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A gecko’s foot is like a perfect Post-it: As the lizard walks up a wall, its feet stick fast and peel off smoothly, never slipping and–since no viscous glue is involved–never losing grip. Now, a team at Ohio’s University of Akron has produced a new kind of “gecko tape” that mimics the thousands of hairs on the gecko’s footpad, each of which splits into hundreds of smaller nanohairs. The tape uses bundles of setae–strong but flexible carbon nanotubes–which, like the gecko hairs, create an electrostatic attraction with a surface....

Media Platforms Design TeamThese three images, created from Cassini Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, show the appearance and evolution of a mysterious feature in Ligeia Mare, one of the largest hydrocarbon seas on Saturn’s moon Titan. (Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell)This month, two new probes reached the orbit of Mars—one from NASA, and one from India’s space agency. But seriously: While exciting new discoveries are bound to come from our robotic Mars explorers, let’s get a new explorer to Titan already....

Lancair EvolutionMedia Platforms Design TeamLancair’s latest turboprop kit will cost from $750,000 to $1 million to complete depending on engine (new or used) and avionics choices. The basic kit sans engine, prop and avionics runs $250,000 and takes less than 1000 hours to build–so they say. The carbon fiber, four-seat speedster will cruise at 338 knots at 25,000 feet on just 35 gallons-per-hour. Fuel capacity is 140 gallons. That makes it faster than some Very Light Jets with a lower fuel burn....

Media Platforms Design TeamGtech AirRam High-power Cordless Vacuum CleanerPrice: $350This powerful cordless vacuum easily handled the dust, dirt, and debris I let accumulate in my apartment during the Stanley Cup playoffs, including ground-up potato chips, popcorn, and pizza-crust crumbs. The stylish AirRAM gobbled up gunk with its agitating brush bars for 40 minutes before its 22-volt lithium-ion battery pack was tapped out. LED light bars on the handle signaled the amount of power left in the charge; a full recharge took about 4 hours, as advertised....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast August, Chesapeake Energy had only four rigs tapping into the Haynesville shale natural gas deposit in northwest Louisiana and east Texas. Now, the company has 24–and plans to add eleven more by next summer. Despite the economic downturn and the collapse of natural gas prices (now at a six-year low), energy companies like Chesapeake are charging into shale gas deposits because of the growing pressures for cleaner, abundant domestic energy....

Media Platforms Design TeamGive me your elevator pitch. What does this system do?SmartStove makes wood heat easier, safer, and more efficient. It is an integrated control system that enables an existing wood stove to control itself without requiring user intervention once the firebox has been loaded and lit. This frees you to go about your life without being tied to monitoring and adjusting the stove.How does SmartStove control the stove?SmartStove balances the heat generated (via the draft control) with the heat extracted (via the heat exchange blower control) to produce a heat output that the user has selected using the wireless control panel....

(Published in the March 2002 issue)More: The Top Gaming Innovations of the past decade. The Sony PlayStation 2 (PS2) finally has some competition. After standing virtually alone in the video game spotlight for the past year, life got interesting for the PS2 when Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s GameCube hit store shelves in November 2001. If you’re trying to decide which console to purchase, we understand your confusion. We know you’ve been deluged with articles highlighting the differences between the systems, but most of those pieces were written before the consoles were available....

Media Platforms Design TeamAustin, TX—The bottom of a major recession seems like a strange time for a factory-issue chopper to thrive, but Honda’s tricked out Fury has emerged as the top-selling bike in the metric (i.e., non‚—Harley-Davidson) factory custom genre. Proving they won’t take those claims sitting down, Yamaha’s Star Motorcycles division has retorted with a chopper of their own, the low-slung Stryker.Starting at $10,990 in black and $11,240 in blue or reddish copper, the Stryker undercuts the Fury by as much as $2,000....

You probably have a Google Plus account floating around in the ether. An outdated page with your face on it that you’ve only looked at once or twice. You probably only have one because some more important Google service required it. Well, those days are over and soon you’ll be able to leave it behind forever. In a blog post today, Google announced that over the coming months Google Plus will be decoupled from every other Google service that requires it....

Media Platforms Design Team1. InspectAs your trees begin to turn those charming fall colors, Smiley says, look for early or uneven fall color or defoliation—both could be signs of potential problems such as nutrient deficiencies, disease, and insects. Mushrooms aren’t usually a problem unless they’re in clumps near trunks, which might be a sign of root rot and decay. 2. Have Your Soil AnalyzedFall is a very good time to evaluate your soil, so collect samples for nutrient analysis....

Perry Chen & Yancey StricklerKickstarter (Video by Jane Nisselson / Virtual Beauty) In 2009 this duo unveiled a website that lets ordinary people provide support—often just $5 or $10 at a time—for creative projects by artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Crowd funding has since transformed areas such as game design and hardware development as well. So far Kickstarter members have contributed nearly $1 billion to 55,000 projects, helping to launch the Pebble smartwatch, the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, playgrounds, orbiting satellites, and 20 movies that were screened at 2014’s Sundance festival....

How would you survive in the end of the world? Would you be ready and able to build yourself a new home from the wreckage, throwing together the rusted scraps of the old world to make a new one? If you’re anything like me, you’ve asked yourself this question too many times. And in Fallout 4, I finally got a chance to answer it. Out today, Fallout 4 follows in the footsteps of a handful of critically-acclaimed after-the-bomb role-playing games that came before it....

Media Platforms Design TeamGreg Nicotero sees zombies everywhere —even among the living. In fact, he can’t stop pointing them out. “See this tall guy with the glasses?” he asks. “He’d be a great zombie.” Five minutes later, he’s at it again. “This girl has a long face, nice bone structure. Look at her forehead! Great zombie.“It might seem macabre, but Nicotero has a reason to look for potential ghouls: As the special-effects makeup supervisor on The Walking Dead, a new television series about a group of humans trying to survive in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, he’s tasked with bringing the show’s most gruesome characters to life....

It took seven long years, but the greatest fictional moneymaking scheme of the 20th century is about to become real. There’s a startup that wants to sell you gasoline and bring it to your home, just like the foolproof plan from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.Media Platforms Design TeamOkay, it’s not exactly the same. In the season 4 episode, “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis,” Charlie and company drive around in a van with trashcans full of gas and attempt to unload the fuel door-to-door....

Media Platforms Design TeamBelieve it or not, the geeks behind Lost gave PM the inside scoop that love triangles would be coming back to the show—and fast. So while Thursday’s episode, “Something Nice Back Home,” revolved more around the psychological action than the scientific, we’re still curious as to how exactly super surgeon Jack Shephard landed on sweetheart maternity doc Juliet Burke’s operating table. After all, as the island’s sage cancer survivor Rose said, people don’t get sick amidst all the electromagnetic pulses and sketchy experiments: “Here, they get better....

Media Platforms Design TeamI admit that I wasn’t really paying attention when my wife said, “Oh, I love this little bench. Wouldn’t it look great in our foyer or a child’s room?” She was looking at one of those furniture catalogs full of pictures of excessively styled rooms with way too many pillows. (I won’t say which one, but it rhymes with “bottery parn.”) By the time I finally looked at the catalog, I saw a nice enough bench, well designed and properly proportioned—but nothing I couldn’t build myself....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor the past few years, NASA has been funding private space companies in the hope that they can build spacecraft that will carry astronauts to orbit. This is a historic change: Until now, every NASA craft has been designed and wholly owned by the agency. Now, industry would build and operate rockets and spacecraft, and it would do it more quickly, cheaply, and flexibly than the government could, opening a new era of spaceflight....

“Is a gas barbecue supposed to make a whistling sound?” a neighbor asked. “No,” I said. “Sometimes it can make a humming sound, but definitely not a whistle.” She insisted her grill was producing some pretty unusual noises, so I grabbed some tools and headed over.True enough, the grill emitted a faint whistle and, ominously, a slight odor of propane. It took only a few seconds to find the cause: a damaged regulator....

DETROIT — Lexus has never had a high-performance line of vehicles to compete with Mercedes-Benz’s AMG and BMW’s M cars. But that will change very soon. This morning, Lexus unveiled it’s very first one—the IS-F based on the IS sedan. We’ve been spying on this car, referred to as the IS 500, for months as Lexus fine-tuned its handling at race tracks around the world.Lexus decided on the “F” designation for their performance line to stand for both “F1”, the open wheel race series in which Toyota competes, and “flagship”....

NASA is working to build and fly its first piloted supersonic X-plane since the X-31, a Mach 1.2 jet designed to test thrust vectoring technologies that achieved first flight in 1990. The aeronautics agency’s next faster-than-sound experimental plane—the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) aircraft that contractors submitted bids to build last month—will be more concerned with the physics of breaking the sound barrier than the nuances of engine performance. In a quest to bring supersonic flight to commercial aviation, NASA hopes to design and fly a supersonic jet that produces a low rumble when it breaks the sound barrier, rather than the kitchen-rattling double thunderclap that people who live near Air Force bases with fighter squadrons are accustomed to hearing....