Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: Summer 2011 (but sold out for first 18 months)Price: $387,000Competitors: Ferrari FF, McLaren MP4, Porsche 911 Turbo SPowertrain: 6.5-liter V12, 691 hp, 509 lb-ft; 7-speed, automated manual, 4WDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 10/15 (estimated)What’s New: Lamborghini’s first all-new car in eight years, the Aventador replaces the Murciélago as the brand’s top supercar. The Aventador is Lamborghini’s first production car with a full carbon-fiber monocoque. The roof and tub are created separately, then cured together to create a light and super-rigid shell around the driver—Lamborghini claims that the structure is 30 percent lighter and 150 percent stiffer than the aluminum chassis of the Murciélago....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-sale date: August 2012Price: $35,350 to $42,000-plus Competitors: Acura RDX, Infiniti JX Powertrains: 2.4-liter inline-four-cylinder, 182-hp, 172 lb-ft of torque; 3.6-liter V-6, 301-hp, 272 lb-ft; six-speed automatic; FWD or AWDEPA fuel economy (city/hwy): 22/32 (four-cylinder with FWD); 16/23 (V-6 with AWD) What’s new: GMC extends its popular Denali luxury sub-brand to the smallest vehicle in its lineup, the Terrain crossover (CUV in GM parlance), accompanied by an upgraded V-6 with more displacement (3....

In 2009 V. Reggie Edgerton and Yury Gerasimenko, two spinal researchers from UCLA, teamed up with Susan Harkema, rehabilitation director at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injurt Research Center, and Joel Burdick, a CalTech Bioengineer, to test the effects electrical stimulation on a human spinal cord. They and their star patient, former college baseball player Rob Summers, came to today’s Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Conference to tell us what they learned from their therapy that gave Summers back some voluntary movement....

View full post on YoutubeTim Hemmes is a friend of PopMech and a hero in the world of brain-computer interfaces. Hemmes, a quadriplegic auto-detail shop owner, took part in a robotic arm study that won a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2012, in which he controlled the arm with just his thoughts.But last month, Hemmes was involved in a serious car accident. On April 4, his wheelchair-accessible van was hit as he travelled home from a doctor’s appointment....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe North American International Auto Show, commonly know as the Detroit auto show, kicked off on Sunday morning with concept car unveilings and 2009 model reveals. Amidst our flurry of multimedia coverage, PM got a sneak peek at the 2009 Cadillac CTS-V—a supercharged sedan outfitted with a V8 engine that will deliver an estimated 550 hp.In 1955, PM unveiled the new model year cars to readers in 48 pages of the February issue....

Media Platforms Design TeamYesterday, Facebook announced that it would acquire WhatsApp, the fastest growing messenger service in the world, for an eye-popping $19 billion. This is one of the biggest tech acquisitions ever and is easily Facebook’s most costly corporate maneuver to date. Seen from a short-term monetary point of view, Mark Zuckerberg’s eagerness to bring WhatsApp under Facebook’s influence would be puzzling. The Mountain View startup, guided by two former Yahoo engineers, does what it does very well....

Media Platforms Design TeamToday, Toshiba, the main backer of HD DVD high-definition disc technology, declared that the company will no longer continue to manufacture HD DVD players, thus ending the protracted format war between the HD DVD and Blu-ray, which is backed largely by Sony. Both formats had been touted as the successor to DVDs that would bring home cinema into the hi-def era. Consumers seemed to be ambivalent; sales of both players have been moderate, but in the end, the studios and movie distributors appear to have sealed the deal....

Devon JarvisWe had several large family cookouts this summer, and our pressure-treated deck is, basically, trashed. It’s covered in grease stains, muddy footprints, and moldy leaves. Should I clean it up now, or can it wait until next spring?Spruce up your deck now while the weather is still good. The change in seasons brings moderate weather that permits deck cleaner to work more effectively because it doesn’t dry too rapidly. Plus, once the job is done, it’s easier to apply a new finishcooler temperatures reduce the chance of lap marks....

Of the three variations of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35B might be the coolest. The proof: It can take off from a ski jump.Built for the Marine Corps, the F-35B can change the direction of its thrusters, allowing it to make short takeoffs and vertical landings. If you want to see how short “short” is, then check out this video of the inaugural ski jump launch, in which the fighter rolls up the platform, hops off, and zooms into the sky....

Media Platforms Design TeamConspiracy theorists can relax a little bit. An enigmatic military research facility, blamed for everything from floods to earthquakes to supposed mind control, is shutting down this summer. The HAARP program—totem of dictators, featured on and in Tom Clancy books, inspiration for a —is out of cash.The X-Filesrock albumHAARP, for High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, is an atmospheric research site in a remote area of Alaska. Scientists use radio transmitters and antennas to heat up the ionosphere, which allows them to study how particles behave in that uppermost atmospheric layer....

ODST wasn’t always planned as a high-stakes gamble. The original idea was to build a quick, downloadable mini-campaign for Halo 3set in the Halo universe, amounting to some 3 hours of fresh gunplay. “It started out ambitious creatively, but controlled technically,” Joe Staten, ODST’s creative director and writer tells PM. “It ended up equally ambitious on the creative front as on the production side. We realized that we could just keep adding more content, make the game longer if we wanted to....

LAS VEGAS — There’s been a lot of news about mini-projectors here at CES. Last night I was at a Texas Instruments demo of a DLP projector that came tucked inside the body of a cellphone—not a real cellphone, mind you, just a piece of plastic shaped like a cellphone, with the images looking more like standard photos than video. Nevertheless, you have to separate gee-whiz from reality: As cool as a cellphone the projected video could be, that doesn’t mean one will be hitting the market tomorrow....

LAS VEGAS — For its lineup here at CES, iRobot has taken the vacuum out of the Roomba and turned it into an open-source robot called Create. After hearing about a lot of Roomba hacking, the folks at iRobot—whom we gave a CES Editor’s Choice Award for the Create—didn’t want you just deciding how often your robot will bang into walls; you’re supposed to use this as the skeleton for you own unique robot....

Earlier this year, the internet was graced with a very special video. A regal display of talent, charm, and sheer mastery. Danish archer Lars Andersen can speed shoot, run on walls, grab an enemy’s arrow mid-air and shoot it back, and even shoot an arrow with his foot.Not everyone was happy with his purported knowledge of the true history of archery, however, and now Anderson is back with a message for all the haters:View full post on IframeAnd in case you’re not interested in all the boring stuff, here’s the meat:Media Platforms Design TeamLars can indeed grab an arrow in mid-air, but not from a heavy war bow....

As a radiation safety professional, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that radiation is not as deadly as they fear. While radiation can cause cancer, it’s not a very potent carcinogen—certainly not as potent as many industrial solvents. While radiation can cause skin burns or radiation sickness, it takes far more to do so than most people would think, and fatal radiation accidents are relatively rare.So when I woke up on Wednesday to hear the story that a radioactive source had been stolen in Mexico, my first reaction was not necessarily to worry....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo get an up-close look at a patient’s tissue, a doctor typically does a biopsy—chops off a tiny chunk of organ or tumor and sends it to a lab for processing. The lab encases the tissue in paraffin wax, then shaves it into slices thin enough to be analyzed on a microscope. The process takes a living, three-dimensional tissue and turns it into a frozen 2D image, like a snapshot of an action scene....

Media Platforms Design TeamMIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) invented anultracapacitor that would increase the standard model’s storage capacity by utilizing electrical fields in cells as small as one thirty-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.Whereas conventional batteries use chemical reactions to create energy, capacitors use electrical fields for greater efficiency in power. The current generation of ultracapacitors have a lifespan that lasts more than 10 years. They also are indifferent to temperature change, have high immunity to shock and vibration and have high charging and discharging efficiency compared to standard batteries and regular capacitors....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the 2012 thriller The Grey, Liam Neeson leads a band of oil rig workers who find themselves stranded in Alaska after a plane crash, using their survival skills to stay alive in the face of bitter cold, and a pack of grey wolves that are stalking the men. In the clip below, the men come face to face with their lupine pursuers. The Grey comes out on Blu-ray on May 15, and we’re giving away 10 Blu-ray combo packs featuring the a Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download of the film....

Science Fiction: “Nothing is off-limits"Tracking the conspiracy and science behind the television show Fringe is so complicated that actor Joshua Jackson, who plays Peter Bishop, has a flowchart. “I’m such a nerd. I’m an actor with a flowchart,” he sighed to a packed house at last weekend’s New York Comic Con. But it is, he has found, a necessary evil. “In case you didn’t realize, it’s hard to keep track of all the little pieces....

Twenty-five undergraduate and graduate students from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia spent a grueling year designing, developing and building a concept boat. Laurent Auguste, a student who worked on the project as part of an elective course called Boat Design says, “There were times when we wondered if we could really make it work.“With the help of several members of the Marine Design Resource Alliance and Tom Gattis, professor of product/industrial design, the students completed the project and launched the striking 21-ft....