There’s nothing like taking a nice Hawaiian stroll out to collect a bit of molten Earth stuff.That’s what a geologist from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) did to collect some samples from the active Puʻu ʻŌʻō zone of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii on September 28th. According to the HVO, a lava pond’s been active in the area’s crater for months now.If that activity sounds particularly dangerous, that’s because it can be....
Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Gary Ombler/Getty Images)Fed up by her often too-hot or too-cold home in upstate New York, Maggie Maurer insulated her attic and replaced a creaky furnace this February. Right away, her utility bill dropped by nearly a third. But Maurer is looking past those monthly savings to the moment she’ll really strike it big: next tax season. A provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, passed in February, allows homeowners like Maurer to claim tax credits for up to 30 percent, up to $1500, of the cost of energy-efficient upgrades like windows, doors, roofs and insulation....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe boomerang pattern is Formica’s homage to 1950s industrial design and a reissue of a pattern it once produced.Plastic laminate makes a great backsplash, but manufacturers recommend that you don’t glue it to drywall. Instead, use a substrate such as particleboard or plywood that has at least one A-grade veneer face. There’s a good reason for this: Adhesives work best on a clean, dry surface with a uniform texture....
Media Platforms Design TeamThose old .doc Word files that you’re used to have been around for years, and are used by just about everybody. There’s something wonderful about this ubiquity—if you send a .doc file to someone, you are pretty much guaranteed he will be able to read it. But the format is also very old—its basic structure has remained mostly unchanged for the past two decades. Beginning with Office 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new file format, called Open XML....
Media Platforms Design TeamHow does the availability of an anticancer “smart bomb” such as T-DM1 change treatment possibilities for patients? Almost all the chemotherapy we give for the treatment of breast cancer involves hair loss, anemia, and low white blood cell count, which make people susceptible to infection. Killing cancer in the laboratorythat’s not a hard task. The hard task is getting chemotherapy where we want it and keeping the rest of the patient’s body out of the picture....
Following the 2013 I-5 bridge collapse near Mount Vernon, Wash., the AP reported that the bridge was not structurally deficient but was functionally obsolete, and listed the bridge’s “sufficiency rating,” at 47 out of 100. But what does any of that bridge jargon mean to anyone who isn’t a civil engineer?U.S. infrastructure is crumbling. But aside from the occasional report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives letter grades in categories such as bridges and drinking water based on the wide-ranging assessments of its members, there’s no unified measurement for the status of different types of infrastructures....
Media Platforms Design TeamJay spends 10 days behind the wheel of BMW’s Hydrogen 7.When I hear people blaming the automobile for global warming, I have to chuckle. At the turn of the previous century, the car was seen as a savior. Back then, horses were the primary means of motive power, pulling heavy carts and carrying people. Sadly, they would drop dead in the streets from sheer exhaustion or abuse. And mounds of manure befouled Chicago, New York and other big cities, spreading nasty diseases like dysentery....
Media Platforms Design TeamDuesenbergs, I love ’em. They called the Duesy America’s Mightiest Motor Car. Introduced on the eve of the Great Depression, the Model J had a 420-cu-in. twin-cam 32-valve straight Eight. Peugeot was first with four-valve heads, in 1912, and Bugatti had three-valve heads in the 1920s, so Duesenberg was really using European technology, but on a grand scale. Almost no one did those heads on a 7.0-liter engine....
Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: NowPrice: $179 for 8GB; $199 for 16GBWhen Motorola revealed the Moto G, the company wanted a cheaper alternative to its high-priced flagship, the Moto X. The Google-owned handset maker had set its sights on the next billion smartphone users, convinced that this massive fraction of the tech-integrated populus will come from international low-end markets. Google and Motorola further cemented this opinion by choosing Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the G’s worldwide reveal because this isn’t a device for countries overrun with top-tier smartphones like the iPhone 5S, Moto X, Galaxy S4, or HTC One....
An ambitious year-long NASA-funded Mars simulation just kicked off this weekend, with stakes higher than before. The “astronauts” will be living on an arid volcano top in Hawaii. They’ll live in a 36 foot by 20 foot dome, using recycled air and living off rations of food. It will be cramped. Privacy will be nil. Dinner will be canned. Anytime they go outside, they’ll have to put on a spacesuit.The HI-SEAS facility, funded by the NASA Human Research program, has been designed to simulate (as best as possible) life on Mars....
Media Platforms Design TeamFew voices carry the sophisticated gravitas of Patrick Stewart’s, and few people are better suited to narrate a documentary about NASA’s future space exploration efforts than Capt. Picard himself. (Or Charles Xavier, if that’s more your thing.)Stewart will bring his classically trained voice to an IMAX Theater near you with Journey to Space. The film is about NASA’s efforts to return humans to deep space, starting with the Orion craft and the Space Launch System....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the rocket takes off, propelling your cyborg hero into space, it’s easy to look away. In this launch sequence, which appears early in the upcoming Xbox 360 game , the developers at Bungie cribbed from the bolted-on camera angles of a NASA mission. It’s a smart visual allusion, but gamers have seen it before. And yet, when the spacecraft’s stages have been jettisoned, and you’re now in control of a Sabre attack ship in orbit, with squadrons of alien fighters swooping in, it’s impossible to resist a stupid grin....
Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $149Feel free to check out at your next long business meeting and let Livescribe’s 2G Sky Wifi Smart Pen do the remembering for you. With the pen, you can record everything you say, hear, write, and draw, and then wirelessly sync those notes and audio to an Evernotes account, where you can then replay, organize, and search them. The downside here is the accessory-requirement: the Sky Smart Pen only works with Livescribe’s pricey dot paper....
Media Platforms Design TeamHyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc.: That’s the name of the company that will try to make Elon Musk’s far-out vision for a super-high-speed transportation system to life.Marco Villa, who until recently was the director of mission operations for SpaceX, and Patricia Galloway, formerly the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, are leading the charge to realize this dream. As PopMech reported last month, these two signed on to head a Hyperloop group on the site JumpStartFund that would try to form a corporation and tap the wisdom of the crowd to work on a real version of the concept....
You don’t want to have to build a new building every time you need to test a new elevator. That’s why concept elevators get tested in this giant concrete tube.German elevator company ThyssenKrupp built the big tube, which stand at just over 761 feet tall, in Rottweil, Germany. Its sole purpose in life is to test futuristic elevators like the magnetic MULTI system we wrote about in December, which has cars moving sideways....
Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamTechnophiles gave their full attention to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. A showcase of the electronics industry’s newest offerings, CES gives gadge lovers a glimpse of the hottest products and future innovations. As always, PM has been on hand with constant reporting on the coolest gear at the show.Back in 1962, a good five years before CES’s first exhibition in 1967, tech buffs turned their attention to the World’s Fair in Seattle....
Media Platforms Design TeamParts of Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are underwater following a series of devastating floods. Countless people have been displaced from their homes and the storms have killed at least a dozen people. To get a sense of the devastation and flooding, some people have taken to sending out drones across the region. Here are a few of those videos.These clips from Bryan Rumbaugh show the damage done in the Houston area, with large chunks of the city currently underwater:View full post on YoutubeView full post on YoutubeFrom Adam Blank, here’s another view from the Bray’s Bayou area of Houston:View full post on YoutubeFrom Chris Ivester, here’s the view near Barton’s Spring in Austin:View full post on YoutubeFrom Birdsiview, this is the view from Wimberley, a town located roughly between San Antonio and Austin:View full post on YoutubeFrom Clinton Bailey, here’s the view from Fredericksburg, located about 80 miles west of Austin:View full post on YoutubeAnd in Oklahoma and Arkansas, the devastation continues, as seen in this video from incognito53:View full post on YoutubeFrom Jeremy Jones, here’s the flooding at the Lake Overholser Dam in Oklahoma: View full post on YoutubeJohn WenzWriterJohn Wenz is a Popular Mechanics writer and space obsessive based in Philadelphia....
Media Platforms Design TeamResearchers from the Imperial College in London have found away to increase the efficiency of solar panel designs by 22 percent—by drawing inspiration from Legos.These researchers’ small blocks are not the building blocks of your childhood. Rather, Legos are a visual metaphor of the microscopic aluminum studs that protrude out of the panels. Imperial College scientists use the aluminum cylinder, placed just 100 nanometers apart, to manipulate light, forcing it travel longer distances in the absorbing layer, thus capturing more energy....
There may be new owners in town, but the corporate shuffle isn’t stopping Chrysler LLC from charging ahead with forward-thinking, environmentally friendly concepts. Using Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep as platforms, three vehicles will be unveiled at the 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. All three incorporate electric motors powered by advanced lithium-ion battery packs, which are supplemented by an alternative-fuel system tailored to each brand’s personality. Media Platforms Design Team Chrysler’s ecoVoyager Concept is a bubble-shaped sedan accentuated with flowing lines and a slender profile that utilizes a “one-box” design as opposed to typical “three-box” sedan designs (one compartement for engine, one for people and one for luggage)....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn this week’s “Confinement,” a strange man exits an elevator, steps into an office and collapses on the spot. Resuscitation attempts by a good Samaritan are unsuccessful. But his bad luck doesn’t stop there. The veins in the Samaritan’s face bulge and appear to burst, causing a cloud of blood to spray from his mouth–not a good start to the work day. Agents Olivia Dunham and Phillip Broyles arrive on the scene with jack-of-all-trades Peter Bishop to investigate the curious death....
