Giant Freakin Robot

Though their days of scouting out mines beneath the ocean are numbered, dolphins still have a few detective skills hidden up their sleeves. In the sleeves of their dolphin shirts.

Navy-trained bottlenose dolphins searching off the coast of Coronado, California stumbled upon an 11-foot-long brass torpedo, discovered to be a Howell torpedo, one of only 50 manufactured by a Rhode Island company between 1870 and 1889, during a time when the U.S. was trying to up their Naval muscle. They were the first torpedoes to follow a track clandestinely, traveling at 25 knots with a range of 400 yards. Pretty tough little bastards, though they were soon outdated by better weapons, and so goes the cyclical nature of things.

“Considering it was made before electricity was provided to U.S. households, it was pretty sophisticated for its time,” said Christian Harris, a biosciences operations supervisor at the Systems Center Pacific.

The dolphins found the torpedo in two pieces, in an area where no one expected to find anything. Years in the water had left it harmless, thankfully, though they could still read ”USN No. 24″ stamped on the side.

It’s sad that the world I live in is so privileged (relative to impoverished people) that seeing my phone’s battery hit below 10 percent capacity brings about genuine disappointment, as if plugging my phone into its charger is going to kill me. But then I can’t text people, or check my e-bills, or read 10 pages of a novel while waiting for water to boil. I need my podcasts!

Sarasota, California’s Eesha Khare, age 18, invented a supercapacitor — not a flux capacitor, mind you — that recently won her the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at an international science fair, which also included a $50,000 prize. Khare, who has an interest in nanochemistry, created the tiny device because “My cell phone battery always dies,” she told NBC News. Though she has so far used it only to power an LED, the device is small enough to fit in a phone, and would completely demolish all currently existing batteries.

It reaches maximum energy storage in 20-30 seconds, and can last for 10,000 charge-recharge cycles, compared with around 1,000 cycles for everyday rechargable batteries. Her supercapacitor also holds its charge longer. Beyond cellphones, these things could be a boon for the electronics industry and the thousands upon thousands of mobile products out there.

Apocalyptic stories are big this year, and this summer the genre is moving into more humorous territory. First we’re getting the star-studded This Is the End. While that looks like it’s going to be a pretty damn good time, the one that many intrepid moviegoers are highly stoked for is The World’s End. Both obviously deal with cataclysmic events that may or may not signify the destruction of our world. Hot on the heels of the first trailer for the film, we now have two new posters for The World’s End.

Hitting theaters on August 23 (July 19 in the UK), The World’s End is the third in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s so-called “Cornetto Trilogy.” They’ve already taken the piss out of zombie movies with Shaun of the Dead, and action extravaganzas with Hot Fuzz, and now the friends have trained their sights on the science fiction realm. If their track record holds, The World’s End will likely function simultaneously as both a send-up and a great example of the genre it seeks to lampoon.

Star Trek has always been at the center of imagination and technology and has always dared us to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now one of the Original Series’ most important props — the Shuttlecraft Galileo — has found a new home, on public display at NASA’s Space Center Houston.

The Galileo has been undergoing restoration for a while now, courtesy of the Galielo Restoration Project. Now Space.com reports that the restored shuttle will eventually migrate to its new home in the Johnson Space Center’s museum and visitor center. Home to both NASA‘ s Mission Control and astronaut corps, the Space Center is a perfect home for an iconic piece of Star Trek history.

The shuttlecraft is one of the most iconic and recognizable relics from the original Star Trek, and it was thought to be lost for almost 20 years. Props restorer Adam Schneider believes that this one piece represents Star Trek’s connection to space exploration and science. He bought the Galileo at auction with his wife Leslie in 2012, and says, “I think a NASA facility is the embodiment of manned space travel. This is the beginning of [Space Center Houston's] entrée into how fictional visions of space travel led to the actual thing occurring.”