Media Platforms Design Team(Photo by Mint Images - Tim Pannell/Getty Images)1. One end of your 2 x 4 could be wider than the other. Or the board is warped. Or a portion could be water-damaged. You won’t be able to use every inch of a piece of lumber in a project, so purchase a little too much material to work with.2. It takes one rogue nail to wreak havoc on a saw blade....
Hearst Magazines is home to a powerful portfolio of brands, from iconic fashion and lifestyle properties to some of the most dynamic voices in food, home, health and wellness.At Hearst, we are committed to bold innovation in an ever-evolving media landscape. Our core value lies in the authentic engagement between our audiences and our brands, a connection driven by data and by premium story-telling expertise. We use the same approach to meet your business needs....
Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a new tool that will allow geek gardeners and amateur eco-sleuths to look at plants in a new way: Infragram, a cheap, DIY infrared camera that images in the near-infrared light just beyond what our eyes can see. When trained on plants, Infragram creates brilliant images that reveal otherwise invisible areas on leaves where food-generating photosynthesis is humming along (or not). This vegetative vital sign can provide an early warning if a plant’s health is failing....
Media Platforms Design TeamTeam Boston’s Curio.House is best seen from far away–by the light of a smartphone. To make energy-use data available to the homeowner, team Boston–with students from Tufts University and Boston Architectural College–created a Web-based energy-monitoring system, in which 24-7 real-time feedback helps users to adjust their energy habits (leaving lights off, turning the heat down) even when they are away. To convert its 6.4-kilowatt photovoltaic system from DC to AC energy for home use, team Boston used a number of micro-inverters, attached to each individual PV panel rather than a system wide hookup....
Blake Freitas, Grace Chen, and Alexi Kararavokiris have a rather innovative vision of what New York City looks like a millennium from now. Times Square is no longer a public square choked with glittery billboards and terrible restaurants, but a mile high city-within-a-tower, including Dubai-like fake biomes including mountain peaks and beaches. It’s a small town within a big metropolis, with enough space for 32,000 residents, multiple commercial districts, and vertical farms to grow food....
Media Platforms Design TeamLess than six months have passed since Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy with new owners and a new lease on life. Yesterday the company gave a progress report to over 400 analysts, dealers, and journalists during an unprecedented eight-hour briefing session. It’s clear that while the name remains the same, the new Chrysler is a very different organization than it was this past spring.Of course the jolt of bankruptcy has a way of forcing change, but the main driver is the influence of Fiat–Chrysler’s new part owner–and its CEO, Sergio Marchionne....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is often attacked for being too strident in its warnings about global warming. But a subset of critics charges just the opposite: that the organization is too conservative in its analysis and predictions.The newest criticism of the IPCC is launched by a team that includes James Hansen, possibly the world’s best-known climate scientist. And while his group could be accused of cherry-picking, it picks the most important cherry by confronting a key conclusion of the IPCC: that the world will be more or less okay if people keep total global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which can be done by limiting humanity’s cumulative CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels to about 1000 gigatons....
Media Platforms Design TeamPickup trucks are the workhorses of the automotive world, hauling heavy equipment and trailers up steep mountains and off of paved roads. In the December 1976 issue of PM, we showcased five of the most popular tow monsters, including the Dodge Adventurer, Chevrolet Silverado and a Ford F-250 that included four-wheel drive and lots of extras for a cool $9000. “A pickup in its raw, unoptioned form is really not very useful for much besides street driving and moving light loads,” PM wrote....
What’s in a name? For the planet formerly known as Pluto, not much. Following last month’s decision by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to strip Pluto of its planetary status, the icy rock now has a new, not-so-catchy moniker: Asteroid Number 134340. The IAU’s decision to demote Pluto to a dwarf planet—a round, celestial body that orbits the sun but isn’t a satellite to any other celestial body—sparked protests, outraged blog posts and Internet petitions....
Media Platforms Design TeamAs promised at last week’s big iPad event, Apple has made iOS 8.1 available today. The update brings support for Apple Pay to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, fixes some bugs, gives you access to the beta version of iCloud Photo Library, and enables SMS messaging support on your Mac (if you’ve installed in the OS X, Yosemite).If you’re now ready to update your iOS device, here’s how to get started:1....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe future of aviation is wobbling. Looking like a giant albino queen ant, the 117-ft.-long Dynalifter airship trundles down a grass airstrip in eastern Ohio, its white, ovoid envelope bobbling with each clod and divot in the runway. Undersize wings poke out from the airship’s midsection, ailerons fluttering, as co-inventor Brian Martin steers from a cannibalized ultralight cockpit slung under the canopy. He turns the ship around at the end of the runway, lines it up with the main axis of the strip and throttles up the twin 100-hp Rotax 583 engines....
Media Platforms Design Team When the freighter went up in a massive explosion in Lost’s season finale last year, it was hard not to declare Daniel Dae Kim’s character Jin a goner. He was last seen on the deck of the freighter, waving frantically to a departing helicopter carrying his wife, Sun. After all, there was enough C4 on that ship to blow anyone on it to kingdom come. But Kim, who plays Jin, always knew he would be back—and he made his reappearance at the end of last week’s episode, “The Little Prince,” unconscious and floating on a piece of the dearly departed freighter....
Media Platforms Design TeamAs Mexico struggles to wrench control from drug cartels, New Jersey–based defense company Dynamic Defense Materials (DDM) may be giving police an advantage while they battle for the nation’s roads: snap-together ballistic barriers that can be set up in minutes. The armored system protects against machine gun and rifle fire, as well as fragments from mortars, grenades and rockets. Roadblocks serve as a way to choke contraband and limit the mobility of drug lord soldiers, but also become targets for cartel members seeking to intimidate soldiers with random attacks....
Media Platforms Design TeamNintendo has been teasing us with the successor to the Wii for more than a year: It hyped the Wii U> at the E3 video games conference in 2011, and we got a hands-on look last year. By this June’s E3 we were still waiting for a release date and price, but Nintendo was only releasing a smattering of details about controllers. Today, at a press conference in New York, the game company finally revealed its plans....
Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamAfter 10 years of relentless pursuit, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe is about to reach its target. As Wired reports, Rosetta is slowly catching up to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at a distance of 4.3 billion miles from Earth. The craft is exiting what the crew calls “rotisserie mode,” which is essentially Rosetta spinning on its axis to maintain course....
Garmin today announced two new entries in their dash cam line, the Dash Cam 30 and Dash Cam 35. Both include a sensor that immediately saves a 1080p or 720p recording to a microSD card on impact, but the Dash Cam 35 also helpfully micromanages your driving.Specifically, the GPS-enabled Dash Cam 35 also comes with “Forward Collision Warnings,” which warns drivers when they’re a bit too close to the vehicle in front of them....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe view from SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket shortly before video transmission terminated two minutes and 20 seconds into its third test flight on August 2. (Photograph Courtesy of SpaceX) Private launch leader SpaceX—the startup founded by PayPal mogul Elon Musk to boost payloads for commercial industry and even NASA—failed on Saturday to launch its Falcon 1 rocket into outer space … for the third time. While the first stage of the launch went off as planned, two of the rocket’s stages failed to separate, and the Falcon 1 was lost before it could reach orbit....
It’s hidden inside the walls, beneath the stairs, in places you’d never think to look. The solution to the great American storage crunch is all around us in the form of unused space—cavities and nooks ready to absorb clutter and help bring order to domestic chaos. As a longtime carpenter and builder, and now the host of Wasted Spaces, a new show on the DIY Network, I’ve specialized in finding quick and efficient ways to make use of these little-used storage resources....
Media Platforms Design TeamAir traffic controllers have, perhaps, one of the most stressful jobs in the world. In the U.S. alone, about 1.7 million people fly on average every day, with about 651 million airline passengers in 2014, per the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Internationally, the numbers get a little fuzzier—the International Air Transport Association estimates about3.1 billion people flew in 2013billion people flew in 2013, or about 8.4 million per day on average....
Media Platforms Design TeamNitrogen triiodide is an unstable chemical so reactive that the slightest touch can set it off, even from a stray radioactive alpha particle. A feather, a mosquito, or a gust of air can also make it burst. When it explodes, it goes BIG, travelling at over 7,000 miles per hour. It’s made by exposing boron nitride to iodine monofluoride in a carbon-fluoride-chroline solution at low temperatures, refining into the nitrogen triiodide, which is (just as it sounds) one nitrogen atom and three iodine....
