after a single dose....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamNEW YORK — Everything will be hybrid. That was the message sent at a seminar here this morning by new Chrysler president Jim Press, as he settles rather rapidly into his post under new owner Cerberus just a couple months after being lured away from 37 years at Toyota.Eventually, Press said, every vehicle that Chrysler makes would be hybrid-powered. He offered no timetable, but the United States government’s mandate to increase fleetwide fuel economy by 40 percent by 2020 is a big hurdle that hybrid technology can certainly assist in clearing....

Yesterday one of two external cooling loops on board the International Space Station failed, leading ground controllers to also shut down “non-critical systems” in the Harmony node and in the Kibo and Columbus laboratories to avoid overheating. The remaining loop (loop B) can keep the station from dangerously overheating, but it can’t keep those noncritical systems running, including experiments that would normally keep astronauts busy.This morning, space station mission integration and operations manager Kenny Todd appeared on NASA TV to provide more detail on the nature of the problem and what could be done about it....

What’s the closest planet to Earth? Common sense would say the answer is either Mars or Venus, our next-door neighbors. Of the two, Venus comes closer to the Earth than any other planet, and its orbit is closest to ours. But as an article in Physics Today points out, over half the time Venus is not the nearest planet; Mercury is. In fact, the scientists behind the article crunched the numbers and found that on average, Mercury is the closest planet not only to Earth but to every other planet in the solar system as well....

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s probe InSight survived its perilous descent to the surface of Mars today, marking another successful landing on the planet known for destroying inbound spacecraft.Cheers filled the mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Lab as the lander relayed the first signs that the landing is a success, signals relayed by experimental CubeSats.A transmission from InSight’s X-band antennae reached Earth, signaling that the vehicle was healthy. More information and imagery are coming as the orbiters over Mars pass over the site and relay data back to Earth....

Do you have the right stuff to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the moon? Do you want to be the first woman in deep space, or be the first person to leave the comfort of low-Earth orbit in more than 40 years? Do you want to be frustrated at Congress’ unwillingness to fund a Mars mission after years of training for the moment? Well, you’re in luck: NASA is looking for its next group of astronauts, and that could be you....

SpaceX may have just secured permission to do something it has been planning for years, fly NASA payloads on Falcon 9 first stage boosters that have previously been launched and landed. According to documents acquired by NASASpaceflight.com, NASA has internally approved the use of a “flight-proven” Falcon 9 rocket for an International Space Station resupply mission. The report suggests the first NASA mission to use a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster is expected to be CRS-13, the 13th SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station, though NASA and SpaceX have yet to publicly confirm this....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhether you want to do portrait touch-ups or reality-bending illustrations, Photoshop is the go-to. And the professional version of the program has become so complex that few people would call themselves experts on all facets of it.But the software program, now more than two decades old, has just made a huge leap—one that sparked heated responses from customers. Gone are the old cardboard boxes with installation discs. Gone, too, is the need for serial numbers to authenticate electronic downloads....

The world is slowly weaning itself off of fossil fuels, replacing sources of energy like coal and natural gas with cleaner sources like wind and solar. But this process is slow, simply because of the scale of the task. Humans used over 20,000 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2016 alone, and building enough solar plants and wind farms to produce that much energy is a Herculean task. The largest solar plant currently in operation, for example, is the Kamuthi Solar Power Project in India, which generates a mere 550 megawatts of power....

On Monday, the Hubble spacecraft discovered further evidence of a subsurface ocean of liquid water on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Now, a group of scientists has announced that Saturn’s moon Dione may also have a subsurface ocean. Their results are published in the journal Geophysical Review Letters.Back in 2014, scientists using the Cassini spacecraft to study one of Saturn’s other moons, Enceladus, discovered that the moon experienced strange gravity fluctuations and wobbled as it spun....

Media Platforms Design TeamI must be a slow learner. For decades, I had been making the same mistake: wearing my work boots for wood cutting and for . Then one day, I found myself clinging to a hillside as I sawed through a gigantic ash tree. My ankles and calves began to ache. My footing was tenuous. And when you’re running a chainsaw, that signals danger.PopMech’s chainsaw testsThe next day I ordered a pair of logging boots....

It’s a snake-eat-snake world out there, which is great news for herpetologists who have a hard time finding rare and elusive specimens that burrow underground. This time, we have the Central American Coral Snake to thank for consuming a completely new genus of snake and then ending up in the hands of University of Texas herpetologist Jonathan Campbell and his team, who recently published their discovery in the Journal of Herpetology....

Paris’ most iconic landmark just got a 21st century upgrade, 400 feet off the ground. In February the American company Urban Green Technology (UGE) installed two of its VisionAIR5 vertical axis wind turbines on the Eiffel Tower, just above its second level.The turbines, painted to match the tower’s facade, generate about 10,000kWh of electricity in a year. That’s not a huge number—it’s about enough to power an American family’s home for about a year, The Verge says....

The U.S. Navy has awarded a contract to Boeing for four Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (XLUUVs). In other words: giant drone subs.The unmanned submarines, called Orcas, will be able to undertake missions from scouting to sinking ships at very long ranges. Drone ships like the Orca will revolutionize war at sea, providing inexpensive, semi-disposable weapon systems that can fill the gaps in the front line—or simply go where it’s too dangerous for manned ships to go....