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Juggling is hard enough when you have eyes to watch the balls. But this machine, the Circular Cloverleaf, makes do with pure math and robotic precision instead.The Circular Cloverleaf was designed by Raffaello D’Andrea at ETH Zurich, and is an iteration on a simple one-paddle machine called the Blind Juggler. Both devices work the same way; instead of using any sort of sensors to control the ball, they use a very slightly concave paddle that fires upwards and hits the ball with a decelerating motion....

Stretchy, soft, and as thin as a temporary tattoo, this new health sensor does something no other wearable device can. Peering into your veins, it tracks the speed of your flowing blood in real time. The study appears in Science Advances.A team of engineers and medical researchers led by Chad Webb, a materials engineer at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has just developed the first blood flow monitor “that can be used without requiring someone to come into a clinic and stay completely immobile while a test is performed,” he says....

Benthic RoverMedia Platforms Design TeamIn July, the 3000-pound Benthic Rover crawled the ocean floor 25 miles off the coast of California. Created by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the Benthic Rover is made of titanium, to withstand pressure of up to 6000 pounds per square inch, and of foam, to decrease its weight to 100 pounds and prevent it from getting stuck in the sediment of the ocean floor....

Seven microscopic motes of dust may be the first material ever collected from outside our solar system, according to a team of researchers from Berkeley and the National Naval Research Laboratory. And from these tiny particles, researchers hope to learn about the origins of interstellar dust.“The particles captured are a sample of the contemporary galaxy as it constantly evolves through star formation, death, and the redistribution of material as dust,” planetary scientist Anna Butterworth tells Popular Mechanics....

Less than one year ago, Brazilians crowded into the Estádio Nacional de Brasília Mané Garrincha in the nation’s capital of Brasilia to watch their home country defeat Cameroon 4-1 in the 2014 World Cup. Now, the once-glimmering stadium is a parking lot. Soccer matches hosted by the home Brasilia club draw barely 5,000 people to the 72,000-person structure, and so the city is making back some lost money by parking some 400 buses in the vast, unused parking lot during the hours they are not needed....

Media Platforms Design TeamForty years after Parnelli Jones won the 1970 Trans-Am season opener in a Ford Mustang Boss 302, the racing legend returned to Laguna Seca, driving the latest iteration of the nameplate he made legendary. “The Boss is back,” said Mark Fields, Ford president of the Americas, by way of introduction.The 2012 Ford Mustang Boss 302 uses a thoroughly reengineered version of the 5.0-liter normally aspirated engine found in the Mustang GT....

Media Platforms Design TeamOver the weekend, Iran claimed that its forces downed an American stealthy unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that was flying over its territory. The Pentagon has since confirmed that the U.S. Air Force lost an RQ-170 Sentinel over western Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. This is the kind of story that can drive military aviation journalists insane: A secret aircraft goes down in a totalitarian regime that has a track record....

Media Platforms Design TeamAlways on the verge of a seeming comeback, airships are back in the spotlight, touting new technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical Systems, based outside Los Angeles. The Aeroscraft ML866’s potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht’s buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says....

The most important pieces of real estate on your car are those four small contact patches that grip the road: your tires. Those few square inches of rubber determine just about everything. Tires harness the engine’s power, allow the brakes to do their job and determine how successfully a car will go around a corner regardless of whether they’re pulling into a parking stall or screaming into a high-speed sweeper. Yes, tires carry an enormous burden....

Media Platforms Design Team1. The HoldEveryone knows the laces should point away from the kicker’s foot, but pros like Henery demand that the ball be standing straight up too. Tilting it lowers the center of mass, making it tougher to strike the sweet spot, says biomechanics professor Jeff Hawks, who studied Henery’s technique with colleague Chase Pfeifer at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.2. The PlantDuring his approach, Henery places his left foot, heel first, next to the ball—barely 10 inches from the nose....

Media Platforms Design TeamUAV explosions are strangely becoming a commonplace sight for residents in the Florida panhandle region, as two UAVs operating out of Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Fla., have crashed within the last week.On July 10, the 53rd Weapons Evaluation Group destroyed a QF-4 drone on its return to base. A press release stated that the drone “had to be destroyed for safety considerations during its return to base following a routine operation....

Going over the river and through the woods was more dangerous back when cars had crummy bias-ply tires, rear-wheel drive, and less effective drum brakes. In today’s world, you can feel confident driving home through several inches of fresh snow after a sumptuous holiday dinner. Your front-wheel drive car has excellent season-appropriate tires and an anti-lock braking system—commonly referred to as ABS.➡ You love badass cars. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together....

Media Platforms Design TeamConsider this: It could be argued that we have reached the limit on performance from a gasoline internal combustion engine.Currently, the most powerful street-legal production supercar is the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport, which produces 1200 hp and 1106 lb-ft of torque at 3000 rpm. It has a 0-60 mph time of 2.6 seconds, which is about the same as an F1 car’s. (The ultimate in power output is a top-fuel dragster, which produces up to 10,000 hp, but that engine lasts for only a few miles before it needs rebuilding....

Media Platforms Design TeamPower sliding through ice and snow may seem like counterintuitive behavior in a six-figure car, but cold weather drive programs have become a de rigueur part of the luxury automotive landscape. From AMG to Bentley to Lamborghini to Porsche, automakers have been gilding the lily of their post-recession recovery by hosting lifestyle consumer events at tony towns like Aspen and Montreal. Some even go the extra mile and hit far-flung locales like Sweden and Finland, capitalizing on the cool climes and enormous scales of Arctic geography....

With all due respect to Frank Bullet, Eleanor and that bald guy from The Fast and the Furious, the most significant car movie of all time is Smokey and the Bandit. It’s true. It might even be the most significant film ever made. Smokey and the Bandit should have easily swept 1977’s Golden Anniversary of the Academy Awards. Instead, Annie Hall won Best Picture that year. Annie who? My memory might be a little fuzzy but I don’t think I saw one Trans Am in Annie Hall....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe swine flu epidemic of 2009 wasn’t as bad as many health experts feared, yet around the world the flu killed thousands of people—many of whom would have lived if a vaccine had reached them in time. For 2010 PM Breakthrough Leadership Award winner Craig Venter, that frustration led to inspiration.According to Wired, Venter was working with Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, but red tape delayed efforts to get the vaccine out of the city and stem the spread of the virus....

Car owners might not love dealer service departments, but independent mechanics do. Why? Because dealers’ stiff rates and by-the-book approach can drive customers straight to a local independent specialist. Alan Prosser, owner of Alan Auto Volvo Service in Portland, Maine, can attest. “When a dealer changes out a common EVAP hose in the rear of a post-2001 V70, they need to remove the exhaust system and rear suspension,” he says. “That’s six to eight hours of labor....

Media Platforms Design TeamRetro gaming is an entirely renewable fad as aging geeks try to recapture that initialPac-ManPac-Man high, and new gamers discover the kitschy-yet-pastoral simplicity of 2D graphics and a big, knobby joystick. Sure, you can play on nearly any PC, with official and unlicensed emulators that perfectly resurrect the neon mazes, the frantic action and the haunting “Wokka Wokka.” But without the solid thud of a classic joystick, it’s not the same....

Around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was created in the Big Bang. Just 600 million years later, EGS8p7 sprang into existence. Astronomers at the Keck Observatory recently discovered it using the multi-object spectrometer for infrared explorationinstrument.But there’s just one thing: We shouldn’t be able to see it. The galaxy EGS8p7 dates from just before the Epoch of Reionization, which charged neutral hydrogen in the universe and allowed for a transparent interstellar medium—that is, the space between stars, planets, and galaxies....

Corvette vs. ViperProbably the biggest question most enthusiasts have is what will happen to the merged automakers’ halo supercars? Well, in this game there can be only one. Sorry snake fans, the news that Chrysler’s been shopping around the Viper sports car brand wouldn’t change with a merger between GM and the Pentastar brand. The Viper is dead, or at the very least, it will no longer be owned by Chrysler-even in a post-merger fantasy world....