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Media Platforms Design TeamI leave the parking garage in Manhattan under cover of darkness, with 50 miles of juice in the Nissan Leaf’s batteries. When I arrive home, 25 miles due north, the dash readout says I have 28 miles of power remaining. I read the manual—as clear as any owner’s manual, murky at best—and plug in the charging unit via heavy-duty orange extension cord. I live in an old house—a converted 18th-century horse barn, to be precise—and electric outlets are few, far between and tough to reach....

Media Platforms Design TeamSept. 30, 1970, is the day dirt died. Or, rather, the day it was supposed to. It happened at the State Fairgrounds Speedway in Raleigh, N.C. Twenty-three NASCAR racers took the green flag. When the checkered flag fell 200 laps later, Richard Petty added one more entry next to his name in the record book: Winner of the last NASCAR race on a dirt track. Beginning with the 1971 season, NASCAR’s top division left behind its roots in dirt-track racing, competing only on paved tracks....

Media Platforms Design Team Las Vegas—The old CLK was too pedestrian to be a Mercedes-Benz coupe. There, we said it. As much as we lusted for the insanely fun 500-hp CLK63 AMG Black Series, the more conventional models in the CLK lineup looked too much like other two-doors on the market. Some have said the CLK even resembled an Accord Coupe. Well, Mercedes Benz has fixed all that with the new E-Class Coupe—a car that not only now clearly belongs to the more upscale E-Class lineup, but also looks distinctly different than any other coupe on the market....

Media Platforms Design TeamChevy’s compact Cruze sedan won’t be the sexiest car in GM’s 2011 lineup–that distinction goes to the six-figure Corvette ZR-1. But along with the high-tech Volt we’ve driven recently, it will certainly be one of the most important.As we’ve previously reported, Chevy’s Civic-and-Corolla fighter shares the same Delta III platform that underpins the Volt. And new details disclosed for the 2009 L.A. Auto Show reveal that the Cruze should come well-equipped for battle....

Media Platforms Design TeamCome summer, America’s backyards start to sizzle. Tantalizing barbecue smoke wafts through the air, accompanied by the sound of ice tinkling in glasses. That’s the ideal, anyway. If your experience falls short of that, then maybe it’s time to consider something better. By moving beyond a grill and a few folding chairs to a true outdoor kitchen, you combine indoor dining convenience with the satisfying illusion of roughing it just steps away from the back door....

Media Platforms Design Team From the colonial cottages of New England to the villas of the Mediterranean, distinct architecture can define geographical regions. In October of 1954’s annual home section, Popular Mechanics paid homage to California-style homes, an inventive and modern strain of design that was quickly spreading from the West Coast to the East. PM turned to architects A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons to design the “PM California House....

The History Channel and Popular Mechanics are teaming up on a new show about the kinds of stuff Popular Mechanics readers love to do: inventing new gadgets; building robots; racing power tools; welding together bizarre machines that drive, fly, climb or launch projectiles. The show will highlight the kinds of people and projects shown in our recent DIY Rally feature, and it’s going to be a blast. One of the first jobs is to find a host, and a casting director in Los Angeles is in overdrive doing just that....

Reviewing TV shows is not usually in our tool-testing, pergola-pounding job description. But we were flattered to hear Mighty Putty and Hercules Hook spokesman Billy Mays’s voice on the other end of the telephone line recently, calling us up to discuss the results of our Zorbeez vs. ShamWow lab test. The conversation, which the Discovery Channel filmed for its new program, Pitchmen, took place between PM, Billy and Anthony Sullivan, the voice behind the Point-n-Paint infomercial....

Media Platforms Design TeamI interviewed [director] Patrick Lussier the other day, and he and I talked a lot about how badass and cool you are in Drive Angry.(Laughs) Oh, thanks! That’s kind of part of the reason why I wanted to do this, because it was such a cool female character. And I thought also it’d be a movie that women would like to seeit’s not just the male-driven movie. I think women will really like Drive Angry because Piper is such a strong female character, which we don’t tend to see in movies these days....

In an exclusive interview with PM, Jay Leno gives us his take on the auto bailout: I think we should bail them out. To me it’s like class warfare. The white-collar guys get a bailout and the blue-collar guys don’t? That’s crazy. You know, I’d rather help a guy with a wrench in his hand than some guy sitting in front of a keyboard. We’ve given the banks $700 billion. Does it seem like anything has actually happened with that money?...

Wireless power transfer is old news–more than a century ago, Nikola Tesla built magnetic coils that transmitted power without cables. But Tesla’s coils also tended to expel bursts of superhot plasma. This past June, MIT researchers announced their own coil-based breakthrough in wireless electricity–called WiTricity–that’s mercifully plasma-free. WiTricity exploits a phenomenon known as magnetically coupled resonance, which allows two objects resonating at the same frequency to exchange energy efficiently. The team was able to wirelessly power a 60-watt light bulb using a pair of 20-in....

Media Platforms Design TeamMost states don’t want a gaping hole in their major interstate disrupting the traffic of roughly 71,000 daily vehicles—one so prominent even Google Maps takes notice. Now that the emergency response to the destruction of the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River in Washington State is past, officials at the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) are racing to put in a temporary span to restore interstate traffic, as well as developing a fast-tracked permanent fix....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt looks like the show is over for United Space Alliance (USA), the space services company that is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, that had been operating the space shuttle and the ISS for NASA for many years. But when the shuttle program retired last year, much of the reason for the company’s existence has disappeared, and it looks like the parent companies are pulling the plug on it....

Media Platforms Design TeamEvery so often, you hear that somebody’s going to come out with a new supercar. It will be made from exotic materials and packed with innovative, exciting technology. And of course–it’ll top 200 mph. You know the rest. But these supercars never quite happen the way the manufacturers promise. Take the Jaguar XJ220 … back in 1992. First it was going to be a V12, but by the time it came out, the XJ220 had a turbocharged V6....

This morning, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed what we’d been suspecting for a few days now, as reports came in of debris floating west of Australia: Based on new data from the U.K.’s Air Accident Investigation Board, which “shed more light on MH370’s flight path,” investigators have now concluded the plane’s last known position was indeed west of Perth, Australia, a long way from any possible landing site, meaning the 777 was lost in the Southern Indian Ocean with no survivors....

Media Platforms Design TeamMicrosoft SurfaceThis tabletop computeruses “multitouch” technology to let several users, employing their fingers, manipulate images and other data right on the screen–no keyboard or mouse needed. In that, it’s like two other Breakthrough winners, . But the Surface recognizes more than mere fingers–it can also sense and interact with objects both digital (cameras, phones) and nondigital (water glasses, paint brushes) placed on top of it. It’s a big step toward a future of pervasive computing, where digital processing power makes everything from tables to walls to floors interactive....

Spy and stealth planes–some with bizarre, bat-shaped wings, others with triangular silhouettes that imply otherworldly designs–have long generated UFO sightings and lore. And official denials feed rumors that the government isn’t telling us about alien ships. The CIA estimates that over half of the UFOs reported from the ’50s through the ’60s were U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. At the time, the Air Force misled the public and the media to protect these Cold War programs; it’s possible the government’s responses to current sightings of classified craft–whether manned or remotely operated–are equally evasive....

The hard landing last week of a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey in New River, NC, cost the military over $1 million, and may throw the safety of the controversial V/STOL transport back into question, according to military.com. The tiltrotor aircraft suffered “major damage to its wing and right engine” from the accident, which occured during a check flight on March 27th. The Marine Corps is conducting two investigations for the Class A mishap....

In the wake of last week’s UN global climate agreement, it’s never been clearer that we’re on the path to a zero carbon-emission future. Today, scientists announced the creation of a radical new carbon dioxide-absorbing material which may help us cut down our carbon emissions quicker than we expected.“Clearly, one of the long-term goals [of our species] is to entirely switch to renewable energy sources like solar and wind power,” says Phil De Luna, a materials scientist at the University of Ottawa....

James DunlopUpton, N.Y.Age: 39Years on Job: 8 James Dunlop re-creates the big bang. At Brookhaven National Laboratory, he uses the electric fields of a particle accelerator to speed up gold nuclei racing around a 2.4-mile-long track. When the nuclei, guided by the accelerator’s powerful magnets, reach 99.9995 percent of the speed of light, Dunlop makes them collide. Each 4 trillion degree Celsius crash shatters the gold particles into quarks and gluons, the tiniest building blocks of a proton....