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Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubePeople stuck on a plane are the happiest when they’re eating and sleeping. This not-quite-groundbreaking finding comes courtesy of British Airways “happiness blankets,” the airline’s newest way to figure out how to handle passengers and our anger issues.Passengers on flights between New York and London tried out the blankets, which, when paired with putatively neurosensing headbands that purport to reveal people’s mental states—woven into the wool blankets are fiberoptics, which change color based on the data they receive, via Bluetooth, from the headbands....

Media Platforms Design TeamThough it was styled with all the élan of a kitchen appliance, the outoing Corolla was a mighty sales success for Toyota, moving nearly 40 million units on a platform that’s been around for nearly a half century. But as automakers will do, Toyota has transformed the 11th generation of its workaday compact into a bigger car with more features and snazzier sheetmetal.For 2014, Corolla’s wheelbase has stretched to 106....

The vast majority of the 200-plus UAVs in use in the United States are military craft. But the 11-model civilian fleet is expected to grow. The planes below – drawn to scale – are all operational and represent the future of unmanned flight.Global ObserverMedia Platforms Design TeamPowered by a liquid hydrogen fuel cell, California-based AeroVironment’s UAV can stay aloft for a week at 65,000 ft., providing low-cost communications relays and aerial mapping....

When you rank countries by internet speed, the United States comes in 12th with an average of 11.5 Mbps. It could definitely be better, but it could also be a whole lot worse. In Cuba, for instance, traditional internet is almost non-existent. But a thumb-drive based alternative has sprung up in its place. A post on Backchannel describes the network—locally known as “El Packete”—which works kind of like an more robust version of old-school, mail-based Netflix....

J MuckleYou can have a ‘67 Mustang in the driveway, a Gibson Les Paul guitar in your hand, and a date with destiny down at the roadhouse open mic—but if you can’t find your car keys, you’re staying home tonight. The cure for such episodes is this combination shelf and coat rack, which I designed and built for my own front hallway. Its three cubbyholes provide more than enough space to store everything from car keys and harmonicas to a porkpie hat (if you’re so inclined)....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: German Aerospace Center, DLR) In what is certainly the coolest looking space-station experiment of the year, astronauts aboard the ISS are levitating and cooling perfect spheres of white-hot, liquid metal.Why? Because scientists are curious about how metal structures itself, especially on the molecular side, when it cools free from the unending pull of gravity we feel on Earth. In the experiments, the metal (which is locked in place with a strong electromagnetic field) is rapidly cooled in a process called quenching—the same process as a blacksmith dipping a hot steel blade in water to harden it....

Media Platforms Design TeamFirst Hyundai and Kia suffered the slings and arrows of overestimated fuel economy figures, and now Ford is taking heat over the efficiency claims of their C-Max Hybrid—but this time, the real world discrepancies are considerable.The buzzkill for Ford is huge: The C-Max has gone from being the quickest selling hybrid in history to becoming a poster child for inaccurate fuel economy claims. Even automotive journalists are disgruntled over the real world MPG numbers produced by the small hatchback....

If Breaking Bad taught the world anything (aside from the fact that you should stay far away from everything involving meth), it was that stealing an entire ATM is pretty much pointless. Even if you peel away the husk of buttons and screens and cabinetry, you’re still left to crack a safe in the center. This is the curious contradiction of the ATM, a big box of cash that easily dispenses whatever sum you request yet is secure enough to be left out in public....

Trapped in amber, preserved for all time, is one of the weirdest and most terrifying arachnid fossils scientists have ever come across. In research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution as separate papers, researchers reported an arachnid that resembles a cross between a scorpion and a spider. Like modern spiders, it has spinnerets likely used to spin webs. But it also retains a telson, a trait common in more primitive arachnids and some crustaceans....

If, after the shelving of the space shuttle program, you feared that America had lost its adoration for space travel, this should help. In July, 46 years to the day after the first moon walk, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., started its first Kickstarter campaign, asking for money to preserve the spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore when he stepped off Apollo 11 onto the moon in 1969....

In cosmology, destruction is not arbitrary chaos, but constructive and totally necessary, clearing the way for future growth. We, and the Russian-nesting-doll of living systems that support us, are evidence of this fact. Steven Benner, an origin-of-life researcher at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida, would agree. In 2018, Benner invited geologists, chemists, biologists, and planetary scientists together to share their latest thinking on how life began. Using evidence gathered from each of their fields, the experts began piecing together a vast universal puzzle, revealing new theories on the emergence of complex molecules such as RNA (ribonucleic acid)....

NASA recently gave six teams of aeronautics experts the green light to research and design the future of aviation. Funded by NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project, the six proposals were selected from a group of 17. And they are wild ideas, including turing the body of a plane into a flying battery.Doug Rohn, who manages NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (of which CAS is a part), hopes each proposal will help answer two of NASA’s current questions about aeronautics....

A U.S. Navy ship sunk during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942 was found this St. Patrick’s Day, 76 years later. A research team sponsored by Microsoft cofounder and billionaire Paul Allen has rediscovered the wreck of the Navy light cruiser USS Juneau. The find follows Allen’s rediscovery earlier this month of the lost carrier Lexington.The loss of the Juneau became famous because all five brothers of the Sullivan family served—and perished—on the warship....

People who search for aliens on Earth are likely thinking of little green men and flying saucers in the sky, but what if they should be looking at tentacles in the sea? A recent paper claims that octopuses and other cephalopods have their origins on a different planet, brought here as eggs on some asteroid in our planet’s distant past.It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, and almost certainly not true, but the idea of life on Earth originating from somewhere else is not as completely ridiculous as it might seem....

Media Platforms Design TeamThink of your respiratory system as an upside-down tree. When you take a breath of air, it embarks on a complicated journey, beginning at the base of the tree’s stump and moving downward through increasingly smaller branches, eventually ending up in the leaves. But instead of leaves, there are tiny air sacs called alveoli, of which each lung contains millions. Wrapped around the alveoli are miniature blood vessels called capillaries....

For the next two weeks, the sun will be positioned between Earth and Mars in an event called the Mars solar conjunction. NASA will be pausing all commands sent to the Red Planet, and all but one spacecraft will stop transmitting new data to Earth. That means the Curiosity rover is taking a break. The “command moratorium” will last two weeks, according to a NASA statement.NASA and its partner agencies are currently running six Mars missions....

The U.S. Army is sending a robotic Humvee to the gun range to see if an autonomous vehicle can accurately engage targets with its remote-controlled machine gun. The killer Hummer is part of the “Wingman” program to develop vehicles that can tag along with U.S. Army forces and do the most dangerous jobs. The Humvee is also testing a new electrically fired machine gun designed to deliver firepower on the battlefield....

In 2022, the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force will take possession of a frigate with one of the most powerful combat information centers (CICs) in the world. Normally a CIC, a dimly lit room isn’t much to get excited about, but this is different. The “Advanced Integrated CIC” set to go on the ship features a 360 degree wall of video monitors, augmented reality, and large tactile tables for mission planning and other tasks....

Thomas Hunt has a hobby we can get behind: He takes the Star Trek movies and removes the characters, showing only the ship scenes. It seems … oddly specific. But give him credit: Even if The Search for Spock was just an okay Star Trek film, the Enterprise blowing up was pretty sweet. And the reveal of the Enterprise-A at the end of The Voyage Home is an excellent moment. Given that the theatrical cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is basically just three hours of tracking shots, it shouldn’t be surprising that it is Hunt’s longest video, clocking in at 25 minutes....

In the years since World War II, much mythmaking has mucked up history with various often incredible claims about the effectiveness of certain weapons. And no country’s wartime record is more muddled than Germany’s, whose arms and armies have attracted legions of devoted fans. From the battleship Bismarck to the V-2 rocket, Germany’s weapons have near a mythic hold on history like few others. But how effective were these weapons really?...