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Star Wars combat vehicles are iconic, sure, but almost always dumb in design and employment. Look no further than all-terrain transports that have legs instead of treads and are now shaped like apes for no good reason. So when Star Wars spilled details on a new First Order spaceship called the Dreadnought, I expected something visually cool, totally unusual, and wildly inaccurate—like a spaceship with wings and a dragon neck or something....

911 is a lifesaver, but it’s also woefully outdated. Built on infrastructure from the 1960s, the emergency service is hard-pressed to handle text messages and mobile calls, much less make use of the wealth of valuable information that’s harvested by our smartphones. Historically, updating the 911 network has proven difficult if not impossible.So what do you do? If you’re Michael Martin and Nick Horelik, a Harvard business student and MIT-trained nuclear engineer who invented the new app RapidSOS, you hack in extra features from your side....

A U.S. Air Force F-35 caught fire during surface-to-air training at an Air Force base in Idaho, causing “substantial” damage to the aircraft. According to Aviation Week, the working theory is that a fire was started after strong tailwinds redirected heat from the fighter’s engine during startup procedures. The pilot got out unharmed.The incident, involving an aircraft assigned to the 56h Fighter Wing, took place on September 23 at Mountain Home Air Force Base....

In this era of computerized conflict, dominated by cyberwarfare, laser weapons, and piloting drones from halfway around the world, it can be easy to overlook the importance of a soldier’s own muscle power. Despite the relentless march of technology—and in some ways, because of it—soldiers on the march are carrying more weight on their backs than ever before, even going back to the days of swords and armor.What the heck happened?...

Geologists have unearthed the oldest fossils ever discovered, chunks of quartz that contain tiny tubes and filaments left behind by microorganisms between 3.77 and 4.3 billion years ago. The fossils were discovered in the Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt (NSB) on the coast of Hudson Bay in the northern reaches of Canada’s Quebec province. The NSB contains some of the oldest layers of sedimentary rock in the world. These deposits of gravel and sand accumulated about four billion years ago around iron-rich hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean, only to be uplifted by geologic processes over time until they emerged from the sea in northern Canada....

Media Platforms Design TeamTime DilationThe latest test of Einstein’s theory of relativity, published in September 2010 in Science, looks specifically at time dilation, a piece of the theory that predicts that two identical clocks resting at different heights or moving at different speeds will tick at different rates. Time dilation is most commonly thought of in terms of the twin paradox: If one twin goes asteroid-hopping on a rocket moving at extremely high speeds, he’ll have aged less than his earthbound sibling when he gets home....

The retro Nintendo systems are about to become limited edition, yet again. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, speaking in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, has said that this holiday season’s NES and SNES Classic sales will be the last chance to buy them off the shelves. “Once they sell out, they’re gone,” Fils-Aimé says. “And that’s it.“The interview mostly focuses on Nintendo’s successful holiday season, with its popular Switch gaming device at the forefront....

A 150-nanometer spinning silica ball is the fastest spinner and finest detector of torque ever made.This team of researchers, from Purdue, is following recent developments by ETH Zurich that use a slightly different laser spinner.The setup could be used to detect and measure vacuum friction, which has remained elusive.Scientists at Purdue University have made the fastest spinning object ever, a tiny ball of silicon dioxide that rotates 300 billion times per second....

NASA is launching its asteroid return spacecraft OSIRIS-REx tonight aboard an Atlas V rocket. The launch will be broadcast live, and the coverage begins at 5:30 p.m. EDT, with the launch itself scheduled for 7:05 p.m. You can watch the livestream of the launch here:View full post on YoutubeOSIRIS-REx will spend the next two years traveling to the asteroid Bennu, where it will take samples and return them to Earth in 2023....

Water may be evaporating off Mars’ surface much more quickly than scientists previously thought.This could shape our understanding of when conditions of the red planet became so dry.Better understanding the history of conditions on Mars can also help researchers pinpoint additional and alternative locations for further study.The dry, dusty surface of Mars is a cold and unforgiving place. But it wasn’t always that way. Evidence gathered from orbiters and rovers that have circled and traipsed across the planet’s surface have revealed a brilliant picture of a previous red planet....

Abu Dhabi will have the cheapest solar farm ever built, set to open in 2022.Unlike costly molten salt or other experimental tech, photovoltaic (PV) costs continue to fall.The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) has abundant sunshine and cheap areas of land, making it ideal for solar development.A collaboration in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) will help to install the world’s cheapest solar farm in 2022. The public electric utility in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the U....

‘Tis the season to celebrate the Apollo program’s first human excursion to the lunar surface in July 1969. Fifty years later, this epic and ground-breaking achievement certainly warrants praise as it set the technological stage for generations of engineers and scientists to follow.But there is also the temptation to say that America needs another Apollo-style program to reclaim its primacy in space. This sentiment ignores both the realities of the moonshot and the amazing possibilities that the current commercial space revolution is opening....

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to make the “Gunslinger,” a missile with a multi-shot gun for air-to-ground and air-to-air warfare.The proposed missile will allow a single weapon to take multiple shots at the enemy.Gunslinger will keep enemy fighter jets at bay, allowing U.S. fighters to engage from beyond visual range. DARPA wants to build a new missile. Called “Gunslinger,” this missile won’t be like any other missile ever made—it will carry a gun capable of engaging enemy aircraft or troops on the ground....

Philip FriedmanEven if you know the story of Drs. James Watson and Francis Crick—who in 1953 co-discovered deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules and later received the Nobel Prize for their work—the building blocks of all living organisms remain mysterious. Packed into the nuclei of cells in strands called chromosomes, pure DNA is seen and handled by few except scientists.Well, here’s your chance. This classic experiment draws the substance from strawberries, whose cells carry eight copies of each chromosome, four times the number found in human cells....

Years of science fiction, from The Andromeda Strain to Annihilation, have trained us to accept what seems obvious: When there’s a science-based catastrophe, only a full-body hazmat suit will protect you. That’s why it might be surprising, almost straight-up suspicious, that life-saving protection from a nuclear disaster could be so minimalist as a band around your waist. Oren Milstein, co-founder of StemRad, knows just how unintuitive his company’s solution looks. “How could it be that a belt going around the pelvis of the user is supposed to protect the whole body?...

Media Platforms Design TeamMono Lake. Credit: Wikimedia CommonsEvery life form we know of needs phosphorous to survive. The DNA responsible for our very existence owes its structure to the element; phosphorus makes up the backbone of the double helix. But in 2010, a study in Science seemed to refute that notion. It was one of the most controversial studies in recent memory—but now new research suggests that it was wrong.The original research, led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, described a microbe called GFAJ-1, which flourishes in California’s Mono Lake by using arsenic in place of phosphorous....

A review by Gary Dell’Abate, a Howard Stern producer and audiophile.If the Frames didn’t have the Bose name on them, I wouldn’t even try them. They seem like one of those “As Seen on TV” kind of things—sunglasses that also play music like headphones. Because they’re Bose, I said, “Okay, they have credibility, I’m willing to take a chance.” Still, I had very low expectations. But as soon as you put them on, the sound is ridiculously good....

China’s first space station, the Tiangong-1 experimental space laboratory, reentered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the southern Pacific Ocean at 8:16 p.m. EDT on Sunday, April 1 (00:16 UTC on Monday, April 2), according to the U.S. Joint Force Space Component Command. The spacecraft reentered to the northwest of Tahiti. In the remote location over the ocean, and with few airplanes in the area at the time, it is unlikely that anyone saw the reentry event....

Media Platforms Design Team Last year’s ultraportable Flip Video camera was a sleeper sensation, quickly becoming one of the top-selling camcorders around—and remains so to this day. Within a year it reportedly snagged 13 percent of the entire camcorder market. It was small enough to fit in just about any pocket or purse, and at $150, cheap enough to be tossed around without worry. So it should come as no surprise that imitators would follow....

In 1965 Frank Herbert published Dune, a science-fiction epic that would do more than just about any other novel to define the genre.Dune by Frank HerbertDune by Frank HerbertNow 30% OffREAD NOWAcross the book’s 412 pages, Paul Atreides struggles against the villainous Baron Harkonnen for control of Arrakis, a desert planet with the galaxy’s most valuable export—melange. Set in this far future on a completely different world, Herbert’s Dune became a seminal text in the history of science fiction....