If a sodden rice paddy feels soft and forgiving underfoot, it is not a merciful place to set down an airplane at 200 mph. And that’s only one of Mike Selby’s reasons to look nervous as he watches his A-10 Warthog—a 10-foot-wide, 65-pound, hand-built model—begin its maiden takeoff roll down a rough asphalt runway near Bangkok, Thailand. Selby, who spent over $12,000 and the better part of a year fabricating and building this radio-controlled jet, stands runwayside with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans, trying to look relaxed as he draws on a Cuban cigar.

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Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

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The Winnebago isn’t exactly a marvel of technology. But there’s a good chance that NASA’s next generation of lunar travelers will live and work out of a two-piece system—a mobile robot and habitat combination that will allow astronauts to bring base camp with them—that has plenty in common with the humble RV.

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It's about time the folks in economy class got some lovin'. For years we've seen the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Emirates Air, and Singapore Airlines pamper their first-class passengers (Virgin calls tham "Upper Class," the snobs) with obscenely luxurious seats that stretch out to full length beds, huge television screens everywhere, fluffy slippers, and smokin' hot flight attendants.

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Last weekend, PopSci traveled to Lakeland, Florida, to watch Mike Selby's 5.5-to-1 scale model A-10 Warthog—star of our recent feature story— compete in Top Gun, an invitation-only event that is effectively the world championship of experimental radio-controlled aircraft.

Selby's team includes pilot Raymond Johns, an Air Force test pilot and three-star general; pit crew/logistician Bill Davidson, who is the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the US Air Force; and Bangkok jet-engine builder Pornchai "Hard Porn" Saechour.

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Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

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Last April, we dissected the world’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35B Lightning II, in the pages of our annual “How It Works” issue. Now military contractor Lockheed Martin is firing up the jet’s 40,000-pound-thrust engine (the most powerful ever built for a fighter jet) in preparation for flight tests. The jet can soar at supersonic speeds (1,000 mph) and deflect radar signals, but by the end of the month, pilots are expected to show off its most highly anticipated feature: the ability to stop mid-flight and touch down virtually anywhere.

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The small airplane is too dirty for an environmentally threatened world. That’s not the view from eco-activists, but from some of the leading lights in general aviation—the category encompassing small planes such as Cessnas flown by citizen pilots. “At some point, some environmental group is going to figure out that small aircraft fly leaded fuel,” said Mark Moore, NASA’s personal air vehicle program manager, to a meeting of engineers, aviation advocates and a billionaire corporate titan with his own private jet. Their goal, however, is not to bury private aviation, but to remake it as the greenest form of personal transit.

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Today marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate, NASA has released a collection of 59 new Hubble images (under the fantastic title "Galxies Gone Wild!") that present galaxies in all of their volatile wonder.

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Burkhard Bilger last summer in the New Yorker wrote a fascinating profile of Michel Fournier, a retired French army parachutist who has spent quite a bit of his retirement and his savings on chasing the world record for highest parachute jump. The article is no longer online (there is an abstract) but it is well worth digging up from your local library. Fournier has attempted the jump a handful of times already, only to be foiled by last-minute snafus. As the profile explains, it is a tremendously complicated thing to hurl oneself out of a balloon basket at 130,000 feet. Quite a lot can go wrong.

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