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The health benefits of chocolate are clear: It can lower the risk of heart disease and can decrease bad cholesterol. But many gardeners don’t realize that chocolate husks, along with a few other waste products from the kitchen, are also good for the garden.Chocolate HusksZach Pickens, farm manager at Riverpark Farm, a New York City restaurant with an accompanying on-site farm, swears that chocolate has helped his tomatoes thrive. He partners with Mast Brothers, a local chocolatier that provides him with cacao husks left over from production that Pickens uses as mulch....

Boeing has patented a “fire-retarding artillery shell,” in what could be, at the very least, a unique innovation in aerial firefighting. Currently, aerial firefighting makes use of helicopters and airplanes to transport firefighters and smokejumpers, provide reconnaissance on new fires, and to drop fire retardant. But as Boeing notes in its patent, which was filed in 2014 and only made public last month: In order to establish an aircraft-delivered firebreak for a relatively small 28-acre fire, it would take approximately 7....

Spot, the internet-famous Boston Dynamics robot dog, just landed its first job at a Norwegian oil and gas company.The robot will survey an oil and gas production vessel, according to Bloomberg.Since last September, Boston Dynamics has been making Spot available for commercial lease. This looks to be the second organization to take the robotics company up on the offer, after a bomb squad in Massachusetts.Spot the Dog—the robotic viral sensation known for opening doors, climbing steps with ease, and even taking clean dishes out of the dishwasher—has just landed a full-time gig as an inspector at an oil and gas company in Norway....

A German science experiment that began 132 years ago has gotten an update. A woman in Australia found a message in a bottle that began its voyage in the 19th century as German scientists were studying shipping routes.While Tonya Illman and a friend were waiting for her son’s car to be dug out from soft sand, she noticed something on the beach. “It just looked like a lovely old bottle so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase," she says in a Western Australia Museum press release....

The slowest watercraft in this group accelerates from 0 to 30 mph in less than 3 seconds, the quickest in just over 2 seconds.Even better, these hot new personal watercraft (PWCs) are powered by 4-stroke engines that already meet EPA emissions regulations for 2006. Best of all, their carefully soundproofed powerplants are quieter than most inboards and significantly quieter than the average 2-stroke outboard. Fuel efficient, ecologically friendly and quiet–it’s time personal watercraft got some respect....

A windowless plane might not sound like the most comfortable of voyages. But the president of Emirates Airlines, Tim Clark, seems determined to make it the future. Passengers would be able to see the outside world through projections from fiber-optic cameras that Clark tells the BBC would be “better than with the natural eye.“Clark sees several advantages to a plane without windows. “Imagine now a fuselage as you’re boarding with no windows, but when you get inside, there are windows....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn Robert Zemeckis’s latest movie Flight, out Nov. 2, Denzel Washington plays Whip Whitaker, a regional-airline pilot who heroically rolls the airplane he’s flying to rescue it from an uncontrolled descent. The inversion sequence—especially an extreme long shot of the aircraft soaring, engines up, over a suburban Atlanta apartment building—stuns. But is it real science?The Basics: At 30,000 feet, airplanes operate on autopilot, with computer software adjusting pitch, power, speed, wing level, and altitude....

Phillip Bossant doesn’t shoot guns. Sure, he’s been on a firing range once or twice, but that was amateur stuff–pistols and a shotgun–not military-grade weaponry. But there, before him, on a table in a room on a military base in southeast Wyoming, lie the pieces of an M16. The 40-year-old art director glances down at the rifle and then up at the infantryman who has just told him to assemble it....

In Beijing today, Bill Gates spoke at a conference with a fantastic name: the Reinvented Toilet Expo. The Microsoft founder took with him to the lectern a sealed jar containing human feces, according to BBC News. Gates reportedly pointed to the poop jar and said that it could contain “as many as 200 trillion rotavirus…20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.”Gates’s stunt was conceived to draw attention to the need for sanitary, off-grid toilets that can remove harmful byproducts from human waste, which helps to stop the spread of disease among the two billion people who don’t have access to clean sanitation....

Media Platforms Design TeamIntelligence reports coming out of the war in Syria have said that Bashar al-Assad’s regime could be mixing components to produce sarin nerve gas to fill artillery shells or bombs. President Obama has warned the Syrian regime that the use of chemical weapons would be unacceptable and would result in “consequences,” while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Assad using chemical weapons against his own people would mean crossing “a red line for the United States....

Japan’s program to build its first homegrown fighter jet since World War II is reportedly dead, a victim of sky-high costs. Instead, the country will try to develop a local version of an existing fighter, a strategy that has had decidedly mixed results in the past. All of this is taking place in the shadow of two troubling trends: Japan’s aging fighter fleet and a newly aggressive Chinese air force. The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Japan would scrap its stealth fighter jet program, the Advanced Technology Demonstrator-Experimental (ATD-X)....

Astronomers announced the discovery of a tiny object roughly the size of a washing machine that has been captured by Earth’s orbit. The mini-moon has been circling Earth for about three years, according to orbital trajectory calculations.Similar mini-moons have been spottted before—once in 2006 and once in 2016 as the object entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke up over Australia. Update: Astronomers at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii have taken some incredible images of the newly discovered mini-moon....

NASA, working with the Department of Energy (DOE), has developed a small, lightweight nuclear reactor power system that could make long-duration exploration on the moon, Mars, and even farther worlds a reality.Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology, or KRUSTY, is a fission power system capable of providing up to 10 kilowatts of electrical power for at least a decade. That’s enough to power several homes. NASA says four KRUSTY units would be enough to power an outpost on an alien world....

Craig SwepstonSan Diego, Calif.Age: 42Years on Job: 22 When Craig Swepston wants his athletes to perform, he reaches for a bucket of herring. As a trainer with the Navy Marine Mammal Program, Swepston prepares sea lions for military missions. They practice capturing enemy divers with snap-on shackles and locating unarmed mines, dropped by pilots during training missions, so they can be recovered. “The sea lions can dive several hundred feet and recover a target in minutes,” he says....

NASA’s New Horizons space probe is charged with exploring some of the farthest reaches of the solar system: the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt beyond. The spacecraft’s next target, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) known as 2015 MU69, is believed to be a peanut-shaped rock, or possibly two rocks orbiting close together. New observations have suggested that MU69 could also have a moon.The mystery speaks to how little is currently known about KBOs....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat was your ultimate plan for the technology when you decided to make the NODE? The overarching goal is quite a lofty one: to give humans superhuman senses, to bring in the data that humans cannot perceive or measure or sense by our natural capabilities. That’s what this device is meant to do. There are a lot of things to sense. We live in a very complex world....

Think you know what to expect from an X-ray? Think again. MARS Bioimaging just developed the world’s first 3D full-color X-ray — they’re pretty incredible (and a little uncanny). The MARS system is a medical scanner using technology from CERN, and it captures the human body in startling detail. It took over a decade to develop, and it could offer not only more visually stimulating bone-scans, but more accurate results for doctors and patients....

So you paid a thousand-dollar deposit to reserve a Model 3? Now Tesla would very much like another $2,500 from you to “confirm” your order. This isn’t an extra fee—the $2,500 would go toward paying off the cost of the car. But it is an interesting development that may surprise some would-be Tesla buyers, as well as one that illustrates Elon Musk’s tricky position as his company tries to ramp up production of the Model 3....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: MB&F)For the well-heeled sci-fi geek who happens to have $250,000 laying around, consider this crazy timepiece.The MB&F HM6 is based on the famous anime cartoon Captain Future, which itself is based on old American pulp stories of a space adventurer raised by robots on the moon who goes on adventures in the solar system. They’ve nicknamed the watch the Space Pirate, a testament to its retrofuturist design....

Scientists in Hong Kong have improved raindrop power generation by “several orders of magnitude.“Triboelectric power includes everything from static electricity to friction in our bodies.This technology could complement existing hydroelectric power or be used in standalone devices.Scientists at the City University of Hong Kong have used a Teflon-coated surface and a phenomenon called triboelectricity to generate a charge from raindrops. “Here we develop a device to harvest energy from impinging water droplets by using an architecture that comprises a polytetrafluoroethylene [Teflon] film on an indium tin oxide substrate plus an aluminium electrode,” they explain in their new paper in Nature....