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Humanity has explored less than five percent of the ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That’s a number XPRIZE hopes to change. The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is a three-year global competition challenging teams to advance and develop technologies for rapid, unmanned, and high-resolution ocean exploration. The goal? To build robots that can create a bathymetric map and then photograph various items underwater. After a culling in Round 1, XPRIZE has announced the nine remaining competitors for Round 2, in which the undersea drones will have to capture an image of a “specifically named item at 4,000 meters,” with a bonus for identifying 10 other archaeological/geological/biological features....

The U.S. Air Force is working with defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Aerojet to develop a new hypersonic cruise missile. The weapon, known as the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW, or “Hacksaw”) will be used to strike time-critical targets in places with strong enemy air defenses. The missile’s sheer speed, which will be a minimum of Mach 5, will allow it to penetrate strong enemy air defenses and reach targets before they relocate....

A new survey of the stars in our galaxy reveals something unexpected: The Milky Way isn’t flat. Our galaxy is usually depicted as a flat disc of stars, but according to new research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it’s actually twisted.The researchers managed to accurately determine our galaxy’s shape by measuring the distances to so-called Cepheid variable stars. Cepheids are extremely useful to astronomers because it’s easy to tell just how far away a Cepheid is from a point of measurement....

An unidentified man in Halifax, England was rushed to the hospital on Monday morning after his car unexpectedly exploded. The man had sprayed an aerosol body spray near the engine before pulling away, lighting a cigarette, and promptly blowing the vehicle up.For the same reason you should shut your car off while refueling, you shouldn’t spray aerosols near your vehicle and light a flame. Gasoline vapors can easily catch fire and cause an explosion, experts say....

Back in 1974, Hungarian inventor and architect Erno Rubik designed the first Rubik’s Cube. Now he’s helping to compile a 40th anniversary museum exhibit that attempts to explain how his creation became a worldwide sensation.You’re putting together a museum exhibit for the 40th anniversary of the Rubiks Cube. Tell us about that.The exhibition about the Cubeits an idea that started a few years ago . . . Liberty Science Center will organize an exhibition here....

The MIT Media Lab, that internationally known hub of innovation and experimentation, has a history of exploring new frontiers of creepiness around Halloween. This year’s idea, which sounds (excuse us) horrifying: asking the Internet to control a person. They call it BeeMe.MIT describes BeeMe as “the first reality augmented game. In times where algorithms make most of our decisions for us, one individual will entirely give up their free will for a day, to be guided by a large crowd of users through an epic quest to defeat an evil A....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamCheck below for highlights PM found while reviewing these docs. We’ll keep adding.The staff at the National Declassification Center in College Park, Md., knew they found something interesting when they cracked open a cardboard box and saw cutaway schematics of flying saucers printed on the pages. The pages describe an Air Force flying saucer program that started in the mid-1950s and ended in 1961. In the upper right hand of each page was the icon of a flying disc stamped over a red arrow, the insignia of Project 1794....

Ants are a common nuisance in households around the world. But fortunately there are some simple steps you can take to ensure they find more hospitable places to live.The number one reason why ants are in your home is that they’ve found a food source. Usually that food source is in your kitchen, which is why the first sign of ants is usually a few scurrying around on your kitchen countertops....

Japanese shinkansen, or bullet trains, are perhaps the best known regional train system in the world. Often seen as a symbol of Japanese efficiency, the trains have helped shape the modern nature of the country. Now, the East Japanese Railway Company (JR-East) is pushing the system even further with a bullet train known as Alfa-X, which is capable of traveling at top speeds of 224 mph (360 km/h).JR-East is one of seven for-profit companies that control Japan’s bullet trains under the auspices of the government’s Japan Railways Group....

When your one-of-a-kind rover is 38 million miles from home, falling toward an alien planet at supersonic speed, it would be nice to know the spacecraft can handle the trip. Today Lockheed Martin announced that its engineers have completed a slate of critical torture tests on the connection between the spacecraft carrying the Mars 2020 rover and its protective aeroshell, making sure it can handle the stress of the interplanetary journey....

Deep sea scientists have a longstanding problem: studying a soft, spineless creature without damaging it beyond recognition. Now they have a new solution: origami-inspired robots with a soft touch.In research published today in Science Robotics, a Harvard-led team presented the initial results from testing the “Self-folding polyhedra.” This robot slowly closes in on a target like a jellyfish and tries to surround it with a soft enclosure. The walls of the device are soft enough as not to burst the jellyfish....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: LinkNYC)Payphones may be relics of another technological age (who still uses a payphone?), but they’re still ubiquitous in many cities, including the Big Apple. New York City has a plan for its thousands of obsolete payphones: turning them into wi-fi hotspots. LinkNYC, which is building the network across the city, has hired City Bridge to turn 7,000 old payphones into free Wi-Fi hot spots. They’ll replace the existing pay phones with nine-and-a-half-foot towers that broadcast over a 150 foot-radius to provide gigabit-speed internet....

Late Thursday night, Senate leaders reported that negotiations on the auto-industry bailout plan had failed to reach a compromise. According to Bloomberg the final unresolved issue was a requirement that Union auto workers accept a reduction in pay to match compensation of non-union auto plants. So what now? On the Senate floor in Washington last night, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid said, “I dread looking at Wall Street tomorrow. It’s not going to be a pleasant sight....

ROSAMOND, Calif. — We recently spent a day hot-lapping Nissan’s all-new, fourth-generation Sentra SE-R and SE-R Spec V here at Willow Springs Raceway. We got the lowdown from Larry Dominique, Nissan’s VP of Product Planning about the SE-R’s technical details. And after taking a few laps ourselves, we asked our pal Danny McKeever, owner of Danny McKeever’s Fast Lane Racing School, to take us out for a few laps and give us his impression of the sporty 200-hp sedan....

Media Platforms Design TeamBoeing has a second electrical problem to deal with on the 787 Dreamliner, U.K. investigators said today. Their attention focuses on a kind of lithium battery on the plane, but a totally different one than the problematic batteries that grounded Dreamliners for several months this spring. Investigators aren’t saying whether the batteries caused this new problem to begin with or ignited after some outside event such as an electrical short....

Maybe the thrill of perusing aisles of awful VHS cassettes in a dimly lit video rental store is lost on modern movie-watchers. But once it was a fantastic pastime, and the pictures were a mix of forbidden fruits and cover art that could never live up to the movie inside. Behind many of these treasures and stinkers and how-on-Earth-did-this-get-made movies was one company: Cannon Films.Cannon was so notoriously shoestring that it lost its rights to a Spider-Man movie because its check to Marvel bounced....

On Wednesday, an Atlas V set out from Cape Canaveral, carrying a GPS satellite to orbit. While the Atlas has been in use since 2002, the rocket yesterday had a key upgrade at ground control: A new diagnostic system built by DEWETRON. In the wake of accidents involving rockets from Orbital and Space X in the last year, it could help companies stay up to date on the health of their rockets....

The U.S. Army has issued a solicitation for a new, more powerful rifle that would replace the M4 carbine. The solicitation popped up on the FedBizOps web site on Friday, August 4th. Interested gunmakers have one month to provide a sample rifle and 210 rounds of ammunition for an Army competitive evaluation that could eventually lead to up to 50,000 rifles procured.The solicitation states, “The Army has identified a potential gap in the capability of ground forces and infantry to penetrate body armor using existing ammunition....

One of the problems with setting up renewable power sources—like solar panels or wind turbines—is that it can be difficult to predict just how much power they will generate once they’re built.Say you’re considering installing some solar panels on the roof of your house, and you want to know just how many kilowatt-hours of energy they will generate. A new website hopes to make that task easier. The website, renewables.ninja, can calculate the amount of energy produced by a solar panel or a wind turbine anywhere in the world....

Media Platforms Design TeamHomeowners in Las Vegas have been busy tearing out their lawns, thanks to a $2 per-sq.-ft. incentive program. So far, 80 million sq. ft. of grass has been removed, with each foot saving up to 73 gal. of water annually. And local water authorities fly over a 475-sq.-mile area each year, snapping photos to map every remaining scrap of turf. Why all the fuss? Because lawns and gardens are a home’s biggest water users–and that’s true not just in Nevada, but nationwide....