Drones used in a recent attack on Russian military bases in Syria were not supplied by the United States but instead likely purchased on the black market. The crudely flying drones used in the nighttime suicide attacks are identical to those advertised for sale in a nearby Syrian city. The attacks took place on the night of January 6 against Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Latakia, Syria, and Tartus naval base....
Samsung Electronics said Friday it will announce on Monday Jan. 23 the reason why its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones overheated and caught fire.The announcement will be livestreamed in Chinese, English and Korean on its websites. Koh Dong-jin, Samsung’s mobile president, will give details of the probe.The Galaxy Note 7 was a fiasco for the world’s largest smartphone maker. Samsung recalled and eventually discontinued it after numerous reports of it overheating and bursting into flames....
A U.S. Navy warship, sunk just two weeks prior to the end of World War II in Europe, has finally been found. The patrol boat PE-56 sunk off the coast of Maine in April 1945. The ship, long thought to have been the victim of an accidental explosion, was revealed in 2003 to have actually been sunk by a German u-boat. PE-56 was one of sixty Eagle-class patrol boats built as submarine chasers in World War I....
The British Antarctic Survey had a problem. Scientists had set up five successive research stations on the Brunt Ice Shelf, one of the best places to study the Earth’s magnetic field and the near-space atmosphere—it’s on the Brunt Ice Shelf where the hole in the ozone layer was first discovered. The problem was the first four research stations they’d built had disappeared.In that section of Antarctica, you get around 3 to 5 feet of snow per year....
The U.S. Army is quadrupling the number of Stryker combat vehicles equipped with the new 30-millimeter autocannon. The upgrade will allow Strykers to better fight against similar vehicles used by potential adversaries. It is part of an Army-wide effort to increase firepower as the service swings away from guerrilla wars back to the prospect of big-power conflict.The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored vehicle designed to carry an infantry squad across roads and cross-country to the battlefield....
A dark legacy of warfare still sits on the bottom of the world’s bodies of water, including millions of pounds of unexploded bombs and other explosive devices. In the Gulf of Mexico, that tally could even include containers of the chemical weapon mustard gas. Some of them are in areas marked for resource exploitation, including fishing and undersea oil drilling, heightening fears they could cause a manmade disaster.After World War II, the U....
The beefy, bad-ass A-10 Thunderbolt II—better know by its nickname of “the Warthog”—has been in service since the late 1970s. But with the F-35 hot on its heels, its retirement has been looming. But now the Air Force is considering delaying the Hog’s end of life for a few more years. Gen. Herbert Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command, put it this way to reporters at the Defense Writers Group breakfast, according toThe Hill: “We have to retire the airplanes, but I think moving it to the right and starting it a bit later and maybe keeping around the airplane a bit longer is something that’s being considered based on things as they are today and what we see in the future....
A family in Belarus has what many tank buffs would consider the best job in the world: saving abandoned tanks and restoring them for a living. The Yakushev family has gradually turned its hobby—recovering these World War II-era vehicles from the bottoms of rivers and swamps—into full time jobs for everyone. The tanks go on to museums and are even used to research video games.The nation of Belarus was a battlefield for much of the Second World War, a time when it was a part of the Soviet Union....
The U.S. Navy is considering a major flexing of fleet muscles designed to send a message to China. The show of force, reported by CNN, would involve ships and aircraft operating in China’s backyard, in a demonstration to the Beijing that the U.S. is prepared to operate wherever it is legally allowed to do so. Planning for the “show of force” coincides with last weekend’s “unsafe and unprofessional” intercept of a U....
This coming Sunday night, as January 20 becomes the early morning of the 21, the moon will become completely engulfed in Earth’s shadow. In North America, we are well positioned to view the total lunar eclipse in its entirety, as are the people in South America, Europe, and Africa. What is a lunar eclipse?Lunar eclipses occur when the moon is full and in alignment with both the Earth and sun. Pretend you’re back in grade school science class and picture the sun as a basketball, the Earth next as a baseball, and the moon on the right side of Earth as a Ping-Pong ball....
Google Stadia is a cloud-based video game streaming service, and it’s launching this November.Stadia, originally announced in March, will come with a free Base option and a $10 Pro version.In order to access Stadia, you’ll need purchase the $130 ‘Founder’s Edition’ or wait until the service becomes more widely available in 2020.In March, Google announced that it would be entering the world of gaming in a big way—a complete cloud-based gaming platform....
Woodworking (and carpentry) is one of humanity’s oldest careers, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still mucking it up now and then. Here are a few common mistakes people make when entering the complicated-yet-rewarding world of woodworking, and how best to avoid them.Mistake #1: The Wrong BladeBUY NOWCMTSome people keep one blade on their circular saw and they use it for everything. This is either the 18-tooth or 24-tooth combination blade that the saw came with (and it’s probably dull, too)....
Researchers in Stockholm, Sweden have created the world’s smallest accelerometer, which measures the force of acceleration, according to new research published in the scientific journal Nature Electronics.The sensor could mean new capabilities in fitness trackers and smartphones, which already use accelerometers for swimming, walking, and running data, among others.The scientists used Graphene, which is only a few atoms thick, to build the accelerometer.When it comes to measuring our heart rate during exercise, we’ve come a long way from having to grip the sweaty metal bars on treadmills....
From far enough away, our solar system looks 2-D. All eight planets still orbit on nearly the same horizontal plane, which matches up with the plane of the sun’s equator. It’s what makes our home system look like a flat, spinning disc, and also a sign that our system hasn’t experienced anything too chaotic since its formation more than 4 billion years ago.Until now, many astronomers thought that comparatively few star systems end up looking like ours....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat prompted you to start the Detroit Bus Company, and how is it going to be different than previous public transportation in Detroit?The Detroit Bus Company is a homegrown solution to transit issues. We had some massive cuts to a bus service that was already bad to begin with, and now huge sections of the city are disconnected from basic public transit. Weve had a lot of solutions come and golight rail, for instancebut right now, were stuck....
Employees at GreyKey, an app law enforcement agencies use to access iPhones without the owners’ permission, have said that the latest version of iOS blocks their app from accessing data. Forbes’ Thomas Brewster spoke with sources at GreyKey’s parent company GreyShift, who confirmed that the update specifically blocks the GreyKey app, and they cannot figure out why. Now, if a phone has the latest iOS update, GreyKey is only able to perform a “partial extraction,” limiting its efficacy to useless scraps of unencrypted files and some metadata....
A few years ago, the British Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) went unexpectedly viral when the Internet took over a voting campaign to name a new research vessel. Left open for suggestions, the poll became flooded with joke responses, like It’s Bloody Cold Here and, most, notably, Boaty McBoatface. Eventually, NERC chose a different name, but kept Boaty onboard as an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Now the little AUV has created a 3D map of deep ocean waters to better understand global warming in the waters near Antarctica....
An organization founded nearly 40 years ago by Carl Sagan is now sending a small spacecraft, known as the LightSail 2, to orbit around the planet. The tiny satellite, around the size of a loaf of bread, will attempt to power itself solely through “the gentle push” of solar photons, the organization says in a press statement.The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by Sagan, fellow NASA scientist Bruce Murray, and engineer Louis Friedman....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe last car I drove before I moved to the East Coast was an underpowered hatch that wanted to be a hero. The little white ‘94 Ford Escort, powered by a 100-hp engine tied to a five-speed manual, carried me on long hauls across the Great Plains with just enough oomph for I-80.On my road trip this weekend, PopMech’s 2013 Hyundai Elantra GT felt a little like that old Escort’s spiritual successor, which is probably why I liked it immediately....
Earlier this month, reports from the South China Morning Post unveiled China’s purported new laser weapon, a “laser AK-47” that sounds almost impossibly portable and powerful. Laser (and laser gun) expert Styropyro has taken his knowledge on the subject to form a strong technical critique. In short, it’s nearly impossible to create a laser with the characteristics the report describes. What’s more, making such a laser portable is much harder—even impossible—considering the limits of modern battery tech and the size of the weapon according to the report....
