Posts

Chernobyl is due to be decommissioned, but researchers must first find a safe way to do it.The area has been an official tourist attraction since 2011, but the plant remains enigmatic and extremely dangerous.By recreating reactions and explosions in their lab, scientists will help design a plan to take the plant down.Scientists in England are recreating the Chernobyl disaster in order to better understand how to dismantle the real Chernobyl. Claire Corkhill of the University of Sheffield leads a team that seeks to supplement Ukraine’s low available funds with a science assist about how to best decommission Chernobyl’s disastrously melted-down reactor....

Rick Rahim, a commercial helicopter pilot in Virginia, had a son with a loose tooth. And what good is a child’s loose tooth if you can’t get a good YouTube video out of it? (Visits from the tooth fairy don’t pay for themselves.)View full post on YoutubeWe’ve covered people who have pulled their children’s loose teeth with drones before, but this is the first time we’ve seen a full-sized helicopter pull off the trick....

Getting wrapped up in the innumerable data breaches that occur every year isn’t a matter of if, but when. Security breaches run the gamut from the credit rating agency Equifax to the soup and bread bowl peddler Panera, which is why Firefox’s newest feature will notify you directly if any of your passwords have been exposed to the big wide world of hackers. Originally unveiled in beta in June, Firefox Monitor scans the web for email addresses that have been compromised in various hacks....

Media Platforms Design TeamGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel checks her mobile phone during a session of the Bundestag on November 30, 2012 in Berlin, Germany. Credit: Getty Images.Finally, Blackberry has a purpose again. Mobile security for Germany has become a big issue since the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. Hoping to prevent things like this from happening again, Germany has turned to Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion), once the rules the cellphone market....

Small wonder that scientists want to copy the cockroach, one of the most durable creatures around. But Harvard roboticists are now one-upping the insect with Harvard’s Ambulatory Microbot (HAMR). The new, next-generation HAMR can walk on land, swim on the surface of water, and walk underwater for as long as needed.What gives HAMR its terrain flexibility are the multifunctional feet, made of electrowetting pads (EWP). The focus of electrowetting is reducing the surface tension in a liquid/solid interaction via electricity....

In the 1970s, U.S. intelligence believed the embassy in Moscow was leaking information.Repeated searches for a secret transmitter in the embassy turned up nothing.Finally, engineers discovered a typewriter with a transmitter hacked into it.The Cold War spy drama that played out between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the source of much ingenious spy technology. One of the most ingenious devices fielded by both sides was a typewriter designed to spy on the user, quietly transmitting its keystrokes to KGB listeners....

Media Platforms Design TeamJohn le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy brought Cold War paranoia back to the big screen in 2011. The movie adaptation of le Carré’s 1974 novel, starring Gary Oldman as the the retired intelligence officer George Smiley, earned rave reviews and multiple Oscar nominations, in addition to introducing a new generation to cunning espionage stylings of Smiley.Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out on Blu-ray on March 20, and we’re giving away 10 Blu-ray combo packs featuring the a Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download of the film....

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is continuing to deliver new information about Jupiter. The gas giant’s atmospheric winds are nothing like the atmospheric winds of Earth, the latest findings show. Rather, they run deeper into the atmosphere and have longer lifespans than anything on this planet.“These astonishing science results are yet another example of Jupiter’s curve balls, and a testimony to the value of exploring the unknown from a new perspective with next-generation instruments,” says Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno, in a press release....

Recyclingis it working?Not as well as you might imagine. Sure, the magic of recycling allows an enterprising homeless individual to transform a purloined shopping cart full of aluminum cans intovoilà!a single glass bottle of Night Train Express, which seems like a net gain. But in general, Americans are not recycling enough to keep up with the increasing rate at which we are generating refuse. In 2012, according to Environmental Protection Agency data, U....

With Jurassic World just over the horizon, maybe you’re getting a little itchy with nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. Now, thanks to participants in the Global Game Jam 2015, you can relive that scene where Lex hacks the GUI of the park’s system because of her hacker skills and knowledge of Unix, via the game “I Know This.“View full post on YoutubeCreated by Renaud Bedard, Gavin McCarthy, Adam Axbey, and Matthew Simmonds, “I Know This” takes place in a similar GUI to the one displayed in the movie....

Kids with autistic conditions sometimes work with robots to help them better distinguish emotions. Now, scientists at MIT are using artificial intelligence to make sure these robots understand the children they’re working with.When therapists use robots for kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), they do so to demonstrate how to better understand emotions and socialize in a more general population. A study in 2012 showed several “potential advantages to using interactive robots” with ASD children....

People tend to look to decades past for examples of great science fiction—the works Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. But the 21st century is living in its own golden age of sci-fi. Along with film and TV adaptations, novels like Cloud Atlas, The Road, The Martian, and Never Let Me Go are becoming more mainstream, and in some cases, even Oscar-worthy.But what about the books that aren’t blessed by Hollywood’s cinematic touch?...

We need to talk about turn signals.The other day I got into a fight with a Lexus. The GS F we were test-driving is a sleek piece of $85,000 machinery with a snarling 458-hp engine and all the future tech you’d expect. It ate up the I-95 between New York and D.C. in rapid comfort and joy. Except for one thing. Our Lexus test car had the kind of smart turn signals that turn themselves off once you change lanes....

The U.S. Navy wants an anti-ship missile to protect friendly forces in coastal areas.The prime candidate is the Naval Strike Missile, already serving on U.S. Navy ships. The coastal defense mission is something the Pentagon hasn’t done for more than half a century, but is reviving as an option against countries like Russia or China. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps want a land-based version of the new Naval Strike Missile....

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is researching new long-range smart weapons designed to devastate attacking enemy forces, buying time for the U.S. to send reinforcements in a hypothetical future engagement.The program, known as “Assault Breaker II,” mirrors a Cold War era program designed to stop Soviet armored spearheads poised to roll into Western Europe. The effort would consist of a combination of long-range sensors and bombers loaded with smart weapons designed to seek out and destroy tanks, ships, and other enemy systems....

Media Platforms Design TeamPeter Jackson has always loved the magic of moviemaking. After watching the 1933 classic at age 9, he started shooting stop-motion films with his family’s Super 8 camera. Three years later, he carved up an old fur coat that belonged to his mother and used it to create a model of the great ape. In his early 20s, the budding director was baking latex molds in his mother’s oven to produce the prosthetic hands and heads for the homemade horror flick that earned him a trip to Cannes in 1987....

In less than a week, the entirety of North America will experience a partial or total eclipse, where the sun will temporarily be blocked by the moon. Therefore, it’s worth taking a moment to talk about what exactly a ‘moon’ is. Our moon is a moon pretty much by default, but what about objects around other planets?Minute Earth talks about why deciding what is and isn’t a moon is harder than it sounds:View full post on YoutubeSpace is a very big place, and there are things of all shapes and sizes....

We all know: The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. But the mitochondria is much more than a simple power plant. It’s also a unique source of DNA that can give us important clues to our species and our history. That’s because the DNA in your mitochondria comes only from your mother. At least, that’s what we believed, but a new paper suggests otherwise.Mitochondria were already pretty weird parts of our cells, even before this news....

China and Russia maintain large missile and bomber forces capable of targeting airfields with precision, knocking them out and preventing high performance fighter jets from flying.So the Air Force is planning to disperse its fleets of fighters, bombers, and other planes during a war to protect them from attack.The dispersal plan, known as Agile Combat Employment, will require the service to become lighter and more rapidly deployable in emergencies.The U.S. Air Force’s sprawling bases abroad will come under major attack in a future conflict....

LOCATION /// JEFFERSON CITY, MISSOURI* EVENT /// REGIONAL JET CRASH* DATE /// OCTOBER 14, 2004For three and a half minutes on the night of Oct. 14, 2004, Capt. Jesse Rhodes and First Officer Peter Cesarz were on top of the world. The two Pinnacle Airlines pilots had pushed their twin-engine, 50-seat regional jet to its maximum altitude and were now proud members of the “410 club,” an unofficial society of Pinnacle airmen who’ve attained 41,000 ft....