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The first two Avangard hypersonic weapons are now operational.Avangard was originally announced in March 2018 by Russian President Vladimir Putin.Avangard is designed to neutralize American ballistic missile defenses.Russia’s new Avangard hypersonic weapon system is now operational. Avangard, which Russian President Vladimir Putin only announced in March 2018, travels at Mach 27 and is designed to take out U.S. ballistic missile defenses ahead of a wider nuclear attack. Avangard is just the latest in a series of hypersonic weapons under development by the U....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Low-DownSamsung’s new Galaxy Note 8.0, which hits stores on April 11, is a Android tablet with an 8-inch screen. Like its smaller and larger brothers, the 5.5-inch Galaxy Note II and 10.1-inch Galaxy Note 10.1, the Note 8.0 uses the company’s EMR (electromagnetic resonance) S-Pen stylus, which works with a Wacom digitizer layer beneath the screen. It’s a compelling midsize tablet, but the price is a bit rich, considering the competition....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Tim Robberts/Getty Images)A long-sought solar milestone was eclipsed on Tuesday, when Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar Inc. announced that the manufacturing costs for its thin-film photovoltaic panels had dipped below $1 per watt for the first time. With comparable costs for standard silicon panels still hovering in the $3 range, it’s tempting to conclude that First Solar’s cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology has won the race. But if we’re concerned about the big picture (scaling up solar until it’s a cheap and ubiquitous antidote to global warming and foreign oil) a forthcoming study from the University of California-Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that neither material has what it takes compared to lesser-known alternatives such as—we’re not kidding—fool’s gold....

MORE ON THE UNLUCKIEST SHIP IN THE NAVY* SLIDE SHOW: More Photos from the USS TrayerIt’s impossible to see more than a few feet through the thick smoke, but what I can make out is bad enough. The deck has buckled upward, and fragments of tables and chairs lie piled among broken steel beams. Sporadic flashes of light illuminate a severed half-body dangling from a pyramid of debris that reaches to the ceiling....

It’s been eight days since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket erupted in a fireball on a Cape Canaveral launch pad, taking the AMOS-6 satellite that Facebook was going to use to provide internet services with it. The company’s founder Elon Musk tweeted early this morning that the incident has proven the most “difficult and complex failure we have ever had.“View full post on TwitterThis is quite a statement, considering SpaceX’s first three test rockets blew up, almost bankrupting the company, as the Washington Post points out....

The discovery of the presumably unsinkable Titanic, which hit an iceberg and sunk to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, wasn’t part of a scientific search effort for the lost ship. It was a secret U.S. military operation to reclaim wayward nuclear submarines that located the ship, according to a new report. Upon discovering the fallen passenger ship’s location in 1985, Robert Ballard was hailed as a hero for finding the wreckage largely on his own accord....

Since 2013, the U.S. and governments in Europe and Asia have been locked in a constant battle to equip supercomputers with more processing power to claim the ever-shifting title of world’s fastest mega-machine. The U.S. relinquished its place at the top of the pile last June, but reclaimed it a year later when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory managed to get its Summit supercomputer online. Now, patriotic computer geeks will be pleased that the two fastest supercomputers in the world currently reside within U....

Roboticists and engineers around the world are chasing after the next great prosthesis to help bring autonomy, control, and comfort back to more than 2 million amputees in the U.S. alone. But even the most advanced, fine-tuned robot limbs share one common limitation—the brain.Advanced artificial limbs can’t help anyone if they can’t speak with the body’s muscles and nerves. Even with all their high-tech enhancements, robotic prostheses are mostly controlled by old-school biology with leftover nerves severed during amputation....

Forget Lonely Girl, Obama Girl, even Wii Fit Girl. The Internet zeitgeist isn’t just making celebrities–it’s bringing back the forgotten ones. Rev up for an exclusive sneak peek at NBC’s adaptation of Top Gear with new host Adam Carolla, who dishes out details on the ultimate gearhead show’s America premiere, new test drives and high-octane YouTube appeal. Plus, meet despised director Uwe Boll, whose poorly reviewed video game-based movies led to a massive viral campaign to end his career, and comedian Tom Green, the MTV bad boy making a mini comeback thanks to the shape-shifting expectations of video on the Web … and the iPhone 3G....

The 65th annual Daytona Bike Week begins today. Naturally, big dog Harley-Davidson is there with news and activities. First up: If you’re lookin’ for great places to ride (in addition to the beach down in Florida), Harley’s new Great Roads interactive Web tool now lives in the Experience section at harley-davidson.com. The tool encourages you to explore the country on your bike; you can also rate 20 of ’em. Next, H-D will have a variety of events going on at Ocean Center, the Speedway and Destination Daytona from Mar....

Yantar is allegedly an “oceanographic research vessel”.It does however spend a lot of time hanging out around sunken military hardware and in the vicinity of internet cables.Yantar recently entered the Caribbean, but why?Russia’s underwater spy ship recently traveled across the Atlantic Ocean and is currently sailing in America’s backyard. Yantar, allegedly a ship meant to research the deep ocean, has an odd habit of skulking around sunken military equipment—and undersea telecommunications cables....

A wildfire in Ireland has revealed an important WWII-era relic: a giant sign carved into the Earth, meant as a warning for Allied and Axis pilots. The sign was forgotten in the years after the war and hidden by shrubs and undergrowth. A fire last month cleared the plants away and uncovered the landmark.The sign in question is one of more than 80 ‘EIRE’ signs constructed by the Irish government during WWII....

We’re only two days into the new year, 2018 already has an obnoxious “health” trend on the books: so-called “raw water.” According to The New York Times, several companies, including Live Water in Oregon, and Tourmaline Spring in Maine have begun selling “unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized” water for several dollars a gallon to people overly concerned with the government tampering with their taps.“Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,” said Mukhande Singh, conspiracy theorist and founder of Live Water, to the Times....

Here comes Boeing’s next big flyer. This week at the 2017 Paris Air Show, the company discussed some design details for a new passenger plane, revealing that the aircraft will have a composite fuselage with a “hybrid cross-section” and “fifth-generation” composite wings. The airliner has been called the 797 at the show. However, Boeing’s official project name (for now) is simply New Midsize Airplane (NMA). The NMA is to be a twin-aisle plane with a capacity for 220 to 270 passengers and a range of 5,200 nautical miles, according toAviation Week....

There’s a fairly robust community that builds and launches water rockets. You know, regular rockets in pretty much every way except for the fact that they use pressurized water and air to launch into the sky. One such water rocket from a South African team of students at the University of Cape Town just broke the world altitude record with it’s most recentView full post on YoutubeThe university team managed to grab the record thanks in part to an extremely lightweight frame....

Media Platforms Design TeamNatural gas has been used in our homes for generations. Americans use it to run water heaters, home furnaces, stoves, clothes dryers, and other appliances. As a fuel it accounts for 24 percent of our total energy consumption nationwide, all but 1 percent in residential applications. And as we reported last fall (“Drilling Down,” September 2011), new fracking techniques are tapping domestic reserves that previously were not economically viable....

The tools we use most often should, ideally, be of the highest quality possible, making your most repeated actions pleasant and not tiring. The same as someone who drives screws every day needs the best drill, if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, you should invest in a mechanical keyboard. Most keyboards use rubber domes that rest underneath each key to provide resistance and spring. On mechanical keyboards, each key has a precision spring and a piece of metal that opens and closes to register each keystroke....

Media Platforms Design TeamEven among the mutants in the universe, Emma Frost is unusual: The telepath can literally transform her body into a diamond, making her impervious to harm. In the 1960s-set origin story out June 3, Frost (played by January Jones) is central to a plot hatched by villain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) that would exterminate humans and make mutants more powerful. VFX designer John Dykstra—who led the team that developed motion control for the first film—knew he had his work cut out for him when it came to figuring out how to best represent the mutants’ powers—for example, Shaw’s ability to absorb and discharge energy, Azazel’s (Jason Flemying) teleportation and Angel’s (Zoe Kravitz) insect wings....

The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe landed on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan 15 years ago today.As it dove toward Titan’s surface, the probe suddenly started spinning in the direction opposite to what engineers had planned.New wind tunnel tests and computer simulations have finally revealed why. For two hours and 27 minutes, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Huygens probe spun swiftly as it hurtled toward the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon....

A team of engineers at Brigham Young University have built a futuristic shield for law enforcement that can stop handgun bullets. The shield borrows its shape from origami and is much lighter than conventional police shields.Current shields used by the police are typically made of solid steel and can weigh around 100 pounds. They are only large enough to protect one person and are cumbersome to transport and use. The BYU engineers wanted to improve that system, so they designed a lighter and more manageable shield using the principles of origami....