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The U.S. military speaks many languages. From the markings on tanks to the classification of aircraft, the armed services use a lot of symbology and abbreviated text to quickly convey information. The Armed Forces are all about efficiency, particularly in wartime, and the ability to quickly discern a lot of information from a simple glance is useful, particularly in high-stress situations.As an outsider, though, it can be hard to figure these things out....

Media Platforms Design Team1–OPTICAL DRIVE: dual-layer, dual format DVD writer with 48x CD-R ($100). Burns at up to 21.5MB per second.NEC ND-3500AWhy?2–GRAPHICS CARDS: Two nVidia 6800 Ultras ($500 each). Why? It’s not enough to have the most powerful graphics card on the market–so we got two of them.3–SATA HARD DRIVES: Two 74GB 10K RPM Western Digital Raptors ($240 each) + two 300GB 7.2K RPM Maxtors ($250 each) + one 400GB 7....

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is stepping out into the public world of competition. The boring and tunneling company has announced that it will bid to build a transit link between O’Hare airport and downtown Chicago.View full post on TwitterMayor Rahm Emmanuel has called a new transit system “essential for our city’s future.” The goal is for the entire trip to take 20 minutes and with fares that would be cheaper than Uber, Lyft, or a taxi....

Long gone are the days when musicians had to pay hundreds of dollars an hour to use a professional recording studio. A series of powerful and affordable music production programs have made it easy to write and build a hit track with a laptop and a pair of headphones and nothing embodies this new norm like Ableton—a leading piece of production software.Buying the software is easy, but taking full advantage of Ableton’s incredible power and scope requires some education....

Only a few companies make avalanche transceivers, and probably no one makes a bad one. But every few years there are some big advances, and this is one of those years: At least two significant new devices are generating interest here in Salt Lake City. Basically, a transceiver continually emits a signal while you’re traveling in avalanche terrain. If someone in the party is caught in an avalanche, the other members of the group turn their transceivers from “send” to “search....

A research team has made a quantum chip using more stable, multi-electron quantum dots.The same team has been working on a quantum dot periodic table of its silicon artificial atoms.An electrical charge draws electrons, which arrange themselves into layers and form quantum dots.Australian scientists have used artificial atoms called quantum dots to make a quantum silicon chip they say is surprisingly stable. The quantum dots make quantum bits, or qubits, and the qubits’s instability has been a bottleneck in designing this kind of chip....

Russia launched the world’s longest submarine today, the special mission submarine Belgorod. Designed to support a variety of military missions, including the Poseidon long-range strategic nuclear torpedo, the sub is far larger than anything operated by any other naval force, including the U.S. Navy. The six hundred foot long submarine displaces more water than a World War I battleship and can dive to a depth of 1,700 feet.The submarine was launched today, April 23rd, at the Sevmash shipyards in Russia, with Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly watching via satellite....

For 30 years, the space shuttle fleet was the way for Americans to get to space. It carried Hubble, portions of the ISS, satellites, and countless astronauts. As the first reusable crew vehicle in NASA’s fleet, the shuttle was an aerospace icon until the program was shut down in 2011. Now, LEGO City has a LEGO Spaceport playset, helping put the location of LEGO City firmly in an equatorial region somewhere....

The U.S. Air Force awarded major defense contractor Lockheed Martin a $928 million contract to develop a weapon designed to fly more than five times faster the speed of sound. These hypersonic weapons are designed to overwhelm enemy defenses with blistering speed and provide the capability to strike targets where the time window is tight. The contract, announced by Air Force Magazine among others, is in support of the Air Force’s hypersonic conventional strike weapon (HCSW) project, pronounced “Hacksaw....

The crowning attraction of New York City’s new luxury neighborhood Hudson Yards is a weird geometric structure called the Vessel, which looms over the 28-acre complex in midtown Manhattan like a giant honeycomb.The Vessel is pure selfie-bait: With crisscrossing staircases that meander into the sky, it’s a blatant tourist trap that cries out for Instagram. And therein lies the problem: According to Gothamist, Hudson Yards already claims full rights to any photos taken by visitors in the Vessel’s immediate vicinity....

There are plenty of ways Mars wants to kill you. It has very little atmosphere. It’s cold. There are thick dust storms. The planet doesn’t protect the surface from deadly space radiation the way that Earth does. But the biggest challenge for humans who want to go there might be the most basic one: You gotta eat.“One of the things that’s extremely clear is that the life on Mars, for the first people that arrive there, is going to be like camping out in the fuselage of an airplane,” Douglas Paulson says....

Shawn James is very good at building cabins in the woods. Working under the YouTube name My Self Reliance, he silently goes through the step-by-step process of building a cabin in the Canadian forest. Now you can watch him build his latest project in under five minutes (Though if you want a more in-depth look, watch this.)The timelapse makes everything look quick and easy, but building the actual cabin was months and months of work....

Media Platforms Design TeamBruce Lund, CEO of Lund & Co. Inventions, cemented his company’s reputation as the toy inventor that produced hit products, including Honey: My Baby Pony and TMX Elmo. But through a curious chain of events, his company’s latest product is a nonlethal weapon for the military nicknamed the Big Hurt.Lund’s road to weaponeer started as the company, which invents products for large toy sellers, was researching new power sources for toys....

Two award-winning science teachers and four students will start the Times Square countdown tonight.The theme is climate change, which countdown organizers say is a critical issue hugely affected by student action.Special guests are invited to push the button each year, beginning the 60-second ball drop to midnight.The organization that runs the nationally televised Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration has announced that this year’s countdown is dedicated to teachers and students who are studying and addressing climate change, Grist reports....

If you’re in need of a video that will lift your spirits, look no further than the one posted by The Collective Project today. The clip features Alex Pring, a 7-year-old boy who loves superheroes and bike riding, who was born with a partially developed right arm, receiving a brand-new 3D-printed arm by none other than Tony Stark himself.Getting the arm from Stark seems to be even more exciting than his superhero doppelganger, since the genius scientist is a bionics expert who addresses the little boy like any other colleague....

The cockpit of a jet fighter, Angkor Wat, a Paul McCartney concert—I visited all of them without wearing pants. Those weren’t my first experiences with virtual reality. I’d tested the Oculus Rift at tech conventions, and recently I explored a Volvo that wasn’t on the road yet. But I never got to bring virtual reality home and try it from my couch. Samsung Gear VR ($200) gave me that opportunity.The device requires a Samsung S6 or Galaxy Note 4 phone, headphones, and, if you want to take full advantage of the games, a $60 controller....

What’s the oldest living thing in the world? It’s not an easy question to answer. Some animals and plants can survive for hundreds or thousands of years, and because nobody was around when they were born it can often be difficult to get an exact age, according to the BBC.The oldest known animal, for which a precise age can be measured, is a clam discovered in Iceland in 2006. Clams are easy to age because scientists can count the number of rings on their shells....

If you want to do a caveman’s job, just hire a robot. That’s what researchers at Monrepos Research Center in Neuwied, Germany are trying to do as they research Stone Age tools. They’re using robots to take replica tools and scrape animal hides over and over again to find out for sure how certain Neolithic tools were used. The researchers are hoping to emulate the wear patterns they’ve seen in artifcats to determine how the tools were used by ancient humans and their relatives....

The 2019 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 is completely awesome, a 755-hp racetrack-slaying scythe of a car. The last Corvette ZR1 was generally noted for being more user-friendly than the Z06—that is, the ZR1 felt less hard-core despite its extra horsepower. Not this one. No, this ZR1 reminds you, every chance it gets, that it’s basically a race car. Driving on a cold road—even a dry one—is like driving a normal car on ice....

Media Platforms Design Team5 Ways the G1 is Better Than the iPhone5 Reason’s the iPhone’s Still Number One1. The G1’s Not a Real Media Player … YetThe iPhone doesn’t just play back video–it’s one of the best (and best-looking) portable media players on the market. While we’ll certainly see developers making video playback programs for the G1, there are none built into it. But Apple beware: If there’s one thing the open-source development community loves, it is support for a wide range of video formats and codecs....