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Media Platforms Design TeamSince 2003, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have captured more than 1.3 million photos of Earth. They’re beautiful, and many of them are the highest-resolution nighttime photos ever taken from orbit, but there’s one problem: What the photographs show, exactly, is unclear. Which is why NASA hopes you can provide the answers.With a project called Cities at Night, a group of scientists from Spain are turning to crowdsourcing, asking anyone interested to plot these images on a map....

In 2003, the most recent year tracked by the National Fire Protection Association, there were 388,500 home fires in this country. Those fires killed 3145 people, accounted for 13,650 injuries and did $5.9 billion in property damage.And while many people equip their home with smoke detectors and dutifully replace the battery in them annually, they may be poorly equipped to prevent even a small fire from getting out of hand. Your first line of defense is a properly charged fire extinguisher placed where you can get at it as quickly as possible....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf your inkjet printer were a vending machine, you’d probably have to feed it at least a nickel for every page of black and white text, a quarter for every page of text with color, and fifty cents or more for every large photo.Ink isn’t cheap. In fact, by weight, the retail price of refill ink can equal that of silver (about $20 an ounce), and in some cases can be four times that amount....

Media Platforms Design TeamTwo comets visible in the Chilean night sky, March 2013. PANSTARRS is seen in the lower right. Credit: Juri Beletsky, Observatorio de Las Campanas, Chile.The first of two great comets expected to be visible to the naked eye in 2013 makes its flyby this weekend.Comet PANSTARRS will be closest to the sun on March 10th, but for those of us in the northern hemisphere, it will start to appear to the west just after sunset tonight, March 8....

Media Platforms Design TeamTuesday afternoon, a UAV plummeted from the sky on the East side of Manhattan. This wasn’t a massive military drone, but a three-pound quadcopter that almost struck an unsuspecting businessman during rush hour, who removed the memory card from the downed drone and reported the incident to police. According to New York’s ABC 7, the man “called the police who took a look at the drone video, but did no further investigation because they said no law was broken....

Media Platforms Design TeamDETROIT — The race for the Automotive X Prize is wide open. With more than 50 teams saying they’ll participate, the field showcases a multitude of concepts for engineering a 100-mpg vehicle. Strict requirements for the competition—and lack of funding for some teams—will no doubt weed out many of the entrants. But for every engineer, from Malcolm Bricklin’s Visionary Vehicles to a PM-sponsored team from Cornell University, the nascent stages of the AXP provide a larger venue for publicizing alternative and advanced auto technology....

Intel is dropping big money into quantum computing, announcing a $50 million deal with Delft University over the next decade. The goal: researching the kind of advances that will bring robust quantum computing into reality. Quantum computing seeks to move beyond binary – information fed through ones and zeros in a logic device. Instead of the bit, it has the qubit. It’s composed of ones, zeroes, and the “quantum superposition,” a third option which can be in many states at once....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe palladium that powers Tony Stark’s arc reactor—and, by extension, his Iron Man exoskeleton suit—is slowly leaking into his bloodstream and killing him. And the fast-talking industrialist has exhausted the rest of the periodic table looking for an element that is a safer power source than palladium. Stark’s only option is to create a new element—which he does by constructing a particle accelerator in his workshop out of some metal tubes....

The afterword to PM’s book, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To The Facts, by PM editor-in-chief Jim Meigs, is now available online. The essay recounts the magazine’s experiences with the so-called “9/11 Truth Movement,” and analyzes some of the inaccuracies and distortions commonly found in conspiracy literature. Critic Austin Bay called the piece “crisp and compelling.“On February 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for global domination....

Now that cars have black boxes, do car companies know where we go? Am I being followed?A black box, formally known as an event data recorder (EDR), and informally known as a narc-in-the-box, logs a variety of data regarding the operation of the vehicle in which it’s installed. The good news is that EDRs do not (yet) track your location, nor do they beam real-time information to feds, cops, carmakers, or mothers-in-law....

Rock Band 2 does not repeat Rock Band’s quantum leap in game-play design and technical innovation. What it does is expand on and improve the original enough to supplant it as the most fun party game of the year, and perhaps of all time. If you have the original game and hardware, plopping down $60 for the new software is a no-brainer, if only to jack up your arsenal of playable songs....

Media Platforms Design TeamSpeak And Spell (And Understand) The Endurance PC, custom built for rapid translation programs, is small, light and built to milspec.NEW YORK—Sometimes it’s hard enough to explain yourself in English. Once you cross the border, navigating a foreign language—fraught with idiomatic expressions and obscure but critical aberrations of grammar—can mangle a simple statement beyond recognition. Indeed, as President John F. Kennedy told a crowd of West Berliners, “I am a jelly doughnut....

Media Platforms Design TeamBad news for people who love absurd workout gadgets, hair-growing laser helmets, bizarre shape-altering underwear, gnomes, and generally wasting time on a long flight: . Katy Stech, bankruptcy reporter at The Wall Street Journal, tweeted this morning that the company behind the in-flight catalog has officially filed for bankruptcy.View full post on TwitterThe announcement is sad if not surprising. The Los Angeles Times reported back in April on the company’s financial troubles, driven partly by a failure to keep up with the times and partly by losing what was once a captive in-flight audience....

It looks like a lot of Apple users are holding off on downloading iOS 8, the newest version of its mobile operating system that was rolled out last month and comes standard on the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.According to Apple’s App Store support page, 47 percent of the devices that have visited the App Store recently are running iOS 8. That sounds like a decent number—that is, until you notice that it’s barely up from the 46 percent Apple reported two weeks ago....

Don’t forget to set your clocks an hour ahead today! This practice, which goes into effect the first Sunday in April, sometimes feels like the cleverest April Fool’s joke of all—causing people across the country to miss appointments and show up an hour late for brunch. It’s clever alright, but as a strategy to better utilize daylight hours in spring and summer. First suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 as a way to conserve fuel, daylight savings effectively moves an hour of sunlight from the morning to the evening....

Lust. That’s how we felt when we saw the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder at the 2006 Greater Los Angeles Auto Show. Now, only a few weeks later, we’re in Key Largo, Fla., driving it. Yes, this could be the best Monday ever. The roads in south Florida are flat and straight. So the Lambo folks arranged for us to test their latest raging bull on a road course at Homestead Miami Speedway....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe effect of guerrilla-style warfare is changing America’s military, and the Department of Defense wants all its troops to adopt tactics once reserved for Special Operations Forces (SOF). But experts at a recent defense convention in Washington, D.C., dedicated to SOF sounded warnings that the Pentagon bureaucracy is not nimble enough to match the changing mission.Experts, government officials and uniformed personnel at this week’s 20th annual Special Operations/Low Intensity Conference lamented the Pentagon’s focus on big-ticket hardware purchases over more intellectual innovations....

NEW YORK – In other news, the crew of Expedition 13 spent April Fools Day aboard the International Space Station. The crew, which includes the first Brazilian (Marcos Pontes) aboard on the ISS, dockedtheir Soyuz spacecraft to the station yesterday. Meanwhile, in orbit around Mars, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to aerobrake in the Martian atmosphere as the craft stabilizes its highly eccentric orbit. That didn’t stop the probe from a quick photo op: MRO sent back some of the highest resolution satellite images of Mars to date, with resolutions as high as 11 inches per pixel....

Fred Waring was a big band conductor whose band, Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians, was the first to electronically record a song. When an inventor approached Waring to invest in his early blender, the Miracle Mixer, Waring tweaked and renamed the product. The Waring Blendor debuted in 1937. Odd spelling aside, it looked pretty much like what you see here. Model: Waring PBB212Produced: McConnellsburg, Pa.Number of parts: 87Time to disassemble: 1 hour, 12 minutes, 2 secondsMedia Platforms Design Team1....

What is the strategy in Afghanistan?The fight in Afghanistan is a massive exercise in unconventional or “irregular” warfare. Conventional warfare pits armies against one another. Whoever is left standing wins. Irregular warfare is defined by the Pentagon as “a violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” After more than five years of aggressive, U.S.-led raids, the approach in Afghanistan these days seems to be, Let the Afghans go first....