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Lithium ion batteries are common today, but for a number of environmental and economic reasons, scientists are looking for the next big battery. Calcium has potential in a number of areas, but struggles in finding a way to move electricity through an electrolyte.It’s not perfect yet, but scientists have created the best electrolyte to date.A recently synthesized chemical offers the promise of an entirely new type of battery: calcium-based, as opposed to the modern batteries that rely on lithium....

What if there were a quick and simple system that alerted all drivers when someone was driving the wrong way down the road? German automotive supplier Bosch aims to better warn wrong-way drivers, both those actually driving the wrong way and those near the car driving the wrong way, using a cloud-based software application.The premise is that Bosch provides a software application that constantly checks a vehicle’s movements against what it understands as the permitted direction on any given road....

Based around the idea of vertical takeoff, DARPA’s new long-range drone project, TERN aims to make a drone that can take advantage of small-deck ships as landing sites.TERN stands for Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node, or basically a scouting vessel which takes off vertically while sitting on its tail, and then transitions to horizontal flight in the air. Currently in Phase 3 of development, a single TERN will be able to carry up to 600 pounds of sensors and equipment....

Machine learning has all kinds of nefarious and trivial applications, but one of the most useful and terrific has been the rise of quick and cheap transcription tools. This tech is slowly but surely murdering the scourge of the unwanted, unplanned phone call. Years ago, Google’s Voice service began the invaluable practice of machine-transcribing voicemails and forwarding them to your inbox. Now, as Google continues to roll out its call-screening tech to Google Pixel devices, the robots are mercifully turning phone calls into text....

Flights departing from Britain’s Gatwick Airport, its second busiest, have been halted for upwards of six hours from Wednesday evening into Thursday morning due nearby illegal drone flights that officials have said were deliberate but not terror related. Flights will continue to be suspended until at least 7 PM GMT as officials continue to monitor the situation. According to the Sky News, a drone has entered and left the airport airspace a number of times during the period of the shutdown, with law enforcement calling out on Twitter, asking bystanders to help identify the operators if possible:View full post on TwitterThe drone has been identified by airport staff as a heavy, industrial drone as opposed to an off-the-shelf quadcopter and appears to have had its battery replaced multiple times during its brief disappearances....

An extremely severe security flaw has been found to affect nearly every Intel processor made in the past decade or more, giving any hackers who might know how to exploit it access to protected information systemwide. The Register reports that programmers are rushing to make the sweeping changes necessary to protect against the vulnerability on Linux and Windows operating systems, with such fixes required on macOS as well. Even worse, you can expect these vital updates to noticeably slow down your computer....

Thomas Bernich is admittedly not a musician, but his contributions to the music industry are just as important as any chord combination.“I can play the stereo, but I can’t play the guitar,” he tells Popular Mechanics.Growing up, Bernich would rush home from school to listen to his records. “Then my father would get home, so I’d have to turn the music off and I’d help him bore out an engine.”After visiting a vinyl pressing plant in Queens in 2001, Bernich decided to combine his childhood passions and purchase two machines of his own....

SpaceX is scheduled to launch its Crew Dragon spacecraft on Sunday, January 19 at 10:30 a.m. EST from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The launch is a critical test of Crew Dragon’s in-flight abort system, which will test whether the capsule can safely disengage from its launch vehicle in the event of an anomaly.If everything goes according to plan, the company will get the green light from NASA to send astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station....

The U.S. military’s most dangerous weapon isn’t the F-22 Raptor, Arleigh Burke class destroyer, or even the new aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. It’s a converted airliner that doesn’t carry a single weapon but can start—or finish—World War III. It’s the E-6 Mercury.The E-6 Mercury, The National Interest explains, is designed to fight a nuclear war. Described by the U.S. Navy as a “communications relay and strategic airborne command post aircraft,” the E-6 is also called TACAMO, an acronym that stands for Take Charge and Move Out....

This week Washington D.C. was rocked by allegations that the President of the United States tried to tie the sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine for dirt on his political rivals. The simple, easy to use anti-tank missile is Ukraine’s weapon of choice in its undeclared war against Russia.In May 2018 Ukraine purchased 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launchers from the United States for an estimated $47 million.The Javelin missile is an unlikely weapon to be thrust into the political spotlight....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe citizens of Red Sox Nation went into an aquatic panic this weekend after a massive rupture in the pipe that shuttles water to more than 2 million people in Boston and its dense inner-ring suburbs. By Saturday afternoon the state water-resources agency asked people in 30 communities, including Boston, to quit drinking water out of the tap. Governor Deval Patrick declared an official state of emergency, but soon people were flooding into stores to buy whatever backup bottled-water supplies they could find....

Yesterday, we shared this video of an iron anvil floating in a vat of liquid mercury—and then, for good measure, a guy sloshing around in the tub:View full post on YoutubeIt’s a fascinating science experiment (albeit one we don’t recommend), but it only raises more questions: Where does mercury come from, anyway? How did people find it? And why is it so damn weird? The Quaintness of Quicksilver videophoto//Getty ImagesThe original Latin name for mercury, hydrargyrum, means “quicksilver:”: the changing, moving, and living form of silver....

NASA’s next X-plane, the all-electric X-57 Maxwell, is getting closer to its maiden flight. Engineers at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California, along with prime contractor on the program Empirical Systems Aerospace (ESAero), are preparing to integrate electric systems into a Tecnam P2006T to convert it to the X-57. The first electric version of the aircraft, known as Mod II, will replace the P2006T’s gas-driven Rotax engines with electric motors and a battery pack to power the plane....

It’s a familiar sensation to anyone who’s ever helmed a boat: You’re maneuvering toward the dock when you realize that the tide is taking you one way and the wind another, and you’re not entirely sure whether you’re going to sidle up smoothly or do an impromptu reenactment of the final scenes from Speed 2: Cruise Control. (Spoiler alert: you could say that a cruise ship makes a less-than-smooth approach to the dock, in that it ends up about a half-mile inland....

The aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov will sail into the Mediterranean this October and carry out air strikes against the Islamic State until early next year. That’s according to an article by Russia’s state-run TASS news agency. The carrier, which has been outfitted with new fighter planes, is Moscow’s only flat-top.Built in the late 1980s, Kuznetsov was to be the first of several planned Soviet aircraft carriers. After the USSR fell apart the ship languished in Russian service for decades, changing names four times....

Around 350 years ago, Isaac Newton made a simple observation that would forever alter the field of physics: He realized that the force that pulls an apple down to Earth is the same force that keeps the Moon in orbit. The consequences of such a hypothesis are hard to overstate. The physical laws governing Earth were the same in the heavens. When we pointed our telescopes started looking at the most distant stars and galaxies in the visible universe, the laws of physics never changed....

By feeding strings of human-written data into colonies of bacteria, scientists have discovered a way to turn tiny cells into living, squirming hard drives.A team of Harvard scientists led by geneticists Seth Shipman and Jeff Nivala has just developed a fascinating way to write chunks information into the genetic code of living, growing bacterial cells. It could be the code for a computer program or the lines of a poem. Either way, these living memory sticks can pass this data onto their descendants, and scientists can later read that data by genotyping the bacteria....

Media Platforms Design Team Olivia (Anna Torv) finds herself trapped in a mysterious lab in the Fringe episode “Bound.” (Craig Blankenhorn/FOX) It’s January, and that means all of our favorite shows—and a few new ones—are back with big premieres. This week, we will be covering the returns of Lost and Fringe and the debut of Lie to Me. Here is a guide to get you up to speed on the plots—and the ties to science—behind Lost and Fringe....

Scientists are exploring ways to use lasers to “see” around corners.Two promising methods complement each other, one gathering general information about an environment and the other more detailed—but limited—images of objects.The two technologies could some day help soldiers “read” rooms, identifying adversaries without exposing themselves to enemy fire.Here’s an unexpected way lasers might beam their way onto the battlefield: sneaking a look around corners to detect adversaries. University researchers funded by the Pentagon can now get an idea of what’s in a room by reading the interference pattern of a laser beam....

Even using primitive 1950s-era radars, National Weather Service forecasters could tell something bad was brewing over the central United States. On April 2, 1974, a sprawling mass of cold, dry air dropped down from Canada towards the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, and an opposite mass of warm, moist air pushed northwards from the Gulf of Mexico. They were set to converge beneath an intense jet stream with 140-mph winds at an altitude of 40,000 ft....