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A new Airbus prototype is a blended wing aircraft that could be used for commercial flights.Flying wings and blended wings date back 100 years and have mostly been for military use.The MAVERIC prototype is a scale model that’s 3 meters wide, ideal for testing and showing off.Airbus has released a new prototype for a “giant flying wing” that could revolutionize commercial flight. The MAVERIC prototype is 2 meters long by 3 meters wide and flown by remote control....

Media Platforms Design TeamLots of people are investigating the use of exoskeletons or treadmills to help a user move in space as they wear the Oculus. What do you thinkis there a solution you like?So something like an omni-directional treadmill? I think its a really difficult problem to solvelocomotion in VR. For one, you really need to have everything wireless or youre going to get all tangled up. Lets say you want to simulate running around....

Media Platforms Design TeamClarke Crocodile Circular Saw /// $100 /// Available Now The Promise: A handheld circular saw designed from the ground-up to cut hard tough materials such as metal and marble precisely. In Practice: To test, we put this minute cutter down on solid wood, aluminum, copper pipe and drywall. After several days of rugged outdoor use, the Crocodile cut all materials swiftly, steadily and with far more precision than a typical circular saw....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt won’t be long now before Star Wars fans fill the sky with every kind of vehicle from both sides of the battle. Redditor Olivier-FR, the designer of the RC Millennium Falcon, didn’t take long to put out another followup. This time it’s the Imperial Star Destroyer. It too lights up and is totally ready for flight.The RC Star Destroyer is based on a similar design: starting with a quadcopter and using lightweight polyfoam to fill out the body in the shape of the Star Wars spaceship....

Big Hero 6 was one of Disney’s recent sleeper hits, and now the company’s high tech lab is working on bringing Baymax, its inflatable robot hero, to reality. “Our goal is to bring animation characters to life in the real world,” Disney Research says. “We present a bipedal robot that looks like and walks like an animation character.“There’s a video about the development process below. As you can see, the real thing is not quite up to the computer renderings yet....

The long-term effects of climate change are significant and pervasive. Global temperatures are warming, and sea levels threaten to rise at alarming rates. By 2100, an increase in global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius could melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets enough to cause the sea to rise by as much as a meter, displacing millions of people and causing trillions of dollars in damage. While clean energy initiatives race to catch up with rising atmospheric greenhouse gases, geoengineering projects may be a way to mitigate rising sea levels....

Metabo HPT (formerly Hitachi), has just launched a new fleet of power tools called MultiVolt, that allow you to go corded or cordless. The key is in the AC adapter, which gives you the choice to plug in when you have access to power or go cordless by switching out the adapter for the 36V 4.0Ah battery. These MultiVolt batteries are also backwards compatible with Hitachi’s 18V line giving you a battery rated at 8....

Researchers at UC Berkeley created a water harvester that can pull more than five cups of water from low humidity air per day per 2.2 pounds of water-absorbing materials.The goal is to create massive systems to harvest water for entire villages.This method actually produces enough water for you to survive in extreme circumstances, with some left to spare.It sounds like a magic trick, but in a new paper for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have unveiled a device that can literally turn thin air into water....

What’s the best way to generate more power? There are a lot of options for a county or state to consider when increasing their power generation: coal, gas, nuclear, solar, or wind, to name a few. But which to choose?There are many different factors to consider when choosing a new power source, but perhaps the best choice is the cheapest one. The University of Texas Austin’s Energy Institute crunched the numbers and found the cheapest power plant to build in every county in the U....

Earlier this year, Leatherman began its largest product launch since the company started 35 years ago, with the Free Collection multitools. All of the multipurpose tools in the three collection lines possess the company’s proprietary magnetic locking technology, which makes it easier to open and close the tools with one hand. Today, the brand finally released the final line from the Free Collection, including four K-Series tools.Compared to the P- and T-series of the Free Collection, the K-Series knives are at a midpoint price with fewer tools in total, but feature a primary 3....

For all the amazing discoveries from Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and the other robotic explorers of Mars—including evidence of flowing waters and even deep sea volcanic vents in Mars’ past—nothing compares to rocks in the laboratory back home. By studying meteorites in the lab, for example, scientists have identified rocks that could have come from a now-destroyed planet, and one that might even predate the solar system. Every mission to the surface of Mars, dating back to the twin Viking spacecraft that landed in 1976, looked for signs of life on the Red Planet, past or present....

Media Platforms Design TeamEditor’s Note: This story originally published on March 19. Tuesday, March 25, Facebook announced it had agreed to purchase Oculus VR for $2 billion.By the end of the year, or perhaps in 2015, the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset will launch as the most hotly anticipated gaming peripheral in years. About 50,000 Rift headsets are in circulation among developers working on applications for the hardware, and the company just announced a new and improved dev kit at the Game Developers Conference....

Airlines cause more delays than the weather, for reasons extending to mechanical breakdowns to lack of flight crews. But they’re not responsible for everything, as a recent flight Shanghai to Guangzhou shows. According to the South China Morning Post, a woman held up a plane by tossing a coin into the engine.Passengers boarding China Southern Airlines Flight 380 noticed that an elderly woman, around 80 and with limited mobility, was tossing coins into the engine in what appeared to be a good luck superstition....

New evidence shows that saber-toothed cats may have been much more fierce than we originally thought. The cats belonging to Smilodon populator species—who likely used their elongated canines to tear through the soft spots on the bodies of their prey—may have also used those fearsome teeth to stab through the skulls of other saber-toothed rivals.Nicolas Chimento, a paleontologist with the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Argentine Museum in Buenos Aires, was the lead author of the paper that examines injuries found in the skull of one saber-toothed cat inflicted by another who may have been defending territory or fighting for a mate....

Update: 3:35 pm: The lander failed and crashed into the surface. With only seconds before touchdown, the spacecraft suffered a problem with the main engine followed by a communications failure. A few minutes later, mission control confirmed that the lander indeed crashed into the moon’s surface.“Well, we didn’t make it,” said board member Morris Kahn, “but we definitely tried. And I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous....

Spiders can’t fly, but they can naturally paraglide. Their ability is known as ballooning, and scientists have now shown that it extends further than windy thermals. Electric fields are strong enough to trigger ballooning even when there’s no wind.Erica Morley and Daniel Robert of the University of Bristol, UK have been studying the ways spiders move with electricity since 2013. They focused their studies on the atmospheric potential gradient (APG), the constant electric circuit revolving around the Earth....

The U.S. Army’s mysterious new super-extended long-range gun could sit on an island in the South China Sea and hit Chinese targets hundreds of miles away, smashing artificial islands made from dredged sediment that act as Beijing’s military outposts. That’s according to Secretary of the Army Mark Esper, who says the fantastical weapon would “open the door” for the other services, blasting enemy defenses before they have a chance to open fire on U....

One of the most critical concepts in infantry combat is the idea of taking cover. Hiding inside doorways, behind trees, and inside bunkers is a time-honored strategy for staying out of harms way on the battlefield. But it might not work so great anymore. The U.S. Army’s XM-25 Counter-Defilade Target Engagement System, also known as “The Punisher”, is in final development. Using a combination of “smart” grenades that explode in midair and a laser rangefinder, Punisher is capable of reaching and attacking enemy forces even when they’re hiding behind cover....

Toyota will soon take to the streets to begin testing new Prius models with solar panels. Working with the Sharp Corporation and Japanese government agency NEDO, the automaker will study the cruising range and fuel efficiency of electrified vehicles equipped with high-efficiency solar batteries.The new tests have been in the works for three years. NEDO, a national research and development organization, set up the Vehicle Strategy Committee, which focuses on developing solar....

The little ship called R/V Petrel is on a roll. Just last week, the team behind this research vessel said it had found the wreck of the Japanese battleship Hiei, the first one U.S. force sunk during World War II. Now the ship, which is part of an expedition launched by late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, has found an even more famous World War II wreck on the bottom of the sea: the USS Hornet....