Chain mail was an essential tool for medieval warriors hoping to avoid a quick (or slow) death by a sword. But NASA engineers hope a similar material , with a few modern upgrades, could prove to be just as useful for spacecraft and astronauts looking to survive the rigors of outer space. Read more…
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NASA Is Developing 3D-Printed Chain Mail to Protect Ships and Astronauts
Harvard researchers have discovered a parchment manuscript of the Declaration of Independence at a small archive office in the United Kingdom. Only the second parchment copy known to exist, it contains several features that mark it as distinct from the original. Read more…
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Second Handwritten Copy of the Declaration of Independence Discovered in England
It isn’t only the junk processor that makes a really cheap computer slow. Or the memory or the video card (or lack of video card). The primary reason your cheap laptop loudly chugs along at glacial speeds is because of the hard drive. Cheap laptops use cheap hard disk drives, which are much slower than the solid state… Read more…
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Intel’s Optane Memory Makes Cheap Hard Drives as Fast as Expensive SSDs
In these divisive times, a new controversy emerges: is Starbucks’ limited-edition unicorn frappuccino fun and exciting, or a dangerous sugar bomb? It’s a little of both. It’s a slightly watered down milkshake. Read more…
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Starbucks’ Unicorn Milkshake Is Just as Bad for You as All Their Other Milkshakes
On Thursday, the Center for Constitutional Rights challenged the NYPD’s body camera polici es , asking a judge to block the city’s forthcoming pilot program, which is slated to outfit 1, 000 officers with body cameras as early as next week. The cameras were supposed to be a step forward for police accountability and… Read more…
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Lawyers Fight to Block Terrible NYPD Body Cam Policies
Physicists have created a fluid with “negative mass, ” which accelerates towards you when pushed. From a report on BBC: In the everyday world, when an object is pushed, it accelerates in the same direction as the force applied to it; this relationship is described by Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion. But in theory, matter can have negative mass in the same sense that an electric charge can be positive or negative. Prof Peter Engels, from Washington State University (WSU), and colleagues cooled rubidium atoms to just above the temperature of absolute zero (close to -273C), creating what’s known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, particles move extremely slowly, and following behaviour predicted by quantum mechanics, acting like waves. They also synchronise and move together in what’s known as a superfluid, which flows without losing energy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Physicists Observe ‘Negative Mass’
A new book published by the Imperial War Museum features a rare collection of color photos from World War II, some of which haven’t been seen in over 70 years. From P-51D Mustangs and Flying Fortresses through to anti-aircraft spotters and flame hurling tanks, these images cast the war in a vibrant new light. Read more…
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These Rare Color Photos From the Second World War Are Incredible
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game — plus the Brood War expansion — for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would’ve cost $10-15 bucks. The company says they’ve also used this opportunity to improve the game’s anti-cheat system, add “improved compatibility” with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and fix a few long lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison — so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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StarCraft Is Now Free, Nearly 20 Years After Its Release
Recreations of Paleolithic people at the museum usually look like the typical Geico commercial caveman. Famed Otzi the Iceman , for example, has the face of someone who’d be fun to disembowel a moose with, but whose conversation might be just a little gauche. A new facial reconstruction of a Stone Age woman who lived… Read more…
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How Do You Keep a 13,600-Year-Old Woman From Looking Like Wilma Flintstone?
Google pushed out a big update to Google Earth for Chrome and Android today. Alongside a snazzy new look, the new version adds guided tours, 3D maps, a random button, and lots more. Read more…
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Google Earth Gets a Huge Redesign with Guided Tours, 3D View, and More