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One frigid night in February, 1921, Jack “Skinny” Knight, flying some 248 miles from his departure airstrip, scanned the darkness over Omaha for any sign of blazing drums of gasoline. The only thing keeping him from freezing in the cockpit of his De Havilland DH-4 biplane was the heat radiating back from its Liberty V-12 engine.Knight was one of seven airmail pilots attempting something never done before in America–flying mail coast to coast, day and night....

BREAKING NEWS ON THE LATEST NAVY TECH* PLUS: From Periscopes to Mine Bots, The Navy’s Holiday Wish List* ANALYSIS: 4 Challenges as More Unmanned Drones Go UnderwaterThe Navy is developing new weapons and sensors that demand large amounts of electrical power, but it is not clear that future ships will have the juice. Current ships use most of their energy to run engines, so some weapons being developed would need new ships....

The Boeing 787, billed as a revolutionary design in terms of fuel efficiency, range, and passenger comfort, has spent the last two months with its wings clipped. The FAA grounded the Dreamliner following two separate high-temperature failures of the plane’s lithium-ion batteries in January, leaving the 49 planes that Boeing has delivered so far to seven different airlines sitting idle.Today Boeing executives announced a fix that the company hopes to implement and certify “within a matter of weeks....

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly has agreed to abandon his nuclear weapons program in return for a peace treaty with the United States and a pledge to not invade his country. The pledge, reported by The New York Times, marks the latest part of an apparent “peace offensive” by Kim against neighboring South Korea and its ally, the United States.This sounds too good to be true, because it probably is....

In 1998, Deep Impact and Armageddon simultaneously struck on asteroids as the perfect disaster movie plot. What force better to bring together the people of the world then sudden destruction? However, a new study offers some depressing news for any would-be Bruce Willis: an incoming asteroid would likely be much more difficult to break up than previously imagined. “We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws....

Two Facebook researchers based in Paris have built a new neural network for Facebook capable of solving complex mathematical equations, even those dealing with calculus.Their work is outlined in a December 2 paper made public on arXiv, a repository of scientific research run by Cornell University.It represents a major leap for neural networks, which traditionally are great for use in pattern recognition, but could only complete rudimentary arithmetic until now.If today’s college students could find a way to get their hands on a copy of Facebook’s latest neural network, they could cheat all the way through Calc 3....

In the home –as in life–it’s often the little things that matter. And it’s amazing how many small structural things can go wrong around your house. Whether it’s the front-door lock that won’t let you into your own home, or the cracked window that won’t keep the cold out, small household problems can have a big effect. For most of these, there’s no need to call for a repairman– the solution lies in tapping your ingenuity and using a few common household materials in innovative ways....

Florida Keys resident Carl Blahnik wasn’t content to just be a car thief. Instead, the 59-year-old stole a backhoe from a construction site and led police on a low-speed chase through the Seven Miles Bridge, ripping up pavement and throwing off reflectors as he went. According to ABC News, a low-speed police chase ensued before Blahnik slammed the backhoe into reverse. When police tried to negotiate with him, he retaliated by trying to attack them with the construction machinery....

No longer the expensive business-traveler stepchild to the desktop PC, the laptop is more affordable and comes in more varieties than ever before. There’s a laptop for every possible lifestyle – practical daily drivers, lightweight travelers and entertainment powerhouses. The key to buying the machine you need is knowing what’s what under the hood.What do you get for your money? BUDGET $600-$900 Processing: Single-core CPU (Intel Celeron M, Intel Core Solo, AMD Sempron, AMD Turion 64) and a graphics processor that shares system memory Operating system: Windows Vista Home Basic Screen: 12 to 15 in....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe experimental French trimaran Hydroptère has a footprint the size of a basketball court and a 100-foot-high carbon-fiber mast that can fly 6000 square feet of sail—made variously of carbon, Kevlar, and Cuben fiber—yet there’s not much room aboard. There’s barely even a deck, just a scrim of netting that stretches between the narrow center hull and two pontoons. I hunker down next to the bowsprit, which I’m told is the best place to soak up the action away from the spray that’s thrown by Hydroptère’s two underwater wings, one under each pontoon....

This man took matters into his own hands and put fire to what appears to be an ant nest in his backyard.Not surprisingly, this didn’t go well. He blew up more than just ants in this DIY-gone-wrong (though luckily no humans—or dogs—were injured).To correctly get rid of those pesky ants, we’ve got a Popular Mechanics guide.When those irritating little ants start showing up in the house, raiding the kitchen for crumbs and making cozy homes in your walls, the natural reaction is to set an ant trap or call the exterminator, right?...

Previous attempts to power spacecraft with giant solar sails, like the abandoned Soviet-Russian Znmaya project and the successful Japanese IKAROS, relied on giant, reflective, metallic sails to move through space and to reflect light back to Earth. Now, RIT scientist Grover Swartzlander is now calling to abandon these reflective materials in favor of metamaterials, synthetically created materials with properties that don’t occur naturally.Swartzlander’s solar sails would power CubeSats, the tiny satellites that have become en vogue due to their low cost and ability to be built with low cost....

What’s the point of training a cat if you can’t also train them to use high-tech gizmos?Ben Millam understood this more than most, and built an RFID-tracking device that automatically feeds his cat, Monkey, when triggered. All Monkey has to do is track down a couple wiffle balls that Millam’s hid around the house.View full post on YoutubeThe actual device is fairly simple. It includes an RFID reader, a remote antenna, some relays, and an Arduino to run the code that tells the automatic feeder that its time to do its thing....

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania unveiled the world’s first solar-powered circuit in a January edition of ACS Nano. The technology shows particular promise for touchscreen devices, which could use the circuits as a direct source for sun-power. Not to be confused with solar cells, which convert sunlight energy to electricity and store it for later, this breakthrough involves circuits—electrical devices that provide paths for electricity to flow. This means that sunlight absorbed by the device can immediately use the energy to power the device....

Plenty of insects exhibit some sort of hive mind behavior, where complicated behaviors can come from a group of individuals following only a few simple rules. For instance, each individual worker ant might only be able to perform a few tasks like following pheromone trails and picking up food, but the result is a colony that is capable of building extensive nests and intelligently responding to outside threats.A group of researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France have created their own simple version of this type of hive mind behavior, by building tiny, mindless robots that only know how to go forward, but can still work as a group to maneuver around obstacles....

Media Platforms Design TeamUPDATE: that shoulder-mounted SA-24s have gone missing in Libya. But arms control experts now tell PM that there’s no evidence of gripstocks for the missiles in Libya. That means that any SA-24s looted from Gaddafi’s stockpiles could be vehicle-fired, but not shoulder-fired. This makes them less of a terrorist threat.CNN originally reportedThat said, the proliferation of these missiles on the black market is still a large concern, especially in other parts of the world where gripstocks might be available that would allow the weapons to be used as Man Portable Air Defense (MANPAD) missiles....

Ever wonder what it takes to build the fast and flashy cars that headline Hollywood’s mega-buck movies? We did too. So last week we went to E.P. Industries in El Segundo, CA, to meet master inventor and Hollywood car customizer Eddie Paul. Paul has been building movie cars and rigging stunts for over 35 years, building props for some 250 movies. Our favorites? He created those cool hot rods for Grease in the ’70s, the ‘50 Merc for Stallone’s movie Cobra in the ’80s....

The cockpit voice recorder from Lion Air Flight 610 has been found by Indonesian authorities, not far from where the doomed Boeing 737 Max 8 plunged into the ocean killing all 189 people aboard. The device was found buried in 98 feet of mud, according to Reuters, with authorities using a “ping locator” to dredge it up from the Java Sea. The “black box” device is colored bright orange and was apparently found around 160 feet from the plane’s original flight data recorder....

(Image: Colorised STEM image of the meteorite thought to be from a destroyed protoplanet, showing the diamond phase (blue), inclusions (yellow), and the graphite region.)Something fell from the sky in the Nubian Desert of Sudan in 2008, and it could be a key to understanding lost planets from the early formation of our solar system.In research published today in Nature Communications, a group of planetary scientists provide evidence that a fragment of a meteorite may be a piece of a protoplanet that was destroyed as the solar system was forming....

Years ago, I took a road trip in a Winnebago Via, which is an RV built on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis. To add a degree of difficulty, I towed a boat, bringing the total length of my mini road train to about 40 feet. Propelling all this amphibious vacation overkill was a mere 3.0-liter diesel V-6, the Sprinter’s small but torquey powerplant of choice. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that it would be awfully nice to be able to buy such an engine in a pickup truck....