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Media Platforms Design TeamWhen you go to a Michael Bay movie you know what to expect: beautiful cinematography, oversaturated colors, random hot women, and over-the-top mayhem. In out today, all the glorious Bay-hem is there.Transformers: Age of Extinction,The movie begins four years after the series’ third installment, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and the Autobot–human alliance is in shambles. The government is now hunting Transformers indiscriminately and melting them down for their priceless components....

The U.S. Air Force Academy isn’t just minting new officers. It’s also on the verge of producing its own stealth drone. Academy cadets have been working on a full-size stealthy drone since 2007. The unnamed aircraft will be tested in 2019 and could become the first aircraft designed by the academy to enter service with the U.S. Armed Forces.Work on the unnamed drone began in 2007, when faculty and cadets at the academy decided to move past the design study phase and actually build an aircraft....

View full post on InstagramAn image purportedly taken of a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor over Syria has surfaced on social media. The grayscale image was reportedly taken from the infrared targeting cameras of a Russian fighter jet. The image surfaced on Instagram account fighter_bomber_ with little explanation other than it was allegedly taken by a Russian Sukhoi Su-35 multi-role fighter. Known by NATO as “Flanker-E,” the Su-35 is capable of both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat and is roughly similar to a modernized F-15E Strike Eagle....

The report earlier this week confirmed what we thought was true: Dutch investigators concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile last July while en route to Amsterdam, leading to a crash that killed all 298 people on board the 777.But what’s still an open question, investigators and safety experts said this week, is why commercial airliners are still flying near over conflict zones at all....

“You know how Carl Sagan said that we have billions of stars? Well, we have billions of clocks,” says ­Carrie Partch. “Someday I think there’s going to be this palm-to-forehead moment where we all say: I cannot believe we didn’t understand that every form of life on this planet has a clock that links us to Earth and its terrestrial day.”Then Partch led a mindfulness meditation outside the temple at Burning Man while celestial gongs rang to celebrate a new day’s rising sun....

Walk into a brewery taproom today and it’s no surprise the menu is littered with IPAs. The hop bombs keep the lights on. But look to the corner of the beer list and you’ll likely see a humble lager. Order it. It’s the most carefully brewed beer on tap. While loud and bold IPAs are brewed for the consumer, subtle and highly drinkable lagers are brewed for the brewer. All beers in this great sudsy world trickle down from two streams: ales and lagers....

Now I know what it looks like when an armor-plated rhinoceros bashes into a field of soldiers.Ryan Coogler’s outstanding and eye-poppingly gorgeous Black Panther is the 18th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the one least connected to the rest of the franchise’s lore. That’s in keeping with the small and mysterious nation of Wakanda, which, for centuries, has maintained a strict policy of isolationism. [Warning: Spoilers ahead]Although it’s an atypical superhero film, director Coogler, cinematographer Rachel Morrison, and production designer Hannah Beachler are a superhero team-up in their own right, making Black Panther one of the most visually arresting and memorable Marvel films to date....

Media Platforms Design TeamSeattle–Back in 1996, Kia’s Sportage debuted as an innocuous offering amidst a sea of more menacing, oversized SUVs. In those days, the big boys got all the glory, while pint-size players assumed the humble role of glorified subcompact. That paradigm has since shifted against a backdrop of rising fuel prices and a stumbling world economy. Americans have changed the way they view transportation, and, at least in urban centers, bigger is no longer necessarily better....

The story of human evolution has taken remarkable turns in the last few years. What once seemed like a neat and tidy story of one human relative flowing into the next is shaping up to be the story of multiple migrations, several relatives, and cross-species interbreeding. A new paper published today in Nature adds another fold to this story. New evidence from a Russian cave reveals a first generation cross breeding between Neanderthals and their Asian cousins, the Denisovan, found in the teeny bone fragments of a prehistoric girl....

Ever since Bitcoin mania took the world by storm, thousands of people have been employing large computer rigs to mine them. According to a new study, those computer rigs are using so much power that in a few years they’ll begin to outpace many entire countries.Back in December, we highlighted an analysis that predicted Bitcoin energy demand would outpace the entire energy demand of Denmark within a few years. Well, over the past six months since then, energy use for Bitcoin has more than doubled, according to a new study published in the journal Joule....

Concept of a cold fusion reactor, or Energy Catalyzer.Media Platforms Design TeamCold fusion, or low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), is potentially an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But it’s a big idea with a bad name. Back in 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons published an experiment that suggested nuclear fusion, the merging of two or more atomic nuclei, is possible at near-room temperatures in the right conditions, rather than the incredible temperatures found where fusion happens inside the sun....

Home maintenance isn’t restricted to repairs. In fact, certain tasks– when performed regularly–may actually prevent things from breaking in the first place. But when things do go wrong (and it’s inevitable that they do), we have some backup plans that you can try before you grab the phone to call for pro. Appliances and plumbing are the most frequent offenders, but they also often can be the simplest to care for....

China’s J-10 fighter is now equipped with thrust vectoring controls that allow the jet to perform seemingly impossible aerial maneuvers. This long-rumored upgrade to a well-known jet fighter made its debut at the Zhuhai Air Show. View full post on YoutubeThe Chengdu J-10 “Vigorous Dragon” is a single-engine fighter developed for China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (the Chinese air force). The J-10 falls in the same general category as the American F-16, and the two planes even share the same DNA, as the Chinese jet was built with Israeli assistance from Israel’s F-16-based Lavi fighter....

Black Plastic or Landscape FabricPlastic and landscape fabric are typically used as base layers for more decorative mulches. They have the benefit of suppressing weeds and keeping moisture in the soil where it’s needed. The downside of black plastic is that moisture can’t get into the soil—and plastic isn’t especially attractive. If this is your preferred route, opt for rolls of black polyethylene that are 3 to 4 feet wide and 1 to 1....

That tricked out racing wheel your rich friend had back in grade school? That’s nothing compared to CXC Simulation’s Motion Pro II. Not only does it have a wrap around screen, force-feedback on the wheels, and motors that will jostle the chair around. It’s actually so powerful that a virtual crash could give you real injuries if you’re not careful.Before you get too jazzed (or scared) you should know this rig is almost certainly not for you....

Media Platforms Design TeamEditor’s Note: The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) made news this week more for what didn’t happen than anything that did.Back in December, PopMech traveled to the DRC at a speedway outside Miami. Teams brought their humanoid robots to demonstrate how those machines could help in the aftermath of a disaster. But the event was overshadowed by Google, which purchased two of the prominent teams at the DRC before the competition....

Unlike water or space heating, a home’s total electrical usage is the sum of many footprints, from small to large. You have a few light bulbs here, a toaster and a cordless phone there – and then the outsize items, such as clothes dryers and air conditioners. Taken together, these add up to more than one-third of a home’s energy consumption. That’s arithmetic Vermont homeowner Jon Floyd learned after hiring an energy auditor to help with a different problem: the drafts that had plagued his family during their first winter in a 34-year-old split-level ranch....

The transmission company Trans-Elect plans to build a $5 billion power-transmission backbone with the help of a major investment by Google. This ambitious project, called the Atlantic Wind Connection, will stretch 350 miles from Virginia to New Jersey, and can carry up to 6000 megawatts of power from ocean breezes to 1.9 million homes on the East Coast. A this point, however, there is no power to carry. The U.S. has yet to coax a single watt from offshore wind turbines....

On June 18th, 2017 Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael “M.O.B.” Tremel made history—he was the first pilot to shoot down an enemy airplane in 18 years. Tremel told his story at last week’s annual Tailhook convention for naval aviators, describing the tense aerial environment, which saw the skies over Syria filled with planes from nearly a half dozen countries, and what it was like to engage in combat the first time.Lieutenant Commander Tremel, a member of VF-87 (“Golden Warriors”) had launched off the aircraft carrier USS Bush in the Mediterranean Sea in support of U....

Ever download a folder full of files, only to notice all of the documents inside are zipped shut and encrypted—basically the digital version of Fort Knox? These are examples of the ever-wonderful, yet confounding zip file, identified by its extension, “.zip.” While the extra steps you must take to open these kinds of folders can be a minor annoyance, zip files really are your friend. Not only can you compress huge files into a compact size for sharing, but you can easily lock down the contents so that only the intended recipient can see what’s inside....