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Media Platforms Design TeamEver notice how hills become steeper as you become older? When you begin to feel like “The Little Engine That Couldn’t,” and there’s still half the hill to overcome, you might want to consider “The Little Engine That Can”–a small bolt-on bicycle engine. Petrol power added to leg power equals a new dimension in biking.Now, before all you exercise fanatics begin lighting your torches and sharpening your mattocks to come and get us, we’ll be the first to admit the health benefits of a brisk riding workout....

Media Platforms Design Team"Take your marks." The swimmers bend down on their blocks, ready. The buzzer sounds. Eight of the best male freestyle swimmers in the United States dive into the pool. In a little under 2 minutes the200-meter Olympic swimming trial semifinal is over, and two swimmers are headed to the 2012 London Olympics.Those swimmers are Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte, two men with arguably the best freestyle form in the world....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: David McNew/Getty Images)Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced this week that the city has signed a contract to buy 800 TASER International Axon body cameras, using $1.5 million raised from private sources. In addition, the city plans to buy and deploy another 6,200 body cameras this coming year. “Out on the street, things aren’t always clear cut,” Mayor Garcetti said in a December 16 statement to the press....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt has long been conventional wisdom, going all the way back to Apollo, that heavy lift was a prerequisite for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, but this summer has seen several cracks start to appear in that consensus. First, partly as a result of white papers circulated among its members in the last few weeks, the Augustine panel itself has championed the concept of propellant depots. But defenders of the current approach have claimed that the ideas aren’t fleshed out, and are too complex and expensive....

Price: $55The 360 Quick Select passes the first test of a new power tool: It feels good in your hand. This cordless power screwdriver by Skil contains 12 bits, including varying sizes of Phillips, Allen, and common. And at about the size of a hot glue gun, it’s remarkably agile.The Skil is built like a handyman’s revolver: A wheel containing the bits rotates to slot the bit you desire into the chamber....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere’s your first look at Mazda’s sexy—if radical—new concept car that will make its world debut next month at the 2008 Detroit auto show. With its obvious yet sophisticated aerodynamic design, it’s no wonder the company settled on Furai, which is Japanese for “sound of the wind.” Mazda’s not handing out many juicy details, but we do know that the power behind this Batmobile look-alike is a 450-hph, three-rotor rotary engine....

A month after it sent the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) probe hurtling into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, NASA revealed today that it has uncovered irrefutable evidence of “significant quantities” of water. NASA scientists had been keeping the results of the LCROSS crash close to their lab vests, saying only that the mission had been a success and that they had obtained copious amounts of new spectrometric data....

America’s patent office might stand on the brink of an open-source revolution, but whatever happened to turning heady science into practical new gadgets? PM resident roboticist Daniel H. Wilson, whose new book looks way ahead on how robots could prevent an alien invasion, joins us to dream up inventions we might have in our 22nd-century households. Plus, CIA veteran Robert Wallace talks spy tech, Formula One guru Guy Nègre explains the power of the Air Car as we get pumped for the Auto X Prize and ponder a microcar comeback, and Yale physicist Robert Adair takes a swing at the science of steroids....

Across the Middle East, the image has become a common one: white pickup trucks racing down stretches of lonely desert highway, streaming black flags of the Caliphate, filled with enthusiastic Islamic State fighters carrying AK-47s. From the Maghreb Desert to the Euphrates River, white Toyota pickup trucks rule the battlefield. The Internet has gone crazy with a particularly odd conspiracy theory: somehow, Toyota has been supplying the fighters of the Islamic State with pickup trucks....

A cornerstone of military planning is figuring out how to position who and what is needed to win the fight. Logistics can often decide the outcome of a war. That is why military planners looking at future United States combat operations are fretting over their inability to move the Army around without the benefit of well-developed airfields. It is a question of air power, but not the kind measured in laser-guided bombs or rounds fired per minute....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis is an in-depth look at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart where highly precise technicians use highly precise tools to assemble the highly precise parts of the 918 Spyder. (Those recalled axle fasteners are clearly the exception, not the rule, right?)There’s absolutely no doubt that the car is special: does its 2.5-second 0-60 mph run impress you? How about the 10-second flat quarter mile at 143.7 mph? And so the plant that builds what amounts to a road-going Le Mans prototype is exactly what you’d expect: bright, clean, and futuristic....

There’s much more to human dialogue than just words. Robots, generally terrible at determining emotional cues, can’t master most of it, carrying out conversations in the same flat, literal way. But Japanese researchers have designed a robot that can pick up on a person’s body language and respond appropriately with gestures and changes in voice inflection. Also it can harass you. “Talking-Ally,” designed by scientists at the Interactions and Communications Design Lab at Toyohashi University, can determine if listeners are engaged or if they are distracted from the conversation....

Call me crazy, but I think zeppelins have gotten a bad rap. Sure, the Hindenburg went up in flames on its maiden voyage, and airplanes made slow-moving dirigibles all but obsolete after World War II. But I still love giant floating gas bags.So this announcement that a team of French engineering and tech students have come up with a solar-powered blimp that uses flexible solar cells gets me all giddy. Called Project Sol’R, the team hopes to cross the English Channel using its blimp, simply to prove that it can be done....

BREAKING NEWS & PHOTOS* PLUS: NASA Not Ready to Give Up on Martian Life* EARLIER: New Alien Video Shines (Photoshopped) Light on UFO Hoaxers* UPDATE: Phoenix Mission ‘Definitely’ Finds Water Ice on Mars* COMPLETE COVERAGE: News, Analysis and Experts on SpaceFrom the moon to Mars, to other planets and comets, stargazers have long speculated that there’s water in outer space–and wondered how the heck it got there. The obsession continues because the presence of liquid water is thought to be the most promising indicator for life....

There’s a lot to say about Taser’s civilian-marketed C2, a stripped-down, $350 version of the unit carried by some 10,000 law enforcement agencies around the country. It fires a pair of probes into a target, presumably someone who’s attacking you, from up to 15 ft. away. If the probes get within two inches of your skin (they don’t have to penetrate skin, but they can, as I found out), they complete a circuit and deliver 30 seconds of muscle-clenching incapacitation....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: NASA)We know black holes are powerful, but new research suggests that when the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies collide, they create enough force to fling stars through space at close to the speed of light. We may even be able to spot one of these super-fast stars in the next decade.Scientists have known for a while about what they call hypervelocity stars. These stars were once in orbit around supermassive black holes, but their parent black holes slingshotted them out of the galaxies at frenzied speeds of 1....

If you can spot United Airlines’ next major vulnerability before malicious hackers do, then your reward could be a whole lot of free flying. United just awarded a million miles to a security researcher for tipping off the company to a remote-code execution flaw in the airline’s website, Wired says.This was the first submission to United’s “bug bounty” program for Jordan Wiens, proprietor of security firm Vector 35. United launched the program back in May after it botched the way it handled the case of security researcher Chris Roberts, who allegedly hacked into a United plane to demonstrate vulnerabilities....

Over a the fascinating Medium series, “The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car,” Chris Urmson, the lead of Google’s autonomous car project, lays out one of the bigger problems facing his team: “Our self-driving cars are being hit surprisingly often by other drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the road.“To illustrate his point, Urmson uploads data recorded from a fender bender in Las Vegas:View full post on YoutubeWrites Urmson about the accident:Our braking was normal and natural, and the vehicle behind us had plenty of stopping distance — but it never decelerated....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhy does your floor smell of chowder? There’s a guy named Mel in your shower? Huh? What? Hang on. Call me back. Ah yes, much better. Cell towerswhy aren’t there more of them? Turns out it’s not as simple as one might think. Consider this, for starters: Would the sudden appearance of a happy little cell tower right over here enhance the real-life Bob Ross painting that is your backyard vista?...

Media Platforms Design TeamWindows are complex. A new model may consist of wood, metal, plastic, glass, mineral oxides and perhaps an inert gas. Yet even a well-insulated unit delivers an R-value no better than an uninsulated wood-frame wall’s (roughly R-4 to R-5). And a house can lose nearly 12,000 Btu per hour, or about 10 percent of a heating system’s output, just through these leaky openings. That means there’s a lot at stake when it comes to choosing, installing and sealing windows....