Posts

We’re still waiting for the flying car, and it looks like we might still be waiting for a very long while. But in the meantime, Airbus has revealed a concept vehicle which is part self-driving car, part flying machine called a Pop.Up. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, which is fitting considering the chances that it will ever actually exist. View full post on YoutubeThe Pop.Up, unveiled during the 87th Geneva International Motor Show, is what Airbus bills as “the first modular, fully electric, zero emission concept vehicle system designed to relieve traffic congestion in crowded megacities....

View full post on YoutubeScience fiction is nothing without the sound effects. But it’s not all red alert klaxons, phaser fire, robot servos, and blaser noises. The small details matter too, like the white noise that fills in an otherwise eerily silent scene.Naturally, intrepid sci-fi fans have ensured that these sounds get wider recognition. There’s a loop of the ambient sounds of the USS Enterprise-D that goes on for an actual day....

There’s a Florida company specializing in used military aircraft sales, and boy have they got a deal for you: 20 jet airplanes for less than $250,000. The 20 Fouga Magister trainers are sitting in Israel just waiting for someone of modest means who wants to start his or her private air force.As reported by The Aviationist, Raptor Aviation of Port St. Lucie, FL, is handling the sale of the Magisters. Made by French aviation company Fouga, the Magister was designed to train pilots of the 1950s how to handle jet aircraft....

Media Platforms Design TeamUPDATE: DARPA attempted a flight of the HTV-2 this morning, August 11. But just about half an hour into the flight, which took off from California’s Vandenburg Air Force Base at 7:45 a.m. Pacific time, DARPA said via its Twitter account, “Range assets have lost telemetry with #HTV2. More to follow.” That is: The agency lost contact with the craft, which also happened during the first test flight in 2009....

Apple has Siri, Google has Google Now, Windows has Cortana, and now Facebook has “Facebook M.” Yes, Facebook now has a digital assistant. Like its competitors, Facebook M will take your requests and try to delivery on them for you, but it has an edge no other digital assistant has: real, live people. Announced in a post on Facebook (where else?), Facebook M manifests not as part of the Facebook website or even the Facebook app, but as part of Messenger....

The old waffle iron is brown with rust and broken into pieces. Yet there it sits in a protective case, smack in the middle of Prefontaine Hall at Nike’s World Headquarters near Beaverton, Oregon. Why treat a waffle iron like a museum piece? The answer has nothing to do with breakfast food.“When she said ’threw it away’… she meant she tossed it in a rubbish pit.“Forty-five years ago, Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman used this common household appliance to create the company’s Waffle Trainer, the shoe that launched a billion-dollar athletic empire....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn early November, two MIT PhD students, Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer, introduced an eye-catching project from the MIT Media Lab: A table built with motors, linkages and pins, that can render a person physically in real time via a digital source. Some articles hailed the technology with potential to change the world and others were captivated by its strange, almost science fiction-type quality. The consensus was that this thing was really, really cool....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere’s a simple truth: It’s better to bend than to break, and it’s best to be prepared for the worst. This age-old wisdom is going by a new name in slide-rule circles: “Resilience engineering” starts with the insight that it’s smart to design and maintain systems so they have some give. That means building technologies that offer extra capacity to handle sudden loads, plenty of warning when normal operations are beginning to break down, backup systems in case things do go wrong, diverse digital architectures so that a single bug doesn’t produce widespread failure, and decentralization so that when (not “if”) communication breaks down things don’t grind to a halt....

A computer glitch interrupted flights of several major airlines early on Monday morning, causing delays at airports in Chicago, New York, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit and Washington, D.C., according to the Associated Press. The issue came from a third-party company called Aerodata, which tracks the weight and balance of planes. Aerodata’s unknown computer issue has been resolved, but the impact of delays could last well into Monday. Southwest Airlines delayed 55 incoming flights to Denver International Airport alone on Monday morning....

China’s most prestigious aviation magazine has published an artist’s depictions of the Chinese Air Force’s next-generation heavy strategic bomber. The stealth bomber, known as JH-XX to aviation watchers, is a sleek, twin-engine aircraft quite different from U.S. stealth bomber designs. The Pentagon believes the plane will be capable of carrying nuclear weapons.Artist images of the the JH-XX appeared on the cover of the May 2018 issue of Aviation Knowledge magazine. Aviation Knowledge is the oldest and most popular aviation magazine in China....

The United States sent an inert Hellfire missile to Europe for training purposes in 2014, but somehow the missile was then mistakenly shipped from Europe to Cuba. American officials are concerned that the incident could have resulted in a major loss of sensitive military technology, according to The Wall Street Journal.The Hellfire missile did not contain explosives, but the weapon uses sophisticated sensors and targeting technology that has not been revealed to U....

We all know you have to be careful what you download and what networks you connect to in order to make sure that malicious hackers can’t sneak into your computer and have their way with all your data. But even the most benign peripherals can be a point of weakness. Your wireless mouse or keyboard, for instance, could be a way in for hackers. The news comes by way of researchers at the Internet of things security firm Bastille who tell Wired that wireless mice and keyboards from at least seven different major companies are vulnerable to attacks they call “mousejacking” which is exactly what it sounds like....

A November 2019 paper described two feral cats who had taken to eating decomposing bodies at Colorado Mesa University’s (CMU) Forensic Investigation Research Station (FIRS)—also known as a body farm.This is not the first case of cats chowing down on their owners. In fact, cats aren’t the only pets who have been known to eat their humans, either—dogs have also exhibited this kind of behavior.The picturesque campus of Colorado Mesa University (CMU) stands in stark contrast to the school’s Forensic Investigation Research Station (FIRS), where a body farm is home to several decomposing corpses—and the two feral cats who fed on them....

MOSCOW (AP) — An unmanned Russian cargo spaceship heading to the International Space Station broke up in the atmosphere over Siberia on Thursday due to an unspecified malfunction, the Russian space agency said.The Progress MS-04 cargo craft broke up at an altitude of 190 kilometers (118 miles) over the remote Russian Tuva region in Siberia that borders Mongolia, Roscosmos said in a statement. It said most of space ship’s debris burnt up as it entered the atmosphere but some fell to Earth over what it called an uninhabited area....

For decades if not centuries, we wondered whether Mars had water. Now, after a string of robotic expeditions to the Red Planet, we know the answer: It definitely used to. All of the traces of water we’ve discovered, however, have been on the planet’s surface. Recently, though, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite changed that, by finding some of the first evidence of Martian water underground.It is tough to collect evidence of groundwater on Mars because that water is, well, underground....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a section in your book called “Bugs of War.” How have bugs been a part of human conflict? We have always used bugs for warfare, not just in ancient times but also right on up to present times. An ancient example would be something like stuffing a beehive with angry wasps and lobbing it over the enemy’s wall, which is this very Monty Python-esque idea. There are stories like that going back to Greek and Roman timeseven filling a woven basket with scorpions and throwing it at someone....

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s price is set to fall considerably once the jet goes into full production—so says the military head of the F-35 program. Meanwhile, however, the Pentagon has stopped accepting new jets over a disagreement about who pays for costly repairs to fix problems that went undetected during the manufacturing process.First, the good news about the F-35’s cost. According to Vice Admiral Mat Winter, director of the F-35 program, all three versions of the F-35 will drop below the $100 million mark once the plane goes into full rate production....

During the late 1960s, a top secret Soviet program to sneak nuclear weapons around U.S. early warning radars was mistaken for a rash of UFO sightings by Moscow’s citizens. The weapon, known as FOBS, created a mysterious pattern in the night sky that many mistook for signs of alien visitation.In the Spring of 1967, people living in the western Soviet Union noticed something odd in the sky at dusk: a mysterious crescent-shaped sliver of light, about the size of the moon from most directions but larger from others....

The princess has been cursed by a witch, and your job is to cut her apart and save her. Princess Plastic Surgery is one of dozens of plastic surgery games on Apple and Android app stores: other games will let you perfect nose jobs, try performing surgery on the body, or give face lifts. The games have brightly colored graphics, questionable taglines, and have been stirring up serious controversy. A Change....

Media Platforms Design TeamKeep it CleanA clean bike is a well-riding bike. Clean your bike after every dirty or wet ride, giving it a more attentive cleaning every few weeks.At least twice a year, use a chain breaker to remove the chain from the drivetrain, and soak it in a container (I like a 32-ounce Gatorade bottle) filled with degreaser for 20 minutes or more. With the chain removed, take an old toothbrush or other cleaning instrument and scrub the sprockets of the rear derailleur....