Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamThink of your computer’s hard drive as the closet of your PC. When you first build your house, you try to design in enough closet space to hold all the stuff you own and plan out a little extra storage for the new things you’ll acquire in the future. Inevitably, your closets become overstuffed with tennis rackets, board games, coats, towels and other objects you just can’t part with....
Media Platforms Design TeamWASHINGTON — This morning saw the “big” announcement here at the International Electron Devices Meeting, as Intel let out details on its 45-nanometer, high dielectric constant, or “high-k,” Penryn microchips, which will become the new state-of-the-art architecture for computer chips in 2008 (although, in retaliation, an alliance of competing chipmakers, including IBM, AMD, Freescale and Samsung will be presenting on a next-generation of 32nm chips). I’ll dispense quickly with the technical details: The most important thing to know about a chip is that the more transistors you have, the more calculations can be done at once....
Media Platforms Design TeamE-readers are known for their go-anywhere, lighter-than-a-paperback convenience. Now they have a medicinal value: easing the frustrations of dyslexia. Matthew Schneps, the director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a team of researchers investigated in that e-reader apps (in this instance, GoodReader) on small devices like an iPod Touch significantly increase reader comprehension in dyslexic participants.a new studyIn the study of 103 students who have struggled with visual attention span, oculomotor, or sight-word reading deficiencies, almost half showed an increase in reading speed and comprehension....
Media Platforms Design TeamSupermassive black holes at the center of most massive galaxies are, you guessed it, pretty massive. They usually make up about 0.1 percent of the total mass of the central group of stars in their galaxy. But when astronomers looked inside one otherwise unremarkable small galaxy, they found something bigger.a lotScientists at the Max Planck Astronomy Institute in Heidelberg, Germany were looking at galaxy NGC 1277, part of the Perseus galaxy cluster 200 million light-years from Earth, when they saw the monster....
Q: I have a 2003 GMC Yukon that developed electrical problems after I replaced the transmission with a used one. Prior to that there were zero problems with the system. Vehicle Symptoms: a. As you change gears P R N D the doors lock/unlock with each gear change. Also when in N the display actually reads as though it’s in park, although it’s not. With doors closed, shutting the engine off causes the doors to lock....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe United States makes the lion’s share of the world’s stuff, having produced $1.6 trillion worth of goods last year for nearly a quarter of global manufacturing value. The U.S. ranks No. 1 in the manufacture of sophisticated items such as satellites and industrial machinery, according to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), as well as pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Almost a third of the world’s commercial vehicle fleet comes from American factories....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe Web has been buzzing with shock and a little schadenfreude recently over . The website provides a Google map interface for viewing live streams left unsecured by TRENDnet webcam security vulnerabilities, allowing Web users everywhere to peer through insecure webcams to see what’s on the other side.TRENDnetExposedTRENDnetExposed is supposedly providing a public service: By giving the world one-click access to the private homes of countless strangers, the creators say they hope to push webcam owners to download the necessary security patch....
When I ride my restored 1924 Ace motorcycle to places where motorcyclists go, like the Rock Store, a tavern on Mulholland Highway near Malibu, it always gets attention. That’s probably because it still looks like a superbike, like something special. Other riders give you the thumbs-up. Even non-motorcyclists say, “Wow. What is that?” But it’s a tricky machine to master because other than the twist-grip throttle, the controls are completely foreign....
Every superhero needs a supervehicle—and the masked vigilantes in Kick-Ass, out April 16, are no exception. For the Red Mist character, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, producers tasked Ezra Lafayette of Ezra Design Group with amping up the look of a supercharged Mustang modified for drag, street and canyon driving. (Click on the gallery button below for pictures of the build.) They call it the Mistmobile. “It’s an all-out race car,” Lafayette says....
Brake It EasyQ: I have a 2002 Mercury Grand Marquis with 120,000 miles on it. Last week in the mountains, we were going uphill at about 50 mph with the cruise control set to 55, and I needed to tap the brakes for a car in front of us. The pedal was rock hard. I pushed harder, and it finally worked, but as if the booster was not activating. Could the cruise control use up all the available vacuum pressure that the car was producing under high throttle, thus preventing the brake booster from functioning?...
According to physicist Daniel Faraday’s plan, the only way to prevent “the incident” from happening is by destroying the pocket of electromagnetic energy that lies underneath the Swan station. We spoke with Dr. Greg Carman, one of the top minds in electromagnetism and a professor at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA, to find out whether a nuclear explosion could indeed destroy the magnetic field, bringing Faraday’s plan to change the past–and the future–to fruition....
Media Platforms Design TeamI’m one of those hopeless optimists who firmly believe those last few miles can be eeked from the precious few drops of fuel remaining in the tank, and get you where you’re going before you finally bother refueling. I’ve also sputtered to a stop and hiked to a gas station, jerrycan under arm, enough times to know better—which perhaps makes me the target audience for a product called Magic Tank....
Media Platforms Design TeamToday, we here at Popular Mechanics took even more pride in coming to work—not because of our beautifully designed, delightfully geeky magazine, but because of our beautifully designed, delightfully geeky home in Manhattan. Hearst Tower just became the first office building in New York City to achieve platinum certification, the highest level of sustainability in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. Six years ago, the Hearst Tower became the first office building in New York City to be rated LEED gold for new construction, inside and out—core to curtain wall....
Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $150Plenty of us now use smartphones for in-car navigation duties. Many apps do a yeoman’s job of linking the lost to their destination with a blue line, and don’t require buying a new, expensive piece of hardware like a standalone nav unit.But the biggest downside to using a phone for way-finding is visual accessibility. Navigation apps might have an electronic voice to read the directions aloud through your car’s speakers, but phones are often tossed on the car’s passenger seat or in the cup holder—not ideal (or safe) places to catch a meaningful glimpse of the road ahead....
Media Platforms Design TeamDon’t underestimate 20,000 pounds of pure bite force, especially when it comes from an 8-foot wide, 8000-pound set of steel shark jaws. MythBuster Grant Imahara did, and he took an unexpected flight because of it. It’s June 11, and we’re on hand to watch the MythBusters filming “Sharkzilla,” a Discovery Channel special that will air next week during the 25th anniversary of Shark Week. On this particular afternoon, Imahara and fellow MythBusters Tory Belleci and Kari Byron are on the beach in Ventura, Calif....
This year could bring the Silicon Valley-funded renaissance in solar power we’ve all been waiting for. First, San Jose-based Nanosolar began delivering its affordable thin-film solar coating, followed by a construction boom in American solar thermal power plants–essentially the reflective equivalent of geothermal power. Now, for the first time, the solar cell revolution is arriving by droplet.Konarka Technologies, the Massachusetts-based company we first recognized with a 2005 Breakthrough Award for its affordable Power Plastic solar film, said this week that it has successfully manufactured those thin solar cells using an inkjet printer....
The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), a student project at Portland State University, launched a rocket out in the Oregon desert on July 19th. The rocket soared nearly three miles into the sky—an impressive feat, but that’s just the beginning for PSAS. The group has its sights set much higher.View full post on YoutubeIn the video, you see the ground quickly zoom away as the rocket, dubbed “LV2.3,” shoots into the sky....
We owe a lot of our understanding of genetics to the fruit fly. It breeds super fast, lays a ton of eggs, and only has four pairs of chromosomes. Two of those reasons are also why the flies are so annoying, which makes it extra fun to see them abducted by this lab machine.While fruit flies have always been valuable for scientific study, the process of actually studying them was arduous....
View full post on YoutubeWikipedia is a beautifully expansive network of articles with one big problem: It’s ugly. The open-source encyclopedia’s grayscale, text-heavy design isn’t easy on the eyes, nor does it suggest the rich web of connections that exist between Wikipedia entries.Owen Cornec, a French computer science student, wanted to change that. His creation is called Wikigalaxy. The experiment visualizes Wikipedia as a vast cosmic expanse of interconnected ideas.At the moment Wikigalaxy contains only 100,000 articles, so you can’t expect any particular one to show up....
(Published in the February 2010 issue)More: How tosurvive a 35,000 foot fall.You’ve taken your rubber duck for a dip in the ocean to show it life beyond the bathtub. All of a sudden, you feel as if a giant vacuum cleaner is pulling you out to sea. Uh-oh! You and your duck are caught in a riptide. What should you do?Riptides, or rip currents, are long, narrow bands of water that quickly pull any objects in them away from shore and out to sea....
