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The Washington state Department of Corrections (DOC) has been incorrectly calculating prisoner sentences since 2002, according to a statement released by Governor Jay Inslee yesterday. The mistake has resulted in as many as 3,200 inmates being released from prison early.The problem began when the state Supreme Court ordered the Department of Corrections to reduce state sentences based on “good time” earned by inmates in the county jail system. The calculations were not properly applied, however, and about three percent of all prison releases since 2002 were earlier than intended....

BAGHDAD, July 28 — To respond to this nontraditional conflict, the Marines have constantly adapted their existing aircraft to work for them not only as support vehicles but also as smart, intel-savvy reconnaissance scouts. That switch is on full display here in a remote part of central Anbar province at Al Asad Air Base, where Marine Aircraft Group 29 oversees everything from fixed-wing assets such as FA-18s to heavy-lift choppers such as the CH-53....

Media Platforms Design Team Cobra XRS 9950 /// $259 (radar detector); $129 (GPS speed/red-light camera accessory) /// Available now The Promise: “The XRS 9950 provides total protection and peace of mind with Xtreme Range Superhetrodyne Technology, detecting all 12 radar/laser bands with its super-fast lock-on detection circuitry.” It also has an integrated digital compass, as well as a car battery voltage display. When hooked up to its GPS locator, the XRS 9950 can deliver alerts about red light-running and speed-enforcing cameras....

Webster Cash created the Starshade project, a clever method to discover new worlds, because he was looking for a way to block out the light of a distant star, allowing a telescope to capture the light coming from its orbiting planets. But now the University of Colorado professor has reversed his own invention.Cash’s new creation is called the Aragoscope. It could become one of the first ways to take high-res pictures of stars and galactic nuclei, giving us unprecedented glimpses into objects too large for planet hunters to study but too small for Hubble and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope....

Astronomers looked in the right place at the right time and saw something that had only been seen in science fiction: a planet orbiting the two suns of its alien solar system. Scientists using the planet-hunting Kepler telescope spotted the Saturn-size world in a star system they call Kepler-16, and today they reveal their discovery in the journal Science. It’s the first exoplanet ever spotted orbiting both stars in a binary star system, evoking images of Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker gazing into the twin sunset on Tatooine....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Stock the StuffNothing beats a bulging stocking on Christmas morning, but the traditional cloth design can hold only so many goodies. This super stocking redeploys the tough Tyvek FedEx envelopes that arrive with holiday gifts. Fully loaded, the fibrous polyethylene sock holds 50 pounds. That’s enough for a generous load of toys, sugarplums or even coal. Gather up four 15 x 12—inch envelopes, a ¼-inch eyebolt for wood or masonry (depending on the mantel), an S-hook, Duco Cement, eight grommets and a tough, ¼-inch-diameter nylon rope....

A groundbreaking program has converted human skin cells into a network of functioning heart cells, and also fused them with lab-grown liver cells using a specialized 3D printer. Researchers at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine provided Popular Mechanics with both still and moving images of the cells for a fascinating first look.“The heart organoid beats because it contains specialized cardiac cells and because those cells are receiving the correct environmental cues,” says Ivy Mead, a Wake Forest graduate student and member of the research team....

INDOORSCleaning is one of the best things you can do during the winter.1. Dust Off: Get the dust out from under and behind the refrigerator and the stove.2. Swap Filters: Change the furnace filter.3. Clean Carpets: Pretreat stains then shampoo the carpets. Take two passes over high-traffic areas.4. Get the Radiators: Vacuum inside and under fine-tube baseboard radiators.5. Tuneup Your Vacuum: Change a bagless vacuum’s air filter, clear its air flow channels and wash out its canister....

Soon, you might not have to clog up your whole phone with apps just to be able to use them. Google has started experimenting with streaming apps on Android. And if all goes well, downloading apps to your phone could become the exception, not the rule. Right now, the feature just works inside of the Google Search app on Android, that place where Google Now lives. Google offers a situation like this: Maybe you’re searching for a hotel, and the information you want would be easiest to get by using the HotelsTonight app instead of a janky mobile website....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the few short years that microprojectors have been around, they’ve been more objects of geek fascination than useful application. Sure they’re cool, but all the pieces—brightness, color saturation, power efficiency—aren’t quite there yet.Which is why the real microprojector revolution could come from lasers. In particular, tiny projectors that use separate red, green and blue beams to output an RGB video. The promise of lasers includes long-lasting batteries, intensely bright pictures, accurate color representation and the ability to instantly focus on any surface from any angle (a feature known as “inherent focus”)....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe great arctic offshore oil and gas rush is showing signs of fizzling—sort of. In May, federal officials delayed until 2011 a Royal Dutch Shell plan to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, which fan out to the west and east of the point of land occupied by Barrow on the northern shore of Alaska. The move was prompted by the Deepwater Horizon oil leak....

Media Platforms Design TeamTwelve million light years away, in the heart of the M82 galaxy, a binary star system detonated. One white dwarf star had gradually increased in density until matter, spit onto its surface by its larger twin, piled up past a point of no return. Then, at the core of the white dwarf, carbon and oxygen fused until they exploded in a chaotic fit of light and energy. Today, 12 million years later, many Earthlings can see this explosion in the night sky....

Media Platforms Design TeamHunstville, Ala. – When NASA released news of engineering troubles surrounding the under-construction Ares I rocket’s propensity to shake violently, critics were quick to jeer. But now NASA engineers at Marshall Flight are cautiously optimistic that the fears have been overstated, after reviewing early data from the Ares I-X’s test flight. “The data is very preliminary but the trends are very good,” says Pat Lampton, the chief engineer for the first stage....

“James Cameron’s Story of Sci-Fi” airs tonight on AMC at 10 PM Eastern. The third episode of this six-part series focuses on space monsters and how they’ve been portrayed in science fiction.(This post was originally published in July 2013 to address how to fight the monsters in Pacific Rim. We find that its suggestions are still valid for the latest installment, Pacific Rim Uprising, and for attacking any other space monsters that might trouble humanity....

The International Builders’ Show is up and running in Las Vegas, and the first thing that struck me after less than an hour on the show floor is that the products I’m finding seem to be following in the footsteps of consumer electronics. The cool stuff is smaller, more capable and, in many respects, less expensive.Media Platforms Design TeamRockwell’s 12-volt Li-Ion H3 Rotary Hammer is Exhibit A. It’s a true rotary hammer in that it uses a hammer mechanism, not gears, to deliver up to 4800 blows per minute....

Media Platforms Design TeamBurt Rutan, our Breakthrough Leadership Award winner, is in the buildinglive on The Popular Mechanics Show after talking shop with our other honorees, one of whom just showed off our simplest—but maybe most broadly effective—innovation of the year.Jock Brandis, a TV and movie engineer in North Carolina, has developed an inexpensive, beyond easy-to-make peanut cracker (scroll down) that he came up with on the set of the otherwise dreadful movie Dracula 2000....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat made you decide to open the brewery?I had been home brewing for eight years, juggling it with a full-time job as a mechanical engineer. I often worked 90 to 95 hours a week doing both. I eventually left my job to study concise brewing technology at the Siebel Institute in Chicago. It took a while, but I convinced my wife, Brenda, to come on board, and she now manages the brewery’s gift shop and tasting room and is responsible for designing the beer labels, some of which are inspired by local history....

In a scientific version of “monkey see, monkey do,” researchers now find that monkeys can learn how to solve problems by watching videos of other monkeys doing so, perhaps the first time videos have been used in the wild to help teach lessons. Scientists experimented with 12 groups of wild common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. The experiments involved a video display with a transparent box underneath it that held fruit....

China’s Geely Automobile Co. displayed its CK subcompact at the Detroit Auto Show earlier this year–the first Chinese car to appear there. It was hardly well recieved. Reviewers called it “hopelessly outdated,” and remarked that it suffered from “unfortunate styling” and possessed “some of the waviest body panels this side of a demolition derby.” One journalist remarked that the letters on the car’s badging weren’t even on straight. But still, it was a start....

The Claim Mighty Putty is supposedly “the easy way to fix, fill and seal virtually anything fast, and make it last.” It’s a two-part epoxy similar to many other products found on the plumbing aisle of the hardware store. This packaging combines the adhesive and a catalyst in a clever pig-in-a-blanket pairing. When mixed, the putty hardens into resin and “bonds to any surface” to repair leaks in pipes, broken ceramic, gouged wood and more....