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Media Platforms Design TeamCasio Exilim EX-FS10: $350Split-second shots are never easy. No matter how quick you are on the draw, you’re left to the mercy of your camera’s inner workings. And if you’ve got a slow camera (or cameraphone), you have little chance of capturing the exact moment your nephew kicked his goal or daughter landed the perfect gymnastics move. To the rescue: this Exilim’s superpowered burst mode. Most decent cameras–even digital SLRs–max out at three or four shots in a second....

To square up your wood boards you’ll need to start with at least one straight edge. That’s easily done using a jointer or tracksaw, but when you have neither of those tools, you can still get a straight edge by with just a table saw.Start by finding a piece of wood that has a factory edge on it. These aren’t always 100% straight but they are usually good enough. This will serve as a guide to cut the edge for the workpiece....

The Japanese government has released footage of what it claims is an oil tanker registered in the Maldives passing oil to a North Korean oil tanker. The incident, which took place in the dead of night, was observed by a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft passing through the area. The incident calls into question exactly why a Maldivian ship was involved in such an exchange, and who was the true source of the oil....

There are millions of stars in the night sky, and there’s a good chance nearly all of them have planets orbiting them. Potentially billions of planets are out there waiting for us to discover them, and a new NASA spacecraft has just begun helping us find them. NASA’s TESS spacecraft just released its first image of our galaxy’s stars, and a new recently-released paper details how researchers have already used TESS data to find a planet around another star....

A beard tax coin from 1705.U.S. State Department In 1698, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, as he would come to be know, was waging a war on beards. In an attempt to modernize his empire and make it more like the west after spending years exploring Europe in disguise, Peter instituted a tax on facial hair. You could avoid it by shaving, but if you opted to pay the tax, you would receive a token to verify your beard as legal, and an especially rare version of one of these tokens has recently been found....

Welcome back to the island of knights and knaves, where there are just two types of people: the knights, who always tell the truth, and the knaves, who always lie. Today we are going to come upon a fork in the road on the island, and we will need to question the knights and knaves to choose the correct path. If you have seen the movie Labyrinth, you might be familiar with this puzzle....

Media Platforms Design TeamWindow manufacturers would like you to think that the only way to get more efficient windows is to invest lots of money into energy-saving, top-performing windows. However, innovative manufacturers of window inserts are giving window companies a run for their money. Rather than replacing an entire old window, homeowners can preserve their home’s older charm and still save energy, all while spending less money up front.Window Inserts to the RescueWindow inserts are like storm windows, but they’re most often installed in the interior of the home....

There seems to be an infinite amount of Star Wars merchandise out there. Beyond just the usual t-shirts and toys, you can even get a Star Wars arcade machine and furniture inspired by the Dark Side. Now…there’s Star Wars Barbie.Mattel and Disney have joined forced to release Star-Wars-themed Barbie dolls this fall. The collection includes Princess Leia, Darth Vader, and R2-D2. (Sorry, fans of C-3PO, Chewbacca, and Han Solo.) Related StoriesEverything We Know So Far About ‘The Mandalorian’The Most Expensive Star Wars ToysAs if Barbie decided to go to Comic-Con, the dolls’ designs are more like cosplay than accurate representations of our beloved characters....

Despite several days of warning and Russian claims otherwise, Syrian air defenses launched only two missiles during strikes by the United States, United Kingdom, and France to destroy the country’s chemical weapons capability. Both missiles missed the incoming cruise missiles. Syrian forces fired several dozen other missiles after the strikes were over when there was nothing left to hit.The Daily Beast reports that Syrian air defenses, largely consisting of Cold War era air defense radars and missiles, launched only two surface-to-air missiles against the barrage of 105 JASSM, Tomahawk, SCALP, and Storm Shadow missiles that struck targets throughout the country on April 13th....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor an alien-abduction movie, there are surprisingly few aliens in The Fourth Kind. In fact, there are none. There are alarming bursts of the ancient Sumerian language, either rumbling away on a microcassette or spat out by humans videotaped while under hypnosis. And something, some shadow rolling across the sky, can be seen in footage recorded by a police car’s dashboard camera, before that tape becomes hopelessly scrambled....

Update: The KC-46 took off on its test flight at 4:24 Eastern time on Friday, Sept. 25. Here is some footage of it in flight: View full post on YoutubeAmerica’s new aerial refueling tanker, the Boeing KC-46A Pegasus, is set to make its first flight from Boeing’s Paine Field in Everett, WA this Friday. It’s about time: America’s existing airborne tanker fleet is stunningly old.Derived from Boeing’s Dash 80 (the prototype of the 707 airliner), the KC-135 Stratotanker entered service with the USAF in 1957....

The world’s oldest spider has died at the age of 43 after being attacked by a wasp, according to scientists in Perth, Australia.The 43-year-old female Giaus Villosus trapdoor spider was known as “Number 16,” to researchers from the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University who published their findings in the Pacific Conservation Biology Journal in April.The trapdoor spider known as “Number 16” died aged 43 years.Curtin UniversityThe research on the spider population in the Central Wheatbelt region of Western Australia began back in 1974 when Barbara York Main, who is now 88 years old, discovered Number 16 shortly after the spider was born....

Model: Frigidaire Gallery 8,000 BTUMade in: WuHu City, ChinaTime to Disassemble: 2 hours, 27 minutes, 0 secondsIf you grew up with central air conditioning, what you likely called “the air conditioner” was a loud, hulking fan assembly on a concrete pad in your backyard. But that was only half the story. That part of the air conditioner dissipated heat from inside the house into outside air. The other part of the air conditioner, which absorbed that heat in the first place, was somewhere inside your home, at the heart of all the ductwork....

Here’s how it works: step on the back platform, so the front is facing up. Then plant your front foot on the blue section of the grip tape. There, a sensor reads that your foot is settled, which allows the brushless motor inside the go-kart wheel to know it’s good to go.Lean forward, Segway-style, and the board’s gyroscopes balance and accelerate, sending you north of 12 mph. That feels like warp speed because the huge wheel makes any terrain feel smooth....

The USS Ford is the first ship with electromagnetically powered elevators designed to lift bombs and missiles between decks. After years of work only two of the elevators still work.The Secretary of the Navy originally promised that President Trump could fire him if the elevators don’t work on delivery but has now declared the ship “ready to go”.The USS Gerald R. Ford will sail from the shipyard this month where she was built to a Navy shipyard, marking a major milestone in her progression into U....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere in the United States, spring’s thaw is right around the corner. In Mars’ northern hemisphere, however, winter is just getting started, and that means it’s time for snow. Although Mars is millions of miles away and still poses plenty of scientific riddles, thanks to discoveries over the last year, researchers think they now have a pretty decent idea of what Martian snow is like. In short: Mars has two kinds of snow, and one isn’t like Earthly snow at all....

What’s better, a GFCI outlet or a GFCI circuit breaker? BILL H., CASPER, WYOMINGBoth are equally lifesaving devices that have contributed to the steady drop in electrocutions from consumer products—down from 481 in 1968 to 30 in 2015, according to the Electrical Safety Foundation International. Outlets and breakers with GFCI, which stands for ground fault circuit interrupter, monitor current flow on the ungrounded (the hot) and the grounded conductor (the neutral)....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s been almost three weeks since beneath the Yellowstone River in Montana, spilling an estimated 1000 barrels (42,000 gallons) of crude oil into the water. And still, cleanup crews keep coming. As of Monday, about 700 workers and regulators from ExxonMobil, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), state agencies and private spill-response companies were on the scene. an ExxonMobil pipeline burstThe Exxon spill in the Yellowstone River happened little more than a year after the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico....

Gerald Shur, the retired founder and longtime head of the Federal Witness Protection Program, poses for a portrait May 6, 2002 at an undisclosed suburban location.The U.S. Federal Witness Protection Program, also known as the Witness Security or WITSEC Program, tries to stash you where you’ll blend in, whether that’s Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, or anyplace in between. Thriving cities and sunny beach towns are definitely possibilities, depending on who you are....

She’s electric. Say hello to the first Porsche EV, the 2020 Taycan.Back in 2015, when Porsche debuted its sleek, battery-powered concept sedan, it promised to bring something very similar to production, and it signaled to the world that the Stuttgart automaker was coming for the luxury EV space then occupied by the Tesla Model S. Now, we’re tantalizingly close to the realization of the first all-electric Porsche. Here’s everything we’ve learned....