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NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is coming up on its second year studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere. But it had to make an unexpected maneuver this week as it came face to face with an unlikely foe—a Martian moon named Phobos.The larger of Mars’ two moons, Phobos’ defining feature is a giant crater on its surface, Stickney, and a smaller crater within that crater, Limtoc. It moves around Mars faster than Mars rotates, and it became clear last week that it was going to be on a course missing the MAVEN satellite by only seven seconds....

Scientists have found an extinct squid ancestor in a 100-million-year-old, 3-centimeter-long piece of Burmese amber. The ammonite (a marine mollusk) was the last thing researchers expected to uncover, as it’s the first ammonite, let alone one of very few marine-dwelling animals, ever found in amber.The relic surfaced when a Chinese collector purchased the item from a seller who touted the fossil as a land snail.View full post on TwitterAmber comes from the fossilization of plant resins found on land, so finding marine creatures in it is super rare....

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — A cargo plane that was reportedly overloaded crashed along the banks of the Nile River after taking off from the South Sudan’s capital, killing at least 25 people, witnesses and officials said.An Associated Press reporter at the scene of the crash saw the bodies, including those of women children. Parts of the plane were scattered in a bushy area on banks of the Nile with a few homes nearby....

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the parent company of Budweiser, just launched its barley seeds into space. It’s the fourth in a series of experiments meant to test how the seeds germinate in microgravity.The seeds flew aboard SpaceX’s Dragon Cargo capsule, which launched today and will eventually return to Earth for genetic testing. The company aims to be the first to brew beer on Mars. Think your basement brewing project is tough? Try brewing beer in space....

After teasing it at this years E3 conference, Microsoft has officially announced a cloud-based game streaming service called Project xCloud, which aims to let you play Xbox games on your smartphone. Like similar streaming services before it, none of which have yet managed to supplant the traditional console-under-your-TV approach, the service would relegate all the computational heavy lifting to computers in a data center far away, and beam the game play directly to your hands in real time....

Concrete is a fantastic building material, but if you’ve ever walked down a poorly-maintained sidewalk, you know it deteriorates over time. As concrete ages and dries out, cracks form in the material and it grows weaker. Eventually, concrete with too many cracks will crumble and fall apart.A group of researchers from Binghamton University and Rutgers University wanted to find a way to prevent concrete from growing weaker. Their solution? Embedding a fungus into the concrete to give it healing properties....

After the question has stumped scientists for more than a century, a college student has finally explained why bubbles “stick” inside very narrow tubes of liquid.Observations about bubbles in glasses of beer or tap water relate only broadly to these few-millimeters-thick tubes.The scientist bounced light off of the bubble and tube to measure thickness of a film holding the bubble in place.A college student in Switzerland says he’s solved a 100-year-old physics problem....

Two more answers for a complex math problem have been found.Called the “summing of three cubes,” the challenge is to find x, y, and z.It took over a million computing hours to find the solution. For decades, a math puzzle has stumped the smartest mathematicians in the world. x3+y3+z3=k, with k being all the numbers from one to 100, is a Diophantine equation that’s sometimes known as “summing of three cubes....

Back in April, NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence ofliquid water on Mars. Still, this is no life-friendly oasis: The water is hyper-salty, ultra-cold, and contained in fleeting layers of sludge trapped beneath the red planet’s regolith soil. Nonetheless, it completes the trifecta of requirements for Earth-like life. We now know Mars has soil-bound nutrients, a carbon monoxideenergy source for hungry microbes, and liquid water.The scientists behind the water discovery, including Morten Bo Madsen at the Niels Bohr Institute, say that “finding life on Mars still doesn’t look very probable, because it’s simply just too cold and/or too dry” on large swaths of the planet....

Media Platforms Design TeamI built my first bookcase in middle school. A multitiered assemblage of wooden planks laid across stacks of bricks, it was reminiscent of pieces from the early Flintstone Period–and I was proud to have made it myself. Since that masterpiece, I’ve built 50 or 60 more, most while working as a cabinetmaker for an interior design firm, where I learned the carpentry skills, design guidelines and construction techniques used in the bookcase shown here....

Yesterday, we found out about a wide-reaching security exploit that affects a decade’s-worth of computer processors. As the details dribbled out, it became clear there two distinct but related exploits “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” and while the lingering effects will likely haunt us for years, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself right now. Both Meltdown and Spectre exploit a feature of computer processors called “speculative execution.” This is when a CPU performs an action before it necessarily knows if it needs to be done, a key method in letting it do its job as fast as possible....

Japan’s public TV station, NHK, mistakenly issued a warning that a North Korean missile was incoming this morning, just days after a similar gaffe in Hawaii left citizens expecting a nuclear attack for over 30 minutes. Fortunately, Japan’s NHK was able to retract the false alarm in a matter of minutes. Related StoriesHawaii Sends Out Terrifying False Missile Alarm Does a Fallout Shelter Actually Protect You?The alarm, which went out on Twitter as well as the stations website and mobile app, urged citizens to seek shelter after the apparent launch of a North Korean missile....

Quantum computing is just over the horizon. It’s crunching big numbers for NASA and Google, and Intel is investing big money to advance it over the next decade. But what is quantum computing, and how is it different from traditional computing? Even experts in the field at times have trouble bringing it into layman’s terms, but this video is a great start to learning quantum computing in less than seven minutes....

By attaching circular magnets to an AA battery, you can make a little homopolar motor that uses an electric current and magnetic field to propel itself across a conductive surface. It’s one of the simplest motors around, and you can make it at home with supplies from the hardware store. There are a number of examples of simple homopolar motors that rotate a conducting wire around an AA battery, but Magnetic Games took it a step further by attaching circular magnets to the ends of batteries to make little homopolar motorcars....

Media Platforms Design TeamHeavy rains and flooding are likely to continue in the northeastern United States over the next few days, after recent storms that caused levees to collapse, homes and vehicles to be swept away, and several reports of deaths and missing persons. It’s reminiscent of flooding in 2011 that which inundated neighborhoods in New England and the mid-Atlantic states that had remained above water since being built. This is the kind of weather that makes people wonder whether we’re seeing a long-term shift in climate....

Seventy-four years ago, in a remote stretch of desert outside Alamogordo, N.M., a brilliant flash of light heralded a new age. This week, a YouTube channel devoted to sharing video from America’s nuclear age has a newly remastered clip of the world’s first nuclear weapons test, codenamed Trinity.View full post on YoutubeThe YouTunnel channel atomcentral has been bringing important archival footage about nuclear weapons to the world’s attention for a dozen years now, covering topics as diverse as nuclear tests, missile production, and even interviews with individuals like Edward Teller, considered the father of the hydrogen bomb....

The first time I rented an RV, for a bachelor-party road trip more than a decade ago, I had no idea what I was doing. How, for example, do you empty the holding tanks when you bring it back? Where do you go to do that? How do you hook up the hoses? It all seemed fraught with peril, so I returned it without emptying the tanks, thus incurring a hefty charge....

On June 4, 2010, the Falcon 9 rocket took to the skies for the first time, launching from Cape Canaveral carrying a dummy model of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. In the first hour of Tuesday, March 6, Elon Musk’s space company reached another milestone, launching its 50th Falcon 9 from the same launch pad that hosted the maiden flight almost eight years ago. Since its first flight, the Falcon 9 has grown more than 50 feet and gained some 600,000 lbs....

Developer: MachineGames // Publisher: Bethesda Softworks // Release: May 20, 2014 // Systems: Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows // Price: $60At MachineGames, no one says the phrase “first-person shooter”—or any other acronym variation—in reference to their latest title, Wolfenstein: The New Order. It would be understandable if they did. A few minutes after pressing start, the game looks and feels like an FPS. But after you take a deeper dive, ford through an angry river of Nazis, and see what the game offers, the company’s hesitance to pigeonhole this game into the conventional category begins to make sense....

Microsoft has introduced two new foldable devices, the Surface Neo and the Surface Duo, directly competing with Samsung’s Galaxy Fold phone.To compete with Apple’s AirPods, Microsoft has introduced its own wireless earbuds.Fast charging will allow new devices like the Microsoft Surface 7 to charge.Seven years ago, Microsoft launched the first Surface.The devices have come a long way since then, culminating in the new tablet-sized Surface Neo and phone-sized Surface Duo (a swipe at Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold)....