Posts

Media Platforms Design Team Keeping the nation’s more than 180 ports healthy means more than just dredging channels and patching wharfs. The ports, which are critical for the movement of food, fuel and manufactured goods, have to link efficiently to America’s road and rail infrastructure. We spoke with Lillian C. Borrone, chairman of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C., and member of the National Academy of Engineering, about future challenges, the agile port concept and security issues....

Comcast has a new broadband service on the way, and if the numbers are to be believed, it’s astoundingly fast. The new Gigabit Pro can download at 2 GB per second, Comcast says. It’s the company’s latest move to try to beat back the the looming threat of Google Fiber, which threatens municipal monopolies with its super-high-speed service.The first roll-out is in Atlanta, which also happens to be a Google Fiber target city....

Media Platforms Design TeamWeeks ahead of its official debut at the 2014 Detroit Auto Show, Popular Mechanics took a sneak peek at the Infiniti Q50 Eau Rouge Concept at Metalcrafters in Los Angeles, and spoke with the manufacturer’s global design director, Alfonso Albaisa to get the inside scoop on the hopped up sedan.With its matte primer finish and stripped out interior, it seemed hard to imagine the Infiniti concept named after the famed curve at the Belgian Spa-Francorchamps Formula 1 track would be ready for prime time in just a few short weeks....

Harald Sunngård was a Norwegian inventor in the early years of the 20th century who noticed a common perceived weakness of automatic pistols: reloads under stress were often bungled by shooters, leaving them vulnerable to return fire without being able to shoot back. Doing the classic inventor thing, Sunngård figured out a solution to the problem in 1909–a two-part solution, in fact. The first part of his solution was to use a big magazine and a small cartridge, to maximize magazine capacity....

Honda’s smallest and cheapest car may be one of its best. It’s fun to drive, reliable and, for its size, very roomy. Then there’s the fuel economy: The Fit’s mileage has been all over the map. Press gently on the gas pedal around town and set the cruise control to 60 mph on the freeway and the results are surprisingly Prius-like. But try to keep up with the rest of the manic traffic flow in Los Angeles and fuel economy can dip into the high 20s....

One of the biggest issues facing the development of quantum computers—tomorrow’s supercomputers based on the strange principles of quantum physics—is keeping everything cool. Electronics make heat, and while your laptop and smartphone can use fans or heat-absorbing water tanks, those just won’t cut it for quantum computing, which will take advantage of the quirks of quantum mechanics to create computers that calculate at insane speeds.“When you start to make electronics smaller and denser, not only are you making much more heat in the same amount of volume, but it’s much harder for the heat to flow outward,” says Peter Nalbach, a theoretical physicist at the University of Hamburg, Germany....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamMORE BREAKING NEWS FROM THE 2008 L.A. AUTO SHOW• 2008 LA AUTO SHOW: All of Our Updates and Analysis in One Place The Mercedes ConceptFASCINATION is a sleek vision of a wagonlike crossover. Powered by a four-cylinder diesel, the concept wears loads of slick features and including a built-in humidor and a refrigerated luggage compartment. Mercedes has hinted that its nose offers a glimpse at the future E-Class coupe, and while we’re not sure this concept will ever see production, we sure would like to see its novel styling influence Benz production cars....

Media Platforms Design Team Climate Change: Picturing the Science, edited by Popular Mechanics editorial advisor Gavin A. Schmidt and photographer Joshua Wolfe, is the first book anyone seeking a layman’s understanding of the science of global warming should read. The researchers who contributed chapters show where the data come from, how climate models are constructed and how the current situation compares to Earth’s climate in earlier ages. The photography is extensive, dramatic and blissfully lacking in forlorn polar bears adrift on scraps of ice....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s hard out there for a hipster. You have to listen to tapes on an old-school player ironically, but that band you love that nobody has heard of doesn’t put out cassettes. What’s a music lover to do? British developer Matt Brailsford has a solution: reworking an old tape recorder to become a Spotify player. Just load one of his cassettes into the player and it reads the tape’s NFC ID to play a specific Spotify playlist....

The folks who brought us the giant, smartphone-controlled cyborg cockroach are back—this time, with a wired-up scorpion. Be afraid.Backyard Brains, a small Michigan-based company dedicated to spreading the word about neuroscience, has been running surgical experiments on these deadly arachnids for the past two months, using electrical current to induce them to strike. Dylan Miller, a summer intern working the project, insists it’s the first time that an electrical current has ever been used to remotely induce a scorpion to strike with its pedipalps (claws) and tail....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe said it last summer when it was front-page news. According to the study, NASA says there’s no evidence that a “ghost in the machine” software glitch in some Toyota vehicles can cause them to run away at high speeds in spite of heroic efforts by the driver to stop them.At least that’s the gist of the study that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) commissioned to investigate the software in Toyota engine computers to see if a programming error could command the throttles to open without input from the drivers....

Media Platforms Design TeamHeroes: Season Three Six-Disc Set (2008)Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Tim Kring’s Misfits of Science premiered in 1985, audiences (and special effects) weren’t ready for real-world, live-action super-heroics. Now, more than 20 years later, FX technology has caught up and the world embraces comic book heroes like Batman and The X-Men daily. With Heroes, Kring immediately struck geek gold with a series about everyday people who manifest various superhuman powers seemingly overnight....

With just a few months to get ready for the November 5 start of the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR), teams are preparing their boats, sails, equipment and themselves for the eight-month odyssey around the globe. The VOR will take seven competing boats 31,000 miles, stopping in nine ports along the way. The race’s biggest drama unfolds in the two long Southern Ocean legs, one from Cape Town, South Africa, to Melbourne, Australia, and a second from Wellington, New Zealand, around Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil....

What’s better than a remote-controlled car? A self-driving remote-controlled car.A group of makers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden built a phone-powered RC car that uses machine vision algorithms and sensors to work its way around a track. It doesn’t exactly zoom, but it’s impressive to watch this tiny defensive driver.View full post on YoutubeDimitris Platis, one of the tinkerers on the project, has written up a detailed breakdown that explains how the engineers modified the chassis and which bits of technology they plugged in....

Media Platforms Design TeamQ: Between my work and personal lives, I juggle no fewer than four different phone numbers. Is there a simple way of making it easier to handle all these phones?A: With today’s mishmash of landlines, office phones and personal and company-issued cellphones, people who aren’t forced to juggle multiple phones (and multiple phone numbers) have become an endangered species. Google Voice is undoubtedly the best way to manage this mess....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: December 2011Price: $38,295 (after the $7500 federal EV tax credit)Competitors: Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet VoltPowertrain: Permanent magnet AC, 134 hp, 221 lb-ft; single-speed transmission, FWDEPA Range: Rated at 110 miles; up to 150 miles (claimed)What’s New: Coda Automotive is a 3-year-old, privately funded Los Angeles–based startup that originated from Miles EV, which builds low-speed electric vehicles for university and government use. Flush with $300 million in private funding from U....

Media Platforms Design TeamLeft to right: PM Breakthrough innovators William B. Carter of HRL Laboratories, Bruce Goodwin of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Pain Free Socket inventor Katherine Bomkamp, Donnie Wilson of Elastec/American Marine, and Jesse Harrington Au from Autodesk.1. Sequoia, the world’s fastest supercomputer, is about to start mimicking the human heart.Sequoia, the 20 petaflop computer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is about to begin a new project, according to panelist and lab researcher Bruce Goodwin....

Try living for a week on $2 a day. That’s what my students and I do when I teach my class about international development. It helps them begin to understand the trade-offs that must be made when you have only very limited resources. More broadly, it was in the Peace Corps in Botswana that I learned to carry water on my head, and noticed how heavy the bucket was; and I learned to pound sorghum in to flour and felt the ache in my back....

Even with the long-delayed F- 35 Lightning II still in development, industry players and the Pentagon are already looking at the next-generation warplane.The forthcoming F-35 is considered a 5th generation aircraft; it’s highly networked with sensors and stealthy to evade radar. This naming system dates back to the jets that first appeared after World War II, which were the first generation. Second-gen warplanes were equipped with radar; the third generation carried long-range missiles, enabled by better radar and guided ground attack missiles....

Joost Janssen is not an assassin. Real assassins don’t tend to respond to interview requests. But he is a close second: a Navy SEAL for 13 years, and currently an instructor at BUD/S, the school that SEAL candidates attend. He’s also the military advisor for American Assassin (September 15), a brutal thriller about a CIA recruit whose fiancée is killed in a terrorist attack. That man is trained by a legendary operative played by Michael Keaton, and Keaton was trained by Janssen....