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Media Platforms Design TeamAutomotive teases can range from clinical countdowns and blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em video peekabos to completely non-visual audio snippets of stirring engine sounds.In anticipation of the 2013 SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association) show, Hyundai chose a surprisingly un-coy way of hyping their armada of show vehicles. By commisioning a series of renderings that depict the show cars in hyper-stylized, abstract settings, the Korean carmaker created a visual setup for the vehicles, entirely free of the artifice of suspense....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast week, Davin Coburn headed to the Pacific Northwest to learn about one company’s revolutionary new build process for their high-performance kitplane—and then to go for a test drive, to figure out what it was like 180 degrees from a midtown Manhattan office. Catch up with his journey by clicking here, then learn how to build your own plane below…It’s amazing how far the aircraft came in one day....

There’s something deeply upsetting about forcing a robot to sing a dissonant, non-vocal version of the song “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston. Self-described artist, hacker, and DJ Martin Backes created an automated machine—which he calls “What do machines sing of?"—that croons through a selection of ballads from the 1990s one after another. Endlessly. View full post on YoutubePerhaps more unsettling is that Backes designed the singing machine using the SuperCollider programming language to mimic the pitch of whatever it’s singing, meaning that it closely adheres to the emotional resonance in each....

Media Platforms Design TeamSECOND REPORT - August 2010Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Dan Chavkin) The top has been up more than down over the past six months—the realities of the ‘09 to ‘10 El Nino season in Southern California. But the storms are gone. And we’ve found great pleasure in leisurely early morning top-down drives up the Pacific Coast Highway, sipping a warm cup of coffee as the cool breezes caress our cheeks....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design TeamRobots are taken over the written word. According to The Wall Street Journal, a single software program is responsible for creating 2.7 million articles, or 8.5 percent of all the entries on Wikipedia. The writerbot, coded by 53-year-old Sverker Johansson, searches databases online and then arranges facts into articles. Johansson says his bot can write up to 10,000 separate posts a day....

Media Platforms Design TeamHurricane Isaac continues its northwesterly crawl across Louisiana, leaving considerable damage and not a little heartbreak in its wake, particularly in the parishes south of New Orleans.But it’s no Katrina, and not simply because it’s a less severe storm than its storied predecessor (Isaac is moving through as a Category 1, while Katrina was a Category 3 at landfall). Casualties and property damage have been significantly reduced in the Pelican State in part because Louisiana is better prepared for a hurricane than it was when Katrina made landfall seven years ago....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow did you get involved in Prometheus?It was about two years ago. I’d been back [from my break after we finished writing Lost] for just a couple days and my phone rang and my agent said, “Ridley Scott is calling you in five minutes.” I slammed on the brakes… and pulled over [to take the call]. I stammered my way through that conversationI was convinced that [Scott] thought I was someone that he already knew, because I have been worshipping the ground that he walked on for as long as I can remember, and [I was] secretly hoping that whatever he was sending me was the Alien prequel I’d been reading about....

On a chilly day in late January, Darren Buscemi took his 10-year-old daughter, Ali, and 8-year-old son, David, to the beach at Surf City, N.J., to try out a new metal detector. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had just begun to pump 33,000 dumptruck loads’ worth of sediment onto the shore, and Buscemi, a real estate developer, suspected he might find something interesting. When telltale beeping led him to a rusty cylinder 412 in....

Apple has announced the new iPhone X, a beautiful redesigned iPhone with a screen that stretches from edge to edge, a fancy new camera, and some wild facial recognition tech. And just like every year when Apple releases its latest and greatest iPhone, millions of people ask themselves (and their tech-savviest friends) the same question: Should I upgrade? No one can answer that question for you. It depends on all sorts of factors, chief among them being how much money you’ve got kicking around....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe FAA announced six sites for advanced unmanned aerial vehicle testing today. The accepted proposals come from various universities, state governments and airports. “The FAA considered geography, climate, location of ground infrastructure, research needs, airspace use, safety, aviation experience and risk,” the agency said in a release.Many locations were vying for a test site, seeing it as an immediate jobs generator and a foothold into the growing field of drones....

This week tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil leaked out into the ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara County, CA. The slick—estimated at 21,000 gallons on the low end, just over 100,000 at the max—spans nine miles across the Santa Barbara shore.The rupture in the 24-inch wide, 28-year-old line owned by Plains All American Pipeline has been fixed, but the oil that’s already escaped is now free floating in the Pacific, and it’ll continue to contaminate beaches and kill wildlife unless it’s contained....

Media Platforms Design TeamComet Sliding Spring was 86,000 miles from Mars when one of NASA’s explorers snapped these pictures. And while you might not see much more than a dot, you’re looking at history. This is the closest look we’ve ever gotten at such a comet.It came from the Oort Cloud, a vast region of icy objects 50,000 times farther from the sun than we are, and even much further than the Kuiper Belt that’s home to Pluto....

Media Platforms Design TeamAsk a dozen mechanically gifted men to name their favorite tools, and the answers may surprise you. No one mentions an expensive table saw or a compressor-driven nail gun. A few toss out power tools, but most respond with something humbler–a steel ruler, a pair of pliers, a block plane that fits in a nail apron. Each is a familiar ally in the battle of man against mechanical chaos....

I met my pilot, Patrick, the night before he was to take me up in the air a mile above Lakeland, FL. He was one of eight pilots there as part of the legendary Breitling Jet Team, the evening after their first official North American flight. He joked that his nickname, Gaston, came from a French cartoon, a character famous for his narcolepsy.“So if you hear me snore in the cockpit, just make sure to wake me up,” he says....

There’s a barn I’m renovating—and will be renovating for the remaining years of my life. It’s 30 years old, has a concrete-block first floor and gambrel roof, it’s in great shape—and it’s slated to become my shop, which now takes up temporary digs in the basement of the house. Some might be satisfied with the basement¬—but that’s another story.Now, this is a real barn—it has stalls for horses—and the last owner had sheep, too....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor sheer firepower, it’s hard to imagine anything outgunning the planet-killing Death Star from the “Star Wars” movies. Not for lack of trying, though. Since the first catapults and cannons took aim, the search has been on for guns that can shoot farther, faster, and deliver more deadly results. Yet there are also those who’ve foreseen the opportunity to put these weapons to peaceful purposes.It’s difficult to imagine the shock waves that reverberated through Paris on the morning of March 21, 1918, when shells began raining down on the city....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn his recent State of the Union address, President Obama spoke glowingly of 3D printing, saying the technology “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” At NASA, the revolution is already under way. Engineers are now testing 3D printing (more broadly known as additive manufacturing) for making engine parts for the Space Launch System (SLS), the vehicle slated to take mankind back to the moon, to asteroids, and someday to Mars....

NOTE: You may have noticed that all of the pliers we reviewed got five stars. That’s not a mistake. It’s also not something we’ve done before. For the first time ever, all of the tools in this test deserved our highest rating. You can’t go wrong with any of them.C.H. Hanson 10CJCH HansonBuy NowThe clamp mechanism is a marvel of design. A small machine screw with very fine threading allows for minute adjustments....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamMORE BREAKING NEWS FROM THE 2008 L.A. AUTO SHOW• 2008 LA AUTO SHOW: All of Our Updates and Analysis in One Place The Los Angeles Auto Show offered a glimpse of what our world would be like without GM or Chrysler. The show was quieter and less energized than it had been in recent years. In fact, the mood was downright eerie at moments. Sure, we had world debuts from close to a dozen automakers....

On Tuesday, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) announced a new 3D printing technology capable of creating intricately detailed structures at the nanometer scale with unprecedented speed.The process, called two-photon lithography (TPL), works by tracing a finely focused laser beam through a pool of resin. As the beam’s focal point—just two photons wide—pulses into the liquid, the resin hardens on that point and leaves behind a solid structure....