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Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s just another unexceptional small industrial park along the edge of the town of Apple Valley in Southern California’s high desert. One cinder-block building is divided into nine 2000-or-so-square-foot work spaces with roll-up garage doors. In one unit, there’s a cheerleader academy. In another, a heating and ventilation company. But unit No. 8 is full of aerospace hardware worthy of the Smithsonian. And it all belongs to Waldo Stakes....

Los Angeles is home to one of the greatest concentrations of automotive design studios in the world. So each year, as part of the Los Angeles Auto Show, designers from the major car companies are given a general theme and then cut loose to create their vision of the future. It’s called the Design Challenge and 2006 marks the third year for the competition.This year, the participants will create vehicles that are “environmentally aware of their global footprint....

Have a look at these two stories about digital tech that can help prevent health problems: The first is about the Clarity Pro, a device that can determine the health of a person’s skin. The device, a kind of digital imaging and analysis system, … can depict the depth and severity of wrinkles in a 3D chart, show the extent of bacteria-filled pores in a graph, or represent UV damage in purple dots scattered about your face in a white-light image....

Media Platforms Design Team(U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Tiffany Trojca) The Air Force’s newest intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft, the MC-12 took off yesterday for its first combat mission in Iraq. This medium-altitude manned turbo prop aircraft will support Coalition and joint ground forces. This aircraft is a product of the ISR task force put together by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to rush surveillance platforms into warzones. —Tyghe Trimble RELATED STORIES• PLUS: 7 Defense Winners and Losers Under Gates• ANALYSIS: Fixing Government Procurement• EARLIER: Behind the Scenes with a Special Ops Gunboat• FOLLOW US: Popular Mechanics is Now on Twitter!...

NASA announced today that it has found the Milky Way’s youngest supernova remnant. The remnant, dubbed G1.9+0.3, occurred near the center of the galaxy and is less than 140 years old–approximately 200 years younger than the previous record holder, Cassiopeia A. “Now, we can examine remnants at a stage that we’ve never seen them before,” said Dr. Stephen Reynolds of North Carolina University, who studied the object with the agency’s Chandra telescope....

Start SmokingGrilling makes for good eats, but true barbecue is a spiritual exercise. For the ultimate in smoked-meat manna, you need a classic barrel smoker with an offset firebox–like the one shown above, designed by PM’s Mike Allen. (For full plans on how to build it, click here.) “It’s all about controlling temperature,” says Jamie Purviance, author of Weber’s Big Book of Grilling, and a smoker gives you ultimate control....

As our investigation into hardware tampering illustrated, the Department of Defense may be defenseless in accounting for counterfeit chips inside its weapons, aircrafts and missile systems. Herb Lin, chief scientist for National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, joins us for a roundtable discussion on digital security. Plus, we catch up on tech trends from SWSX Interactive, scour the rumor mill for the New York Auto Show, get tips on night driving and meet a microcosm of America’s recent exporting success....

What do you do when NASA pulls the funding for the ambitious, autonomous, experimental space plane you’re developing? If you’re Boeing, you build it and fly it. That was the fate for the X-37 Approach and Landing Test Vehicle (ALTV) autonomous space plane, which flew for the first time late last week in a test flight organized not by NASA, but by the Pentagon’s DARPA office. The flight was a huge success, right up to the point where the robot plane rolled off the Edward’s runway and damaged its nose gear....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf a strong hurricane hits South Texas just right, an epic storm surge of more than 25 feet will barrel through the Houston Ship Channel, knocking over oil and hazardous materials storage tanks, crippling the nation’s busiest foreign tonnage port and its largest petrochemical complex in one blow. Even a monthlong closure of the channel would cost the national economy more than $60 billion—no doubt drawn from federal coffers—before counting rebuilding and environmental cleanup costs....

(Published in the October 1997 issue)More: How to choose the right engine for your boat.Don’t confuse durable and reliable. For instance, use durable paint, but don’t tell people you have a reliable paint job. Your mailman should be reliable, but you could probably care less if he’s durable, provided his replacement is equally reliable. And while it’s no problem to say your wife or girlfriend is a reliable person, it could get ugly if you call her durable....

Media Platforms Design TeamI clearly remember my first Apple computer—a Macintosh Plus that my father got in the mid-1980s. My dad acquired it through his bank, which gave him the computer at a steep discount instead of interest on a CD—an oddball promotion that, to this day, I still don’t understand. That computer had 1MB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive built into the front of it, a mouse and a keyboard that attached to the main unit through a corkscrew spiral telephone cord....

Media Platforms Design TeamCan police attach a GPS tracker to your car, or is that an invasion of your privacy? On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in , ruled unanimously that doing so is a search, meaning that it must pass muster under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This ruling may put a crimp in the use of this popular law-enforcement technique, but what’s really interesting is that it also may signal the court’s willingness to overhaul how it thinks about what constitutes a trespass on your privacy....

YouTube user OtaKing77077 has finally finished an ambitious tribute to two great loves: 80s action-filled anime and Star Wars. Their powers combine in the short fan film Star Wars: Tie Fighter, one of the most fun Star Wars fan creations we’ve seen in ages.The King made this over the course of four years, starting with a shorter version released in 2013. In sum, his work adds up to seven minutes of giant mechs, bigger space ships, loving tributes to classic LucasArts games, and big explosions....

Texting in the rain is a modern-day nightmare. You try and pin the umbrella between your neck and shoulder to free up your hands and wind up soaked, stumbling into other pedestrians, or both. A Korean company has a solution. A terrible, ingenious solution. It looks so horrible and geeky. And I need it. Invented by kt Design, the Phone-brella (yes, the Phone-brella) is simple in concept; instead of just having a hook on the bottom of the handle, it also has a hook on the top so it can rest on your wrist while you use both your hands for typing....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Alice takes her tumble down the rabbit hole in Tim Burton’s latest movie, Alice in Wonderland, audiences will feel like they’re falling with her, thanks to expertly rendered 3D. And if there’s any place that’s made for the format, it’s Wonderland. “In [this] world—the shrinking and the growing and the spatial stuff—3D helps,” Burton told reporters at last year’s Comic Con. “It enhances the experience.“Unlike megablockbuster Avatar, Alice wasn’t filmed with a stereoscopic camera rig; instead, it was shot with traditional cameras and converted after the fact....

Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: Team OMAThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, spurred by the devastation that storm wrought last year, has collaborated with New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge to host the Rebuild by Design competition. Earlier this week, 10 teams each presented various projects to improve the infrastructure of the New York area and make the region less vulnerable to the next natural disaster....

Hello, Star Wars-style hand replacements? A prosthetic hand that can not only grip but also allow the wearer to feel is getting closer than ever.Two new studies out today document mind-blowing mind-controlled prosthetics: the first bionic arm to connect to bone, muscles and nerves, and a bionic hand sensitive enough to pull the stems off cherries without mashing the fruit into a pulp.Sensory FeedbackIn one study, researchers experimented with a Swedish man whose right arm was amputated just above the elbow more than 10 years ago....

Media Platforms Design Team LOS ANGELES — Though hybrid technology takes center stage at General Motors’s L.A. Auto Show booth, the newly unveiled Aveo5 shows that GM also is taking more traditional approaches to building fuel-efficient vehicles. Expected to be the lowest-priced car in the U.S. when it goes on sale next year, the Aveo5 will feature a 107-hp, 1.6 -liter Ecotec engine capable of 26 mpg city, 34 mpg highway....

Media Platforms Design TeamNAMYANG, South Korea — When we first saw the 2009 Hyundai Genesis at the Detroit auto show in January, we wondered if the Korean automaker could take its first venture into the global luxury market and play with the high-end big boys. This was the same question many asked of Toyota when they launched Lexus nearly 20 years ago. And we all know how successful that brand has become....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo play in the heavy-duty pickup truck segment, Ford, Chevy, GMC and Dodge know they have to deliver big capability and capacity anytime they come out with a new truck. And now, they need to meet tough new emissions regulations too. Dodge’s new Ram HD has a Cummins diesel that met the coming emissions levels three years ago. Where Ford and GM are investing cash to develop entirely new diesel engines for their all-new heavy-duty models next year, Dodge was able to invest that money in redesigning the outer skin and upgrading the interior of its trucks....