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When Goran Olsen stopped for a rest while hiking through the mountains and plateaus of Haukeli, an area about 150 miles west of the Norwegian capital Oslo, he never expected to uncover a sword under a pile of rocks. Much less could he have guessed that the rusted iron blade that he did uncover would turn out to be a Viking sword that is roughly 1,200 years old.The Hordland County Council in southwestern Norway confirmed last week that the item is a Viking artifact dating from 750 A....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn an autumn afternoon in 2011, five normal humans became telekinetic aviators in a school gymnasium. Using thoughts alone, they took turns maneuvering a flying quadcopter through rings, steering the machine through a three-dimensional suspended obstacle course. This experiment, conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and published this week in the Journal of Neural Engineering, represents the latest development in the increasingly sophisticated field of brain-computer interfaces....

Scott Kelly, an astronaut who recently embarked on an unusally lengthy mission in space, tweeted a perfectly clear shot of San Francisco on Monday."#SanFrancisco. I almost felt like I was with you as we flew overhead a few minutes ago," he wrote around noon. Since Kelly and a fellow astronaut are attempting NASA’s first-ever one-year spaceflight, his tweet included the hashtag #YearInSpace.View full post on TwitterKelly, an American from New Jersey, and Russian Mikhail Kornienko are in the International Space Station with Russian Gennady Padalka, who will be with them for six-months, the typical length of NASA’s spaceflights....

The current version of OS X has a severe security flaw that gives malware a way to access all the app passwords in your keychain, according a new report by security researchers. The researchers reported their findings to Apple, but six months later the vulnerabilities are still live.Luyi Xing, the Indiana University team’s lead, described the issue this way to The Register: Recently we discovered a set of surprising security vulnerabilities in Apple’s Mac OS and iOS that allows a malicious app to gain unauthorized access to other apps’ sensitive data such as passwords and tokens for iCloud, Mail app and all web passwords stored by Google Chrome....

These days, you get two different stories about convertible tops for coupes, depending on who’s telling the story. The folks at Volvo, who recently introduced the C70 as a hardtop convertible, crow about advantages:• Looks better with its shiny surface. • Looks better longer with no visible wear and tear over time. • Looks better in profile, with its sleek lines. • Offers more noise reduction with its metal barrier to the outside....

To get at the stuff you’re carrying in your backpack, you have to take off your backpack. This is one of those unavoidable facts of life. Unless you’re Stretch Armstrong. Or you’re wearing a Paxis.Media Platforms Design TeamThe brainchild of Paul Vierthaler, Paxis is a backpack that look like any other, but with two compartments for storing things. The top one stays in place. The bottom one, however, is mounted to an articulated arm....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast September, as the sun set over the English city of Bristol, 20 giant jellyfish shapes shivered into the sky, one by one. Their loose skins quivered and swayed in the pale rosy light, swelling as they filled with hydrogen gas into taut, five-story-high spheres. The start of the Gordon Bennett Cup ­balloon race was drawing near.For American balloonists Richard Abruzzo, 47, and Carol Rymer Davis, 65, the evening was becoming tense....

Media Platforms Design TeamBLADE AND TILLERS As the blade irons out bumps in front, the hydraulic-powered tiller (not pictured) leaves behind the finished product. Attachments include a 3000-pound half-pipe groomer with a 12-ft. radius for carving out terrain park fun.CAB Insulated and quiet, the cab, packed with controls, is so comfy that some drivers wear slippers to work. “It’s like riding around in a cloud,” Christensen says. Flying snow contributes to the effect....

LAS VEGAS– Just got out of Toshiba’s CES press conference, and guess what? Toshiba is going to be launching 3D TVs! Wait, everybody’s launching 3D TVs aren’t they? Actually, yes, they are, but Toshiba’s launching them, too. And Toshiba’s Cell TVs will probably win the prize for highest horsepower TV’s this year, because Toshiba’s sets will have Cell processors in them. These are the same multi-core chips that run in PlayStation 3’s–Toshiba co-developed the Cell with IBM and Sony, which should allow Cell TVs to do some pretty fancy tasks....

As the world’s easy-access oil supplies dry up, North America is increasingly turning to unconventional sources—such as drilling in the deep sea, mining oil sands, and using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to recover oil and natural gas from shale deposits—to feed our cars and power plants. The unconventional hydrocarbon industry has been growing rapidly in recent years. Shale gas production in the Northeast United States is increasing by 25 percent each year, while shale oil production at the Bakken formation in North Dakota is increasing by 35 percent a year....

LOS ANGELES — Plug-in hybrid cars are certainly enticing as we look for ways to lighten our demand on petroleum—and as Detroit hunts for the battery technology to do it. But taking a spin in an electric vehicle that’s self-sustained through its solar-panel roof and plug-in wind turbine is, frankly, pretty amazing. We recently caught up with Venturi, a French company that plans to sell its three-seat, 30-mph, 30-mile-range Eclectic street car globally next year for a bit over $30,000 as the first electro-solar ride to hit the market....

IKEA instructions, say hello to your doom. The Self-Assembly Lab at MIT has made a chair that can assemble itself. You won’t go rushing out to buy this quite yet: It’s a little less than 6 inches across, more fitting of a small dog than a large person. But the technology is amazing. Embedded magnets and water turbulence work in concert to bring the whole chair together, without direct guidance from human hands....

Jeffrey WestbrookI’ve heard platinum spark plugs can get stuck in engines. Is this true? If so, is it possible to prevent?There has been a long-standing rumor, longer than the promised 100,000-mile lifetime of platinum spark plugs, that these plugs tend to get stuck in place. The concept behind the rumor is that because the plug is made of platinum, contact with the steel or aluminum of the engine’s head results in galvanic corrosionsurface degradation that happens when dissimilar metals are in contact with each other in an electrolyte, in this case, water....

Media Platforms Design TeamHave you shopped for paintbrushes at a home center recently? If not, you’re in for a shock. The average home center and hardware store carries dozens of paintbrushes in a seemingly unlimited variety of sizes, shapes, prices, materials, lengths, and bristle types. Choosing the right paintbrush is nearly as difficult as picking the right paint color.Fortunately, you need only a few brushes to cover the vast majority of DIY painting chores....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe number of people who own mobile phones is rising, fast. The number of people in the world who own a traditional rain gauge is not. Luckily for lovers of meteorological data, though, it seems that the proliferation of phones has created a new, roundabout way to figure out an area’s rainfall: by measuring how much a cellphone signal degrades on its trips between the phone and the cell tower....

WhalePower Media Platforms Design TeamWhat It Is /// The company, WhalePower, has redesigned the typically smooth blades on a turbine, adding a series of ridges, based on tubercles, the bumps on humpback whale fins. The company says this new blade design could increase annual electrical production for existing wind farms by 20 percent. How It Works /// Humpback whales tilt their fins at steep angles to achieve better lift in the water....

LAKE GARDA, Italy- Just when does love turn into covetousness? Have a good look at Alfa Romeo’s gorgeous new baby. Gaze at that chromium-plated grille gaping like the slashes on a Versace dress, those hood swage lines soaring back like a bird of prey’s wings, and those sweet little headlamps, so full of charm and innocence. Are we supposed to be thinking these things about the Alfa Romeo MiTo? Are we, perhaps, being manipulated here?...

Media Platforms Design TeamDETROIT – Wow. The ZR1 is officially back, live and in person–and it’s a beauty. The 2009 “King of the Hill” promised to be the quickest production car in the Corvette’s long history, and what we’re hearing and seeing on the eve of the Detroit auto show proves that just might come true.The ZR1 is based on the Corvette Z06’s aluminum chassis, but there are quite a few unique body panels....

Media Platforms Design TeamHOCHGURGL, AUSTRIA–Mercedes-Benz has already sold more than 100,000 of its 2010 E-Class sedans since they debuted earlier this year, but its midsize lineup is incomplete without all-wheel-drive options for cold-weather dwellers. The fourth-generation 4Matic system arrives just in time for the winter months, and we traveled to snowy Hochgurgl atop the Austrian Alps to test Mercedes-Benz’s latest rain-, ice- and snow-ready sedan and wagon.THE SPECSMercedes-Benz’s 4Matic technology first appeared in 1985 on the Series 124 E-Class, and evolutionary improvements to the latest versions supersede the third-gen system, which dates back to 2003....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Specs Regal shares its “global midsize architecture” with Lacrosse, but where the latter is built in North America (Fairfax, Kan.) on a 4-inch-longer wheelbase than the Insignia, the first Regals will come directly from Germany with dimensions identical to the Opel. At 190 inches long overall, Regal is nearly 7 inches shorter than Lacrosse and about 0.75 inches narrower. But the track remains the same; so it has a more aggressive stance, with its wheels pushed out closer to the corners under flared arches....