Inspired by a photo of someone cramming a firecracker inside a USB flash drive, a hacker who goes by “MG” on Medium has detailed a recent project where he engineered a Mission Impossible-style flash drive that ignites and explodes after delivering a nefarious software payload onto an unsuspecting computer.
Astronomers spend their days looking at the sky. Maybe some crazy complex new telescope is helping, or some form of AI is teasing the complexities out of vast piles of data. It’s still just the sky. The sky isn’t immutable, though. Some of the most interesting science happens when brief blips pass into and out of…
I realize that airbags have saved countless lives since they were introduced in the early ‘70s, but that doesn’t make the idea of having a giant pillow explode in your face any less terrifying. Especially after watching the explosive mechanism that fills an airbag in just 0.03 seconds detonate in super slow motion.
Tomorrow night (weather permitting), you might be able to peer up to the sky and see some of the year’s brightest meteors, the Geminids. And now, thanks to new research, you may have a better understanding of why they sometimes blow up and make those spectacular flashes.
The Earth, the Sun, Andromeda galaxy, they’ve all been around for as long as you can remember and as long as humanity has been around. So when a new light suddenly shows up in the distance, it’s a weird occurrence. But a newly detected explosion could be one of the weirdest—and it’s not the only one.
A large fire at an ammunition depot in central Ukraine has triggered a series of massive explosions, prompting the evacuation of about 30,000 people. Hinting at sabotage, the country’s Prime Minister said “external factors” could be attributed to the blasts.
Look up and you might see the bright constellation Cassiopeia trace a zig-zag across the sky as it seemingly always has. But almost 450 years ago, it was the source of surprise: A bright flash, Tycho’s supernova, or “SN 1572" as scientists call it. This was one of the few supernovae humans have been able to see with…
Elon Musk has been sitting on a trove of spectacular fail videos from the SpaceX archives, and on August 31st he promised to release a blooper reel with “some epic explosion footage.” This morning, he made good on that promise. Now you can watch many millions of dollars go kaboom in just over two minutes.
When you get exclusive access to a 150-foot-tall tower, you’re going to want to do more than just take in the view. So when the team from How Ridiculous got just such an opportunity, they made the most of it, hauling a heavy anvil to the top and then dropping it on a stack of spray paint cans on the ground below.
On the night of March 11, 1437, Korean astronomers recorded a strange light low in the sky, in the tail of the constellation Scorpius. It must have been at least as bright as the North Star, Polaris, maybe even as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper. Fourteen days later, the light disappeared.
We’ve been told our entire lives not to play with fire. But whoever coined that expression never stopped to think about how flames and explosions could make falling dominoes even more captivating to watch.
If a looming helium shortage isn’t enough to dissuade you from getting balloons for your next birthday party, consider the consequences if they escape from their ribbon moorings and end up brushing against some high-voltage power lines. You might be safer decorating for your kid’s party with hand grenades.
There’s no better way to celebrate a long weekend, or your nation’s birthday, than by blowing up giant paper shells packed with explosives. It’s not hard to understand how the firecrackers you played with as a kid worked, but YouTube’s BeyondSlowMotion channel reveals how those gigantic fireworks that fill the night…
Unlike a battery, which stores power as chemical energy that’s slowly and steadily discharged to keep your gadgets running, a capacitor can unload all of its juice in the blink of an eye. Even a small capacitor has the potential to stop your heart, but when it’s the size of a dishwasher, well, this watermelon…
By now we’ve all seen how dangerous some batteries can be, but the Slow Mo Guys are back with some more incredible slow-motion footage revealing that even the seemingly innocuous AA batteries stuffed in your TV remote can easily turn into a high-speed, exploding projectile if you’re not careful.
This particular engine we’re looking at has four strokes: the intake, the compression, the combustion (or power), and the exhaust. Smarter Every Day visited the guys of 805 Road King and their see through engine to show us exactly what’s going on in an engine when we fire it up and it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
Universal has bought Michael Bay’s new future dystopia project Little America. The movie is apparently set the near-future where a Trump-like president has bankrupted the country, China has called in its debts, and Americans are migrating to China looking for work. It’s also being described as “sci-fun.” I have some…
