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Media Platforms Design TeamNEW YORK, July 16—Audi joined forces with Twentieth Century Fox to develop its first car built specifically for a major motion picture. Hero detective Will Smith battles robots in the year 2035 while driving this unique Audi mid-engine concept car in the movie “i, ROBOT,” which opens in theaters today.Audi believes its designers have created an appropriate car for the fictional future world of “i, ROBOT,” and that the resulting RSQ sport coupe is a good interpretation of Audi design philosophy....

Nerf blaster modifications come in all different forms, from rigs that give you basically unlimited ammunition to more ambitious total-conversion mods that change more about a blaster than they actually leave the same. But this modification project by Giaco Whatever has got to be one of the most involved and ridiculous we’ve ever seen. I mean, who wouldn’t want to try a blaster powered by liquid nitrogen?Equal parts impressive and impractical, this blaster fires by trapping expanding liquid nitrogen in a chamber where its only way out is a DIY burst disk made of potato chip bag....

Lichens, a fungus-algae composite organism that grows on rocks and trees across the world, are hardy and can survive just about anywhere on Earth. As it turns out, they can also latch onto just about anything, including nuclear fallout. According to Los Alamos National Laboratory, lichens taken from areas near nuclear test sites in the 1940s and 1950s contained radioactive isotopes unique to those bomb tests. The isotopes included traces from the Trinity test site, where the atomic bomb was tested under the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, as well as the Nevada Test Site, where atmospheric nuclear weapons tests took place from the 1950s into the 1960s....

Land mines may serve their purpose as defensive weapons, but they are a scourge on the world. They kill and maim indiscriminately; a friendly soldier will trigger a buried mine just as easily as an enemy soldier. Worse, a civilian can trigger a mine days, weeks, or even years after the war ends.The U.S. Army still uses land mines, but is now trying to build a version that would prevent civilian casualties....

Early in the universe’s history, stars began to form. The first generation of stars are known as Population III stars by scientists. Yet though we know these stars existed, we’ve never seen one. Why? According to this video from PBS Space Time, it has to do with the size and composition of early stars. They were big. Really big–the smallest Population III stars would have been at least a few times bigger than the sun....

Though you’ll never hear it said on screen, there’s a name for the blue liquid that leaks out of the not-quite-humans of AMC’s “HUMANS” when they get hurt. It’s called “synthetic magneto hydrodynamic conductant.” Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley, co-creators and co-writers of the series, say the purpose of this blue fluid is to circulate electricity throughout the Synth’s bodies. “We like to try and get our fake science feeling as real as possible,” Vincent says....

The White House’s proposal to privatize the International Space Station has dominated headlines about the Trump administration’s proposed 2019 NASA budget, which came out Monday, February 12. However, there’s a lot more we can glean from Trump’s plan for the future of American space exploration.The 2019 budget of $19.89 billion is $350 million more than NASA received in 2018, but not everyone should be happy with what’s in the space agency’s budget....

Media Platforms Design TeamElectric vehicles are still finding their place in this brave new world, duking it out with internal combustion and alternative propulsion machines for consumer attention. As such, Scotts Valley, California-based Zero Motorcycles has played both the mileage game and the hot rod card, and their just-unveiled 2014 lineup encompasses an even wider swath of those extremes than ever before.Consider, for instance, the new SR model (pictured), an “R” spinoff of the “S” model that boosts horsepower by 24 percent and torque 56 percent....

Media Platforms Design TeamSmall-Space GardeningWhether you’re a city dweller or you just have a small yard, space can be a major factor in whether you can start a vegetable garden and how much you can produce. Space restraints have led to innovative techniques that allow gardeners to grow more food regardless of their outdoor square footage.If your yard is small, vertical gardens such as potato towers could be your answer. They require minimal space, can be constructed with simple materials, and can grow a variety vegetables and produce high yields....

The F-4 Phantom, introduced in the 1960s, is slowly disappearing from air forces worldwide.The old jet was as versatile as the F-35, capable of both air to air and air to ground missions.The F-35 is even operated by most of the countries that originally flew the F-4–that is, everyone except for Iran and Turkey.The era of the F-4 Phantom, once one of the most popular fighter jets of the postwar age, is coming to a close....

A Polish train driver found himself in a position you never want to be in: staring out of the front of a speeding train and seeing a truck on the tracks just ahead. Fortunately he was able to think fast and used the final seconds before impact to warn passengers further back in the train, the BBC reports. His three-second sprint was caught on the train’s security cameras and shows passengers bracing for the crash just seconds before the train, moving at nearly 70 miles per hour, hit the truck on the tracks: View full post on YoutubeSo far there have been no reports of serious injuries, perhaps due in part to the advanced warning that passengers at the front of the train received....

After successfully launching its Mangalyaan craft in orbit around Mars last September, the India Space Research Organisation has a new plan: it’s preparing a Venus mission, being developed alongside a second Mars mission. ISRO chairman Dr. Kiran Kumar also hinted at ambitions for a trip to an asteroid. “Venus is our neighbour and has many scientific challenges and aspects that need to be studied,” Kumar told the Hindustan Times. “Exploring an asteroid is also challenging task....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe introduction video for the 2015 Chevy Colorado said it all. After overtaking a Nissan Frontier on a curvy stretch of pavement, the Colorado speeds along as a bighorn ram looks on from a mountainside and a ranger’s hat in the middle of the road gets blown away. The message: The Colorado is here, and the competition better be ready.Following up on the release of the new Silverado 1500 and Silverado HD, Chevy makes a return to the midsize truck segment with the all-new Colorado....

LIGO has picked up on gravitational waves emitted during a celestial scuffle between two neutron stars.Because only one of the observatories two facilities was operational, the team wasn’t able to locate the collision or spot the accompanying burst of light. This is the second such tussle captured by the observatory—gravitational waves from the first collision were observed in 2017. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, emitted during two stars’ collision as it rocketed toward Earth on April 25, 2019....

Media Platforms Design TeamLess than a week after NASA announced that its Phoenix Lander has positively identified , the agency today dampened enthusiasm for by announcing the probe has found a toxic chemical that is not friendly to life. Although media leaks of today’s announcement on indications that life could exist on the planet, scientists inside and out of the Phoenix program hold out hope that Mars could still harbor organisms....

NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is either a stepping stone to Mars or an expensive distraction (depending on who you ask), has a plan, finally. Audacious visions of capturing an entire asteroid and dragging it into lunar orbit are out. Instead, the agency plans to break off a piece of a larger asteroid and then drag that “boulder” into orbit around the moon.The mission will get under way in 2019, when NASA will select the asteroid....

The residents of the International Space Station try to keep the place as clean as possible, but humans will always bring bacteria with them. A new silver- and ruthenium-based antimicrobial coating is being tested on the space station to help reduce the risk of infection during extended space travel.Bacteria play many crucial roles in human life, from supplying essential nutrients to helping with digestion. But bringing them into the void of space is a unnatural activity that can cause them to evolve in ways they wouldn’t have on Earth....

Media Platforms Design TeamGesture-based controls have become so widespread they seem almost mundane. We casually flip through photos on our smartphones and have no problem swinging our arms back and forth in front of an Xbox Kinect. However, both touchscreens and camera-based recognition systems require specialty hardware. At Microsoft, researchers have created a program called SoundWave that needs only a speaker and a microphone.Sound might seem like an unusual choice for gesture recognition—after all, moving hands need not make any noise....

On the busy, noisy flight deck of an aircraft carrier, ground crews talk to pilots with a shared language of hand gestures. Now, as the Navy prepares for drones to share the flight deck, it may teach the machines to understand those same gestures. The U.S. Navy is holding a competition to select the service’s first operational carrier-based drone. The MQ-25 Stingray will be primarily an aerial tanker designed to refuel an aircraft carrier’s four F-35Cs and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet strike fighter squadrons....

Could Uncle Sam shoot down Kim Jong-un’s nukes from space? Perhaps not.For decades, the United States has pondered deploying a space-based ballistic missile defense system. Hundreds of satellites, each armed with interceptor rockets, would safeguard America from attack by shooting down nuclear-tipped missiles as they rose up up from the Earth. But the idea has never been practical, and according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, this strategy hasn’t gotten any easier even against relatively small nuclear powers such as North Korea....