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Living on the Moon is still a completely foreign concept, and in all likelihood not that comfortable. It’s a cold, desolate place, and staying there for an extended period would likely require holing up deep underground. So to see what it would be like, European researchers and students have built a replica of the experience under the Swiss Alps. The IGLUNA project features 20 student teams from 13 universities, which are based in nine countries around Europe, with 150 students total....

We can psych ourselves up and try to get motivated all we want, but it’s often easier said than done. But recent research suggests that it can be scientifically crafted. All you need is a little motivation. And an fMRI scanner. The research, published today in Neuron (press release available here), involved setting up test subjects to an fMRI machine. From there, the researchers began to look at the region of the brain associated with motivation and concentration, somewhere in the ventral tegmental area....

With nearly 80 billion pounds of trash (and counting) spread across four official dumping sites, India is facing a waste crisis that is killing its citizens and worsening air and water quality.A dump site in New Delhi has been nicknamed ‘Mt. Everest’ due to its massive and increasing size.The pile is so dangerously large that India’s Supreme Court has said warning lights need to be added for aircraft visibility.Ghazipur, one of New Delhi’s gargantuan trash piles, has grown at an alarming rate since it opened in 1984 and reached capacity in 2002—just like New Delhi’s other notorious dumps....

In 1944, the SS Richard Montgomery, a Florida-built cargo ship laden with 1,500 tons of explosives, ran aground and broke in half in the Thames Estuary in England. The ship was never salvaged and remains in place to this day—where it may be a ticking time bomb that could set off a damaging rogue wave.The Richard Montgomery was a Liberty Ship, a type of transport ship meant to be manufactured quickly and in large quantities during World War II....

On New Year’s Day, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past an asteroid in the far reaches of our solar system, and the slow trickle of photos coming back to Earth is revealing the secrets of Ultima Thule. At first, Ultima Thule appeared as a blurry, snowman-shaped smudge in the blackness of space. A few weeks ago, NASA released a higher-quality image showing craters and other terrain on the asteroid’s surface. This newest image carries a surprise: Ultima Thule appears to be much flatter than astronomers thought....

On October 29, 1969, in this room at UCLA, a student programmer sent the first message using ARPANET, a precursor to the modern internet. The message didn’t go well. The programmer, Charley Kline, got halfway through the word login before the program crashed. It wasn’t a great start.It would take a few more decades until the internet started entering our homes, but its impact is almost incalculable. It’s transformed nearly every facet of life, and whole human generations identify around its existence....

Any time that code appears in a TV or movie, you can pretty much rest assured that it’s completely unrelated to whatever is happening on screen. Sometimes, as is the case with the 80s TV show Airwolf, it’s functional code that just needs some debugging. In the case of The Terminator, it was a pretty clearly last-minute copy and paste job of some arbitrary programs. YouTuber Behind the Screens explains: [youtube ]https://www....

Residents of the German town of Limberg woke up to a startling sight this morning: a crater in a field as large as a house. The explosion was apparently caused by a leftover bomb from World War II. Unexploded bombs are a problem in Germany and other European countries, as long-buried weapons periodically surface or spontaneously explode.The incident took place in the central German town of Ahlbach, just north of Frankfurt....

While there’s a sure-to-be-stunning Perseid meteor shower coming up later in the week, another spectacle is trying to steal the show tonight. Remnants of the comet PanSTARRS C/2017 S3 are going to pass by Earth on August 7, coming within 70 million miles of our planet. This likely marks the first time the comet has ever come into the inner solar system.This comet is famous for its green color and large size, leading some people to give it the nickname “Incredible Hulk....

Here’s the problem with road-tripping in a 2019 model car: You can see the future from here, but you can’t drive it.Case in point, a drenched night on I-64 in West Virginia. I am hugging the yellow line at the far left side of the fast lane, trying to give an extra-wide berth to the semitruck I’m passing—and I want to pass him fast, because the 18-wheeler is blasting our car with buckets of water....

A Carnegie Institution of Science-led team has found one of the most elusive objects in the universe: a fully formed galaxy just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.It’s a true rarity. Astronomers have only ever discovered one object of comparable size in this era of the early universe. The results were published today in papers in Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters. “The number of quasars as luminous and as distant as we’ve just found … there should be between 20 and 100 over the entire sky,” Eduardo Bañados of Carnegie and lead author of the study says....

Scientists have discovered a new class of celestial objects orbiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The objects behave strangely, like stars, even though their spectrographic images suggest they may just be balls of gas. Researchers believe they may have formed after two stars within a binary star system merged together to form one big star.Something weird is happening in the center of our universe....

I take a lot of pictures at conferences–sometimes for this Web site–and they’re often in low light. That’s a pain. You can use a flash, of course, but the small flashes built into most cameras these days don’t do much beyond a few feet. What’s more, flashes that are big enough to really help can be nearly as big as the camera itself, with their own sets of batteries, cables and the like....

Chinese shipyards are reportedly busy constructing what will be the largest destroyers in Asia. The yet-unnamed destroyers, tentatively called the Type 055 class, will be stealthy and packed with firepower. Despite the hype on the internet, it’s unlikely to be a super-ship. Instead, China’s next jump forward will likely have the Chinese Navy merely catching up with the rest of the region. The first reports of the Type 055 emerged in 2014, when photos of a giant land-based mockup of the ship’s superstructure—particularly the bridge and radar mast—were spotted in Wuhan, China, hundreds of miles from the ocean....

Detroit’s extremely long-delayed bronze statue of RoboCop will be finished in March.We’ve almost invented actual robot cops in the nine years it’s taken to complete the statue.The huge statue was delayed by copyright problems, manufacturing issues, and more.After nine years, Detroit is finally getting that RoboCop statue, dammit. The Detroit Free Press reports that the comically long-delayed statue’s parts are all fully fabricated, and now they’re all just waiting on a final weld and finishing patina....

DirecTV got special permission to send a volatile satellite to early retirement.Satellites can collide, and DirecTV’s satellite has “thermal damage” that could ignite even without a collision.In a perfect world, all retired satellites are drained of volatile fuel before they’re killed.DirecTV has asked for special permission to move a satellite it says is likely to explode in about a month, The Verge reports. The SPACEWAY-1 is part of parent company AT&T’s satellite TV fleet, launched in 2005 as part of a major satellite TV boom....

Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellites will be able to keep the U.S. military in communication even after a nuclear attack.They’re also more resistant to electronic jamming, which is a growing concern as tensions with China and Russia heat up.In the war of the future, nations may try to physically destroy other nations’ satellites to disrupt communications and navigation.Your phone is not going to work on the day nuclear war starts....

Media Platforms Design Team"It can be crazy to think that we recognize the need to tune up our motorcycle, but we don’t tune up ourselves or our judgment," Motorcycle Safety Foundation President Tim Buche says. “Our skills and our judgment can be kind of perishable.“The Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) offers riding courses on everything from motorcycling basics to specialized skills for dirt bikes, sport bikes, and even three-wheelers. If you are one of the 50 percent of American motorcyclists who has never taken a riding course, an MSF Basic RiderCourse still might have a lot to offer, even if you have years of experience....

The gladius sword became synonymous with the Roman Army’s ancient conquests. Mentioned first in a 1 AD biography of Alexander the Great, the gladius sword was the standardized weapon for the feared Roman foot soldiers. It was shot and double-edged, which made it a versatile tool for slashing or stabbing. Miller Knives shows how they can still be made today.View full post on YoutubeWhile there’s some controversy over what a true gladius sword looks like, since the Romans used several variations....

Biking is one of the oldest modes of transportation around, dating back to the early 19th century. But back then, you didn’t need to dish out thousands for a set of wheels nor deal with the complexities of choosing the right setup. Pure Cycles is on a mission to get back to those roots—and is making purchasing a bike simple and affordable again. Here are three options starting at just $399, each designed for a specific type of rider in mind....