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A Russian Backfire bomber performed an emergency belly landing in southern Russia.The bomber is nuclear-capable but was not carrying nuclear weapons at the time.It’s the second crash landing for Backfire bombers in a year, and the second major incident involving Russian military equipment in one week.A Russian bomber crew successfully landed their stricken aircraft in a field after the one of the airplane’s engines failed. The Tu-22M3 bomber was put down away from populated areas and Russia’s air force is now trying to figure out how to recover it for repairs....

“Ferrari is like a beautiful woman,” Ferrari chief Luca di Montezemolo explains. “You must desire her, you must wait for her.” That explains the two-year wait for a nearly $300,000 458 Spider model. Owners are members of a very exclusive club, and that’s been reflected in Ferrari’s long-time reign as “most popular” by discerning valet parkers at the nation’s top restaurants.These days it’s harder to get your Ferrari in the top parking spot, partially because of the rise in interest of special classic cars, as well as the proliferation of exotic car models from Lamborghini, Bentley, Maserati, and even Tesla....

Five years ago, when Yahoo was grasping for relevance via stunts such as buying Tumblr, it breathed new life into an icon of the early internet: Flickr. Yahoo had owned the photo-hosting giant since 2005 (and then arguably ran it into the ground). In 2013, though, Flickr roared back to life with a new enticement—a freakin’ terabyte of free storage, an offer that led lots of people to start using the site as a primary photo backup....

German environment minister Svenja Schulze has declared that the country would likely not meet its carbon emissions goal for 2020. Germany is one of the leading countries combating climate change, which makes its inability to curtail its own emissions troubling.As part of the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, each signatory country is asked to set ambitious goals for reducing emissions in that country, with the aim of limiting global warming to 2℃ or less by the end of the century....

Media Platforms Design TeamMy owner’s manual says I should change the transmission fluid every 30,000 miles, but my father swears it should be changed as often as engine oilevery 4000 to 5000 miles. Will frequent changes damage my transmission?The only thing frequent fluid changes harm is your walletassuming, of course, those changes are performed properly. Frequent changes increase the chance that you or an absentminded mechanic might pour incompatible ATF into your car, strip out a transmission pan bolt, or incorrectly install a new gasket or filter....

Devon JarvisAt least half of the wood chairs we own are wobbly. We’ve tried every adhesive we can think of to fix themwhite glue, yellow glue, epoxy, polyurethane. Nothing seems to work. What do you suggest we do?Glue alone won’t work. It’s natural to think that it would do the joblike most homeowners, you squirted some glue into a loose joint and hoped for the best. But unfortunately, applying a thick glob of adhesive is actually counterproductive....

“Mad” Mike Hughes, a daredevil and prominent supporter of the flat-Earth theory, died February 22 after his homemade rocket crashed into the ground.The rocketeer hoped to reach the Kármán line, the point at which Earth’s atmosphere and outer space meet, about 62,000 feet above the surface of the globe. In 2018, Hughes strapped into and launched a similar rocket, reaching heights of nearly 1,900 feet before crash-landing in the Nevada desert....

Media Platforms Design TeamBuried beneath a mile of ice in the center of Greenland is a beautifully preserved canyon more than 460 miles long and reaching depths of 2600 feet—similar in scale to parts of the Grand Canyon. Geoscientists who scouted the hidden landscape using ice-penetrating radar, which maps the topography of the land under the ice, in today’s issue of the journal announced the discoveryScience.In a press release, Jonathan Bamber of Bristol’s School of Geographical Sciences, lead author of the study, said: “With Google Street View available for many cities around the world and digital maps for everything from population density to happiness one might assume that the landscape of the Earth has been fully explored and mapped....

Applications like Google Photos’ image search are a terrific example of how neural networks can do the great and useful job of recognizing what is in a picture and helping you search for them. But what about going in the other direction? It’s a little iffier. As Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness explains, some AIs have had a decent amount of success with ginning up pictures based on text prompts, so far as the scope of the project is relatively constrained....

A new analysis shows that each U.S. nuclear plant reduced carbon emissions by an average 2 million metric tons in its first year alone.A handful of high-profile disasters have soured the public on nuclear power, but new reactors could change that.Researchers considered each plant opening and plant closure as an “event” to build an event study analysis.Economists have analyzed two decades of data to find how well nuclear power replaces traditional fossil fuel power plants, especially as part of an overall goal of reducing carbon emissions....

The Pentagon is planning to scale back annual military exercises in South Korea designed to simulate war on the Korean peninsula. The annual Foal Eagle exercise will be reduced “to a level that will not be harmful to diplomacy,” according to U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis. The joint U.S and South Korean exercise is held every year in the spring but is opposed by North Korea, which views it as two enemies practicing to invade and topple its government....

Energy storage is an increasingly large problem with renewable energy. Energy Vault wants to solve it by storing extra energy as potential energy in concrete blocks. The company recently received a major investment from Japanese holding company SoftBank.That money will allow Energy Vault to build its first full-scale prototypes.In August 2019, the Japanese multinational holding firm SoftBank invested $110 million in Swiss company Energy Vault. It was a major boon for the company, which has a somewhat unique take on renewables: It stores potential energy through the use of stacked concrete blocks....

When oil tankers crash and inevitably spill oil into the open seas, a go-to clean-up method is corralling the rapidly spreading oil and burning it. But in some places, like the ice-strewn Arctic ocean, physically corralling that oil with boats and boons is practically impossible. Now, there’s a better way to collect that leaked gunk—and the methods users, greener, more biodegradable chemicals, too. To make corralling that oil easier, chemists developed a tool called an oil herder....

A Tesla Model S, reportedly using the Autopilot feature, smashed into the back of a parked fire truck on a freeway accident scene in southern California.The Autopilot claim comes from the Twitter feed of the Culver City Fire Department, a small city within Los Angeles County though it has yet to be confirmed by an independent news outlet. Telsa has the capability of determining if and when a car had Autopilot enabled....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile testing the 2015 Volvo V60 T6 R-Design for a week, I came across an alluring feature that is a perfect fit for a technophile like myself: A real, honest-to-gosh web browser in the dash. Besides being really quite useful, it could show how cars will connect in the future.The sporty ride, which is shaped a bit like the station wagon my dad drove in the 70s, offers the typical tech extras you’d expect in a 2015 car, such as an iPhone or Android app that shows you how much fuel is left in the tank and the ability to call a human being at the push of a button....

As far as companies screwed over by the internet go, it’s hard to beat Blockbuster Video. The company’s precipitous decline in the streaming age has now reached its near-nadir: As of August, there will be only one operating Blockbuster store in the entire country. It’s in Bend, Ore.According to a report by the Anchorage Daily News, the last two Blockbuster stores in Alaska are closing their doors for good. The two stores—in Anchorage and Fairbanks—will remain open through August to sell off their inventory....

The V-22 Osprey is built to transport U.S. special operations commandos long distances, and mid-air refueling comes with the territory. This video certainly makes Osprey refueling look like a harrowing experience, yet this is a job the aircraft carry successfully out around the world every day. View full post on YoutubeThe Air Force made the decision to buy a fleet of long-range special operations transports after Operation Eagle Claw, the 1980 failed attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran....

There are lots of exciting lunar events to look forward to this year, including four lunar eclipses. First, a brief explanation of what we mean when we say “lunar eclipse.” During a total lunar eclipse, when the moon passes through the innermost portion of the Earth’s shadow, it takes on a coppery color A partial lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes through even a small part of Earth’s inner shadow, called the umbra....

When a big blaze like California’s Camp Fire ignites, animals do about what you’d imagine they do: run like hell. Interestingly, however, many of them likely enjoy a bit of a head start. Just as children somehow sense the approaching apocalypse that is the annual “back to school” period, animals pick up subtle cues that wildfire season is in the offing.Related StoriesJamie Hyneman’s Apocalypse Firefighting TankPhotos of the California Wildfires’ ProgressionExperts aren’t certain precisely what tips them off—a smell, certain sounds, the increased presence of high school burnouts wantonly flicking their Bics in the backcountry—but something sets animals on edge and helps them stay ahead of encroaching flames....

Media Platforms Design TeamAny woodcutter will tell you that there are few machines that offer the power-to-weight ratio and productivity of a traditional gas engine chainsaw. So how could an electric hope to compare in a straight-up test?If you look at the full range of woodcutting performance—not simply power but also noise, speed, and ease of use‚Äìthen the test becomes more interesting. So we staged a face-off between two remarkable little saws, both from Stihl....