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Media Platforms Design TeamWhen I’m painting, I never can seem to get a clean line in the corners. I’ve tried masking tape and bought trim brushes. No matter what I do, it never comes out neat. What’s the trick?You need one of two things to cut a clean line: a steady hand or masking tape. If you use the latter, buy high-quality blue or green crepe painter’s tape. Tan masking tape is cheaper, but it’s all but impossible to get a crisp line with the stuff....

Toyota has a recent history of turning Detroit auto show truck concepts into reality. The FTX Concept became today’s Tundra and the FJ Cruiser Concept was brought to market, virtually unchanged, as the FJ Cruiser. In 2008 Toyota is showing the A-BAT Concept. A-BAT is essentially a lightweight, high-utility hybrid compact pickup. And it’s a concept that we think makes sense. A-BAT is smaller than a Tacoma. In fact the chassis is slightly larger than today’s RAV4....

Media Platforms Design TeamGeorge Lucas owes Bioware a favor. The once-celebrated filmmaker spent years and millions creating a trio of prequels that threatened to retroactively disembowel all of the mythical heft of the original Star Wars movies. And in one stroke, the Canadian game studio repaired at least some of the cultural damage wrought by Jar Jar Binks, with the release of Knights of the Old Republic, a PC and console-based role-playing game set in the distant past of the Star Wars universe....

Nine years ago the flagship Mercedes was the SLR McLaren 722 Edition. That car did zero to sixty in 3.6 seconds, cost nearly a half-million dollars, and looked like the SL500’s coked-up uncle. It was replaced by the SLS AMG, a car that seemed sensible by comparison—it was just as quick off the line as the SLR but cost a mere $200,000. Now the SLS is gone, replaced by the Mercedes-AMG GT S, which starts at about $130,000 and does zero to sixty in 3....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn his five-year tenure as host of The Late Late Show on CBS, Craig Ferguson has never had a band or a sidekick. In fact, it’s become sort of a running joke that he’s had to do without such costly flourishes. But all that will change when MythBuster Grant Imahara comes to The Late Late Show to deliver Geoff Petersen—a robot sidekick built especially for the late-night host....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor years the U.S. Army has been trying to build a replacement for the Humvees that have been hauling around gear and troops since the early 1980s. But the process has gotten continually bogged down in delays and cost overruns; the government nearly quashed the entire effort before the Army and Marine Corps cut down how much it would cost.With the program saved, on Friday the Army announced the three finalists for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV)....

Sony and Westinghouse aren’t the only companies investigating reports of HDMI and HDCP compatibility issues between the PlayStation 3 and the television maker’s LCD panels: The corporation that owns the rights to the HDMI specification is also trying to determine the cause of the PS3 blink.“We’re actively investigating the Sony-Westinghouse issue,” says Leslie Chard, president of the HDMI Licensing Corp. “We’d like to see what the real issue is there.” Chard expects an update on the investigation this week, though he didn’t speculate on what the update would determine....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamTesla CEO Elon Musk. Photo credit: ChinaFotoPress/Getty ImagesIn a blog post yesterday titled “All Our Patent Are Belong To You,” a not-so-subtle reference to Zero Wing, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla was going open source, allowing other car companies to use its technology without threat of a lawsuit. Musk symbolically instituted the policy by removing the framed patents hanging on the walls in Tesla’s Palo Alto HQ lobby....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you still think a musclecar has a shaker scoop sticking through the belly of some giant animal sticker on its hood and a lumpy V8 driving chromed Cragars on the rear axle, you’d better turn down that Bee Gees 8-track and listen up. The members of hot rodding’s new school embrace a decidedly different breed of performance car. These cars have half as many cylinders as their ancestors, with redlines and rear spoilers that scrape the stratosphere....

Inspired by the Darryl Worley hit “Tennessee River Run,” we decided it was high time we blasted full throttle from Knoxville, Tenn., to Paducah, Ky., 652 miles down the Tennessee River. To legitimize our adventure, we borrowed two nearly identical walkarounds: a Triton 2286 equipped with Suzuki’s DF225 and a Cobia 230 equipped with Yamaha’s F225 powerplant.We figured this demanding trip would tell us three things: how these big 4-stroke outboards perform in real life, how practical a long trip might be on a pocket-size cruiser, and whether the Tennessee River lives up to its advance billing....

FILMWe have to start the list with Smokey and the Bandit, which starred a 1977 Firebird Pontiac Trans Am (and Burt Reynolds). We urged Pontiac to bring back the Bandit a few years ago, and the film made it into our top ten car crashes in movie history.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/U8jFWh_GtCk&hl=en&fs=1[/youtube]Burt and Smokey director Hal Needham were at it again with more Trans Am awesomeness in 1978’s Hooper–a tribute to Hollywood stuntmen: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/kLokDBOb7-U&hl=en&fs=1[/youtube]What else could Needham and Reynolds have chosen as the cop car to catch a Lamborghini Countach in The Cannonball Run?...

“When you hit a bridge at 160 [mph] where you take off, that’s pretty scary. Because there’s nothing you can do; you land where the thing lets you land.” That’s legendary racing driver Stirling Moss, recalling just one of the many intense moments that defined his record-breaking and still unbeaten 1955 Mille Miglia victory. Only 25 years old at the time, Moss famously piloted the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR #722 to the podium in a record-setting time of ten hours and seven minutes, averaging 98....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere in Orlando, just a few miles from Disney World, some serious imagineering is going on. Scientists, engineers, visionaries, hackers, and government officials are here to spearhead the most ambitious project for an agency known for its risk-taking. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which gave us the Internet, satellite positioning, and self-driving cars, is going bigger. The 100-Year Starship project is a one-year, $500,000 endeavor to lay the groundwork for building humankind’s first interstellar spaceship, and this conference in Orlando is the beginning....

View full post on YoutubeI found a surprise when I checked my mailbox today (for the first time in at least a week): a pamphlet from the US Postal Service advertising various holiday services, among them a free new augmented reality app for iPhone and Android. The acronym-heavy USPS AR app, released earlier this week, is supposed to let you scan any of the USPS’s iconic blue collection boxes in your neighborhoods using your smartphone’s camera....

Media Platforms Design TeamSomewhere out there, there’s a garbage truck driver named Jack who is very good at his job, and also has a great time doing it. In a truck equipped with an automated side loader (normally meant to grab and dump wheeled trashbins, like so), Jack decided to go after the ultimate target: a discarded bed mattress.View full post on YoutubeAfter carefully positioning the mattress using the truck’s claw, Jack manages to grab the thing (which flops around like a live fish the entire time, trying to escape the claw’s grasp) and slams it into his bin....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn 2013 radiation expert Robert Emery examined a research paper in his office at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston that declared a health crisis was at his door. Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman claimed they could link 14,000 American deaths to fallout from Japan’s March 2011 . Mangano, the executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP), holds a master’s degree in public health; Sherman is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo....

My friend in front of the Z/28.Chin, a friend of a friend of my father’s, with a nickname whose origin was obvious when you looked at him, sold cars in Florida. His stories of auction deals had made their way to Pittsburgh, where they’d inspired in me dreams of driving something other than an inherited ‘83 Camry. And so, with my paperboy savings fully liquidated, my dad and I flew to Orlando and found ourselves walking aisles of cars in what looked to be a barnyard parking lot....

Media Platforms Design TeamFRANKFURT — Bugatti announced today that it will produce limited edition Veyron models. This one, dubbed the “Pur Sang,” confirms our suspicion that the Volkswagen group seems to have an obsession with gore in 2008. Pur Sang translates to “pure blood”—this from a car unveiled moments before the Lamborghini Reventon, which is named after a slaughtered bullfighter. The car is the first in a series of specials and was itself specially requested....

Media Platforms Design Team Napa Valley, Calif.—According to Takayuki Katsuda, chief engineer for the 2010 Lexus RX350 and RX450h, one of the most important fundamentals he established with his team was that they tell him the bad news first. “It helped open the lines of communication, and issues were solved quickly,” he says. Perhaps that principle was somehow embodied in the new control layout in the 2010 RX line. Despite the comprehensive list of equipment and the extraordinary range of interfaces between gadgets and occupants, the new Lexus has one of the most logical control systems we’ve ever encountered, making for a luxury hybrid that has it all....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’m MeltingQ:I’ve had to replace the radiator in my truck twice and the heater core three times in the last five years because of corrosion. I use fresh antifreeze, but it doesn’t seem to help. What’s happening here?A:If fresh coolant, changed every other year, isn’t holding the corrosion at bay, look for one of two problems. First, the combustion gases could be leaking into the cooling system through a bad intake manifold gasket, head gasket or a cracked head or block....