🦖 US Navy's first hypersonic missile, animals predict earthquakes, how dinosaurs became stupider over time

The United States Navy’s famed stealth destroyer, the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), is being retrofitted to carry the service’s first-ever hypersonic missile. The works are planned for all three of the ships of the class and are being undertaken at Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Shipyard workers are replacing the twin gun turrets with missile tubes. Once the work is complete, the USS Zumwalt (and its sister ships) will be capable of performing fast, precision strikes from a distance.

Work began on the upgrade in August of 2023 and is scheduled for completion by 2025. Once complete, this retrofit will raise the ship’s profile and help repair its poor reputation for cost overruns during development. Delve deeper into our Must-Read.

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🚀 US Navy’s stealth destroyer to deploy first-ever hypersonic missiles

“It was a costly blunder. But the Navy could take victory from the jaws of defeat here and get some utility out of them by making them into a hypersonic platform,” Bryan Clark, a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute, told the Associated Press (AP).

This builds on news from last year that the U.S. Navy planned to convert the class of ships into what it calls “Conventional Prompt Strike” ships. This means that the new hypersonic armaments will launch like a ballistic missile and then release a hypersonic glide vehicle that would travel seven to eight times faster than the speed of sound before hitting the target.

The Navy and Army are jointly developing the planned hypersonic missiles that the ship will carry. Each Zumwalt-class destroyer will have four missile tubes, each holding three missiles, allowing for 12 hypersonic weapons per ship.

🐕 Dogs, goats, birds join space-based system to predict earthquakes, volcanoes

An international team of scientists developed a new system for predicting natural disasters which involves tagging wildlife and monitoring their movements from space.

ICARUS, or the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, several years in the making, ambitiously wants to capitalize on the latest in tagging technology, that is, smaller and more lightweight devices to gather relevant data from animals pertaining to the planet’s homeostasis.

As has been well-recorded since ancient times, animals often act strangely before disaster strikes, such as snakes fleeing the scene, goats on Mount Etna refusing to climb to heights that normally appeal to them, and toads disappearing in the days before the tragic L’Aquila earthquake in 2009.

🦖 Giant horned dinosaurs shrank brains, chose size, armor over intelligence: Study

US-China researchers have uncovered a surprising evolutionary trend in horned dinosaurs by examining their fossilized skulls.

A 100-million-year evolutionary journey led horned dinosaurs down a path of diminishing intelligence and sensory capabilities. The team states that this decline could be attributed to their colossal sizes.

“The early horned dinosaurs bear relatively large brain volumes, even higher than most extant reptiles,” the researchers wrote in the study paper.

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