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2020 is an exciting year for sci-fi movies. There are no major Avengers blockbusters (thanks to Thanos’ shenanigans last year), and Star Wars is a taking a cinematic hiatus. Maybe, just maybe, some other films can get a moment in the sun. But that doesn’t mean the next 12 months will be bereft of big films designed to fill movie theaters. While a couple intriguing ones dot the calendar (we personally can’t wait for Bill & Ted Face the Music,) Denis Villeneuve’s Dune will end 2020 with a bang, and hopefully create some kwisatz haderach fanboys and fangirls the world over....

Media Platforms Design Team(1) SMELLS LIKE: MAPLE SYRUPWHEN: After the engine has warmed or possibly even after it’s shut off for a few minutes.THE CULPRIT: Coolant containing sweet-smelling (but toxic) ethylene glycol is leaking from somewhere. It could be coming from a radiator or heater hose, a failed intake manifold gasket or cylinder head. It might be coming from a leaky radiator cap or the radiator itself, especially if you smell it outside the car....

If you pay a visit to the German town of Wittenberg, you can receive a blessing from a priest—except in Wittenberg, the priest is a robot.To be fair, there are human priests in Wittenberg, too, but the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau recently built a robot priest to give blessings as part of a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The robot, named “BlessU-2,” has a touchscreen, glowing hands, and can forgive your sins in five different languages....

Media Platforms Design TeamAlthough you’re an IndyCar driver, you still love go-karting. How does karting compare to your day job?Well, there are two things. We don’t drive the race cars as much as we used to because of the costs. In IndyCar especially, they have limited testing. The best workout for a race car driver is to drive, and it’s go-karting that gives you that. So, that’s No. 1. As far as reflexes and reaction, karting is the quickest thing you have in racing, to be honest....

A giant construction crane fell onto new Tappan Zee Bridge being constructed north of New York City, stopping traffic Tuesday afternoon on the key suburban highway crossing.No cars were hit by the crane, but Rockland County Executive Ed Day wrote on Twitter that three people suffered minor injuries when vehicles swerved and stopped to avoid the wreckage.View full post on TwitterVideo from a news helicopter showed at least one person being removed from a car and loaded into an ambulance....

At the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA Ames Research Center, engineers are working on a little robot cube that will be launched to the International Space Station later this year. The one-foot-cube robot, named Astrobee, will fly around the ISS with its tiny fan-powered thrusters to help astronauts with a variety of tasks.The little bot is being designed to replace the SPHERES robots that currently orbit on the ISS. Astrobee, however, will come with a few new tricks to make life easier in space....

The newly discovered dinosaur was an entire ton of carnivorous, flesh-ripping terror when it stalked the Earth millions of years ago. Also, it had silly little baby arms.A team of paleontologists led by Pete Makovicky, the head dinosaur curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, has just revealed a new species of two-legged carnivorous dinosaur. It is Gualicho shinyae, a distant cousin to the better-known Velociraptor and T. rex. According to the scientists, Gualicho is an especially interesting find because like the T....

Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $200On sale date: NowIn the past year, fitness tracking has been embraced by manufacturers and consumers. We’ve seen entries from Nike, Fitbit, Motorola, Jawbone, and Razer all competing for your loyalty and cash. Although this fitness boom has given consumers plenty of options, companies must try that much harder to stand apart.Enter Samsung’s Gear Fit, a fitness tracker that doubles as a smartwatch—or is it the other way around?...

The Su-47 “Berkut” (“Golden Eagle”) was towed out of storage during a Russian air show this week.The Su-47 is one of two known aircraft built with forward-swept wings, which greatly increases maneuverability at low speeds.The U.S. also looked into forward-swept wings with the X-29 aircraft, but the experimental plane required extensive fly-by-wire computer controls and lightweight carbon fiber materials to fly.One of the world’s most unusual-looking fighter jets made a surprise appearance earlier this week at a Russian air show....

A Tesla Model S, which the driver says was in Autopilot mode at the time, crashed into a parked police car in Laguna Beach, California. The police car was unoccupied and the driver of the Tesla suffered minor injuries.Photos of the incident were captured by the Laguna Beach Police Department.View full post on FacebookOn Tesla’s website, the company describes the Tesla Model S as having “the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver....

Zooming down the highway past a radar speed sign can serve as a reminder you’re going a little to hard on the gas pedal, but it can also get your license plate number siphoned into a massive data dragnet used by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). A new report in Quartz details an extensive new government contract between the DEA and RU2 Systems, a manufacturer of Radar Speed Display Trailers, and other contractors based in California, Virginia and Canada....

Maybe you’ve seen it: three lanes of midsize crossovers that could trade badges and nobody would notice. Those shapes are dictated by interior space, powertrain packaging, federal regulations, and production feasibility. But most of all, they’re designed for aerodynamic efficiency. When we started asking manufacturers around the country how that works, we realized that it’s not incredible that so many cars look so similar. It’s incredible that cars look different at all....

Last month, Tesla unveiled the next step in its vision of electrifying the future of transportation: the Tesla Semi, a battery-powered truck capable of hauling cargo across the country. The announcement came with a laundry list of stats, including a 500-mile range and 0-60 in five seconds, but one very important statistic was curiously missing: the weight of the vehicle.For a freight truck, the weight of the vehicle with no cargo—called the empty weight—is an extremely important statistic because it affects the total amount of cargo the truck can carry....

Invertebrate, soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish and octopus take up seven percent of the world’s biomass (that’s more than 100 times the biomass of humans). But these delicate ocean dwellers can be hard to capture, which means they’ve been often neglected in scientific studies.Engineers and marine biologists have finally designed a nifty, 3D-printed, 12-sided origami-inspired trap called the rotary actuated dodecahedron (RAD) that can fold around squids and octopuses without damaging them....

It’s got the perfectly round pod-shape, but this is no Prius. Say hello to Toyota’s Concept-i, a far-out concept car the automaker unveiled during its press conference at CES 2017. With it gullwing doors and outrageous styling, it is, shall we say, a bit of a departure from the safe and basic styling you might associate with the brand.Like all concept cars, this is intended not to hit the road as-is but to demonstrate the carmaker’s vision of the future....

Some of the elements on the periodic table may be all-but-useless, but here’s a novel use for at least 62 of them: put them in a paperweight. It sounds silly at $75, but what other object on your desk can you say “Yeah, this has almost every collectible element inside it” with a straight face?So there are a few things to know. The first, and this is the spoiler, is that uranium is not in the cube....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: December 1Price: $31,750 to $42,160 Competitors: Buick LaCrosse, Chrysler 300, Ford Taurus, Hyundai AzeraPowertrains: 3.5-liter V-6, 268 hp, 248 lb. ft., 6-speed automatic; 2.5-liter 4-cylinder, 156 hp, 156 lb. ft., plus AC synchronous electric motor, 141 hp, 199 lb. ft. (combined system hp: 200), CVT.EPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): V-6, 21/31; Hybrid, 40/39 What’s New: Like the three generations that came before it, this latest Avalon shares architectural and powertrain elements with the midsize Camry....

Skiers panicked when the No. 4 lift tower on the Excalibur gondola snapped at the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort, in British Columbia, Canada. A supporting tower snapped under the pressure of ice buildup, toppling over, causing multiple injuries and setting off a frenzied but successful rescue operation. Now, as engineers finalize their report on what went wrong on Tuesday (they’re still unclear about how the water got into the supporting towers), one question lingers: Could a similar accident topple the new Peak 2 Peak Gondola–the largest ski lift of its kind in the world?...

According to newly unsealed court documents, Facebook was aware of children blindly throwing away their parent’s money on Facehook-connected games, thought of a solution, but then decided to do nothing because it would slow down revenue.The documents stem from a class-action lawsuit and were first reported on by investigative news site Reveal. Looking through over 135 pages including internal Facebook memos from 2010 through 2014, Reveal’s reporting shows that the company actively chose not to help parents in either stopping their children’s spending on misleading purchases or getting their money back....

Duck decoys are considered an important form of North American Folk Art, and have been revered and collected for more than a century. If you’ve got an interest in wildlife art and woodworking, carving duck decoys could be the perfect pastime. HistoryNative Americans knew that birds attract other birds, and for more than 1,000 years they made decoys adorned with feathers, brush, and mud for hunting purposes. Early colonists took note and began carving wood duck decoys from white pine and white cedar which were both durable and buoyant....