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The America’s newest fighter jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, might finally see combat in 2018. According to the Marine Corps Times, the U.S. Marine Corps is sending the jet on two overseas patrols next year, to the Middle East and the Pacific. The Middle Eastern tour could see the jet sent into combat over a number of regional conflicts the United States is currently embroiled in.The Marines are sending detachments of F-35Bs on two Marine Expeditionary Unit cruises, with the Okinawa, Japan-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit on the USS Wasp and the West Coast-based 13th MEU on the USS Essex....

On a March day in 1223 BC, the moon blocked out the sun. The eclipse cast an enormous shadow across the Earth that happened to pass over Ugarit, an ancient port city in present-day Syria, plunging the inhabitants into darkness for a little more than two minutes. This may well have been the first total solar eclipse anyone bothered to document. On an ancient clay tablet discovered in 1948, an inscription in the Ugaritic language reads: “On the day of the new moon, in the month of Hiyar, the Sun was put to shame, and went down in the daytime, with Mars in attendance....

Iran has announced the first deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle built to crash into targets, which the media promptly called the “suicide drone.“Okay, so it’s got a cool name. Is it really a threat? The answer to that depends on how it’s used—and where it’s aimed.Mobile Bomb?First, the specs. The new UAV, called the Raad in some Iranian press, is basically a clone of the Boeing-built ScanEagle surveillance drone—an unarmed UAV that earns its way onto the battlefield with its eyes, not its talons....

VantrueDash cams are a great way for documenting your scenic adventures (as well as provide some extra legal security on the side). Unfortunately, they can be kind of pricey, but Newegg is discounting a dozen different dash cams for a limited time. There’s the Vantrue N2 Pro Dual Dash Cam that can work as a front and rear dash cam and records in 1080p. It also comes with infrared night vision so it can catch your night trips as well....

Media Platforms Design TeamAccording to TechCrunch, Uber is about to jump into the self-driving cars game. Citing “sources close to the decision,” the site says that Uber will open a robotics lab in Pittsburgh to investigate autonomous car technology.The deal would reportedly see a collaboration between Uber and Carnegie Mellon University, a tech powerhouse. Fifty scientists from Carnegie would reportedly join the Uber project, in addition to some hires from the National Robotics Engineering Center....

When Kyle McDonald took a walk in Amsterdam one day, he decided to stream it for a friend back home: the NeuralTalk image recognition neural network. As he walked, the artificial brain was hard at work trying to make sense of McDonald’s surroundings. NeuralTalk works something like this: using a library of images, the neural network continuously tries to identify the images in frame. Sometimes it gets it right, like identifying a boat, identifying graffiti, and other objects....

Here’s the uncomfortable truth behind most long-term plans to combat climate change and keep the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, the commonly accepted limit before the climate effects become catastrophic: Almost none of them say they can do the job just by cutting fossil fuel emissions and investing in renewable energy. Instead, nearly every potential plan relies on a strategy called carbon capture and storage, or CCS. The problem: CCS only barely exists as a viable technology....

Media Platforms Design Team(Diagram courtesy Wikipedia. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.) Football fans are the sports world’s ultimate know-it-alls-from Tom Brady’s completion percentage to Plaxico Burress’ 40-yard-dash time, it’s all about number crunching. And they might not know too much about Dr. Leonard Reiffel, but they sure know his work. The 80-year-old inventor is the brains behind the telestrator, that digital doodler and staple of sports commentating booths everywhere....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a new fifth planet, at least if you ask the Tajikistan government. The new world is named Tajikistan, and it’s located somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but it totally isn’t Ceres. The former Soviet republic’s state news agency says this mysterious new world is located 250 million miles from Earth and is in a five-year orbital period, but isn’t spilling any more details than that....

After many years and thousands of miles towing trailers, I’ve come to a few realizations. Always add one more safety chain, rope, ratchet strap than you think you need. Grease your bearings more often than you think you should. And when it comes to choosing a tow vehicle, prioritize suspension over power. Your truck’s suspension is the key to your towing experience, and the best setup you can have is air suspension....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’re in the market for a Batcave–or just a place to hide your stamp collection–then Steve Humble of Creative Home Engineering should be your next call. The mechanical engineer turned secret-passageway builder started his Phoenix-based company when he couldn’t find anyone to build a hidden room for his home. “I thought that there would be a lot of people who would want a secret passageway in their house,” he says....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s an elegant idea—you ride your motorcycle to the filling station, pull up to the compressor where other people are filling their tires and top off your fuel tank with air. What could be cheaper and less harmful to the environment? You ride off into the inexpensive, eco-friendly sunset on a fuel tank powered by air. And there’s your happy ending, right? Not so fast.Over the last decade, companies have continually claimed to be a few years away from releasing air-powered cars to market....

Crowdfunding is not an investment—it’s a gamble. And stories illustrating this basic truth just keep coming. The latest, and one of the larger misfires to date, is a company called Plastc. Once promising to bring funders a smart card that could hold multiple credit cards inside it, the $9 million project announced yesterday that it is ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy. From the statement on the site (emphasis theirs): For the past 3 years, our mission here at Plastc was to build and deliver the most technically ambitious smart card on the planet....

LAS VEGAS – Shooting high-definition video on a camcorder used to require lots of time, lots of cords, and extremely powerful computer processors. Now, a slew of new video cams from different manufacturers hope to take some of the pain out of shooting HD by allowing you to easily transfer your video from the internal memory (most use flash, one uses a hard drive) to memory cards. Once your video is stowed on the card, you can easily view it (many new TVs feature memory slots), share it, or edit it, without ever having to plug into your PC....

Google and others sunk half a billion dollars toward an augmented reality start-up called Magic Leap last month. Little else was known about them at the time, but as this preview shows, Google may be getting its money’s worth. The preview video shows an immersive world filled with interactive every day tasks, like email checking and file organizing in what’s (likely) a wearable computer, like the Microsoft HoloLens. The headset would provide that same mix of virtual and physical we call “augmented reality,” showing a digital interface for the real world....

The Air Force is aging. “We have the oldest aircraft fleet we have ever had, 27 years old on average,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James pointedly observed at this week’s annual Air Force Association Conference. Age is a creating a variety of challenges for USAF airplanes including corrosion.In the past, the Air Force has worried mostly about the damage from environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and salt water. But materials specialists at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently have come to realize that organic contaminants—mold, mildew, fungi, bacteria—corrode aircraft surfaces more seriously than they had thought....

Media Platforms Design Team"Snakes on a Plane." Just the name of the recently released movie is enough to conjure up images of poisonous serpents attacking defenseless passengers. But with a new study by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, those snakes should take a backseat to a different creature: the venomous fish.Biologists William Smith and Ward C. Wheeler recently released a study in the Journal of Heredity that concluded there are more than 1,200 species of venomous fish swimming in our waters....

A Los Angeles-based production studio has filmed a terrifying video that features killer robots acting in place of soldiers.The YouTube clip has already amassed over two million views in just two days.Don’t freak out: this video is a parody. We repeat, parody. No need to stock up on canned goods and hide in your basement (yet).There are some legitimate arguments that robotic technology and the military are, uh, absolutely horrifying. Some students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University feel uneasy about the new Army AI research base on campus and Google employees protested working on an AI project for the U....

A fleet of private satellites recently picked up an extraordinary sight in the middle of the South China Sea: a parade of more than 40 warships of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy sailing in formation. The exercise was likely meant as a show of force to China’s neighbors, many of whom contest the country’s territorial claims. The photos also demonstrate the usefulness of commercial space in monitoring military developments worldwide, even in the most remote places....

Media Platforms Design TeamVice Adm. William McRaven, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, planned the bin Laden raid. Fortunately, he wrote the book on such missions. In 1995, the former SEAL team commander published Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare, an analysis of the eight greatest raids in modern military history. In it, he explores the principles that enabled the missions to succeed. So, how does the admiral’s raid stack up against his own criteria?...