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An F6F Hellcat fighter converted into a suicide drone sits onboard the aircraft carrier USS Boxer during the Korean War. Credit: By USN [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons During the Korean War, a life-or-death race took place between an U.S. Navy Hellcat fighter aircraft and a group of North Koreans on a railroad handcar. Apparently believing that the fighter was preparing to attack with its machine guns, the North Koreans frantically pumped the railroad handcar&rs ...read more

Sometimes all it takes is one glance to realize that checking out will be a whole lot harder than checking in. (Credit: Twentieth Century Fox) If you feel like there is something deeply unhealthy about the modern world, director Gore Verbinski has just the movie for you. If you roll your eyes at New Age cures, he’s got you covered, too. And if some mornings you wake up wondering if you sleepwalked into the wrong corner of the multiverse…yes, he’s on top of that one as well. ...read more

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An Indian rocket delivered a record-setting 104 satellites into orbit Tuesday night. A camera on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle captured the spacecraft, most of them tiny CubeSats, as they tumbled into orbit—the most placed into orbit by a single vehicle. A majority of the satellites belong to a U.S.-based company called Planet which hopes to establish a network of tiny satellites to provide near-real-time imaging of Earth. [embedded content] An Indian cartography ...read more

A peculiar new paper proposes the idea of “connecting two spinal cords as a way of sharing information between two brains”. The author is Portuguese psychiatrist Amílcar Silva-dos-Santos and the paper appears in Frontiers in Psychology. Frontiers are a publisher with a troubled history of publishing dubious science. But this paper is unusual, even by Frontiers’ standards, because it contains virtually no science at all. In a nutshell, Silva-Dos-Santos suggests that it w ...read more

(Credit: Stacey Tecot) How do you care for the creatures you love? You shoot them with tranquilizer darts, capture them in cages, embed microchips, pierce their ears or make them wear funny collars. For scientists who monitor endangered species, these are tried-and-true methods to count and track individuals in a given population—along with photography and experts’ sharp eyes. But capturing or sedating an animal is stressing (and could cause physical harm), and boots-on-the-ground ...read more

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Contamination map of the Chernobyl region in 1996. Twenty one years later the hottest areas remain off limits, but quasi-normal life has returned in the less affected “unnamed zone,” including the Rivne Province at the west (left) end of this map. (Credit: CIA Factbook/Sting/MTruch) Regular readers of this blog know that I normally focus on cosmic topics: comets, exoplanets, dark matter, the search for alien life, and the like. I don’t tangle so much with the everyday challen ...read more

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