TechnologyLoco

This doggo is actually a Swedish Vallhund, which is probably a precursor to the Welsh Corgi. But come on—that looks like a stumpy husky or something, doesn't it? He (or she) was too cute not to include. These good boys and girls are all corgi cross breeds, and people have pointed out that they all seem to look like you took a normally proportioned dog and just chopped off half of each leg. And they’re not wrong. Scientifically speaking, they’re almost spot on. The reason corgis have those sweet lil’ legs is that they all suffer (albeit adorably) from the same genetic condition: achondroplastic dwarfism. The first short-legged puppers happened by accident some 300 plus years ago. When people were starting to breed dogs for specific traits, they found some happened to have these miniature little legs with normally proportioned bodies. And those dog breeders who thought that was freakin’ adorable decided to start breeding those vertically-challenged pups with other dogs in an ...

Before Harvey, or Irma, or Katrina, there was Camille. With winds so powerful that they knocked out wind gauges in Mississippi, the epic strength of Hurricane Camille was monstrous. But before it struck the Gulf coast on August 17, 1969, Robert Simpson, the director of the National Hurricane Center, made the executive decision to warn residents in the path of the giant storm of high winds, low barometric pressure and a storm surge of between 15 and 20 feet. According to a USA Today report about the event many years later, the decision to get so specific was unprecedented. In doing so, Simpson bucked tradition at the National Weather Service’s precursor, the United States Weather Bureau, which typically gave people living in the path of a hurricane generic warnings instead of granular details of storm surge or wind speed. The decision to give people more information paid off. More people got out of the way of the storm, and Simpson was on the lookout for ways to communicate the da...

CELESTIAL FIREWORKS A series of young stars glimmer in the distance like fireworks in the sky. This image was released in April 2015 to celebrate Hubble's 25th anniversary. NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/A. Nota/Westerlund 2 Science Team ↑ The Hubble Space Telescope has continuously unleashed a stream of jaw-dropping intergalactic imagery since it launched on April 24, 1990. Not only do these images, which look more like paintings at first glance, allow researchers to study distant worlds, galaxies and nebulae, they have captured the minds of the general public, getting us genuinely excited about space exploration. But here's some sad news: despite all of these wonderful things, Hubble is getting older. In a few short years, Hubble's technology will become fully outdated and NASA will let it drift to a fiery death in the atmosphere, like some crazed band of space Vikings. Once gone, at least we know we'll have the gold-encrusted James Webb Space Telescope to ke...

MARS This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight. REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout We're on our way to Mars. NASA has a plan to land astronauts on its surface by the 2030s. Private spaceflight companies like SpaceX have also expressed interest in starting their own colonies there, while the infamous Mars One project has already enlisted civilians for a one-way trip to our planetary neighbor in 2020. While many may dream of living their remaining days on Mars, those days may be numbered. The Martian environment poses significant challenges to Earth life, and establishing a Mars habitat will require an extraordinary amount of engineering prowess and technological knowhow to ensure the safety of its residents. The technology required to keep astronauts alive on Mars isn’t ready--and it may not be for many years. Though we may soon have the launch vehicles needed to transport people to Mars, a lot of the technology requi...