Media Platforms Design TeamEven with its fifth consecutive year of sales gains, Subaru isn’t exactly threatening to overtake the big players. In 2013, the brand sold about 425,000 total cars; Toyota sold 405,000 Camrys. Which is to say that the new 2015 Subaru Legacy, shown off this week at the Chicago Auto Show, isn’t about to take over the Camry’s position as the best-selling car in America. And that’s just fine....
Media Platforms Design TeamNot content with attempting to overturn just two separate transportation industries, Elon Musk, head of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, today unveiled the details of his plan to build a super-high-speed transport linking Los Angeles and San Francisco.The Hyperloop would send multi-person passenger pods through an above-ground tube at 760 miles per hour—nine-tenths the speed of sound. The tube would sit on 20-foot-high pylons that would mostly follow the route of California Interstate 5....
Media Platforms Design TeamNow you can commute like a lunatic and still get to the office with your coffee intact, even in that Camry you’ve been driving for a decade.This cool piece of car tech is called the Maksimatic cup holder, invented by Maksim Ghyvoronsky. He originally intended his creation to be something that could come from the factory with your new car. But when he found incredible demand for the spill-proof wonder technology, he built a version that can be fitted to just about any vehicle....
Media Platforms Design TeamRecent reports claiming that Aptera founders were “ousted in a boardroom showdown” appear to be false. Aptera, a company we’ve been covering since its inception two years ago, has let some employees go in order to save money recently as it waits for the final round of funding and to reapply for a DOE loan.“We needed to reduce our burn rate on anything not associated with getting a production vehicle out the door,” said Marques McCammon, chief marketing officer....
First Nerf Gun: Nerf Bow and Arrow /// 1991Media Platforms Design TeamThough Nerf balls had been around for years, this was the first Nerf weapon that the company produced. Its ammo was three Nerf arrows with an average shooting distance of 60 feet, so it’s also one of the farthest-shooting toy weapons the company has made. It’s a classic addition to any Nerf arsenal. 2. Nerf Ballzooka /// 1994Media Platforms Design TeamNerf combines its original ball with a powerful gun, creating this Nerf-fan favorite....
If you want to inspire young people, you have to talk to them on their own terms. Sometimes that means Twitter hashtags. Sometimes that means teaching science … with emoji.Bill Nye, the once and forever Science Guy, has teamed with General Electric on the initiative, which ambitiously (and sometimes confusingly) seeks to teach scientific principles in the ubiquitous illustrated smartphone characters. To really get through to the youths, GE is putting it all up on a Tumblr....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe Deepwater Horizon saga playing out in the Gulf of Mexico is officially a Humpty Dumpty situation. On Sunday, President Barack Obama arrived in Louisiana to reaffirm the government’s “all hands on deck” approach to combating the spill. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are mustered in the Gulf, in the form of thousands of oil spill responders, a Coast Guard strike force a hundred vessels strong, 100,000 meters of containment boom, the Air Force’s 910th Airlift Wing, the Secretaries of the Interior and Homeland Security and fleet of fisherman-cum-boom-layers, and one-third of the world’s oil dispersant supply, just to name a few....
China has a new light tactical vehicle in the size and class of the American Humvee. The Yongshi “Warrior”—which looks like a cross between a Land Rover and a Jeep Renegade—is now entering service with the People’s Liberation Army. The web site China Military Online reports that the Warrior has been under development for a decade, with road tests starting in 2007. Six prototypes racked up 1.2 million kilometers on test ranges, and now the vehicle has finally been certified ready for PLA duty....
Media Platforms Design TeamNEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – The first question everyone asks me when they see my fuel cell Chevy Equinox is simple enough: “So what does that run on?” “Hydrogen gas,” my standard, smiling reply goes. And it always leads to a second question: “So where exactly do you get that from?““Well,” I say, “Good question.“During my first week with this loner alt-fuel car, my Driver Relationship Manager (DRM) from GM would meet me when I needed to refuel....
It was just a week ago that a salesman, a computer genius, and a coder hatched their plan. One episode later, the trio of tech geeks is already in deep.Lovable Cardiff Electric engineer Gordon (Scoot McNairy) broke bad in last week’s pilot episode of Halt and Catch Fire, reverse-engineering IBM’s proprietary BIOS code. IBM finds out, but because of a strange loophole, the company cannot sue Cardiff for copyright infringement if Cardiff can prove it built its own code from scratch, leaving him no choice but to try....
Media Platforms Design TeamComposting can be incredibly simple: Just pile up some food and yard scraps, and turn it with a pitchfork now and then. But if you want to speed up the process and keep it rodent-free, a rotating bin is worth a weekend of labor. Once assembled, fill it two-thirds full with scraps, moisten with water and rotate every few days.Step 1Mark an opening on the side of a food-grade barrel using masking tape....
When Dennis Tito, the first astronaut to pay his own way to orbit, announced inspiration Mars, he was vague on the details. Now, his plan to send human explorers on a trip around Mars is coming into focus.The basic outline of the mission, revealed in February, seemed doable—if just barely. It called for sending a man and a woman on a flyby trajectory that would bring them within a couple hundred miles of the surface of the Red Planet before swinging them around Mars and on their way to a no-boost-needed return flight to Earth....
Media Platforms Design Team1.) Gather PartsI designed a mobile bench because the projects I build on my webcast, The Ben Heck Show, typically happen in locations without a shop. To build it, first use a table saw to cut a 4 x 4–foot sheet of ½-inch plywood into panels at the dimensions shown. Obtain two cabinetmaker’s cup hinges (Salice or Blum brands work), four 1 x 1–inch leaf hinges, a box of 1-inch No....
Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamLOST FINALE: INSTANT EXPERT ANALYSIS• MYTHBUSTER: Explosions Were Crap, but I Get Big Picture• PHYSICIST: Einstein Would Approve of Moving the Island• TIME-TRAVEL GURU: Orchid Station Opens Trap Door• PLUS: Complete PM Coverage of Lost Season 4! To help you navigate tonight’s two-hour, physics-packed finale of Lost, “There’s No Place Like Home,” we followed up a season’s worth of debunking with more TiVo and experts on hand for a recap on all the science we could find—including formulas and phrases from Daniel Faraday’s notes and the original hatch’s blast door....
Media Platforms Design TeamOnboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, HM1 Ingrid Cortez monitors a real-time chatroom dedicated to streamlining patient transport by allowing the Navy hospital ships to communicate with medics on the ground in real-time. (Photograph by Benjamin Chertoff)USS BATAAN, Haiti–With an armada of more than 20 ships, a vast network of medical-response teams on the ground and helicopters buzzing patients between the ships and the island, the immediate medical response to the earthquake in Haiti suffered from a massive logistical problem: How to get the right patients to the right care as quickly as possible....
Media Platforms Design TeamAn international team of scientists has found hundreds of methane gas plumes in the depths of the Arctic Ocean. German and English researchers used sonar to detect 250 columns of bubbles pushing out of the seabed of West Spitsbergen and then sampled the water in those areas, finding that the gas was predominantly methane. The discovery indicates there may be more of the gas being released and from deeper areas of the Arctic seabed than expected....
A group of recent graduates and grad students from MIT is reconfiguring parts from old cars to create a simple turbine that runs on the heat of the sun instead of the oil drum. They hope to make it available in off-the-grid regions such as remote parts of the African country of Lesotho–where they recently completed a prototype (pictured above)–as a clean, inexpensive source of electricity, hot water and even refrigeration....
It’s no “former ninth planet,” but for New Horizons, 2014 MU69 will have to do as its next destination. After a Hubble survey narrowed down three potential Kuiper Belt targets for the craft, the New Horizons team has arrived at an answer: 2014 MU69, an object just 30 miles around. The tiny Kuiper Belt Object is a bit of icy debris from the formation of the solar system. Just as Pluto is teaching the New Horizons teams about the largish-objects that serve as the bricks planets were made of, so too can 2014 MU69 teach the team about the formation of the planets, asteroids, moons, and comets as we know them today....
Today’s Pluto press conference brought forth fascinating new tidbits about the world from the New Horizons flyby. That will have to tide over space fans, because this will be the last new imaging for a little more than a month as New Horizons’ slow data transfer continues. Ice flowsPluto is coming into brilliant view. Ice flows are plentiful on the dwarf planet, both in the north of Tombaugh Regio (seen below), which show nitrogen ice flows that move like glaciers, and in the south of the Tombaugh Regio, which shows ices flowing and mingling with a dark, heavily cratered area of Pluto....
Frantic Star Wars fans rejoice! We’re only a couple days away from the biggest premiere in years, and as we all know, nothing is scarier than the inevitable barrage of spoilers on the World Wide Web. Press screenings have already started, and people are already saying good things (don’t worry, spoiler-free), but it’s only a matter of time before killjoys start tweeting the details. Fear not, however, because that’s where Google can save your bacon....
