We’ve grown up seeing futuristic weapons such as laser beams in sci-fi movies. Now, it has become a reality, as the US Navy successfully tests its new laser weapon system. This video of the USS Portland shows that the laser weapon system onboard the ship was able to disable the unmanned drone, which appeared to catch on fire quickly.
The Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) MK 2 MOD 0, developed by Northrup Grumman, allows ships to defend themselves against drones and even smaller enemy boats, the Navy claims.
According to a recent report, the market for similar energy weapon systems are on the rise across the globe, with a new arms race as nations look for novel ways to enhance border security and counter threats including drones and missiles.
“With this new advanced capability, we are redefining war at sea for the Navy,” Karrey Sanders, commanding officer of the USS Portland, said in the statement.
Bridgton, Maine — At around 6 in the morning of July 29, 2019, a man named Nat Woodruff found a dead bald eagle found floating face-down on the Highland Lake. Also found dead near the eagle was a loon chick. The man left the dead bird appropriately while he called the Warden Service. After a few moments, Maine Game Warden Neal Wykes arrived and brought the dead eagle to the Norway Veterinary Hospital for a radiograph to determine if the bird was shot.
No metal showed up on the image, but during the external exam a puncture wound on the eagle’s chest was discovered.
What caused the puncture wound? It was stated that it could be from the beak of an adult loon.
A loon’s best weapon is its dagger-like bill, and it will often attack adversary loons by coming up from beneath the water’s surface with its bill straight towards the other loon’s sternum, or chest. Many adult loons have several healed-over sternal punctures from fights like these.
This could mean that an adult loon (probably the chick’s parent) could have gone in to rescue the chick from the talons of the eagle. Unfortunately, the chick did not survive the ordeal.
The reason this is so interesting to loon researchers is that such a case has not been documented before. We know conflicts between bald eagles and loons have soared in recent years as a result of the recovery of our eagle population. We are seeing more and more eagle predation on loon chicks and even adult loons. Who would think a loon would stand a chance against such a powerful predator?
Sure enough, the pathologist who examined the eagle and loon chick in the lab, called me shortly afterward to tell me it indeed looked as though the loon was the culprit in this eagle’s death. The size of the puncture wound was similar to the size of a loon’s bill, and it extended straight to the heart which likely led to a quick death. Not only that, but the loon chick had puncture marks consistent with the spacing of eagle talons.
Brad Balukjian is a lifelong baseball fan who spent his childhood in the 1980s collecting baseball cards. Upon reaching his 30s, Balukjian realized he was at the age that most baseball players are retired, with a lot of life left. What happened to all those sports heroes on the cards he collected in his youth? To find out, he devised a plan that eventually became the basis for his new book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife.
Pondering what happened to his heroes after they retired, Balukjian came up with a plan: In fall 2014, he went on eBay and ordered about a dozen sealed packs of Topps baseball cards from 1986, and opened them, searching for a pack with a set of 14 players who would make for a good cross-country road trip.
While digging into all those old baseball-card packs, Balukjian even gave into the temptation to try the nearly 30-year-old gum. “I remove the calcified stick of gum with the caution of a bomb expert, place it in my mouth, and clench down on its powdered surface, splintering it into a thousand crumbs, which instantly dissolve on my tongue,” he writes in The Wax Pack. “It’s delightfully gross.”
Once he settled on a pack, Balukjian then planned to spend the summer of 2015 driving across the United States in his 2002 Honda Accord trying to meet each of the former players in his baseball-card pack, the “Wax Packers” as he calls them, to find out what fate befell each one. He would blog about his adventures each day of the trip and hoped the blog could turn into a book.
Balukjian settled on a pack of 14 players and managed to meet and get to know most of them. He found them to be much more interesting and complex than their baseball cards, or their sports careers, would lead one to believe. They came from varied backgrounds, often from small towns, broken homes, and even abusive childhoods. They dealt with career problems such as adultery, racism, and substance abuse. The Wax Packers opened up to him for the most part and became friends. Read about that road trip, and oh yeah baseball cards, too, in an article that will appeal to both fans and people who don't know a thing about baseball at Collectors Weekly.
Star City is a gated community in Russia that was built in the 1960s specifically for the Soviet space program. The only residents are those who work in the industry and their families, which today is about 6,000 people. Despite its government mission and dependence, Star City survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is still centered around space exploration. And it's not always been completely off-limits to everyone. The facilities were super-secret during the space race, but after the Apollo moon landing, there was a seismic shift.
Then, the unthinkable happened in 1973 when Uncle Sam arrived. “The Soviet and American spacemen will go up into outer space for the first major joint scientific experiment in the history of mankind,” announced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “They know that from outer space our planet looks even more beautiful [and] it is big enough for us to live peacefully on it, but it is too small to be threatened by nuclear war.”
Dubbed the “Apollo-Soyuz Mission,” the joint venture was an extremely sensitive, highly calculated effort to end the Space Race – or at least ease tensions between Soviets and Americans.
While politicians played, well, politics, the scientists, astronauts, and cosmonauts got along well in Star City. And the American presence remained after Soyuz. Read about NASA in Star City at Messy Messy Chic.
He must be a farmer, because he's certainly not a forklift driver. I'm no forklift driver, either, but it appears he lifted the load too far from the cab. The real payoff of this chain-reaction snafu is his reaction -that poor hat! The security video has no sound, but you can imagine what he's yelling. -via Digg
As the company is transforming into an industrial company, after over 120 years in the lighting business, General Electric will be selling the said area of business to a smart home management company called Savant Systems. Sources state in The Wall Street Journal that the transaction was valued at around $250 million.
Savant specializes in full smart home systems for the luxury market. Acquiring a lighting business directly will allow it to take advantage of vertical integration and take more control over the physical equipment it installs in consumer' homes. Savant will keep the business's operations in Cleveland, where it is currently based, and will receive a long-term license to keep using the GE branding for its products.
The lighting business is GE's oldest segment, dating all the way back to the company's founding through a series of mergers with Thomas Edison's companies in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Despite having spun off the last of Edison’s original business, H. Lawrence Culp, the current CEO of the company, states that they will draw on the roots of their founder.
More details about this news over at Ars Technica.
Technology indeed has advanced to the point where we are one step closer towards a future where we humans live alongside cyborgs and androids.
Researchers have developed an artificial eye that mimics the structure of a real human eye. Having a faster reaction time than the latter, the device could potentially have a sharper vision than human eyes.
“In the future, we can use this for better vision prostheses and humanoid robotics,” says engineer and materials scientist Zhiyong Fan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
[...]
The artificial eyeball registers changes in lighting faster than human eyes can — within about 30 to 40 milliseconds, rather than 40 to 150 milliseconds. The device can also see dim light about as well as the human eye. Although its 100-degree field of view isn’t as broad as the 150 degrees a human eye can take in, it’s better than the 70 degrees visible to ordinary flat imaging sensors.
More details about this study over at ScienceNews.
Do you think we’re only a few years before we see the first cyborg or android?
With a population of around 23 billion worldwide, chickens are the most numerous birds on our planet. With this in mind, it would only be natural to assume that the ancient bird bones found alongside other domesticated animals like dogs and pigs would be from these birds. But what if they weren’t?
…new research suggests that another species was once a strong contender to become the world's favorite poultry: ancient bird remains in China have turned out to be not from the first domesticated chickens, as researchers long assumed, but from pheasants. The study further indicates that wild pheasants lived side by side with people, shedding light on the early domestication process.
“It's uncommon for us to have evidence of deer, for example, living with hunter-gatherers,” says Loukas Barton, an archaeologist at California-based environmental consulting firm Dudek. “But in this case, we see what otherwise is considered a wild animal living in the human biome.” Barton is lead author on the study, published in February in Scientific Reports.
A social media scuffle has arisen in India. Hashtags were trending, asking users to ban Tiktok in India. The scuffle has affected Tiktok, as its ratings dropped to 1.2 on Google Play Store. It seems that Google came to intervene, as it has removed over five million negative reviews for Tiktok. The intervention has bumped the app’s rating to 1.6 stars.
If someone told you that you can remove all your leg hair with just a powder, would you believe it? I certainly won’t. Some have difficulty shaving their legs with the necessary tools, so will a powder be effective? The answer is yes, as Buzzfeed’s Krista Torres tested out the Magic Shaving Powder, a product that magically removes leg hair without a razor. See her whole experience with the product at Buzzfeed.
Don’t do this at home, kids. Sometimes when life throws unpredictable circumstances at you, you need to do your best to adapt to them. Well, this Miami guy is good at adapting to the situation. With the roads flooded, this man took the carpool quite literally. See how he water skis on the flooded roads over Instagram.
In October of 1998, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which guest host Lucy Lawless played Stevie Nicks as the proprietor of a casual Tex-Mex restaurant in Arizona. It was a weird random setup, a one-time bit that was never reprised. For many it was forgotten, but in the hyper-communicative era of the internet, we learn that it resonated with a lot of people, even decades later.
“I tell you what: I didn’t really realize it had a life of its own,” Lawless tells me.
Honestly? It’s pretty wild that it does. “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” wasn’t prescient. It didn’t put its finger on the pulse of 1998, or anticipate the ways in which pop culture would shift in the years to come. It didn’t point toward some broader universal truth, or teach us something about ourselves.
It just … started, and was weird for two and a half minutes. But it was really weird for those two and a half minutes, blithely absurd and blissfully silly in a way that cuts through the clutter and nestles itself into your gray matter. We can’t always explain why something sticks in our brains; sometimes, it just works. And for a lot of people, “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup”—something that probably shouldn’t have worked for anybody—just worked.
Fans of the sketch are delighted to find that they are not alone, and Lucy Lawless herself is tickled that people remember a thing she herself had forgotten. Read how “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” came about and found an afterlife of its own at the Ringer. -via Metafilter
Artist Chet Phillips (previously at Neatorama) has created a series of illustrations that portray fictional creatures from pop culture as vintage scientific field studies. Click to the right on the picture above to see more of the collection he calls Unnatural History. It's as if a science artist wanted to show us accurate flying monkeys, xenomorphs, or gremlins in the days before photography (or CGI, for that matter)! Prints of these are available at Etsy, in case you see your favorite fictional character. -via Laughing Squid
Now that’s a way to celebrate your recovery! I’m not sure if it’s actually recommended, but the nursing home staff let Jennie Stejna celebrate her recovery from COVID-19 with a Bud Light. After all, the 103-year-old went through something so painful and dire, she deserves a cold one after successfully beating the sickness!
It seems pretty natural now, to ease the symptoms of a cold or flu with hot lemonade, spiked with some honey and/or whiskey. It hydrates the body, provides vitamin C, and soothes a sore throat, but it doesn't cure anything. However, the reason we enjoy hot lemonade when we feel sick goes back to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and the power of advertising.
The telegram first arrived at Sunkist’s sales office in Los Angeles: The East Coast needed lemons. The arrival of cheaper, Sicilian imports had been slowed by the war, and America’s new go-to citrus, the orange, had suffered a poor growing season. Demand for the little-used lemon was high and supplies were low. In Boston, wholesale prices had more than doubled in a month. Meanwhile in California, leafy lemon trees, finally recovered from the sweltering 1917 season, were heavy with fruit.
Countless home remedies emerged as Americans grappled with the disease, some placebo, some actual poison. From the pantry came the promise of health in the guise of red onions or black coffee or watered-down molasses or brandy with asafetida, a pungent spice common in Indian cooking. But only the lemon had the advertising know-how of Don Francisco and Lord & Thomas behind it.
The campaign advertising lemons never claimed it cured the flu, but they knew what to say to lead people to think so, even to the point of sucking lemons directly. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.
