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A “new” F-22 Raptor is about to join the U.S. Air Force, nearly a decade after production of the world’s most advanced jet fighter shut down. The fighter will be upgraded to current standards and used to test new tech that might someday equip F-22s flying from Hawaii to Syria.The F-22 was one of just 195 Raptors built between 1996 and 2011. In 2009, facing an economic recession and the pressures of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama Administration and Congress agreed to end production of the advanced fighter....

Media Platforms Design TeamGravity is no obstacle for this climbing robot. It scales vertical walls—even those made of smooth materials like glass. Jeff Krahn, an engineer from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, created this gecko-inspired tank of a robot, which he detailed in a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures this week. Like a gecko, which can hang on to sheer glass with just one toe, the climbing bot uses what physicists call Van der Waals forces to stick to the wall....

Is there anyone that can give a look that both says, “I’m stoked to be here,” and, “I’m watching you,” quite like Russian president Vladimir Putin? We think not.Putin took a bathyscaphe, which is basically just a submersible similar to a bathysphere, 272 feet down to an ancient sunken merchant vessel in the Black Sea near Crimea this past Tuesday. According to the Associated Press, the ship is said to date “back to the 9th or 10th century....

Relations between North and South Korea are very tense right now, in part because of an incident in which two South Korean soldiers were maimed by mines, and in part because of this: A massive live-fire drill performed jointly by South Korean and U.S. forces. It simulates, in part, a full-scale mechanized assault onto North Korean soil, and it is absurdly intense to watch. The drill took place on Friday and is the largest ever performed in South Korea, jointly with the U....

Viva Frei, the man in this video, said he wanted to have the “feeling astronauts get when they realize their smallness in the grand scale of space.” So he laid on the ground and sent his drone flying straight up with its camera pointed straight down, showing Frei becoming a mere speck on the ground.It’s not quite an astronaut shot: The maximum comm distance between a high-end DJI Phantom II and its user is about 3,281 feet, while space is about 327,360 feet up, depending on who you ask....

When it comes to developing a working invisibility cloak, we may not be at Harry Potter level yet, but today’s newest breakthrough is nonetheless impressive.A team of researchers led by Xingjie Ni—a nano-engineer at Pennsylvania State University—have just unveiled an fascinating invisibility cloak: one that takes the form of a sleek skin of nano-material. While other scientists have recently made headway building bulky and mechanically complex attempts at concealing screens, Ni’s is far and away the thinnest and most cloak-like....

Other than color, every iPhone of a given model is exactly identical to the rest of its kin, right? Wrong. There can actually be some subtle variations from phone to phone, so tiny that under normal circumstances you’d never even notice. And in the iPhone 6S, those variations could be affecting your battery life. Every model of iPhone—6 and 6 Plus, 6S and 6S Plus, etc—has the same processor inside. These little chips are designed by Apple, but not actually made by Apple....

Media Platforms Design TeamLAS VEGAS — Sometimes I just love the weird confluence of people and technologies here at CES. Today we took a ride around Sin City with Intel to get a mobile demo of WiMAX technology, which I’ve written about here. In the same parking lot across from the Las Vegas Convention Center, General Motors was demoing its autonomous Boss vehicle, in which PM contributing editor Erik Sofge rode around Robot City with Carnegie Mellon before it won the DARPA Urban Challenge....

If you want to take home a prize of nearly $29,000 from NASA, all you have to do is protect astronauts from dangerous long-term radiation exposure.Here’s the problem at hand: Traveling to Mars will take hundreds of days—far more than a year, and much longer than any journey the Apollo missions took. That’s a lot of time to be exposed to dangerous radiation, which might even give astronauts brain damage, a recent study suggested....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe carbon fiber phenomenon has gone from fiercely functional (1980s-era F1 cars) to annoyingly decorative (1990s-era Pep Boys accessories) and all the way back to square one (see: Boeing Dreamliner.) And while the carbon wheel has dodgy implications on the passenger car scene (bling bling, anyone?), there are plenty of functional arguments to be made for the high-tech hoops including quick acceleration and turn-in, crisp handling, and smooth ride quality....

I ran into Casey Neistat in the men’s room at the Oscars, two Oscars ago. I recognized him from his vlog. He looked the same as he does on YouTube, except he was wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses instead of a T-shirt and sunglasses. He had a Samsung Gear 360, which at the time was a spanking-new, golf-ball-shaped camera that tech-type people were going crazy about because it promised to allow the masses to record virtual-reality video....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamWhen the ARSV Laurence M. Gould pulled up to the tiny dock on Anvers Island, Antarctica, its passengers were armed with a cardboard box of perfectly formed snowballs, freshly scooped from the snow drifted on deck. It didn’t take long for the residents of Palmer Station, the smallest of the three U.S. stations in Antarctica, to prepare an arsenal for retaliation. This is the approximate moment I realized that life at the station was going to be not only educational, but also fun—a quick dip in a tiny community at the bottom of the world....

You can’t walk 10 feet at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show without bumping into one of two things: tablets and cases to hold them. Thanks to the healthy head start Apple has in the product category, most tablet cases on the floor are sized for the iPad. And, keeping with this uniformity, most of them are slight variations on grippy plastic, thick padded plastic, hard slippery plastic or, for the truly innovative, padded leather....

California is facing one of its most severe droughts in the last 100 years. The state’s Governor, Jerry Brown, issued the first-ever mandatory reduction of water use. And yesterday, because of raging wildfires fueled by the four-year dry spell, California declared a state of emergency. Yet the most drastically drought-hammered part of the Golden State has been its mountains.According to new research conducted by a team of environmental scientists led by Valerie Trouet at the University of Arizona, the total snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range—the state’s 400-mile-long rocky spine—is at its lowest level in at least the last 500 years....

While the Air Force is working on ways to protect our satellites from hackers, there may be a more immediate concern: the Chinese last week tested an anti-satellite missile, successfully shooting down one of their aging weather satellites. Although FedEx recently pulled its order of the A380 Airbus, apparently they’ve found a technology worth taking for a spin: anti-missile systems on their cargo jets.Apple posted profits of $1 billion for the last quarter of 2007....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen I first saw this home, “Montesilo,” in an the PopMech gallery of the 18 Strangest Homes, a few things caught my eye: the roof, the curved balcony, and the wall of windows on a curve. I was also interested to learn that the structure was originally a farm silo.But what really struck a chord was the siding. I’m seeing more of this type of exterior wall finish featured in high-profile projects lately, which is interesting because the material—corrugated metal sheeting—is inexpensive to purchase and easy to install....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credits: Getty Images, Gallup) Hackers are even scarier to Americans than murderers and terrorists, according to a new Gallup poll. The company surveyed a random sample of more than 1,000 adults living in all 50 states and found that way more of them worry about digital crimes than physical ones. Only two potential crimes worried more than half of Americans, and both were related to hackers. Sixty-nine percent of Americans worry about having hackers steal the credit card information they use at stores, and 62% worry about having their computer or smartphone hacked and information on it stolen....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf Dodge is the wild child of the Chrysler Group’s coterie of brands– second only, of course, to the newly appointed big daddy of all badasses, SRT– then the two-wheeled sport of Supercross is like a corporate branding soulmate for the nameplate. Marketing stats reveal similar median incomes ($72,355 vs $79,812), and a heavily male-skewing demographic shared by both entities, making their partnership seem all the more like a match made in high octane heaven....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile there is no such thing as a perfect building material, drywall comes pretty close. For one thing, it’s dirt cheap, costing about $7 for a 1/2-in.-thick 4 x 8 panel. It’s also DIY friendly–about all you need to work successfully with it is a small bunch of hand tools, some of which you already own. So it’s no wonder that, since the 1940s, drywall has steadily replaced lath and plaster....

Media Platforms Design TeamI generally avoid using my tech columns to complain about glitches and failures of my own gadgets, but I’ve come to the end of my rope with my iPhone, and the only thing that will make me whole again is a public rant.The problem began almost imperceptibly several months ago. I found myself pushing my first generation iPhone’s “home” button two, sometimes three times before the device would respond....