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The Horsetail Fall at Yosemite National Park houses a gorgeous secret: every year, for a period of two weeks in February, the sun aligns just right. As the sunlight floods in and reflects off the cliffside through the water in the falls, an optical illusion takes place. It’s the elusive “firefall,” when the whole downward flow briefly looks like it’s on fire. Photographer Sangeeta Dey wanted to capture the sight, staking out a perch in the park at 2 p....

The head of the government’s F-35 Joint Program Office says that just over half of the of the 280 fighters delivered so far are flight-ready, according to Military.com. Vice Adm. Mat Winter stated that only 51 percent of the aircraft delivered to the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marines, and international customers are available for flight, with older aircraft having the greatest reliability problems.The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was developed and built using a strategy called “concurrency,” which is a fancy way of saying that a manufacturer starts making goods—in this case, fighter planes with a price tag of $100 to $122 million apiece—before the final version is ready....

Outside of the Earth, the moon is probably the most well-known body in the solar system. At least, half of it is. We’ve landed astronauts and dozens of rovers on the near side of the moon—the half that always faces the Earth. But the far side is mostly unexplored. That’s about to change. China has taken the first concrete step toward landing a rover on the surface.Exploring the moon’s far side presents multiple challenges....

Media Platforms Design TeamTornado-forecasting equipment can pick out the conditions likely to birth tornadoes. To know that there truly is a twister, though, Jeff Masters says, you need eyes in the area. “Storm chasers do a real service,” says Masters, the cofounder and chief meteorologist of the Weather Underground and a former hurricane hunter with NOAA. “Three out of four tornado warnings are false alarms, but if you’ve got somebody on the ground and they’ve got that tornado in sight, you know it’s not a false alarm, and that saves lives....

The military wants artificial intelligence, but it’s not intending to cook it up from scratch. Instead, in a recent solicitation, DARPA asked for proposals to build A.I. based on insect brains. The program seeks to build A.I. that is smaller and more efficient than normal software.Unlike us, insects operate almost entirely based on simple stimuli. Moths, for instance, are so programmed to navigate based on the direction of light that they occasionally navigate directly into lightbulbs....

Matt EadyAthens, GA.Age: 27Years on Job: 8 When Matt Eady fell in love with the guitar in high school, it seemed only natural to him that he learn how to build it. After completing a one-year master luthier program, in which he learned to make hollow- and solid-body guitars, Eady took a job at the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, Tenn. There, he helped repair up to 70 guitars a day, including Dickey Betts’s 1958 Les Paul....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s a common refrain that the ocean depths are the last great frontier of the Earth. Yet there’s a place that’s even more inhospitable to humans than the crushing depths of the sea: our planet’s interior. It’s made of iron, in some places it’s 10,000 degrees F, and plenty of scientists devote their life’s work to understanding it. But how exactly do you conduct research on an impenetrable, hostile environment like the Earth’s core?...

For anyone who’s collected Hot Wheels, you know that one of the joys is lining up all the cars and just admiring them. The sunroofs, the awesome wheels, the ones with engines on the outside. If that sounds familiar, you need to see Bruce Pascall’s collection, which has every type of Hot Wheels imaginable. His collection is insured for over a million dollars.View full post on YoutubePascall’s website, Redline Protos, delves a bit deeper into his collection....

Update, January 15: Marriott has given up on blocking personal Wi-Fi hotspots. The hotel chain issued a statement Wednesday saying it would not follow through on an announced plan to block some unauthorized networks inside the hotel: “Marriott International listens to its customers, and we will not block guests from using their personal Wi-Fi devices at any of our managed hotels,” it says.Media Platforms Design TeamEven if your hotel offers complimentary Wi-Fi, you might prefer to set up a hotspot for all your in-room online needs....

Australian researchers from Monash University are developing new “bionic eyes” that don’t rely on the organic ocular system to restore sight to the blind. Rather than using a retinal implant that stimulates the optic nerves within the eye, the new device essentially amounts to a pair of glasses with a mounted camera that is connected directly to the brain. A blind Australian is scheduled to be the first to receive the new device next year....

The past century has been pretty apocalyptic for amphibians. Since about the mid 1900s, a strange flesh-eating fungus has spread across the world, infecting hundreds of different species of amphibians and driving many of them to the brink of extinction. Now, thanks to new research published in the journal Science, we finally know where that parasite comes from.The parasite in question is called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short, and first appeared on scientists’ radar in 1998 when it was discovered in populations of frogs and toads in Australia and Panama....

A Russian Soyuz rocket heading for the International Space Station (ISS) was aborted seconds before launch yesterday, an unusual delay for the most reliable and commonly used launch vehicle in the world.The Soyuz booster was scheduled to take a Progress MS-07 supply ship to the ISS, and is not without controversy. The supply ship is taking a few traditional items, like 2.9 tons of fuel, water, and food for the six astronauts currently aboard the ISS....

The designs for Russia’s next class of nuclear attack submarine, the Laika class, were recently revealed.The Laika ships will replace the existing Alfa-class boats, which have been in production for nearly 50 years. The new submarines will embark regular guided torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, and land attack cruise missiles. Russia is preparing to begin work on a brand new class of nuclear-powered attack submarine designed to compete with the best of NATO’s submarines....

Scientists eager to avoid hefty costs and waiting lists to launch instruments on satellites are turning to high-altitude balloons to find elusive particles zooming through space. The downside is that they have to travel to one of the world’s most inhospitable spots to launch them. In late December the National Science Foundation and NASA flew three helium research balloons up to 130,000 ft. over Antarctica, safely above any atmospheric interference. Several experiments measured the makeup of cosmic rays to determine if they are accelerated by exploding stars....

A scathing internal U.S. Navy report—that was never released to the public—details an appalling lack of professionalism, failure to adhere to procedure, and broken equipment on the guided missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald before its fatal collision with a commercial ship in 2017. The collision killed seven sailors and damaged the 9,000-ton ship.The Navy Times received a copy of the report, authored by Rear Admiral Brian Fort and completed just eleven days after the collision....

Media Platforms Design TeamWatch this high-speed video of a scared whirligig diving from the surface in just 0.2 seconds, and slowed to a speed were you can see the individual sets of legs at work.Bugs from the whirligig beetle family are some of the most nimble on the planet. They are among the few organisms that can fly, crawl, and swim efficiently, and sometimes more than that—they are capable of precise sharp turns and evasive maneuvers, and their ranks include the fastest insect swimmer ever recorded....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo by Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)Coming straight out of my nightmares, these creepy and realistic “Kodomoroids” made in Japan can read and report the news. With the written text entered into the system, the androids never stumble and read through complex tongue twisters with perfection.During a demo, the robots even matched the practiced mannerisms of your local perfectly coiffed news anchor: They twitched their eyebrows, blinked, moved their hands, swayed their heads, and moved their lips in time to a voice-over....

View full post on YoutubeBrute strength is no problem for robots. It’s when they need to be gentle, and handle fragile objects without mangling them, that machines run into problems.GrabIt solves this problem with static electricity. By generating electrostatic energy, the GrabIt’s grippers can handle fruit, glass, bags of chips, sheets of silicon, or numerous other objects too fragile for typical grippers.In some cases, the GrabIt grippers are a bit of a misnomer—there’s no gripping going on at all....

Artist Thomas Medicus created a translucent cube that reveals a different painting depending on which of its six sides you peer into. The cube, titled “Emergence Lab,” depicts a flurry of abstract colors that align into a coherent image when you look directly at one of its faces.Media Platforms Design TeamThe secret to this optical anomaly is the configuration of 216 laser cut acrylic strips that were meticulously painted by hand and then assembled into the cube....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)If you bought a ticket on Alaska Airlines last year, you probably flew the friendly skies. United? Not so much. The Wall Street Journal just issued its rankings of eight major airlines. Alaska rated first, scoring high for on-time flights and having relatively little mishandled baggage. Surprisingly, airlines with a reputation for being passenger-friendly, like JetBlue and Southwest, were only in the middle of the rankings, with Southwest being dinged for late arrivals and mishandled baggage and JetBlue penalized for delays....