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Media Platforms Design TeamDARPA has a new idea for a safe, easy way to eliminate all sorts of chemical weapons—breaking them down to safe compounds such as oxides and alkaline earth metal salts. This month, the agency’s Agnostic Compact Demilitarization of Chemical Agents program put out a call for radical new proposals to make this weapons-to-dirt plan happen.The drawbacks of today’s chemical weapons disposal tech is that none of the available solutions work on all agents, and the fact, due to their large size and limited transportability, these systems require that the deadly agent be transported....

One of Evel Knievel’s stunt bikes, a customized 1976 Harley-Davidson Sportster XL 1000, is coming up for auction next month in Las Vegas. The infamous daredevil, known for jumping Harleys from ramp to ramp, rode the Sportster while fending off Mexican drug dealers in the 1977 action movie Viva Knievel!The Sportster was custom built by Bud Ekins, a stuntman best known for his work in The Great Escape. It has been on display by a Los Angeles-area Harley dealer ever since filming on Viva Knievel!...

Media Platforms Design TeamJon Keegan at the Wall Street Journal put in countless hours into this painstaking four hours of spectacular photos from the Cassini mission. For the last 11 years, NASA’s Cassini probe has explored the Saturn system. In that time, it’s discovered an ocean underneath a tiny moon called Enceladus, discovered massive methane lakes under the thick haze of Titan, found new moons, and discovered a hexagonal storm on Saturn....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis is the week the world seemingly woke up to the U.S. government’s drone wars. Drones have fired missiles on thousands of targets and flown countless flight hours over battlefields in the Middle East and northern Africa. But last week, the for the legality of targeting U.S. citizens who are plotting with al-Qaida by means of airstrikes became public, and the administration used the argument to support the killing of U....

Media Platforms Design TeamCalifornia-based Fisker Automotive has halted production of its plug-in hybrid Karma luxury sedan after battery provider A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last month. The automaker says it is suspending production until a buyer is found for the failed battery manufacturer.The news, first reported by Bloomberg yesterday, is yet another setback to the fledgling automaker, which lost 300 European-bound Karmas during Hurricane Sandy and continues to delay production of its mass-market mid-size Atlantic sedanFisker will be waiting to see what happens when A123 is auctioned off on Dec....

Media Platforms Design Team During the course of its first season, Fringe has played with the idea of that there are actually two realities, one slightly different from the other. In the season finale, “There’s More Than One of Everything,” the show delved into the science behind this idea, fleshing out the alternate reality with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and company trying to stop über-villain David Robert Jones from getting to the elusive Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell, who, according to spokeswoman Nina Sharp, is hiding out in this other reality....

Media Platforms Design TeamGeneral Motors, the “new” General Motors, is out and about these days trying to convince institutional investors that the post-bankruptcy carmaker is worth buying into when it issues stock later this month. The road show for GM involves private jet rides, five-star hotels and a return to fattened expense accounts at top-rated restaurants. Meantime, a much less sexy selling process is going on at “Old GM,” the skeletal remains of the company that went through bankruptcy last year....

Submarine warfare is deadly enough, especially considering that they carry some of the nuclear arsenal. Now consider a radical proposal Robert Ballard recently gave at a U.S. Navy symposium: submarines with wheels that crawl on the seafloor.It’s an idea that has been dormant for at least 30 years, but the the gist is this: If subs can roll around at the bottom of the sea, in terrain that would normally threaten to puncture their hulls, then they could hide out in places where that terrain reflects radio waves and live invisible for a month at a time....

How To Do A DonutEzra Dyer shows us the right way to do a donut. Spin on!https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/how-to/a14700/how-to-do-a-donut-the-right-way/Posted by Popular Mechanics on Monday, March 23, 2015You don’t need a Hellcat to spin a donut. Here, we demonstrate proper donut technique with a 2015 Mazda Miata—all 167 horsepower of it. This Miata has two key ingredients: a manual transmission and a limited-slip differential. The stick shift allows you to bring the revs up and drop the clutch to spin the rear wheels, while the limited-slip ensures that both rear tires break loose (an open diff will tend to simply spin the inside tire, making for a lame donut)....

Q: Our two-year-old gas-fired water heater knocks and rumbles while we use the hot water, and just afterward. Should we buy a new one?Media Platforms Design TeamFlushing the sediment out of a water heater improves its efficiency and prolongs its life. Left in place, the gunk speeds corrosion.A: Don’t give up so easily – this problem is simple to fix. Sediment has built up at the bottom of your tank. When it is heated by the gas burner below, moisture in the gunk flashes into steam that bursts into the water....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe scientists at Palmer Station, the U.S. research station on the West Antarctic Peninsula, study the marine ecosystem, so there’s one tool absolutely essential to their work: the Zodiac inflatable boat. Made of extremely tough rubber, it glides through and over chunks of ice nimbly and noses right up against rocky shores to dock. It also sits low in the water, making it easy for researchers to haul equipment into the boat and deploy it into the water column over the sides....

A new rubbery, starfish-like robot can crawl through fire and over snow even after being run over by a car, and all without the constraints of a tether.Scientists at Harvard recently began developing flexible robots from silicone rubbers. The bots undulate and walk using compressed air that is forced in and out of many tiny pneumatic channels running through their limbs—essentially, they get inflated and deflated like balloons. These soft robots, inspired by creatures such as starfish, worms, and squid, could one day squirm through obstacle courses that might prove challenging or impossible for metallic robots....

Media Platforms Design TeamQ: My iPhone’s earpiece no longer works. I can only hear con­versations over the speakerphone and through earphones. When I called customer service they said I need to bring it in to diagnose the problem. Is there anything else I can do?A: Dirt and dust can easily get trapped in the headphone jacks of many phones and laptop computers. On the iPhone, this can trip a sensor inside the jack, which tricks the phone into thinking headphones are plugged in....

Download this pdf to learn how counterterrorism experts protect U.S. airports.No one sees them coming. There are no flashing lights, no sirens. The black Suburban simply glides out of Fifth Avenue traffic and pulls into a no-parking zone in front of the Empire State Building. Moments later, four men spill out in combat helmets and heavy body armor: Two carry submachine guns; the others, snub-nosed shotguns.Camera-toting tourists stop jabbering and stare at this intimidating new presence, their faces a mixture of curiosity and fear....

Media Platforms Design TeamAUBURN HILLS, Mich. — In a surprise move here this morning amid struggling sales numbers from its dealers and fuel-efficient buzz from competitors, Chrysler announced that it’s charging into the electric vehicle market a lot sooner than expected. The automaker just unveiled a trio of battery-powered vehicles—including an all-electric, 200-mile-range Dodge sports car that we revved up near its 120-mph top speed on the test track and think could give the a run for its money—and plans to bring one of them to market by 2010, aligning Chrysler with the timetable for General Motors’ ....

It seems like every year or so, a different niche photographic technique crosses over from the photorati to the point-and-shoot mainstream. This year I’d put my money on fake miniaturization—a trick that makes full-size cityscapes and vehicles look like closeups of dioramas or Fisher-Price models. In recent months, groups on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites have brought attention to the technique’s amateur auteurs. So how are these photos made? It usually comes down to depth of field—that’s the term photographers use to describe how much or how little of a photo appears sharp and in focus....

A Russian Tank ballet, choreographed by Andrei Melanyin, head of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater of Russia.It’s hard to look away when a 45-ton tank takes a 4-foot jump. And as it lands, more than 15 feet away from where it took off, you feel the force of the impact migrate through the metal bleachers into your feet, legs and gut. I’m at a dress rehearsal at Zhukovsky test center, about 25 miles outside Moscow, for a theatrical performance called The Invincible and the Legendary, set to debut the next day at a Russian arms exposition....

Today, NASA announced that its Curiosity rover might have stumbled upon the most compelling evidence for water seen yet.Richard Cook, project manager at Mars Science Laboratory, said in a press conference today that 158 days into its mission on the surface of Mars, Curiosity is healthy and finally ready to drill—a process he admits NASA has been promising for a while. The engineering tasks required before drilling commences are all complete, he says....

Media Platforms Design TeamSikorsky is throwing its hat in the ring for the U.S. Army’s armed aerial scout (AAS) program: The company announced today that it will build two prototypes outfitted with its to the Army’s specifications. X2 technologiesOne of the new “Raider” helicopters will be crammed with diagnostic and evaluative equipment, or “orange boxes and orange wire,” as Sikorsky’s president Jeff Pino put it in a teleconference this morning. “But we’re building a second one to let our customers experience what we believe is eye-watering new performance with very typical helicopter flight characteristics,” Pino said....

Quantum entanglement is one of those strange facets of quantum mechanics that produces baffling behaviors in objects at the quantum level, but isn’t easy to find in our everyday world that appears to be governed by good old-fashioned classical physics. Yet, according to quantum theory, even objects in our everyday macro-size world should have this property. And in a new study in today’s edition of the journal Science, researchers have shown that they could entangle diamond crystals, the first time entanglement has been shown in objects under real-life conditions....