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Media Platforms Design TeamThe pathogen Phytophthora infestans, born in the Toluca Valley in central Mexico, where it latched on to a white potato heading for Europe, is responsible for starving one million people during Ireland’s Great Famine in the mid-1800s. Within months, this microbe was wreaking havoc on Ireland’s potato production. Today it can still cause blights costing billions of dollars in lost food per year.Scientists think they have finally found the Achilles’ heel of this notoriously resistant organism....

As many as 40 percent of the world’s insects may die off, according to a new report.Experts link the threat with the possibility of another impending mass extinction event.Some species, like butterflies, are disproportionately affected even by these dire standards.A new report from England suggests insects are facing their own “climate emergency” amid increased pesticide usage and climate change phenomena. The Guardian reports that the state of the U.K.’s insects is more studied than in many places....

Earth’s poles are changing, and as the planet gets warmer the ice will continue to melt. Tracking how that ice changes over the next few years will be crucial for understanding the consequences to the rest of the world. Next month, NASA will launch a new spacecraft to help do just that, equipped with one of the most advanced lasers in the world.NASA has been sending satellites into orbit to study the poles for a long time....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe gauntlet was first thrown in . A glimpse inside the visiting spaceship of a band of extraterrestrial hunters revealed a distinctive, elongated skull on the trophy wall. It meant that these Predators, for lack of a better word, had bagged one of the aliens from . It was the silent shot heard round the sci-fi world. Comics and a pair of aggressively forgettable movies followed, playing out just how these unnamed Predators might face off against the similarly unnamed aliens....

Welcome back to the weekly riddle series from Popular Mechanics. Today we try to help a naive fellow gain access to a shadowy guild of thieves. ProblemA businessman, for personal reasons of his own, needs to gain access to a notorious but elusive thieves guild. After snooping around the city for a few days, he finally gets a tip about the location of the guild entrance down a dark alleyway. After observing the entrance for about an hour, the businessman notices that the thieves seem to have some sort of passcode system using numbers....

The National Guard needs to simulate Russian tanks for training.Actual Russian tanks are hard to come by.With the help of a special effects company, the National Guard can turn a Humvee into a T-72 tank.The National Guard Bureau, ramping up training against high end military threats, has contracted Hollywood special effects company Westefx to manufacture kits that turn ordinary Humvees into Russian tanks and armored vehicles. Westefx has provided visual effects for a number of films, including the James Bond films, Taken, and Men in Black 2....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo an engineer, the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch scheduled from Cape Canaveral this Friday is just a first flight test of a new rocket. If the rocket fails to reach orbit, staff will analyze telemetry to find out what went wrong, correct the glitches and then launch an improved rocket, repeating the process as often as needed to minimize future risk to payloads and astronauts. But this is no ordinary test flight....

While pirates are in a panic trying to figure out if they can upgrade to Windows 10 for free, the US Navy is taking a different route. It’s paying millions to just stick with Windows XP for a little longer. It’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Microsoft stopped supporting the now ancient Windows XP in April of last year which means no more security updates. But the US Navy–and other hulking bureaucracies like the UK government–are still reliant on it and can’t move quite fast enough to switch to something newer right away....

If you want to find neutrinos, you may not want to look for them, but instead listen for them. But since they don’t interact with matter, they can remain elusive. The team behind GRAND, short for the Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection, wants a series of radio antennas tuned to just the right frequency to find them. The antennas cost just $500, but there’s a catch: GRAND is going to need 200,000 antennas....

In 1964, a B-52H crew was pushing the bomber to its limits when suddenly things went very wrong. The vertical stabilizer—the tail fin—sheared off in flight, forcing the crew to make a wild emergency landing. They succeeded, and the U.S. Air Force later produced this film to explain to aircrews what had happened, what factors led to the successful landing, and what was being done to prevent incidents like it from reoccurring....

In 2000, one of the worst peacetime submarine accidents ever took place off the coast of Russia. A huge explosion sank the giant nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, killing most of its crew and stranding nearly two dozen survivors hundreds of feet underwater. An international rescue team assembled to save the sailors, but was unable to reach them in time.🎖 Don’t miss our best-in-class military coverage. Join Pop Mech Pro.Kursk—a movie based on the disaster, starring Colin Firth, came out in 2018....

On top of Mauna Kea, the largest mountain in the Hawaiian Islands, a battle has been raging for the future of astronomy. An international consortium of scientists has been seeking to construct a new telescope on the mountain’s summit that stands to be the most powerful tool ever built to study the cosmos. However, members of the native Hawaiian community have opposed the effort in an attempt to preserve a mountain many of them believe to be sacred....

Stare at this blurry mess of pastel colors for a while and something wonderful happens: It disappears. Go ahead, try it. As one of those people who could never master Magic Eye as a kid, a presumed this optical illusion wouldn’t work for me. But then, bam. Let your eyes cross and the picture becomes mushy gray nothingness.This particular illusion got a new life via a Reddit post to r/woahdude yesterday, but what makes it work is a long-known effect of the human visual system called Troxler fading....

Update 6:45 p.m. EDT: SpaceX has done it. After working for 15 years to develop a rocket that can be used multiple times to launch satellites into space, they have proven they indeed have a truly reusable launch vehicle. The Falcon 9 first stage launched, deposited the SES-10 satellite in orbit, and successfully landed for a second time.“It means you can fly and re-fly an orbit class booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket,” said Elon Musk after the successful landing....

The air traffic controllers were so doubtful that the plane would even get off the ground that they notified police and fire departments to be on alert. But the Super Guppy proved them wrong. On September 19, 1962, the bizarre new aircraft took to the skies near Los Angeles. When former Air Force pilot Jack Conroy took off and safely landed this specially modified hulk of a plane without a hitch, he inaugurated a new age of airborne transport lead by Aero Spaceline’s Guppy family of aircraft....

The technology inside this rechargeable battery is nothing new—it’s lithium-ion setup could be used to power your smartphone, digital camera, or quadcopter. But make no mistake, this is no ordinary battery. Thanks to its clever, art-inspired shape, it can extend and retract like a car antenna, even when being used. Stretchable batteries allow engineers and roboticists to custom-fit batteries into moveable, flexible devices like a robot’s legs or a springy wristwatch band—places where an ordinary battery could not go....

Napa Valley, Calif.—As surprising as it may sound, in the world of luxury sport sedans, power takes a backseat to price. It’s true. The lower horsepower (and less expensive) offering in a sport sedan lineup invariably constitutes the majority of sales. In some cases, the less powerful version is close to 80 percent of the mix. Armed with this intelligence, Infiniti decided it was time the G sedan received a less expensive, less potent entry to compete with the BMW 328i, Lexus IS250 and Audi A4....

Near Fort Collins, Colorado, a man running through the West Ridge Trail at Horsetooth Mountain Open Space killed a mountain lion after the animal attacked him yesterday afternoon. Remarkably, the man used nothing but his bare hands to fend off the animal’s deadly advances. He escaped relatively unscathed considering the circumstances, with the lion only biting his wrist and face. Officials from Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) and Larimer County searched the trail in question and found a dead juvenile mountain lion....

View full post on YoutubeWorking at Boston Dynamics is a pretty sweet gig. They’ve had DARPA research money flowing in for ages, are generally recognized as being among the best in robotics research and engineering, and got acquired by Google X in 2013 for an undisclosed (but no doubt massive) sum.Being a robot at Boston Dynamics? Maybe not great. As the supercut above shows, one of the big ways to test the bots ability to dynamically balance themselves is to kick them, shove them, and even drop wrecking balls of them while forcing them to stand on one foot....

It seems that China built a seriously impressive cannon, allegedly the world’s fastest. It’s a 7.5-meter monster that shoots out one-piece, 125mm shells at Mach 6. An impressive feat, which explains the fanfare of a ceremony unveiling it. It doesn’t explain the is the subsequent removal of evidence from the internet. According to Popular Science, the ceremony took place on June 10th, when the 127th Ordinance Institute of the Central Northern University handed over the mammoth cannon to Peoples’ Liberation Army officers, after which soldiers toted it off to the proving ground....