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Whiteman Air Force Base, home to America’s B-2 strategic bomber fleet, released a video showing one of its planes dropping not one but two Massive Ordnance Pentrator (MOP) bombs. The world’s most powerful non-nuclear bombs, MOPs can penetrate up to 200 feet of reinforced concrete to strike targets deep underground.View full post on YoutubeThe video, posted to YouTube by The Aviationist website, shows a B-2 bomber with the tail number 82-1066....

Five years from now, this hunk of remote ground will be the place for shuttling tourists to suborbital space, launching small satellites, and serving as a hub for all things new space. Or so the tenants of Spaceport America and the New Mexico state government hope. But right now, the easiest thing to notice about Spaceport America is that it’s empty. There’s a full-scale model of SpaceShipTwo in an otherwise empty hangar and a garage full of firetrucks for emergencies that aren’t happening yet....

In 1859, Australia began constructing a 3,488 mile long fence, the longest in the world. The fence cuts off the populous, fertile southeastern part of the country, where Melbourne and Sydney are located, from the harsh, arid outback. Why did this happen? We get the answer in the form of a new video from Half as Interesting. View full post on YoutubeLong fences were originally constructed in western Australia to contend with the continent’s terrible rabbit problem....

Scientists and engineers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are halfway through building a new type of fusion reactor.The reactor draws on two different confinement methods to make the experiment work: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. The instrument is set to be completed by the end of next year. Engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico—birthplace of the Manhattan Project—are building a new machine that draws on two diverging methods of creating nuclear fusion....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe market defines the product, and the Tata Nano was specifically designed for India’s wild and primitive infrastructure. It’s India’s version of the Ford Model T and VW Beetle, a $2500 minimalist car meant to put India and other developing countries on wheels. But Tata has claimed that it will sell an EV version in Europe in a couple of years and U.S. sales may follow. It’s easy to see the functionality and the sheer importance of the Tata Nano in India, but how does the little runabout fit into the big picture in the U....

Thirty years ago this week, a truly remarkable airplane first took to the skies. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, a tailless flying wing, wasn’t just the U.S. military’s first operational flying wing, but only the second designed with stealth as a primary consideration. Since its debut, the aircraft has participated in nearly all of America’s wars and military actions over the past three decades. View full post on YoutubeThe B-2 originally began life as the vaguely named Advanced Technology Bomber....

Update: Since we published this story last week, Nissan has announced that the base price for the 2012 Leaf will increase to $35,200 (before government tax rebates), nearly $2500 more than the 2011 model. The Leaf SV is up to $37,250. However, both models will include a new cold weather package. According to The New York Times, the Chevy Volt will drop in price for 2012, from about $41,000 to $39,995....

On Friday, the world helplessly watched an unresponsive small plane run out of fuel and crash in the Caribbean. Could we have done anything to save it?Air traffic controllers lost contact with a Socata TBM-700 carrying a prominent Rochester, N.Y. couple from their hometown to Naples, Fla. The single-engine turboprop went off course around an hour into its flight, shortly after a pilot requested permission to descend from above 25,000 feet to 18,000 feet due to an unspecified problem....

Media Platforms Design Team The Army doesn’t have an Iron Man suit. Yet. But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Warrior Web program is a step closer to developing a soft, low-powered exosuit that will augment the physical capabilities of soldiers. Worn under the uniform, the proposed suit will allow troops to carry 100-plus pounds of equipment without risking the joint and back injuries that typically accumulate in the field....

After a major website’s shutdown, 3D printed gun blueprints face another hurdle: Facebook is blocking sites that host digital blueprints to make guns on 3D printers from using their social media platform, according to Buzzfeed.Facebook’s decision comes amidst a multi-state attack on 3D-printed guns, which itself was prompted by the State Department’s recent decision to drop charges against the group Defense Distributed’s website DEFCAD. DEFCAD, one of the world’s most prominent distributors of 3D printed gun files, had been facing charges that it had been allowing the transfer of weapons of war overseas....

(Published in the January 1999 issue)More: The Physics of a Tennis ServeIf you’ve got the guts of a professional–but the swing of a novice–Wilson Sporting Goods has a tennis racket for you. The company’s new Hyper Sledge Hammer racket is clearly the lightest and most powerful tennis racket now on the market–made specially for the average player. The racket promises those of you with light swings or a bunting style a whole new world of control and power....

Media Platforms Design TeamMorgan Rauscher might just be the quintessential 21st-century Renaissance man. He is at once an artist and an entrepreneur, as comfortable in a machine shop as he is in a computer lab. Fluent in no fewer than a dozen programming languages, he dabbles in such fields as cybernetics and robotics but is also an ace with a belt sander. And at last weekend’s World Maker Faire, he was manning a booth and hawking computer hardware of his own design, while the passing crowds oohed and aahed at his latest creation: Zeugen V2....

Finding the best deal on plane tickets can be a confusing, stressful process. There are so many websites that purport to be helpful, and so much conflicting advice about how to look and when to buy. To make it all easier on yourself, start here.When to ShopThe first rule of searching for flights: Start looking as far in advance of your trip as possible. Last-minute price drops don’t happen often enough for that to be a useful planning strategy, and you’re also likely to make a better decision when you’re not panicking....

A rash of unusual activity, coupled with new construction at the world-famous testing ground of Area 51, has aviation enthusiasts wondering if the base is gearing up to help with the development of a new bomber. Some evidence seems to point to the secret site’s involvement in the Air Force’s B-21 Raider program, designed to create a new stealth bomber to penetrate advanced enemy defenses.Currently under development for the U.S. Air Force, the B-21 Raider is America’s first new heavy bomber in thirty years....

Like a lot of guys who love cars, I’m fascinated by mechanical devices. The weirder and the bigger, the more I’m intrigued. And then there’s the pull of history that attracts me to machinery; I like to trace its development back to its roots. I am not alone in this, either. Guys who like muscle cars wonder, “What came before?” So they go back to the Chrysler Hemis of the mid-1950s....

Mountains and cliffs are among the most tantalizing spaces on Mars or any other rocky planet. The problem? Martian rovers like Curiosity and the upcoming Mars 2020 rover are limited by how much terrain they can cover with wheels. To get to the highest peaks, NASA needs to climb. And for that, the Agency is developing technology gleaned from its experiments with a four-limbed robot named Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot, or LEMUR for short....

A spacecraft, spinning in Earth’s orbit, reaches inside itself. One of its four arms pulls out a length of polymer pipe that has been 3D-printed inside the body of the machines. All four of the spacecraft’s arms are securing pieces together as it builds a new space station right there in orbit.This surreal project, called Archinaut, is the future vision of space manufacturing company Made In Space. The company promises a future of large imaging arrays, kilometer-scale communications tools, and big space stations all built off-planet by smart robots....

Anew report by the Center for Public Integrity claims the private nightmare of nuclear specialists around the world has come true: someone, somewhere has the nuclear material to make a nuclear bomb—and they’re trying to sell it. The story reads like something from a Tom Clancy novel. Identically packaged samples of highly enriched uranium have been seized by authorities three times since 1999, in Bulgaria, France, and Moldova.The danger is that this nuclear material could be used to create a “dirty bomb”—a conventional explosive device jacketed with highly radioactive material, which would then be dispersed into the environment....

In an ingenious Reddit post this week, user Gedanke shared an image of a “Gaussian Prime that looks like Gauss.” That’s it up there, in all its glory.So who’s the guy in the picture? Carl Friedrich Gauss was a legendary 18th century mathematician who did foundational work on prime numbers. He was the first to find a pattern in how prime numbers occurred, and even has a type of prime number named after him, from which the image above is entirely drawn....

Update, Oct. 4: The mission will go on. Planetary scientists behind the MAVEN Mars mission announced yesterday that they have received an exemption to the federal government shutdown. While most of NASA remains furloughed, MAVEN scientists can resume their plans to launch the explorer during its Nov. 18 to Dec. 7 window.Media Platforms Design TeamThe government shutdown isn’t just closing the doors of various federal agencies. Its effects could be felt even beyond our planet....