When you hear about the concept of missile defense in space, your first thought might be Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, more commonly called Star Wars. But ideas for an invisible missile shield in the sky are much older than the 1980s. As just one example, we have this Sunday comic strip from 1959,…
There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects of nuclear winter come back to haunt them? A new…
We tend to associate industrial pollution with the modern era, but human civilizations have been contaminating the planet for thousands of years. By drilling deep into Greenland’s ice sheet, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has chronicled the industrial waste produced by the ancient Greeks and Romans over a…
North Korea has been 30 minutes behind South Korea ever since Kim Jong Un created “Pyongyang Time” in 2015. But starting May 5th, North Korea will adjust its clocks to sync with South Korea in yet another step toward normalized relations, according to state news agency KCNA and Reuters.
The US Air Force conducted America’s first successful intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test of the year, firing an unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California yesterday morning. The missile landed in the Pacific Ocean at an undisclosed location.
The common conception of a technologically enabled apocalypse foresees a powerful artificial intelligence that, either deliberately or by accident, destroys human civilization. But as a new report from the RAND Corporation points out, the reality may be far subtler: As AI slowly erodes the foundations that made the…
Top researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) have called for a boycott of the South Korean university KAIST after it opened a lab with the defense firm Hanwha Systems. Even if you’re not familiar with KAIST, you might know some of the school’s robots. The university won the top prize at the last DARPA…
During World War I, far away from the lines of battle, the UK was faced with a different crisis. As thousands of khaki-clad “Tommies” shipped off to the front, the British economy teetered on the cusp of grinding to a halt. With the men gone, the task of keeping the country’s lights on fell to women. British women…
You might not be cool sending your elderly grandparents to front lines of war. But termites think differently—if grandma and gramps are already old and close to death, termites figure they might as well be the first casualties.
As the U.S. commitment to its long-running railgun program appears ready to wane, China’s own program might be winding up, recent reports suggest.
Scottish and Australian researchers have found surprising evidence than detonating landmines, lethal explosives that leech toxic chemicals into soil, may actually be better for the environment than removing them outright. Their paper appears in the journal PLoS One.
Populations of large, wild herbivores aren’t doing that great. Some 60 percent of large herbivore species are threatened with extinction thanks to overhunting, poaching, and the depletion suitable habitat. Now, researchers have zeroed in on another human-driven source of trouble for these animals: armed conflict. In…
North Korea conducted a missile test on April 28, 2017 that didn’t go quite as planned. In fact, we’re now learning that the Hwasong-12 missile that the country launched actually went astray and may have hit the North Korean city of Tokchon.
A million Russian artillery shells helped scientists discover the Higgs boson. And all over the world, remnants of World War II weapons are built into the most mysterious experiments in physics.
In the mid-1990s, physicists needed tons of a metal strong enough to withstand the massive magnetic fields of the house-sized…
As North Korea and the US keep escalating their war of words, the world sits on the brink of nuclear destruction. So you’d hope that the people in charge of America’s nukes are keeping a cool head under pressure. But the latest tweet from US Strategic Command doesn’t give much confidence in that.
North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Yong Ho just had a rare press conference outside the United Nations in New York. And it’s not great. The diplomat declared that the US has declared war on North Korea. And he stressed that he hopes the world remembers in the future that it was the US who declared war first.
Lasers are the future of war. And if this new video by defense company Lockheed Martin is any indication, that future is pretty damn close.
On September 26, 1983, Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov received a message that five nuclear missiles had been launched by the United States and were heading to Moscow. He didn’t launch a retaliatory strike, believing correctly that it was a false alarm. And with that, he saved the world from nuclear war. But…
North Korea successfully tested a hydrogen bomb on Sunday, according to officials in the country. If confirmed, it would be the most powerful nuclear explosion ever achieved by the isolated country. And South Korean media now report that the US and South Korea have agreed to jointly pursue some kind of military…
Another week, another missile test by North Korea. This time the country shot a missile over northern Japan, leaving the Japanese scrambling to gauge whether it was a legitimate threat. And in response, the US military has done was it always does after a North Korean test: It fired off its own missile test and…
