Posts

Hospitals are continuing to use dangerous cesium blood irradiators that can be dismantled to build dirty bombs.Free cesium is wildly dangerous, linked with cancer, radiation poisoning, and other effects.U.S. regulators refuse to stop licensing these machines, despite other countries doing so already.The L.A. Times reports that U.S. hospitals have resisted efforts to phase out a dangerous device and even added more of them instead. The device in question, a blood irradiator that sterilizes body fluids and tissue, has a dangerous amount of a radioactive isotope of cesium....

China’s first and so far only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, passed through the Taiwan Strait early Wednesday, accompanied by a fleet of escorts. The passage of the carrier so close to what China considers a “breakaway province” was a thinly-veiled warning to the island not to seek full independence from Beijing. At the same time, the incoming U.S. Secretary of State vowed to block China’s access to artificial islands in the South China Sea....

NASA began construction on a fancy new radio antenna—part of its Deep Space Network—which will send and receive signals from spacecraft exploring the distant reaches of the solar system. NASA’s network consists of 12 antennas at three locations around the world. NASA launched the network in 1958. The antennas have sent and received signals from dozens of missions over the years. NASA broke ground on a radio antenna—what’s soon to be the newest component of the agency’s Deep Space Network—in Goldstone, California on February 11....

Not everyone needs an iPhone XS, an expensive piece of glass and metal that feels more like a priceless artifact than a necessary tool you carry every day. The steadily increasing megapixel camera, the always more powerful processor, the unending price creep.As an example of how far things have gone, Apple’s “cheap” phone option—the iPhone XR—still starts at $750. These are the familiar steps we’ve all learned in an endless dance of technological excess....

The Red Planet has played an outsized role in the human imagination since its discovery in 1610. In the 19th century, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, the director of the Brera Observatory in Milan, sparked chaos after announcing that he had discovered a series of canals that he claimed were built by an undetected intelligent civilization. (Spoiler: these “canali” did not even exist!) And the famed science fiction author H.G. Wells envisioned it as home base to an alien race determined to conquer Earth....

Q: I’ve heard about programs that can use the processing power of your computer for scientific research. How does this work, and will it slow down my PC?A: You’re thinking of “distributed computing,” which combines the unused processing-power of multiple Internet-connected computers for scientific number crunching. (Distributed computing could be used for anything, really, but most projects have been science-related.)Your PC rarely employs 100 percent of its processing capability, and it uses very little while sitting idle....

Rust happens. Especially to steel-tank water heaters. Manufacturers take precautions to protect the water heater, but the best they can do is delay its inevitable demise. However, if you learn a little about how your water heater is built, and you take care of this one piece of maintenance, then you can extend the life of your heater and save yourself some dough. What’s an Anode Rod?The first thing manufacturers do in this battle of appliance versus corrosion is to apply a “glass” tank lining to keep water from reaching the steel tank....

China appears to be the first country to place a electromagnetic railgun on a ship. The weapon was spotted on an old Chinese Navy landing craft in Wuhan and images of it quickly spread across the Internet. If this is true, then China has placed a real railgun on a warship before the U.S. Navy, which has been testing its own railgun on land for years.Electromagnetic railguns are an entirely new type of weapon system that use electricity and magnetism instead of the energy of a gunpowder explosion....

Matt BuntingTucson, Ariz.Age: 25Years on Job: 3When Matt Bunting was 12, he began building robots—simple rovers driven by remote control. His parents were supportive of his hobby, but one member of the household wasn’t so thrilled. “I’d make the rovers chase after my cat,” Bunting says. “It would hide, so I had to make a robot to invade its privacy!” His robots became more sophisticated, and when he got to the University of Arizona, he built a hexapod with artificial intelligence....

If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you know that the climate of Westeros is a bit different from Earth. In particular, winter can last for several years at a time. The University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute employed a real climate model to the fictional world of Game of Thrones in order to understand just how its climate actually works—at least in theory.The institute published a mock journal article under the name of Samwell Tarly, the steward of the Night’s Watch....

For the first time, astronomers have witnessed the aftermath of a black hole destroying a star.Using radio and infrared telescopes, including the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), an international group of scientists studied a pair of colliding galaxies. Together the two galaxies are known as Arp 299 and are close to 150 million light-years from Earth. Like most galaxies, the two that make up Arp 299 have supermassive black holes at their centers....

Small satellites could get a lot more power to work with in the future, thanks to space-based 3D-printing and assembly technology. A new system by company Made In Space will assemble solar panels for smaller spacecraft after they get into orbit, giving them more power-generating capability, and by extension more capability to conduct their missions in general.CEO Andrew Rush with a model solar blanket for small satellites.Made in SpaceThe new technology is part of Made In Space’s Archinaut program, which couples 3D-printing and remote assembly to build entire structures in space....

This weather isn’t what Southern California promised. It’s cold and overcast with a chance of “Why is this happening to me?” My trusty passenger/wife, Jess, and I are ready to ride north along a foggy patch of the Pacific Coast Highway on the newest edition of Honda’s sofa on wheels, the 2018 Gold Wing. The rain suits are in our hard cases, the heated seat and grips are warming up, and the power windshield is fully extended....

The Arctic is a strange place, and as our climate continues to change, it’s changing faster than scientists can understand it. Glaciers are shrinking, sea ice is receding, and, according to NASA, strange holes have started appearing in the ice, and nobody knows what causes them.The photo showing the strange holes was taken by John Sonntag, a scientist with NASA’s Operation IceBridge. IceBridge is NASA’s ambitious mission to image the North and South Poles with as much tech as possible, in the hope of understanding more about these parts of our planet....

A municipal worker tries to contain the oil spill from the Greek tanker Agia Zoni II, which sank off the island of Salamis, on one of the beaches of the Athens riviera. Athens, September 14, 2017.NurPhoto//Getty ImagesAlthough oil has been flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline for 9 months, the fight over the project is not yet over. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose protests against the pipeline brought international attention to North Dakota in 2016, has filed a 313-page report to the U....

Local mythology scored a victory over modern archaeology when divers discovered ancient ruins around 3,000 years old at the bottom of a lake in eastern Turkey.Lake Van sits near Turkey’s border with Iran. It is the world’s largest salt water lake and one of the world’s largest endoheric bodies of water, meaning it has no outlet to the ocean. The Uratu kingdom ruled the area for hundreds of years, from 860–590 BC, and legends held that Uratu ruins lay beneath the waters....

What makes some watches so expensive? Labor and brand heritage aside, it’s probably because a fancy watch has a complication – yes they’re actually called that. It’s the term for any feature added to a watch that goes beyond the capability of telling time. Most of them are painfully intricate, which explains the huge price tags on these watches. Yes, your phone can tell you the tide or become a stopwatch with much less effort, but that’s not the point....

Years before nuclear-powered doomsday submarines—centuries, even—naval submarine warfare was already in its infancy. A far cry from the missile-toting tubes of metal we have today, early submarines were little more than watertight barrels piloted by daring and clever inventors turned sailors. One of the very first was The Turtle, put to work all the way back in the Revolutionary War. Its mission was a failure, but that makes it no less impressive....

Apple announced this week that its entire company now runs on 100 percent renewable energy. It doesn’t. But what the Cupertino giant has achieved is impressive anyway, and offers up some good news as other tech titans take renewable energy more seriously.“Apple now globally powered by 100 percent renewable energy” was how the company announced the milestone. While that’s a grand way to say it, nothing in the energy business is quite so clean....

The smoke is clearing from the catastrophic accident that detonated a SpaceX rocket during prelaunch tests, but the issue of who winds up paying for this disaster may not be cut and dry. If past experience is to be a guide, NASA and taxpayers in general may wind up footing the bill. Let’s start with Thursday’s explosion. The fact that it happened on the ground may make insurance a little dicey, as Space News editor Peter de Selding sagely pointed out: View full post on TwitterSurely such a small loophole wouldn’t make a difference to an insurance company?...