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A expedition launched by the late entrepreneur Paul Allen has discovered the wreck of the Japanese battleship Hiei, the first battleship sunk by U.S. forces during World War II. About a year ago, Japanese researchers spotted the shipwreck on sonar not far from where the Hiei was reported sunk in 1942. The wreck was confirmed on January 31 by the research ship R/V Petrel, part of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s wide-ranging effort to locate the wrecks of famous ships worldwide....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the early hours of January 17, 1995, fishermen were already hard at work in Japan’s Osaka Bay when they noticed a strange orange light shoot across the distant shore. They watched as the luminous object, 100 meters tall, swept left-to-right across the ground until it crashed into a nearby mountain range. Then lightning struck from the sky. A few seconds later, the water beneath the boats began sloshing—a magnitude 6....

UPDATE: Joshua Tree is closing all campgrounds effective January 2nd, 2019 at noon, citing toilets at capacity and visitors camping off-trail and causing environmental damage.December and January are popular camping months—especially in the south and southwest. But unfortunately the government shutdown is having a dire effect on the camping experience in National Parks everywhere.Limited staffing and funds are straining resources at National Parks which are usually operating at capacity during the winter break....

The Navy is taking a page out of its own “Top Gun” book, but this time for submarines instead of F-14s. The service is creating a unit designed to teach submariners how to fight their Russian and Chinese counterparts. The “aggressor squadron” is part of the Navy’s push to prepare for—and, with any luck, avoid—a major war with another major power.USNI News reports that the new commander of the U.S. Navy’s Naval Submarine Forces, Vice Admiral Charles Richard, is standing up the new unit as part of a training overhaul for attack submarine commanders and crews....

Reflecting both bitter cold and shifting energy trends, the U.S. spent New Year’s Day setting a natural gas record. Americans consumed 143 billion cubic feet of gas on January 1, 2018.The New Year’s consumption tops another bitter cold snap, 2014’s polar vortex, when we burned 142 billion cubic feet in a single day. While natural gas is the most common source of electricity in America, prices dropped in 2017 by a surprising 21 percent....

Traditional bullets quickly slow to a stop underwater, making the almost completely ineffective..A method known as “supercavitation” can allow objects to travel through water at much higher speeds.These bullets would work with existing weapons and could make special forces even more lethal. A new line of specialized bullets could allow U.S. special forces personnel to shoot their weapons submerged, engaging other divers and their underwater vehicles. While traditional bullets are ineffective underwater, the new bullets work by forming a bubble of air around a bullet, allowing the bullet to travel with fewer physical restrictions....

The IncidentsStephenville Spots[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/MMfSoXpXnrw&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6[/youtube]Stephenville, Texas became the center of UFO-sighting in the United States when, on January 8, 2008, red orbs were spotted in the sky by a number of observers. The next day, the Stephenville Empire-Tribune published one account and, soon after, the town had made national news. “Texas Town Abuzz Over Dozens of UFO Sightings,” wrote Foxnews.com. “Are UFOs Invading Texas?” asked Texas Monthly.Phoenix Lights[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/JvKdc7zEN44&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6[/youtube] Do you think that UFOs are alien spacecraft?...

The gargantuan, double-decker, four-engine Airbus A380 is a titan of the skies, but that doesn’t mean that airlines actually want to fly it. Reuters reports that two of the enormous craft, which only entered service about ten years ago, are about to be stripped for parts. The two planes in question were operated by Singapore Airlines, which put the first Airbus A380 into operation in October of 2007. When Singapore Airlines decided to retire them before the end of their useful life, no other airlines showed considerable interest in buying the second-hand planes....

In 2003, thieves broke into the reputedly impenetrable vault of Belgium’s Antwerp Diamond Center and made off with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of diamonds, gold, cash and other valuables. The heist involved sneaking past police officers less than 200 feet away at the front entrance, keycard scanners to get into the building, a two-story descent to a guard-controlled gate, a magnetic seal on the vault door, motion and infrared detectors within the vault, and seismic sensors to catch anyone trying to tunnel in....

The announcement of the United Kingdom’s new Tempest fighter project marks yet another new fighter program set to delivery in the 2030s. In addition to Tempest, a new Japanese fighter, a Franco-German project, and whatever China and Russia are surely working on, the United States has not one but two fighter jets. These two programs will probably stay separate and turn into separate planes thanks to the miserable experience of the F-35....

Diverting flights into a higher cruising altitude could reduce contrail climate effects by up to 60 percent.Like hole punch clouds, contrails are a reaction between particulate and freezing water vapor.At a higher cruising altitude, warmer temperatures and less humidity means far fewer contrails.A new study suggests that a few small tweaks could greatly reduce how much airplanes affect the climate via contrails. By raising the altitude of certain flights by just 2,000 feet, scientists say we could reduce climate-affective airplane exhaust by almost 60 percent....

Phishing attacks—in which hackers trick you into giving them your password while leaving you none-the-wiser—are one of the most nefarious kinds of cyberattack out there. But Google appears to have settled on an extremely robust solution for protecting its own employees. According to a Google spokesperson talking to security blog Krebs on Security, the adoption of physical Security Keys has stopped the attacks in their tracks. Security Keys are small USB stick devices made by YubiKey that function similar to two-factor authentication (2FA) methods you may (and should!...

It takes tens of millions of years to form a natural dinosaur fossil:pieces of bone, feather or other sediment get buried underground, and a combination of heat, pressure, chemical reactions and fate preserves it for scientists to find. Now, researchers are developing a method to create fossils in a lab in just twenty-four hours. The process will help deepen their understanding of the natural fossilization process, and determine the materials that can become preserved into fossil....

Media Platforms Design TeamNew airplanes, new head-up displays, and—most importantly—$5.5 million of new investor financing came together for the first public demonstration of the hardware the Rocket Racing League needs to finally begin actual races. The league staged the demo at the inaugural QuickTrip Air and Rocket Show at the Tulsa Airport on April 24.The Rocket Racing League (RRL) is the first racing organization of its kind, with plans for rocket-powered airplanes to fly virtual race courses in the sky in front of spectators, 6-foot rocket plumes blasting out behind....

Did you know that, on average, 6 billion SMS messages are sent every day in the U.S. alone? That’s 180 billion each month and 2.27 trillion each year. Globally, 4.2 billion people are texting worldwide. No doubt you’re one of ‘em—which means you fire off approximately 67 texts a day. That’s a lot of “LOL”s. When you send all those texts, you probably assume that you and your recipients are the only ones privy to the information contained within....

The FBI is using fake front companies to fly very real surveillance planes over at least 30 cities across 11 states, the Associated Press reports. The nature of the aircraft and the specific investigations are a tightly held secret by the Justice Department, but according to the report, many of the investigations take place without a warrant. The AP mentioned 13 fictive companies under whose names the FBI flies, including FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services....

Plenty of people have proven that shooting down a drone is as simple as pointing a shotgun at one and pulling the trigger, but there’s more than one way to skin a quadcopter. While the military experiments with jammers, and the Dutch are training eagles to do the deed, the folks at Make It Extreme have their own method: a DIY net gun. The gun has a very simple principle. Using air pressure and four barrels, the gun shoots a net that is weighted on its four corners directly at the drone in question....

CAD designer Jeremy Fielding builds things from scavenged materials including vacuums and treadmills and posts about them on his YouTube channel. The idea for this project—a video-game system rigged to draw its power from a rower—came after Fielding noticed his kids playing on their Nintendo Wii for several hours at a time. Here are the components he used.Rowing MachineI removed the impeller and used a generator to replace that resistance, then used a grinder and cut-off wheel to cut a section from the mesh guard so the drive belt could fit through, and then fitted a pulley to the flywheel....

The U.S. Space Force is finally ready to turn on its new Space Fence, a ground-based radar built to detect small objects orbiting the Earth.The fence is a vast improvement over the old one, with a much greater range. The data collected by the Space Fence can help prevent collisions and monitor the satellites of adversaries.The U.S. Space Force will turn on a new and improved radar system as early as this month that’s designed to track small objects in space....

Just a mile or so beneath the surface, near the south pole of Mars, there is a reservoir of briny water sloshing and churning below layers of ice and rock. This subglacial lake, discovered by a ground-penetrating radar on the Mars Express spacecraft, is about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) wide and perhaps no more than a meter deep. Its discovery is the latest piece of evidence that suggests water was not only present on Mars in the past but is still flowing in some capacity today....