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All-terrain vehicles first went to war in the days after 9/11, when U.S. Special Forces bought them straight off dealership lots in North Carolina and parachuted them into Afghanistan. The hardy, go-anywhere vehicles were useful for patrolling and reconnaissance over the country’s difficult, mountainous terrain.Polaris Defense, maker of civilian ATVs favorited by hunters and outdoorsmen, started marketing a new line especially aimed towards special forces. In 2015, U.S. Special Operations Command bought 2,000 of the vehicles, including 1,700 of the company’s four-seat MRZR-4s, and 300 of its two-seat MRZR-2s....

The Hong Kong Spirit is a behemoth, one of the largest cargo ships in the world, and the view from her bridge suggests she’s gliding serenely across the water at the mouth of Aransas Pass. But a delicate maneuver lies just ahead. All 333 meters of this vessel— nearly 1,100 feet of cargo ship—must make a dogleg turn to stay within the confines of this narrow shipping channel.This massive Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) has never been to into port at Ingleside, Texas, before....

Last week, we gave you a rundown of how the battery in your phone (and laptop) works, and eight ways for you to take care of it. Now that’s all well and good but we understand that eight is sort of a lot, so for those of you with less patience, here the two most basic and easy things you can do for your batteries. 1. Avoid heat Aside from general use, heat is probably the biggest killer of batteries....

More than 48 hours into the search for debris from Malaysia Air Flight 370 in the south Indian Ocean, which started after Australia announced the satellite sighting of two objects possibly related to the flight, some observers are wondering whether the 777 and the 239 people aboard will ever be found. “Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating,” Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told reporters in Perth....

On Wednesday this week, President Trump tweeted that “nice and new and ‘smart’” missiles were on their way to Syria. This hawkish admission arrives days after the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, once again, to kill civilians and rebels in Douma, a city northeast of Damascus.Last year, the U.S. fired 59 cruise missiles at Shayrat air base in Syria in retaliation for a chemical attack. Pentagon sources say that 58 of them hit their targets, and that they destroyed 20 percent of Syria’s combat aircraft....

View full post on YoutubeCreative agency redpepper made a AI-powered robot that can pinpoint Waldo in 4.45 seconds (“better than most five year olds,” according to redpepper). The robot is complete with a rubber hand that points to Waldo on the page.The agency used Google’s AutoML Vision service to train AI on photos of Waldo. The drag-and-drop tool allows users to train AI tools without previous coding knowledge, and has been used to categorize anything from ramen based on the shops they came from to the types of attire carried in an online retailer....

My roommate has been on my case for literally years, since before we started living in the same house, to get into watches. “It’s the epitome of human engineering!” he’d say. And yet I’d look at the price tags, and they were more like the epitome of extravagance. Timex Marlin AutomaticTimex Marlin Automatic$249 at HuckberryI was more than happy with my $30-something Timex. I still am—it’s gold(-like) and waterproof, and I get compliments on it all the time....

The internet loves the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB), an innovative new method of transportation planned to launch in China. The futuristic vehicle straddles lanes of traffic, gliding above the chaos below. It’s an undeniably appealing idea for the busy cities in the most populated country in the world. This week, Jinchuang Corp, who produced the first model of the TEB, took it on a “test run”, producing a video that wowed viewers all over the world....

When LIGO first discovered gravitational waves back in February, it was a confirmation of decades of scientific research and the culmination of years of searching. But what exactly are gravitational waves? MinutePhysics helps explain.Waves are produced when stuff vibrates. Vibrating air produces sound waves, vibrating electrons produce radio waves, and vibrating matter produces gravitational waves. When any object with mass vibrates, it creates gravitational waves, which are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime....

Media Platforms Design TeamTHE BUSTS HAD TO BE TIMED TO THE SECOND. Agents from the Secret Service, operating in tandem with law enforcement officials in Canada, Brazil, Poland, Sweden and several other countries, had been investigating the ShadowCrew crime syndicate for months. The agents couldn’t risk giving the cybermobsters time to alert their comrades or delete incriminating data.The group’s Web site, shadowcrew.com, functioned as a sort of identity-theft eBay, a one-stop shop where criminals could buy and sell credit cards, Social Security numbers and mothers’ maiden names like used car parts....

The current furor over the potential long-lost Nazi loot train in Poland is exciting, but honestly, it’s not all that shocking that there might have been a Nazi train hiding in tunnels all this time. It’s not the first time we’ve discovered hidden Nazi junk.A Whole Mess of Nazi-Era Gold CoinsMedia Platforms Design TeamJust this past July, a man named Florian Bautsch discovered a whole bunch of Nazi-era gold coins in northern Germany....

In June 1983, Sub-Lieutenant Ian “Soapy” Watson was a young Royal Navy pilot with only 14 missions in the Sea Harrier fighter to his name. Flying from the British aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious while on a NATO exercise, Watson became lost. Low on fuel and unable to contact anyone, Watson finally found Spanish container ship Alraigo. He was originally going to ditch his plane in view of the crew, but then noticed that the stacked containers on the ship deck looked an awful lot like the landing pad back on Illustrious....

Media Platforms Design Team"Could that be an ice-carving tool?" Randy Finch keeps an open mind as he walks the aisles of a hardware store, looking for any implement that might be used to shape ice for his business, Ice Sculpting Ltd. Finch’s profession of 20 years will be the focus of the television show , which premieres March 3 on the Food Network, with promotional materials promising to “blow the lid off ice sculpting....

In the early 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci designed a hypothetical bridge for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It was rejected. Over 500 years later, an MIT team has recreated the design with a model and have showed that it would have worked.Da Vinci’s design incorporates architectural techniques that would have not been seen for another 300 years. Researchers at MIT have proven Leonardo da Vinci correct yet again, this time involving his design for what would have been at the time a revolutionary bridge design....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s getting harder and harder to hide these days. Thanks to through-the-wall sensors, such as Camero-Tech’s line of Xaver tactical radars, law enforcement and the military can detect anyone inside a closed room and determine his distance from the device. In fact, the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service have been secretly using these sensors for more than two years, according to USA Today. Now DARPA wants to go one step further: It is researching ways of seeing around corners and behind walls, something not possible with conventional line-of-sight cameras and scopes....

Our planet saw a lot of action as the Pliocene Period gave way to the Pleistocene 2.6 million years ago. The world cooled off, Africa dried out, the poles froze over lowering global sea levels, and a series of repeated glaciations, or ice ages, began. This change in climate has been blamed for the simultaneous extinctions of a number of marine megafauna species, including the largest and most powerful predator to have ever lived—the megalodon....

I spent yesterday in the suburbs of Boston at A123Systems, a manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for the plug-in hybrid market. I don’t want to give too much away before my upcoming print article, but I will say that the level of excitement and momentum at the place was just awesome; they are working incredibly hard to deliver a viable battery to the automakers. The technology is in place; right now it’s all about packaging—making the battery small enough, basically—and cost....

The world strange-knife making is broader than it has any right to be, stretching from old wrenches to knives made with beer and bacon. But maybe one of the most complex and unintuitive builds we’ve seen to date is this project to make a knife out of a bunch of old batteries.Related Story11 Badass Knives That Used to Be Busted Old JunkObviously you can’t just heat and hammer a bunch of batteries into a workable ingot....

Chaining your bike to a tree might seem like a good idea, but not if a particularly determined thief wants to steal it.Take this bike thief in China for example. Even though the bike owner chained their bike to a pretty thick tree, it still wasn’t enough to stop a man from cutting the whole thing down to steal it:View full post on YoutubeOf course that doesn’t mean this mode of attack is always easy, especially if you are very bad at cutting down trees, as these fellows in Philidelphia were: View full post on Youtube(It’s even better with an appropriate soundtrack....

As humanity creates more and more digital information, we’ll need better ways to store it. That’s why newly-developed nanoparticle-based films may be so critical. They’re over 80 times thinner than a human hair and could create materials that can holographically archive at least 1,000 times more data than a DVD in a 10-by-10-centimeter piece of film. “In the future, these new films could be incorporated into a tiny storage chip that records 3D color information that could later be viewed as a 3D hologram with realistic detail,” says Shencheng Fu, who led researchers from Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China in a press statement....