A dazzlingly white blossom sways like a sea anemone. To its right, a jumble of tubular appendages resemble a maze of coral. The night sky’s yellow, green, and red traces mimic the luminescent lures of depth-finding anglerfish—but we are a long way from the ocean. Welcome to the Sonoran Desert, one of North America’s great vast and open spaces, a serious wilderness within a few hours’ flight of every major U....
Media Platforms Design TeamEarlier this morning, President Obama spoke about a number of reforms he wants to make to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, which have been widely criticized since Edward Snowden’s leaked on the extent of agency’s spying operations. Almost every week now, it seems, new revelations emerge, ranging from the bulk collection of telephone metadata to capturing information from computers that aren’t even connected to the Internet through radio waves sent out by the machines....
Google’s Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best. At ten years old, Chrome has picked up some bad habits like hogging RAM or logging in users without their permission. But in the face of Chrome’s hegemonic presence, the field of competitors has gotten leaner, faster, and more interesting. A year ago, I abandoned Chrome for one called Vivaldi, and I’ve never looked back....
Residents of Hawaii’s “Big Island” awoke to quite a start Sunday morning, as a magnitude 6.7 earthquake rumbled through at 7:07 a.m., cutting power statewide—not exactly the kind of alarm clock islanders usually expect on a tranquil tropic morning.Today, with aftershocks at magnitudes of up to 3.9 still thundering and Hawaiians attempting a return to normality, people in the San Francisco Bay Area are marking the 17th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake....
Archaeologists have uncovered a strange type of head covering on infant remains in Ecuador: “helmets” made of other juveniles’ skulls.The 2,100 year-old remains from the Guangala culture are described in a new paper published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.In the paper’s abstract, the researchers describe the helmets as “mortuary headgear,” suggesting that they were used in burial rituals.It may look like the cover of a Cannibal Corpse album, but the image above depicts a real-life infant skull that was excavated in Ecuador—and it’s wearing a helmet made of another child’s head....
To promote his new movie, the space drama Ad Astra, actor Brad Pitt talked to astronaut Nick Hague aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The two talked about the scientific work being done on the ISS and the ins and outs of the daily life on board a space station.Even when movies don’t officially involve NASA as an entity, many studios still work with the agency for accuracy.Hollywood and NASA have grown inextricable from each other....
The Claim: “Tired of your car taking a beating? It gets dinged, scratched, and nicked—and you pay the price!” Fix-It “instant scratch remover” repairs, fills and seals pesky blemishes in any color car. “Like magic, the scratch disappears right before your eyes.” Resins fill the scratch on contact and UV hardeners cure in the sunlight with “no sanding, tools or hard labor.” Just apply and let dry. “The scratch has met its match....
All week long, Popular Mechanics gaming correspondent Brittany Vincent has been on the scene at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, sending dispatches from the trade show, including the coolest upcoming games and big announcements from major developers. Now that the show is over, here are Brittany’s 10 best games from E3.The end of E3 2019 is finally upon us, and though the end is bittersweet, it’s also the perfect time to look back and reflect on every excellent game that was available to explore on the show floor....
Yesterday NASA handed out more than a billion dollars to the companies it hopes will take over shuttling astronauts to Earth orbit—and get the agency of its current dependency on the Russians, now that the space shuttle is retired. Boeing and SpaceX took home the biggest chunks of change, in excess of $400 million each. Sierra Nevada received more than $200 million. After the official NASA announcement, SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk took questions from reporters about where this cash boost would take his company....
After GPS company Strava Labs revealed sensitive data U.S. military operations through a fitness tracking tool eralier this year, another exercise app has been found describing the patterns of soldiers and government agents. This time it’s the activity tracker Polar, through which a Dutch newspaper was able to find the exact movements and locations of U.S Secret Service officers, NSA agents, the British MI6 and a host of international secretive agencies....
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has been erupting nonstop for months, but according to a new announcement by the National Park Service, the volcano has finally gone on pause long enough for previously closed sections of the park to re-open. The Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park is set to reopen on Saturday, September 22.The park closed on May 11 following the initial eruptions from the Kilauea volcano. Over the next few months, the park took severe damage from dozens of earthquakes and eruptions....
Researchers at MIT and IBM have teamed up to create a repository of images that challenge the weaknesses inherent in computer vision systems.Part of the problem with machine learning is that it has no basis of knowledge to fall back on, as a human does, when an object is taken out of contextCalled ObjectNet, the set of images present new challenges for existing machine learning systems. The researchers hope that the engineers building computer vision algorithms will use the repository to better their systems....
Too much of what we design and manufacture today is broken from the get-go. I can finesse or work around a lot of improperly designed user interfaces and hardware, but I shouldn’t have to–and neither should you. On more occasions than I care to remember, I’ve had to make or modify a lot of tools in my shop to take something apart and/or put it back together, often in the wee hours of the morning....
Minecraft is basically just playing LEGO online. That was pretty much everyone’s first thought at seeing it. Well now LEGO is making actual LEGO online. It’s called LEGO Worlds and it’s available (in a beta form) on Steam right now. Unlike the most recent LEGO games that are story-based games on the many, many propreties in LEGO’s collection (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Batman, Harry Potter, you name it), LEGO Worlds is the online equivalent of having a bottomless bucket of bricks and playing with them in a procedurally generated world....
USA Today reports that Google and Mattel have partnered up to bring back the retro View-Master, which dates back to the 1939 World’s Fair. The new View-Master requires a smartphone running a new Mattel app to recreate the 3D effect of the the old toy. Slot your phone into the new device, look at what Mattel is calling its “360 degree photospheres,” and you’ll be able to explore locations like Eiffel Tower or Alcatraz Island in what looks like augmented reality....
We still don’t know whether the debris spotted in the Indian Ocean is indeed the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. And this morning, investigators are chasing a new lead that the plane might have been traveling faster than first believed, and therefore crashed north of the initial search site west of Australia. But if and when investigators do confirm this, they will face the arduous task of figuring out where this flotsam came from in the hopes of finding the site where MH370 went down....
Media Platforms Design TeamSitting has been calledthe new smokingobesity to diabetes. New research suggests staying tied to your desk chair all day can contribute to everything from , but while standing desks have long been used by some of history’s most prominent figures (Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill and Benjamin Franklin all used standing desks), is it enough to just build a desk with longer legs?One California-based company has taken standing desks to the next level with a state-of-the-art workspace called the Stir Kinetic Desk....
A NASA telescope caught sight of a record-breaking burst of X-rays from a neutron star.This burst revealed a never-before-seen change in a pulsar’s brightness. The SAX J1808 neutron star is roughly 11,000 light years away from Earth in the Sagittarius constellation.A telescope perched aboard the International Space Station (ISS) spotted something very strange back in August: a sudden spike of X-rays surging out of a pulsar 11,000 lightyears away in the Sagittarius constellation....
Let’s say you’ve got a truck and need a quick way to MacGuyver a fire. NightHawkInLight has a quick and easy to convert a spare truck mirror into a fire-starting first surface solar concentrating mirror. “First surface” mirrors have their reflective coating on the outside of the glass, making them more powerful and efficient fire-starters.View full post on YoutubeThe first step is to separate the mirror from the housing. Then, looking at the backside of the mirror, NightHawkInLight removes the protective paint that covers the thin metallic sheet housed inside the mirror....
For centuries, rats have taken the blame for bringing the Black Death to Europe, where it killed 200 million people in the 14th century. No longer: A new study says it was your cute pet gerbil’s ancestors who did the deed.Analysis of tree rings revealed that Black Death outbreaks corresponded with wet springs and warm summers. Rats hate those kind of temperatures, but Asian gerbils don’t. They probably flooded into the continent during those years, the thinking goes, bringing with them bacteria-ridden fleas....
