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In the coming decades, we could send a manned mission to an asteroid, put a person on Mars, or construct a space station and telescope on the moon. But the most revolutionary discoveries could come from autonomous robots exploring underground oceans, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. “One of the biggest discoveries in my field is that the solar system is littered with oceans,” says Alan Stern, planetary scientist and principal investigator of the New Horizons mission....

Anyone who’s ever traveled by plane knows that the process of boarding is almost invariably nightmarishly slow, and anyone who’s looked into the reasons for why know there are better methods than the one most airlines use. But what is the best method, and why doesn’t anyone use that? The answer is simple: it’s basically impossible, as YouTube CPG Grey illustrates in a video that runs through the basics. To minimize the time that boarders stand around uselessly waiting, the trick is to position everyone just so in order that as many of them can be placing their bags in the overhead bins simultaneously....

Wind turbines are showing up on top of mountains, across vast plains, and in the waters off the coasts of the world’s cities. Even the open ocean isn’t closed to wind turbines, and in even better news, the project off the coast of Scotland is dramatically surpassing expectations.The Hywind wind farm is the world’s first floating wind farm, located about 15 miles off the coast of Scotland. Unlike other offshore wind farms, Hywind isn’t anchored to the seafloor....

A $330,000 underwater observatory has gone missing from its location off Germany’s Baltic coast.After it stopped transmitting last month, divers were sent to investigate and found only a shredded cable in its place.Too heavy to be dragged by currents or tampered with by animals, researchers said in a statement that they suspect foul play.A deep-sea mystery is swirling off Germany’s Baltic coast. A $330,000 underwater observatory disappeared this week, seemingly ripped from the bottom of the ocean....

In 2016, the Panama Canal was expanded to allow larger ships to pass through, enabling giant container ships from Asia to bring their goods to the North American East Coast. While this is good for trade, it’s not quite as good for American harbors that now have to accommodate these large ships. The port in Wilmington is no exception, and recently received two gigantic cranes in order to expand the size of its docks....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor the past half-century, chemical rockets have propelled most spacecraft, because this is the simplest and best-understood way to do it, and it is also the fastest way, with current technology, to reach one’s destination (particularly important if one is a human being). But chemical rockets require a huge amount of propellant, and so some engineers have long envisioned a future powered by other means, such as ion propulsion....

When Apple revealed the new MacBook at Monday’s launch event, the company took two accepted qualities of laptops and remade them. The first is a new take on the keyboard, which I’m frothing to touch. But it’s the second simple revolution—the decision to give the new MacBook a single port—that has me in awe.I love anything that trims excess. There’s a Bruce Lee quote: “Hack away at the unessential.” It’s true in writing, and it’s true in product design, especially when it means fewer cables in our lives....

A massive asteroid estimated at 470 meters in diameter (about 1,542 feet) will fly by Earth on Halloween morning about 310,000 miles away—about 30 percent further from the Earth than the moon is, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The huge rock will pass even closer to the moon, about 180,000 miles, as it travels at 78,000 miles per hour.On the night of October 30 and the morning of Halloween, you will be able to see the asteroid with a telescope as it is crossing the constellation Orion....

There is a lot to adore about your six-year-old child. Spontaneity, loyalty. Also, the ability to be amazed by things that aren’t amazing. To a child of six, there’s no difference between a 1998 black Buick Le Sabre and a 2018 matte-black McLaren—or at least not much. There’s also not that much difference between Fortnite and Super Challenge Football, which was released in 1978 and is my six-year-old son’s favorite video game....

Base price: $30,875Charging speed: 90 miles in 30 minutes2019 option: 200-plus-mile batteryThe Tesla Model 3 and Chevy Bolt get all the attention, but the Nissan Leaf is the world’s best-selling electric car so far, with more than 300,000 built. Completely redesigned for 2018, the new Leaf boasts stats that were unthinkable back in 2010, when the original car debuted as a 2011 model. The headline number is range, EPA-rated at 151 miles, more than double the original’s 73....

Astronomers discovered two new potentially habitable exoplanets in nearby star systems. The team also spotted a rare cold Neptune, which likely has frozen water on its surface.The cadre of newly discovered exoplanets is close enough that researchers believe they’ll be able to glean more information out of them through additional observations. It’s already been a big year for exoplanets. NASA’s TESS telescope discovered its first potentially habitable planet in the habitable zone of a distant star, and now researchers have found evidence of a second exoplanet circling our closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri....

The FBI is warning banks that a large cyberattack is coming, and criminals are expected to exploit a vulnerability in ATMs to steal millions or billions of dollars over the next few days. According to the FBI, this attack is expected to be global in scale and could target any of a number of different banks.“The FBI has obtained unspecified reporting indicating cyber criminals are planning to conduct a global Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cash-out scheme in the coming days,” reads the FBI alert....

My first drone flew for maybe five seconds, lifting off slowly from the table before leaning hard to the left, careening for the wall. I froze in a panic, only realizing I could steer the dang thing right at the moment of impact. Its frame exploded into a spectacular shower of Legos. It was right then, after that first fantastic crash, that I knew I was hooked. Designed by MIT, Caltech, and UW Madison alumni, Flybrix is a kit of Lego pieces, wired propellers, a battery, and circuit board that when assembled well (or poorly), can take you from jumble of plastic to DIY drone flight in about five minutes....

You and your friends get the call: There’s trouble in Central Park. You head out in the ECTO-1 and, wouldn’t you know it, Midtown is full of slimy ghosts and one furious marshmallow man. Isn’t that how it always goes? Well, there’s no choice but to move your miniatures, roll the dice, and hope to trap a few lost souls. Just in time to see Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon buckle into their proton packs for the July 15th release of Ghostbusters, we’re taking a look at Ghostbusters: The Board Game from Cryptozoic Entertainment....

Google admitted it may have accidentally sent some users’ private videos to strangers after a bug impacted its Photos service.The affected service is called Google Takeout and it allows users to download their data. Anyone who made such a request during a five-day span last November could have been impacted.While Google says less than 0.01 percent of users were impacted, its user base on Google Photos is over one billion, meaning it’s possible that 10 million people’s videos may have been sent to the wrong users....

As of Monday, September 10, 2018, Hurricane Florence was just a relatively small storm circling way out in the Atlantic Ocean. But the National Hurricane Center is already sounding off serious warnings. This storm is coming for the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and it is coming with a fury.While Atlantic hurricane season officially begins in June, August and September see the warmest sea temperatures in the Atlantic. That means means lots of fuel for a hurricane, which is why Florence looks so dangerous as it proceeds along its projected path toward the Carolinas....

You bring your car to the auto repair shop and they slap a sticker on the windshield: change your oil again in 3,000 miles or three months. You probably knew that the 3,000-mile interval was ridiculous, but what about that other deadline? What if you don’t drive much and let your oil sit for six months? A year? 🔨 You love DIY projects. So do we. Let’s build something cool together....

On November 2, 2018, Sam Ballard was killed by something he ate in 2010.The Australian had swallowed a live slug on a dare back then. All these years later, he was diagnosed with an infection of rat lungworm, a parasite the slug had evidently been carrying. The infection caused eosinophilic meningoencephalitis, a rare kind of meningitis. As a result, Ballard fell into a coma for more than a year, endured a severe brain infection, and ended up paralyzed from the neck down....

View full post on VimeoYou know that space in big. But if you ever need to really feel that space is big, then watch this video tour of our solar system, which shows you what it’d be like to travel at light speed.You begin at the Sun and won’t reach Earth until eight minutes in. Just after minute 43, you arrive at Jupiter, and then things get pretty sparse. By the time the video ends at 45 minutes, Saturn is still another 34 minutes away....

Media Platforms Design TeamCall it one heck of a science project by the students at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.: Later this year, NASA will launch satellites designed and built by high school students into orbit for the first time—and Jefferson’s satellite is near the front of the line to blast into space. The satellite, called TJ3Sat, is in its final stages of testing, and its launch—scheduled for sometime this fall—will be the culmination of nearly five years of effort involving close to 50 students....