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The world’s largest (and longest-running) multinational naval exercise began its 2018 edition yesterday, June 27, in Hawaii and southern California. The 2018 Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, hosted by the United States military, is drawing visitors from 25 countries across Asia and the Pacific. But one previous attendee is noticeably absent from this year’s war games: China.Australian Navy amphibious ship Adelaide entering Pearl Harbor for RIMPAC 2018.U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin R....

Viruses are back terrorizing victims on Fringe, and they’re as vicious as ever. Two weeks ago mysterious killers used super-size cold viruses–and questionable science–to murder prominent epidemiologists, and in last night’s episode, “The Transformation,” a deadly virus turned its victims into unrecognizable monsters. The first victim is flying on a plane when the change starts as a nosebleed, and then kicks into high-gear when he convulses and huge spines shoot out of this back....

“The City on the Edge of Forever” starts like many Star Trek episodes do. The USS Enterprise is in orbit around some far-flung planet when strange temporal disturbances (and a raving Leonard “Bones” McCoy) force Kirk and company to investigate the planet’s surface.But after the away team meets the Guardian of Forever, an incorporeal lifeform tasked with guarding a time gateway, the show takes a more interesting turn. Chasing after a raving Bones, Spock and Kirk must enter the gateway in order to fix the past—even if it involves Kirk letting someone he loves die....

View full post on YoutubeAs long as geysers are treated like garbage cans there remains the possibility of a trash eruption. Ear Spring geyser, located in Yellowstone National Park, had long been engorged by years of trash left inside of it by ill-mannered tourists. So naturally when the geyser erupted in September, unleashing its usual blast of searing-hot water and air, a nasty wave of dreck followed.The contents of the garbage eruption were displayed by the National Park Service....

Media Platforms Design TeamScientists have managed to slow down the speed of light, and they did it by changing the shape of photons, the particles of light.This isn’t the first time researchers have accomplished the slowing-down-light-speed trick, but previous experiments typically used low-energy, ultra-cold particles like Bose-Einstein Condensates. But that required light to move through a medium like the condensate or similar states of matter; as soon as the photon was out of the medium, it was back to normal speeds....

Hauling a full 4 by 8-foot sheet of plywood from the store to your home is a task best accomplished using a pickup truck. It’s what they’re made for. But just tossing plywood into the bed can leave marks on it, and it’s not an efficient way to pack your truck. Instead, build these plywood racks that increase the carrying capacity of your truck and keep your wood clean, too.April Wilkerson of the YouTube channel and website Wilkerdos recently bought an old truck that she loves, but the condition of the truck bed left a lot to be desired....

Nefarious villains, beautiful women and action, action, action: These are all key components of a James Bond film. But could a director who has more indie cred than smash-and-awe experience tackle Quantum of Solace? “I had that same curiosity,” laughs director Marc Forster, who recently spoke to PM about all things Bond. “When I met with the producers, I thought, I’m not an action director. It’s not my genre, and I’m not interested....

BATAVIA, Ill. – Want to see the Large Hadron Collider’s first proton beam race through an underground loop at a blistering 185,000 miles per second? Don’t blink. Some 400 physicists, engineers and students just finished camping out here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory through the night, awaiting the birth of an extreme machine so powerful that it could soon reveal what lent mass to the universe in the first place....

Years after switching to solar to power the sets of his movies, James Cameron has taken the next step and re-designed the solar panel. His version looks like a giant photovoltaic sunflower, and the first units were installed on the Malibu campus of the MUSE school (started by Cameron’s wife, Suzy Amis Cameron) last month. Each of Cameron’s Sun Flowers is 28.5 feet wide and has 14 petals. Sonnen Systems provided tracking technology so that each panel would move throughout the day to follow the course of the sun, eliminating one of the problems with traditional, stationary panels....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn keeping with our attempts to provide as much relevant information as possible in the run-up to next month’s primaries, Popular Mechanics has expanded our science and technology guide to the 2008 presidential election by including proposals from Rep. Dennis Kucinich.There have been several comments from users concerning our selection of candidates, which were first outlined here. PM began our research this fall by looking at the top five presidential hopefuls from each party according to Rasmussen polling data....

Roughly 80 million miles from Earth, a spacecraft is stretching. The probe slowly extended its 11-foot robotic arm this week, something it hasn’t done since before its 2016 launch. This motion is a precursor to making history as this week’s robotic arm test is a preamble to the mission’s ultimate goal—when the spacecraft will descend onto an asteroid’s surface to collect a sample. In December this intrepid probe, called OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), or O-REx (as the engineers call it), will arrive at Bennu, an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Promise The Stylus 1050SW is Olympus’s latest addition to its waterproof SW line. This rugged group of pocket cameras can swim underwater with you (down to 10 ft), survive cold temperatures down to 14 F and survive 5-ft falls onto concrete. The 1050SW’s claim to fame, however, is not its waterproofing (after all, its older sibling the 1030SW can go down to 33 ft), but a new feature that the company calls Tap Control....

Russia has tested a new hypersonic anti-ship missile that can travel a blistering 6,138 miles an hour, or 1.7 miles a second. The missile, known as Zircon, will attack ships at sea and land-based targets. It is in all likelihood unstoppable by modern air defenses. CNBC reports that Russia has tested the Zircon anti-ship missile five times, with the latest test occuring on December 10. The December test hit a top speed of Mach 8, or 6,138 miles an hour....

SpaceX has announced that it has signed the first space tourist to fly around the Moon. The announcement came as a tweet posted late Thursday. According to the tweet, the company will announce the identity of the mystery passenger on Monday. Few other details have been provided, but a follow-up tweet by Elon Musk hints that the passenger may be from Japan.View full post on TwitterSpaceX has long had ambitions for ferrying wealthy tourists to the moon on its rockets....

View full post on TwitterWhat does it look like when America fails to maintain its basic infrastructure? It looks like this scene in Desert City, California, on Sunday, when the Tex Wash bridge collapsed after a weekend of heavy rains, injuring one driver and snarling traffic for miles.“Interstate 10 is closed completely and indefinitely.” The bridge is a vital part of Interstate 10, which connects Southern California to Phoenix. “Interstate 10 is closed completely and indefinitely,” said Terri Kasinga, spokeswoman for the California Department of Transportation, speaking to Associated Press....

Right now, the freezing winds are battering the face of Karolis Mieliauskas. The frigid temps are chilling his body. But on he rides across the east Siberian tundra. Mieliauskas is making a seemingly impossible motorcycle trip between the two frost-bitten cities of Yakutsk and Oymyakon, the latter of which is considered the coldest inhabited place on earth. He’ll have only his Yamaha XT660Z Ténéré and ample protective layers to separate him from the elements, which regularly plummet to life-threatening levels of cold during the winter....

With Women’s History Month firmly underway, two astronauts are adding a new chapter: the first all-woman spacewalk. View full post on Twitter NASA astronaut Christina Koch will head into space towards the International Space Station (ISS) on March 14 as part of what’s known as Expedition 59. It will be her first spaceflight. Once Koch reaches the ISS, she’ll meet with fellow NASA astronaut Anne McClain, who has been onboard since December....

If you live near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, you’re probably used to hearing jets pass overhead or seeing convoys on your drive to the supermarket. What you’re probably not expecting, though, is to have a Humvee dropped in your backyard. But that’s exactly what happened earlier today, when a C-17 transport testing a new airdrop system accidentally released a Humvee from 1,500 feet, a mile from its intended target. Instead of landing in the Sicily Drop Zone, the nearly three-ton vehicle ended up in a tree....

The only thing more thrilling than watching cars race in excess of 100 mph is watching tiny, tiny toy slots cars blaze around a room-sized track just as fast.Finland was home to the Slot Car Racing Championship a few years ago, where a group of owners raced their souped up remote controlled cars to extreme speeds so fast that it’s hard to see them whirring by on this video. The video, which recently surfaced on Reddit, gets good 50 seconds in when the eight cars launch in unison across the cruved track....

YouTubeDividing by zero is complicated and we all know it’s something you can’t and shouldn’t do. The simple—but still not perfect—explanation is that if you divide something by zero, the answer approaches infinity. And if you try it on a mechanical calculator, you’re likely to get an illustration of why this happens as the calculator itself screams in robot agony. Watch here as a certified mathematician (we can only assume) attempts to divide by zero on a mechanical calculator called the Facit ESA-01....