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By Alex HutchinsonAs tragic as astronaut Lisa Nowak’s alleged breakdown is, NASA has every reason to be thankful that it didn’t occur during a space mission—and every reason to worry about how it will avoid such scenarios during extended missions in the future, such as a proposed 30-month trip to Mars.In a report issued last year, experts critiqued NASA’s plan for long-duration space missions for failing to deal with “issues of human sexuality,” something that now looks strikingly prophetic in the wake of Nowak’s apparent love-triangle meltdown....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s not often an automaker tells a federal safety agency “no,” at least not without some resulting consequence. But Chrysler Group evidently feels a little gutsy: This week it rejected the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s request for a recall of 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees and ‘02-07 Jeep Liberties. And so what would have been just another auto recall in the growing heap of them (see our 2012 feature Why Product Recalls Make You Less Safe) has become something much more interesting....

Media Platforms Design TeamWET SAW METHOD: To make a cutout in a tile for, say, an outlet, support the tile on a wood block and move it slowly into the blade of the wet saw. Cut one side, flip it over and make another cut to drop out the waste piece.I’ve got a big tile job to do. Does it pay to rent a wet saw? Among the cuts I have to make are some tricky rectangular cutouts....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor the design lover who can’t stand the dry air in her apartment, some good news: Dyson, the company known for its fancy futuristic vacuums, is making a humidifier. It’s called, simply, the Dyson humidifier.If the device looks familiar, that’s because the humidifier is an outgrowth of Dyson’s Air Multiplier line of bladeless fans. This machine uses the same technology to spread air throughout a room or apartment, but with the addition of blasts of ultraviolet (UV) light....

Your car won’t start. Again. Luckily, you have a manual-shift transmission and manage to bump-start it in the driveway. First stop? The repair shop. The service writer takes your information, and the mechanic takes your car. And oh yeah, while it’s on the rack, could you change the oil and rotate the tires, please?A scant 2 hours later, the service writer calls you at work and delivers the bad news: You’ll be paying–big....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sunday October 11th Iran tested what it described as a “new generation” in ballistic missiles. Named Emad (“Pillar”), the missile is designed to evade missile defenses and is supposedly much more accurate than previous Iranian missile designs.Iran’s interest in ballistic missiles dates back to the Iran-Iraq War, when the two countries bombarded each other’s cities with Scud missiles. After the war, Iran increased the range of its missiles—allegedly to target Israel—while at the same time seeking to produce a nuclear weapon....

Media Platforms Design TeamTECHNICAL INNOVATIONLexus Remote TouchAvailable on Lexus HS250h and RX 350As automobiles accumulate more and more advanced electronic functions, how do you control them? Newer systems attempt to access nearly every automotive function with a single-point controller. And every strategy has had drawbacks–except for Lexus’s new Remote Touch.This haptic system works just like a computer mouse: You guide an arrow on the car’s main screen and click a button at the controller’s base with your thumb to make a selection....

Freeze those knees, my chickadees! Valerian and the Empire of a Thousand Planets is an enormous sci-fi epic comic book, filled with expansive, imaginative worlds, weirdo time travel, and space operatics. There are few directors twisted enough to adapt the comic (relatively) true to form, but Luc Besson is just crazy enough to pull it off.Besson is the mastermind behind The Fifth Element, one of the strangest and most unique science fiction films of the 1990s....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou can cover it up, but you can’t fool us. Under that black canvas cover-up is the future Mazda 6 sedan, a car slated for dealer showrooms late this year. How can we be sure it’s a Mazda? Some tell-tale signs give away its identity: Brighten up that front end, and you see the Mazda signature grille. The fancy shape for the headlights is a Mazda trademark, too....

View full post on YoutubeThe brain just doesn’t react well to implants, such the so-called brain pacemakers that alleviate some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s and other movement disorders. Neural tissue swells and scars around the hard steel wires, shortening the time they can stay in the body and deliver the electrical stimulation that alleviates symptoms.Scientists at MIT may have a way around this problem. They developed new flexible implants that are not only friendlier to tissue but also more advanced in their interactions with the brain....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Tuesday, November 30, Popular Mechanics received a Media Vanguard Award for its iPad app, which Ad Age named Best Enthusiast Magazine iPad Edition. Honorees in other categories included and . Cosmopolitan, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, Mac LifeEntertainment WeeklyThe Media Vanguard Awards honor transformative, next-generation media. Among its “Things you must love about the Popular Mechanics iPad app,” Ad Age hailed the app’s fun-to-explore interactive graphics, its “clear but unobtrusive instructions” and “pages laid out perfectly for the screen,” plus “bits of finesse like the cameras and goggles that zoom onto the page a split second after you arrive, making an entrance to their own reviews, or the pull quotes that elegantly glide to their places....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubeElon Musk’s hops are getting higher. This weekend, SpaceX flew the reusable Grasshopper rocket to 744 meters, just shy of a half-mile in altitude, and then landed with a fiery blast of the engine that helped Grasshopper set down on the launchpad. This footage is especially cool as SpaceX used a remotely controlled hexacopter UAV to film the launch. From the small aircraft’s point of view, Grasshopper rises toward it, seems to hover still for a moment, and becomes a speck again as it descends and lands....

Media Platforms Design TeamARIZONADifficulty: ModerateVehicle: 4WD Length: 700 miles; 4 days/3 nightsOur Southwestern Adventure: This corner of Arizona serves up two diverse landscapes for the price of one getaway. You can slalom through arroyos in scorching cactus desert, then climb up into the cool, mile-high evergreen heights of the Dragoon and Chiricahua mountains – two of the region’s renowned “sky islands.” There, shady campsites offer easy access to ridgeline hikes, fishing holes and some serious relaxation....

Media Platforms Design TeamEarlier this year, all our dreams came true when the folks behind the Hendo Hoverboard brought all our Back to the Future II dreams to life. Yes, the Hendo Hoverboard was big and loud and bulky, even when Tony Hawk was riding it, but it was real. But now a slicker, sleeker version two is on the horizon. Unfortunately no one has seen version two quite yet. Arx Pax—the company behind the hoverboard and the Magnetic Field Architecture that makes it work—are just teasing the next version, which will be officially unveiled on October 21st....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe United States is sending equipment to Australia to aid in the search for the Malaysia Airlines black boxes—assuming a debris field investigators are now tracking turns out to be pieces of the lost Boeing 777. At a briefing at the Pentagon today, Rear Admiral John Kirby said that an underwater robot and a towed search system had left New York and were on their way to Perth, Australia....

Media Platforms Design TeamDuring World War II in the Pacific, many native tribes were astounded by their first contact with an advanced technological civilization, when the Americans would come in, clear a strip in the jungle, set up a control tower and loud giant silver birds would appear from the sky bearing canned food, trinkets, fuel and other supplies. After the war, the Americans went away for the most part, but the memories remained....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe AquamanReader: James GarlitzMaterials: $1000Time: Two monthsResult: A downhome, motorcycle-driven, fishing-ready hydrofoil thrill ride.* See Waterbike Runners Up* Submit Your Own DIY ProjectLoathe to choose between a day of cruising on a motorcycle and one spent cooling off on the lake, a Maryland pizza-shop owner opted for both. “The first time we took it out we felt like the Wright brothers,” says James Garlitz of the waterbike he built with his son, Jim....

Bertha, the giant boring machine in Seattle that’s been stuck in a subterranean hellscape since December 2013, is finally going to see the light of day once again. Her drilling head is free and ready for repair.The big machine’s purpose in life is to bore a a 9,270-foot tunnel running under the Elliott Bay to replace the seismically unsound Alaskan Way Viaduct. When Japanese firm Hitachi Zosen Sakai Works finished building Bertha it became the largest tunneling machine ever, with a 57- foot diameter and weighing in at 7,000 tons....

The GPS is your phone is good enough for driving direction, but at times it can be off by anywhere from a few feet to a half a block. The team behind Pozyx is building a system that they say can get down to a few centimeters, and can precisely locate objects indoors, one of the big challenges for navigation tech.If you’ve seen a Roomba crash around in search of a path, you’ve seen how imprecise location finding can be....

What we know:- TransAsia flight GE 235 crash landed into the Keelung River near Taipei approximately two minutes after takeoff. The plane banked 90 degrees and clipped a bridge and taxi before crashing into the Keelung River.- A new recording from the cockpit (you can listen to the ATC recording here) has been released in which you can hear the pilot say, “mayday, mayday, engine flameout.” - Taiwan’s aviation agency said the plane was carrying 58 people at the time of the crash (five crew, 53 passengers)....