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View full post on YoutubeGlaciers are not simply the enormous, placid rafts of ice they appear to be. They’re active on the inside, with water flowing through a complex network of fractures and melt pockets that change all the time. We can’t see it. But, according to new research, we can hear it.Scientists stuck some seismometers into Gorner Glacier in the Swiss Alps. As lake water flowed through the glacier, the seismometers picked up tiny tremors and the sounds of icequakes at the glacier’s base....

Until someone mass-produces a usable version of the power loader exoskeleton from Aliens, your throwback ’80s sci-fi gear of choice is the Ghostbusters’ proton pack. The Anovos kit you see here, with its fiberglass-and-metal body, its working toggle switches, and that war-weary proton wand, is about the closest thing you’ll have to the real thing until you smuggle the real thing out of a prop shop.CPIICPIIThere’s good news and bad news, though....

The 2007 Panasonic World Solar Challenge isn’t officially over until October 28. But a winner has already been declared – Dutch team Nuon Solar, with an average time of 90.7 kmph over 3000 km. That’s not exactly unexpected news, since Nuon won the previous three WSC races.More shocking is the fact that two solar cars from the United States have crashed, including the University of Michigan’s much-hyped and extremely well-funded Continuum....

Today, NASA is launching a next-generation weather satellite. GOES-S will be sent up in an Atlas V rocket later today, where it will be placed in a geosynchronous orbit above the Pacific ocean. Once there, it will undergo several months of testing before being turned over to NOAA and begin sending high-resolution weather data to meteorologists around the globe.Earlier this week, we took a look at GOES-S and its technical specifications....

(Published in the August 2004 issue)More: The best running shoes might be no shoes at all - Barefoot RunningListen. Your knees are talking to you. When you run, your knees bear the brunt of the shock of your feet striking the ground. And they let you know about it. Cushioning, or damping, this shock has long been the holy grail of running shoe manufacturers. Shoe engineers are forever looking at ways to cushion shock by smoothly and evenly decelerating the runner’s foot at heel impact....

Back in early October, AOL announced that AOL Instant Messenger, known simply as AIM, would be shutting down on December 15, 2017. Well, the day has come—AIM is officially dead.View full post on TwitterIt’s death was a longtime coming with chat services like GChat and social networks like Facebook rendering AIM irrelevant for more than a decade. The AOL team doesn’t actually give a specific reason for why AIM is shuttering, but lack of users—especially on smartphones—is likely the killing blow....

Berkeley startup Air Protein announced it’s made protein “out of thin air” using microbes.Science and engineering continue to make better meat analogs and lab meat.Proteins that feed on byproducts offer a way to diversify agriculture and relieve environmental pressure.A startup in Berkeley, California is making a vegetarian meat analog from thin air, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The process involves feeding carbon dioxide to microorganisms that process the carbon dioxide into protein....

New KC-46A tankers fresh off the assembly line were found with “loose tools” and “bits of debris” in them left behind from the manufacturing process. In response, the U.S. Air Force halted deliveries of the new KC-46A Pegasus tanker until the situation is resolved. The service accepted the first of the long-awaited tankers just last month, in January 2019. The Seattle Times reported late last week the Air Force had discovered unwanted tools, bits of debris, and other garbage in various locations of KC-46A tankers....

India and Pakistan continued to escalate a military crisis that began earlier this month, with aircraft on both sides reportedly shot down. In addition, the armies of both countries are reportedly trading artillery barrages on the ground. The situation between the two countries is made worse by the fact both maintain stockpiles of nuclear weapons.The situation started on February 14th when a convoy of Indian paramilitary police forces in was attacked by a car bomb, killing 46 troops....

In a rare move, tight-lipped Apple has released an apology along with a technical explanation of how their batteries work, follows several recent stories (and lawsuits) concerning older iPhone battery degradation.“First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades,” the unsigned letter reads.The letter is the culmination of what started as a series of Reddit posts discussing how iPhone batteries seemingly get worse over time....

Scientist found that turbulence may be the driving force behind the detonation of explosions.They tested their theory by setting off small explosions in a five-foot-long tube.Understanding these explosions could reveal insight into the formation of the universe and provide more efficient and powerful means of air and space propulsion.Some of the smallest explosions in the universe are helping scientists unravel mysteries about the single largest: the Big Bang. Just how exactly do supernova explosions detonate?...

Media Platforms Design TeamI just bought a house with a roof that has seen better days. The shingles are worn and cupped, and there’s lots of rough-looking flashing. Anything I should worry about before I start interior repairs? “The roof comes first” is an old expression, but it remains as meaningful as ever. The roof is your home’s first defense against the elements, so don’t tackle any interior remodeling projects until you evaluate what’s above the eaves....

Proving that space is totally metal, astronomers have a new hypothesis of why they saw a white dwarf star gaining mass. It’s not fusing heavier elements, it’s just eating its planets. In the cosmic version of “Saturn Devouring His Son,” the star WD 1145+017 seemed to exhibit a few strange behaviors. The star is a white dwarf, a sort of husk after lower-mass stars have gone red giant and exhausted their fuel, burning husks of hydrogen only able to fuse into helium....

Today, Apple announced the latest version of its MacBook Pro. Notable among the new feature set are a 16-inch screen (it will replace the 15-inch version), a physical escape key, and—everyone who hated the old butterfly key mechanism, rejoice—an updated keyboard.Actually, the scissor switch on the 16 is similar to the system that preceded the much-maligned butterfly design, which spurred class-action lawsuits for allegedly being defective. In our brief hands-on time with the new Pro (available for pre-order now and in stores this Friday) at a press briefing in New York, typing was more satisfying....

Inventors and scientists have long tried to re-create how animals naturally act and move, but we’re still a long way from bio-bots that can match the real thing. A new study from Duke explains why today’s robots still can’t hold a candle to animals like shrimp, fleas, and ants.The superlative stats you can find in living creatures are staggering. A trap-jaw ant can hit speeds of 140 mph in a less than a millisecond....

Russia’s state nuclear agency has launched a new icebreaker, Ural, as part of the country’s plans to dominate the newly warming Arctic region. The nuclear-powered ship is one of three new icebreakers commissioned by Moscow to navigate waters choked with sea ice and smash its way through if necessary.The ship, Ural, is the third in the class of three Project 22220 icebreakers. The ship was constructed by the Baltic Shipyards of St....

Microsoft has placed its newest data center underwater, in the ocean off the coast of Scotland with the hopes that it will lead to similar sites in the future. The company ultimately sees the data center, which it calls Project Natick, as one of many “environmentally sustainable, prepackaged data center units” that could be sold in the near future.For that to happen, the units would have to be ordered to size, quickly deployed and then left to operate lights out on the seafloor without maintenance for years....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe reusable K-1 rocket, one of two designs that could ship cargo to the space station.It’s not a glamorous mission — hauling water, food, spare parts and clean clothes to the International Space Station (ISS) — but somebody has to do it. The shuttle was the truck of choice when my crew delivered the Destiny Laboratory to the ISS in 2001. But now, with the shuttle orbiters heading for retirement by 2010, NASA wants commercial suppliers to take on the orbital shipping job, to lower costs and spur industrywide innovation....

About 3.6 million years ago, humanity’s ancestors were walking upright on two legs. That’s much earlier than scientists had previously believed. But new fossil records contain footprints displaying clear signs of bipedalism, according to the scientists who studied them.David Raichlen, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Arizona, looked at two sites in Laetoli, a paleoanthropological site in northern Tanzania. He just presented his findings at Experimental Biology 2018.A site of historic importance, Laetoli is where famous anthropologist Mary Leakey and her colleagues found around 70 early human footprints....

If you read this blog regularly (thanks, Mom!), you may have gotten the impression (correctly) that I’m not terribly bullish on ethanol. Renewable, domestic, clean n ’ green: What’s not to like? Lots, actually. Never mind that we lack an efficient, wide-spread distribution system. Never mind that even if your car is E85 ready, it’s only going to get about 70% of the mileage it gets on straight gas. Never mind that we simply don’t have enough farmland to grow the corn we need to eat AND drive....