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Scientists have observed “direct and definitive” evidence of water ice on the moon’s surface. The discovery, a decade in the making, shows that water ice exists in both the southern and northern poles of Earth’s only natural satellite.The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the ice near the moon’s south pole is mostly contained in lunar craters like Haworth, Shoemaker, Sverdrup, and Shackleton. In the north, the ice has been distributed more widely across the surface....

View full post on YoutubeNow that you’ve been enraptured by the teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it’s time to take a look back at how George Lucas teased the original, back before anybody knew was The Force was. Mental Floss unearthed this original Star Wars trailer, which appears to come not as much from a galaxy far, far away as from a parallel universe.The 1976 teaser lacks the familiar John Williams march....

The U.S. Army is using a team of nine robots developed by a nuclear weapons lab to dismantle aging artillery rockets. The robots accomplish the job without endangering humans in the potentially hazardous process. In operation since May 2018, the team has already processed 700,000 of the small, baseball-sized submunitions, hundreds of which are encased in a typical rocket warhead. During the 2000s, a movement began to ban cluster bomb-type munitions....

In a case that sounds nauseatingly familiar, The Weather Company (TWC) is being sued by the City of Los Angeles for using the Weather Channel App to harvest location data from users and then selling it to marketing and financial firms without explicit user consent. Though all third-party weather apps require users’ precise location data to perform their sometimes singular function of providing weather forecasts, the complaint filed by Los Angeles city attorney Michael N....

A Chinese defense contractor has unveiled a new mobile drone launcher designed to hunt and then destroy targets using the same drone. Described as a “multipurpose drone launching armored vehicle,” the vehicle can singlehandedly launch a swarm of drones, then direct them to converge on targets and detonate their explosive payloads.The weapon system, displayed at this week’s Beijing Civil-Military Integration Expo 2019, was recently profiled in China’s Global Times tabloid and C4ISRNet....

Ceres isn’t the boring old rock we thought it was. It’s a rich little world of its own with some growing mysteries around it. For instance, what the heck are these lights?As the Dawn spacecraft approaches the drawf planet, it took this picture of two mysterious lights at the basin of a crater, seen from a distance of 29,000 miles. They were previously observed as a single bright spot, but the recent pictures reveal there to be not one but two light sources....

Media Platforms Design TeamSusan Lindell grew up as a “car person” in Minneapolis. When she split for New York a decade ago she was making a living repairing guitars, and she ditched her car for a 1980s 10-speed—which, naturally, broke down. Lindell (above) didn’t know how to repair it, but she knew she could learn. “I’m obsessive about fixing things,” Lindell says. Hobby turned into profession, and she has long since dumped guitars for rehabbing vintage bicycles at Brooklyn’s Recycle-A-Bicycle, where she is the manager....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Taking Off From the WaterRaytheon’s newest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), tested successfully in September, takes off from the surface of the sea. The SOTHOC, or Submarine Over the Horizon Organic Capabilities, UAV is a considerably smaller vehicle than the company’s KillerBee, Raytheon’s Dave Bossert tells PM. “It’s an aircraft in stowed configuration,” he says–the UAV fits inside a tube about 39 in. long and 16 in. in diameter....

A large asteroid is coming close to Earth on April 19th. While NASA emphasizes that 2014 JO25, as the asteroid is known, has no chance of hitting the planet, it will provide a rare chance to observe an asteroid of its size up close.View full post on YoutubeJO25 was discovered in 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, part of NASA’s Near Earth Observations Program with the University of Arizona....

Belgium has halted all incoming and outbound air traffic for 24 hours as air traffic controllers participate in a national strike over low wages. According to CNN, Belgium’s air traffic authority, Skeyes, announced a shutdown of all air traffic between Tuesday at 10 p.m. and Wednesday at 10 p.m. local time.In a press release, the agency wrote: The management takes its responsibility to guarantee the safety of air traffic. In view of the great uncertainty about the occupation of some crucial posts in the operational services, this guarantee can only be given by not allowing air traffic....

Inside the Arctic World Archive in Norway, GitHub is building an emergency database to prepare for the apocalypse. Special reels hold store copies of its entire code library—you know, just in case. GitHub joins others in the vault, including the Vatican archives and McDonalds’s special sauce. The whole stunt speaks to the importance of open-source code in today’s software development landscape.North of mainland Norway, there’s a secret cave stuffed with seeds for the most important plants to humans—just in case nuclear warfare or a biological weapon destroy all of our natural crops—and stacks and stacks of data platters to prepare for a different sort of “end of the world....

Cars, in case you haven’t heard, are dead. More specifically, cars are crossovers now. Enthusiasts have plenty of reasons for disdain toward the crossover age we now find ourselves in. It feels like a retread of the ’90s SUV craze, for one thing. But more to the point, the Honda CR-V, Toyota RAV4, and their ubiquitous competitors have conquered this vast nation of parking lots in record time, replacing minivans and sedans as America’s de facto family haulers to the point of becoming the new basic embodiment of what a car is....

Media Platforms Design TeamDoes the world really need another big Web browser? With three major players—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari—fighting the latest iteration of the browser wars, Google is set to elbow its way into the game today with Chrome, the search giant’s new, open-source software for browsing the Web. And one might imagine that Google, which has shown such masterful skill at giving directions around the Internet, would be an ideal company to create the software “vehicle” that takes people where they want to go....

A recurring theme in movies and TV shows is the destruction of the United States government. From Independence Day to Designated Survivor, people love watching the White House and Congress get blown up. But if things really were to go south, the contingencies would be more complicated than any work of fiction is likely to illustrate. The contingencies revolve around shifting personnel and areas of operation. Washington D.C. becomes mobile, both on land and in the sky....

Bathroom remodeling projects rank a close second to kitchens in popularity, as they can boost the value of your home and make a great universal design addition for seniors who don’t have to step over the lip of a tub. Walk-in showers are also cheaper to build as you don’t have the expense of a bathtub. The first step to installing a walk-in shower is to create a waterproof enclosure, which the Home Repair Tutor shows us in a series of videos shown below....

Media Platforms Design Team>1. A paper clip acts as an On/Off switch. Just remove one end from the battery tray’s metal contact to kill the current.2. Clip the battery tray’s red cord to the phone battery’s positive metal contact, and the black cord to its negative one.3. The DIY charger has no way of limiting the current or preventing overheating. So limit it to 10-minute charges, and unplug it if it starts to get hot....

The U.S. State Department says that a new Russian satellite’s behavior is “inconsistent” with its stated mission. The satellite, which Russia claims is designed to maneuver close to and inspect other satellites, caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community with its strange activity. The U.S. military and intelligence community rely on satellites for everything from communications and navigation to spying and there are concerns a rival power could attack the United States’ satellite fleet in wartime to gain a strategic advantage....

China hasn’t fought a war in more than forty years, a fact that haunts the modern-day People’s Liberation Army as it grows to fit the country’s new great-power status. The country’s lack of recent military experience could prove the decisive factor in a future conflict, one that would be utterly unlike any conflict China has ever fought before.China fought three wars in the 20th century: Against U.S. and U.N. forces in the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, a brief war against India in 1962, and another brief war against Vietnam in 1979....

Teasing a new sci-fi studio called Oats Studios since April, Neill Blomkamp’s ready to show us what he has in store for his future sci-fi ambitions. A new trailer, released today, for a short film currently named “Volume 1” will stream on Steam “soon.” But while the particulars of the movie are lacking in detail, the trailer is nothing short of a top-notch sci-fi film.View full post on YoutubeWhile the trope is a familiar one, Blomkamp’s new film feels a lot like the possible fallout from Independence Day if it were the aliens—not the humans—who won the day....

Dream of a home where you can really get away from it all. Like away from it all. This $8.6 million San Francisco co-op might be for you. It has no cell service or capacity for Wi-Fi or GPS or radio waves of any kind, because it’s been carefully outfitted to block all signals from the outside world.This lovely, full-floor, three-bed, four-and-a-half bath apartment is not just 3,428 square feet with a one-car garage....