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I can’t be the only one who keeps the live feed from the Deep Space Network bookmarked on a cell phone.Yesterday, while waiting for my beer to arrive at The Goat, an east Dallas dive bar at the tail end of its 3 to 6 pm special on domestics, I opened the DSN Now webpage. That’s when I saw it: a signal between an antenna array in Canberra, Australia and the Opportunity rover currently enduring a severe and possibly fatal dust storm on Mars....

Public opinion is divided over a video showing a woman reclining and a tall man, cramped behind her, hitting her seat in retaliation.Legroom has decreased around 12 to 18 percent since the early 2000s, with proposed seat designs that claim they’ll help.Without an airline-level intervention, consumer options are limited to paying more or using aftermarket stopgaps.A viral video shows a tall man cramped in an American Airlines seat—evidently in the very back of the plane—behind a woman with her seat reclined....

For decades, the Cape May-Lewes ferry has been carrying cars and passengers across the Delaware bay, but the ferry has recently taken its last passenger. The ship was retired, and on Friday it was deliberately sunk 26 miles off the coast to create an artificial reef. A drone was there to capture footage of the ship sinking:View full post on YoutubeArtificial reefs are often created in otherwise featureless regions of the seafloor to increase marine life....

Eagle-eyed observers discovered in October that Facebook Messenger had a hidden pay feature, one that would allow friends to send each other money as easily as they send text and emoji. The company has made it official today, revealing the feature to the world.The money your friend sends you for buying that round of beer can be deposited to your bank via debit card. The process could take a few days, but it’s about the same deal with getting money out of PayPal....

Media Platforms Design TeamJust about any bike helmet can protect your head: All of them must meet government safety standards, so they offer roughly the same protection. (There are differences, but not as big as the difference between wearing a helmet and not wearing one.) So, when buying new headwear, most riders look at other factors—namely, comfort.If you just bought a bike, if your helmet has been through a crash (they’re designed for only one impact), or if you’re just tired of the headwear you have, it’s time to go helmet shopping....

There was no mistaking the alert Hawaiians received on their phones this weekend: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”In fact, it was exactly that. The alert sent just after 8 a.m. Saturday was a mistake, one that happened when an employee trying to begin a missile warning drill pushed the wrong button and sent an entire U.S. state into confusion and panic. What comes next, and how do we avoid another horrific false alarm?...

For Ensign Kyndra Chitwood, learning how to fly blind is just part of becoming a U.S. naval aviator.The 23-year-old strides across the flight line at Naval Air Station Whiting Field. Around her, dozens of orange and white T-34 Mentor training aircraft are lined up, fuselages gleaming in the Florida sun. Pairs of student—trainer teams in flightsuits are making their way to and from the aircraft. A formation flight of two T-34s cruises overhead, wingtip to wingtip....

The U.S. Army is borrowing light armored vehicles from the Marine Corps to offer support for airborne forces. The LAV-25A2, armed with a devastating 25mm automatic cannon, will provide reconnaissance and fire support for paratroopers until an even more heavily armed, permanent solution can be arranged.For decades, 4-68 Armor was the Army’s only airborne light tank unit. Attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, the battalion operated M551 Sheridan light reconnaissance tanks for decades before retiring them for good in 1996....

Media Platforms Design TeamAudi’s e-fuels project won’t fundamentally change how the company builds its cars. It won’t drastically reduce trips to the pump. Nor will it introduce a radically new fuel to the industry. And yet, with its synthetically-produced e-gas, e-diesel, and e-methane, the German automaker hopes to use excess CO2 in the process of creating fuels, producing a gas that gives off just as much carbon as is used to create it....

As things stand today, there are countless species unsuited to assume a place in human society—as any parent of a teenage boy will tell you. But fear not. While it’s too late to do anything about Junior’s surly deportment, dubious hygiene, and barbaric dietary predilections, advances in genetic engineering promise to vastly broaden your pool of potential pets. In theory, anyway.“The vast majority of mammal species have been impossible to domesticate"True domestication goes beyond the mere taming of an individual animal, and reaches deep into an entire species’ hard-coded DNA....

Best ProductsYour phone knows where you are at pretty much all times. This is no surprise—that’s part of the appeal. But while there are options to disable GPS and Location Services in the settings of Android phones, this won’t stop Google from knowing where you are. Short of turning off your phone, there’s actually no real way. New details about the length to which Google tracks Android phones surfaced today from Quartz, which reports that Android phones will track your location even if you disable location services and even if you aren’t logged into the phone....

If you’ve got a Mac that’s running the latest version of macOS High Sierra, you’re going to want to keep it in your line of sight. A recently uncovered bug appears to allow anyone to login as an administrator merely by entering the username “root” and no password. Discovered by software engineer Lemi Orhan Ergin, the bug allows anyone who has access to your computer to gain full, administrative access in just seconds....

Here’s how to optimize taste and texture to elevate any burger, according to chef Daniel Wilson, author of The Burger Lab: The Art and Science of the Perfect Burger and founder of the Australian burger chain Huxtaburger.Bun Brush it with clarified butter, the butterfat you get when you melt unsalted butter and skim off the foamy milk proteins. Then toast it in a pan or on a flat grill. That caramelizes the bun and steams the bread, which allows the bun to compress around the ingredients....

Back-Contact Silicon PV PanelsMedia Platforms Design TeamWhen it comes to solar technology, no one is better equipped to separate the genuine potential from the hype than the Department of Energy, which spearheads the country’s solar research efforts. So it’s worth noting that the DOE’s choice for the brand-new 205-kilowatt solar installation on the roof of its Washington, D.C., headquarters, unveiled in September, was the unique high-efficiency solar panels built by Silicon Valley-based SunPower Corporation....

A June 2018 crash of a F-15C Eagle fighter was caused by pilot error, a report into the incident has determined. The report says that the pilot became confused while visually tracking a F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, thinking he was flying to the right when he was actually flying vertically. The pilot ejected moments before impact, sustaining moderate injuries.The F-15C fighter, assigned to the U.S. Air Force’s 44th Fighter Squadron on the island of Okinawa, was engaged in a mock dogfight with a Raptor from the Alaska-based 525th Fighter Squadron....

Mission Impossible — FalloutHow to send Tom Cruise into a corkscrew dive, by Marc Wolff, aerial coordinatorThe Plot: Ethan Hunt has to save the world. This time it’s from the threat of nuclear terrorism.The Scene: The bad guy (Henry Cavill) chases the good guy (Tom Cruise) in helicopters through a narrow canyon. To escape, Cruise dives his chopper over the edge of a cliff in a tight, nearly vertical, spiral.Tom started training to fly helicopters years ago....

Owner: Christopher Dick Seller: Dan Sather, friend since high school Purchase Price: $8,000 Years Owned: TwoLocation: Minneapolis Dan was living with me, working in the garage of the first house I bought. He had spent 20 years and $20,000 turning a rusted-out Volkswagen into this brand-new car from 1983. It was the kind of project I could never justify doing myself. But watching him work, I was jealous. We had been into Volkswagens since high school, reading about them in European car magazines, thinking about how to make enough money to buy one....

Media Platforms Design TeamShown here is Gemini-North Acquisition Camera image of the Moon’s south pole with the LCROSS impact site near the center. The dark ring is the field lens holder for the Altair adaptive optics system; it is 25 arcsec in radius. The observers can use any bright lunar feature within this ring as a pseudo-star to guide the telescope, specifically, to keep the science detector’s field of view centered over the area of expected impact plume....

LuDela, the company behind the smart candle, is hoping they it can take a piece of the $3.2 billion candle industry by addressing issues like “fire risk, wax mess, hassles with wicks, and the time it takes to light and extinguish multiple candles,” said CEO Jamie Bianchini in a press statement.View full post on YoutubeThe smart candle, which uses a real flame, has numerous potential advantages including the ability to control multiple candles simultaneously via smartphone and what LuDela calls “WiFire....

Scientists have observed entanglement in two quantum memories—puffs of laser-chilled atoms— at the longest distance yet.Photons were shot across quantum memory-connected fiber-optic cables that stretched a distance of more than 30 miles.The research is a big step in creating an ultra-secure quantum computing network. Quantum entanglement has mystified physicists for more than a century and is the cornerstone of quantum communication. Entanglement establishes a mysterious connection between two particles even when they are separated by great distances....