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Maybe you know of Super7, from their collectibles, toys, and apparel based on some of your favorite toys like He-Man, Mega Man, Robotech, or their figures for music legends like Iron Maiden, the Misfits, and King Diamond. There’s a whole variety of ways to make their acquaintance. And that’s what makes them unique. They aren’t fiscally limited to one category of toy or license nor are they bound by traditional large-scale manufacturing practices like Hasbro, Mattel, or Lego....

It’s been five years since Google bought Waze, the crowdsourced live-traffic navigation app that changed the way most of us drive. Or at least the frequency with which most of us warn our fellow drivers of roadkill. In that time, some of Waze’s features have been worked into Google’s navigation. That’s mostly meant that the live traffic, accidents, construction, and road closures reported by Wazers appear in Google Maps when you plan your route....

Every few months, the International Space Station gets a rocket full of supplies from the surface containing everything from food to replacement parts to complex scientific experiments. Last week, a rocket sent one of these payloads to the ISS as usual, although it contained something a little different: a bunch of barley seeds, which the astronauts will grow in space as a precursor to brewing truly out-of-this-world beer. Back in March, Budweiser made a pledge to become the first beer on Mars, and as the first step to achieving that goal the company is sending barley seeds into space....

If you were on the East Coast and looking up at the sky on Tuesday night, you might have seen a green fireball shoot across the sky. Hundreds of people from Maine to South Carolina saw the sky light up around 11 PM thanks to an exploding meteor. According to weather satellites, the meteor exploded over New Jersey, but the fireball could even be seen as far south as Brazil. The meteor was likely only a few inches in diameter, but it was moving so fast that it produces an immense amount of energy in the atmosphere....

A new species of spiky-headed dinosaurs has been discovered in Utah, the oldest of its genus ever found in North America. Akainacephalus johnsoni is 75 million years and like its cousin, the Ankylosaurus, had an armored body and an imposing club tail.The dinosaur’s scientific journey began 10 years ago in 2008, when a paleontologist with the Bureau of Land Management found what appeared to be a fossil site at the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument....

Aside from his many contributions to the evolution of modern science, Galileo Galilei is also famous for defying the 17th century Catholic church. He’s lionized for advocating a heliocentric view of our solar system, spurning Church doctrine and becoming a heretic. But a new discovery presents an interesting wrinkle in the Galileo narrative.A new report in Nature suggests Galileo acted out of an abundance of caution while quarreling with the Inquisition, watering down his rejection of the church’s geocentric model of the universe in a letter dated December 1613....

People are rescuing injured squirrels with CPR and uploading their heroic missions online: when a squirrel got struck by a nearby powerline, a video shows an unidentified man in Colombia giving it CPR until it began to revive, and finally run off. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a student at Central Michigan University rescued a gray squirrel drowning in a campus pond. View full post on YoutubeCPR does work for many animals, including humans, dogs and squirrels....

In China, two pigs with monkey cells were born after researchers genetically modified cynomolgus monkey cells in vitro. The research was published in the scientific journal Protein & Cell.After just a week, the chimera pigs (and their eight regular pig siblings) died of unknown causes. Researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing are planning to try this again with more monkey cells. The end goal is to grow human organs inside animals for use in transplants....

At the 2017 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) last week, researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland revealed a robotic system capable of stacking and balancing irregularly shaped items. In the researchers’ paper on the robotic arm, they describe how the work could help develop new robotic systems capable of building large structures or assembling complex components in a factory.The robot uses a camera to scan objects in 3D and a torque sensor to control its precise movements when stacking items....

On Sept. 1, 2016, a SpaceX rocket exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, immolating the $300 million commercial satellite on board and causing a scramble among Kennedy Space Center’s first responders to contain the damage. The rocket detonated during a routine pre-flight test after the rocket had been fueled—no one was injured.But from the ashes of that 2016 mishap came a showdown between the new pioneer of space, SpaceX, versus the old vanguard of the cosmos, NASA....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor Frank Williamson, it was a deal with the devil, well worth making. In exchange for an early release from prison, Frank is living every privacy advocate’s worst nightmare. His precise location is tracked and recorded at all times, the GPS transmitter on his wrist broadcasting every morning commute and lunch hour errand and visit with friends back to a map on his case manager’s laptop. If Frank’s blip deviates from his designated, geo-fenced portion of the map, the case manager gets an alert....

There is an elegant, simple, and entirely accurate way to define the second. A second is 1/86,400 of the time that it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis. With 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes per hour, and 60 seconds per minute, there are 86,400 seconds in a day. There has never been a more accurate definition for the second, and there never will be. If only the real world were so simple....

What can easily be forgotten in this age, when anyone with a Twitter account and opposable thumbs can call themselves a “content creator,” is that words matter. We are called Car and Driver, which over the years has made us unusually protective of the word “car,” even more so than those car companies around which our world revolves. That word—car—its meaning both to the general public and to us as enthusiasts, has long been threatened with dilution by all ­manner of conveyances that are not cars, from trucks to minivans to SUVs....

The U.S. Marine Corps took another step towards autonomous flight last month with test flights of a Huey helicopter modified to fly by itself. The tests validated a kit developed by Aurora Flight Sciences that can enable almost any helicopter to fly autonomously, performing repetitive, boring but necessary missions while pilots get some much-needed downtime. The tests, which took place in late November, involved a hardware and software kit known as Autonomous Aerial Cargo/Utility System (AACUS) which includes both hardware and software and can be installed on any rotary wing aircraft....

Back in 2013, inventor Benjamin Krempel came up with a novel way to keep your tires inflated to a consistent pounds per square inch (also known as “psi”). The PumpTire uses a built-in pumping mechanism and the motion of the wheel to inflate itself. The problem with the original product is that riders need to use Krempel’s bulky tires, and when they wear down a whole new PumpTire is required. Krempel’s newest invention, the PumpTube, will allow riders to keep their preferred tires and enjoy self-inflating convenience by simply installing a fancy tube....

View full post on YoutubeAmputees who use leg prosthetics may soon be getting some help from the world of robotics. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas are using the same technologies that power bipedal robots to build prosthetics for humans with power and flexibility that’s closer to a real human leg.Compared to other artificial limbs, the scientists say, these more closely mimic the human gait, creating a more seamless experience for the user....

Cable boxes are on the wane, and for good reason. Cable is expensive, and boxes are expensive to rent. Their software is garbage compared to one of any number of set-top box alternatives like Roku. Streaming media is on the rise. But the cable box could get another shot at relevance, thanks to the internet of things. For better or worse, smart homes full of internet-connected devices are probably the future, or at least part of it....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt was slipped deep inside a lengthy press release, but it still made waves: After 31 years, Apple had come out with a new programming language.Called Swift, the new language for iOS mobile and OS X desktop environments was released during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 2. Apple proclaimed it a replacement for Objective-C, the iOS and OS X programming language that originated in 1983....

Forty years ago, NASA launched two intrepid spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, to the outer solar system. Aboard each craft was a record made of gold. A simple cover told about the origin of the craft, how to play the record, and a few details about humanity. Since then, the craft have swept to the outer reaches of our solar system and past the primary influence of the Sun’s energy fields....

Pluto seems like the dwarf planet that, at this point, is messing with us. Ice volcanoes? Icebergs? Liquid nitrogen seas? Oh, and now clouds. Clouds may not seem weird. You can look up and see them now. But Pluto has an atmosphere that is 100,000 times less thick than Earth’s. For comparison, even the thin, tenuous atmosphere of Mars (which can have sparing cloud cover) is one percent that of Earth’s, making Mars seem like a deep undersea expedition by comparison to Pluto....