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Earlier this year, astronomers at the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii detected a planetary object that had come from outside the solar system for the first time. The October 19 discovery came after the object had already made its closest approach to Earth five days before. Astronomers around the world turned our most advanced telescopes toward the object, only approximately 400 meters long and perhaps 40 meters wide, and confirmed that it is without a doubt on a trajectory that will take it back out into interstellar space....

No, you’re not just imagining things. The security line at the airport is getting worse. Last weekend in Chicago, lines at the TSA checkpoint stretched back two to three hours, causing hundreds of passengers who showed up in the recommended amount of time to miss their flights. Things are going to get even worse this summer. The TSA has been laying some of the blame on the flying public, putting on demos to show how illegal items slow down the line....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat’s better than a rugged old pickup? For us, not much. Unless, of course, that rugged old truck sits on modern underpinnings and comes with upgraded styling. And so we have the Icon Power Wagon D200, a creation spawned by Jonathan Ward and his customization company, Icon. The D200 is Icon’s first truck, and it’s a beast. Based on a 1965 Dodge crew cab, the D200 is equipped with a modified chassis and the mechanicals from a 2006 Dodge Ram 3500, supplied by diesel-tuner Banks Power, which also contributed the power­house engine....

Media Platforms Design TeamToday the X Prize Foundation, which drives innovation by organizing high-stakes competitions with prizes up to $10 million, is announcing a major new commitment to ocean research. It plans to launch three ocean-oriented competitions by 2020. And these are building on previous prizes: The organization awarded a purse for a hyperefficient oil-spill-cleanup technology in 2011, and last month it announced a race to develop technology for . Both competitions were sponsored by philanthropist Wendy Schmidt....

Although it’s been nearly 16 years since the Concorde was retired, one iconic feature of the supersonic airliner is poised to return just in time for its 50th birthday. CNN reports that engineers are currently tinkering with the Concorde’s famous slanted “droop” nose in an effort to revive at least part of the last remaining Alpha Foxtrot model, which is currently housed at Aerospace Bristol, a museum in the U.K. The museum wants the nose to become fully functional again by the Concorde’s 50th anniversary, on April 19, 2019—while, at the same time, real plans to revive supersonic airliners of the Concorde’s ilk are gaining traction across the aerospace industry....

Media Platforms Design TeamDeep Breaths: The author gets some fresh air from a rebreather. Unlike traditional SCUBA, rebreathers scrub CO2 from exhaled air and add oxygen so the air can be inhaled again.For an upcoming piece in Popular Mechanics magazine, I did a rebreather familiarization course and dive. Here’s a bit more background than the magazine can hold on rebreather technology. I also shot some video explaining how things work. Ordinary “open circuit” scuba delivers compressed air or Nitrox (a blended gas containing more oxygen and less nitrogen than ordinary air) from a tank to a regulator to your lungs....

Your tabby cat crawls into your lap, purring. Nice, but there’s a huge patch of smelly, slimy, oily goo covering most of its back. Ick. Backtracking oily little catprints leads you into the garage, where a pool of oleaginous fluid has mysteriously stained the concrete floor. What is it and exactly what part of your car is oozing it? Time to put the cat down and get under the car. But there’s leakage all over the engine compartment, and even a distinct pattern of windblown drops freckling the trunklid....

Hall of Fame golfer Greg Norman survived a major scare this weekend while trimming trees at his Florida home. The blade cut into Norman’s left wrist and came within a fraction of an inch of severing an artery.People around the country will be firing up their chainsaws this fall to cut back branches and stockpile their firewood for the winter. But as we’ve noted countless times over the years, you want to make absolutely sure you know the right techniques and have the right gear before you think about turing on the tool....

Media Platforms Design TeamMachine-based language translation has been a longtime dream of science-fiction authors. C-3PO, after all, was fluent in more than 6 million forms of communication. What inspired your researchers to develop AT&T Translator? Language is one of the largest barriers to communication globally. In the 1980s, we produced a short film of what communications would be like in the future. We had a vision that at some point in our lifetime there would be some intelligence in the network where you could pick up the phone and talk to anyone in the world regardless of the language you spoke....

A group of researchers has gained an insight into the economy of the Roman empire, thanks to ancient polar ice. The research could tell historians much about the strength of the empire throughout history.An Arctic glacier would be the last place most people might think to look for Roman history, but glaciers hold a lot of information about our planet’s past. In the Arctic, ice freezes but never thaws, so the contents of that ice are preserved for thousands of years....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor locksmiths, making a replacement car key without its identifying code can be a grueling procedure. Steve Randall should know—he spent a summer during college working for his father’s locksmithing company, watching experts struggle with the process. Lacking the identification codes, called bittings, that tell them which patterns to cut into blanks, locksmiths must rely on trial and error to make a perfect fit. Inspired, Randall and a friend, Ted Schwarzkopf, recently unveiled a solution: the Electronic Key Impressioner....

Media Platforms Design TeamU.S.-based TOTE, Inc., one of America’s shipping giants, is betting on liquefied natural gas (LNG) as the fuel of the future for the marine shipping industry. The company just announced plans to build the first container ships to use LNG as a “primary” fuel source, partnering with San Diego–based ship builder General Dynamics NASSCO to complete two of these containerships in 2015 and 2016.TOTE, owned by Saltchuk Resources, Inc....

A suggested new phase of matter is an ordered ballistic conductance of different electron clusters.Most discoveries of new phases of matter are specialized applications like this.The electrons follow wires etched onto an interface using an atomic force microscope.Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a new specialized phase of matter. By electrifying an interface made of lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate, the researchers observed that electrons were grouping together into what they say is a new form of matter entirely....

Comcast has some of the worst customer service of all the telecoms, which is saying something given how notoriously awful cable, phone, and Internet company customer service can be. But a new start-up called Airpaper will do the dirty work for you. For really, really, really cheap. All it takes is $5. With that money, Airpaper will send its agents to cancel your Comcast service on your behalf. This is a notoriously difficult process, with a “turtles all the way down” mentality that leads customers through seven circles of customer retention hell before they might eke out a victory....

Tomorrow, Americans will gather around the table to consume more poultry than is reasonable to consume in one sitting. Today, however, we need to find the turkey so we can roast that bird. ProblemA week before Thanksgiving, a sly turkey is hiding from a family that wants to cook it for the holiday dinner. There are five boxes in a row, and the turkey hides in one of these boxes. Each night, the turkey moves one box to the left or right, hiding in an adjacent box the next day....

At an event in New York today, Spotify has announced some fancy new features for its streaming service. No longer content to just deliver music, Spotify is also going to start delivering you podcasts and videos as well, all wrapped into a new discovery-based interface called “Now.“Instead of just being a search engine that will spit out whatever hot tunes you explicitly search for, Spotify’s new Now screen will attempt to create playlists for you judging just by what you’ve been into in the past, and those playlists can include podcasts, as well as bite-sized video chunks from partners like Comedy Central, Vice, Adult Swim and more....

The U.S. Navy’s horrible fighter availability rate is gradually improving thanks to increased funding for fighter maintenance. At one point in 2017, just one in three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters was available, a number that’s increased to nearly half of all fighters. The problem is in large part due to past budget shortfalls and delayed introduction of the F-35 fighter jet. The U.S. Navy has 546 F/A-18E and F/A-18F Super Hornet fighters, larger, beefier, slightly stealthier versions of the original F/A-18 Hornet....

Car crashes are still extremely deadly—32,719 Americans died in car accidents in 2013, or almost 90 people a day. But the number of people dying in car crashes—particularly when expressed as how many people per 100,000 die in an auto accident—has essentially steadily declined since the early 1970s. MinutePhysics explains why this is, using, of course, physics. Gasoline, when burned in cars, creates tremendous amounts of kinetic energy. That can either be dispersed by hitting the brakes, or the car hitting something....

Ever come across a plant or a strange insect and wonder what it was and if it was harmful? Or want to know if you could raise chickens or bumblebees in your city plot, or want to get your kids to be more active outdoors? Or what kind of plants you can raise, or how deep people usually dig their wells where you live, or how to do aquaculture, or when to plant garlic or alfalfa, or how much it would cost to heat your home with wood, or how to mitigate earthquake damage, or how to grow hemp for cannabidiol as a side gig?...

You’ve heard the stereotype: BMW makes big, upright-posture, high-displacement designs like the GS and FS that are reliable and exemplary of German engineering. But where’s the passion? Even with bikes to its name that held the title of the fastest production motorcycle, BMW was a bit dull. All the reliability in the world couldn’t match the ineffable appeal of Ducati, Triumph, or Moto Guzzi.But ever since Swedish chopper-head Ola Stenegard put the BMW badge on the beautiful and—get this!...