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Rickster PowellDeland, Fla.Years on Job: 21 Jumping out of an airplane is one thing; doing it with an unproven parachute is something else entirely. But for sport canopy companies like Performance Designs, in DeLand, Fla., someone has to go first–which is where Rickster Powell comes in. The 41-year-old has 20,000 jumps under his belt, and of the 50 chutes he’s tested, nine–like the steep-turning Velocity and speedy Stiletto–reached production. Most tests are safe, he says, even when a new design leads to unstable flight....

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds It’s a problem I didn’t know I had: Why can’t I watch HDTV on my laptop computer? The idea makes sense—I noticed the other day that when I’m on the couch the 15" screen on my laptop is the same apparent size as my big-screen HDTV, and virtually all modern laptop screens have a native resolution that’s more than adequate for a broadcast HD, 1080i signal. Sure, most HDTV owners get their at-home content via digital cable or satellite, but a road-warrior armed with a laptop could take advantage of network HD content broadcast over the air, for free—if there were an easy way to get the signal into a computer....

The X Prize Foundation has a new aim for would be explorers: it wants them to go under the sea. Called the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, it wants to offer up big cash rewards to the first team that can build a robot to explore 2.48 miles below the ocean floor. Though the X Prize Foundation funds a series of research initiatives with the promise of big cash at the end, it’s become perhaps most known for the Ansari X Prize, an initiative to spur on suborbital commercial space flight, and the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which wants to bring commercial lunar exploration into reality....

The FITC (Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity.) Tokyo conference has an appropriately original opening video this year, one that calls upon technologies past and present to create a sublimely glitchy video. Code, fractals, tablet-drawn illustrations, and other effects add to a haunting video produced to kick off FITC. Designers Ash Thorp, Andrew Hawryluk, Michael Rigley, Albert Omoss, Chris Bjerre, Alasdair Willson, Nicolas Girard, and Franck Deron collaborated on the piece from across the world, using tools like Basecamp and Dropbox to create an effective workflow....

Media Platforms Design TeamOne of the rarest video games in the world is up for auction right now on eBay, and it looks like the sell price might even top $100,000. Only 200 copies of Stadium Events are believed to be in circulation. That’s because Nintendo bought the rights to the game shortly after its 1987 limited release and decided to rebrand the game, giving what today is its much more familiar name: World Class Track Meet, a game often packaged with the Nintendo Entertainment System....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Toshiba Kirabook is about as direct a frontal assault as a company could make on Apple’s MacBook Air. It’s got a featherweight (2.9-pound), slim, 0.7-inch-thin magnesium frame with tapered edges that make it seem even thinner. It’s even got an L-shaped hinge and backlit keys like Apple’s laptops do. In fact, it’s pretty easy to mistake the Kirabook for a 13-inch MacBook Air when you first look at it, or even when you first pick it up....

Hydrogen, ethanol and even compressed air all have the shrink-wrapped sheen of the bright, green future. But gasoline? At $1 per gallon?Researchers at UMass Amherst recently published a new method of refining hydrocarbons from cellulose, paving the way to turn wood scraps into gasoline, diesel fuel, Tupperware–anything, essentially, that’s normally refined from petroleum. Many scientists have been working on ways to turn everything from corn stalks to tires into ethanol, sidestepping some of the problems inherent to making fuel from corn and other food products....

Demolitions aren’t always easy, and a recent series of mishaps involving an old smokestack in Alabama is just the most recent example. After refusing to fall after two sets of explosions, and excavator finally took it down. But on its way out, the smokestack exacted its revenge. View full post on YoutubeAccording to Alabama’s AL.com, the initial 32-pound charge set to take out the century-old smokestack merely blew a hole in its side....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn the moon, water is everywhere… but not as drops to drink.Over the past few years, multiple studies have been telling us the same thing: The moon is not the simple barren wasteland it once seemed. In 2008 and 2009, for instance, the Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s LCROSS probes independently found evidence of water ice on the moon, while reanalysis of the rocks collected by astronauts on Apollo missions has led to a flood of new data indicating that the moon’s formation wasn’t waterless....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Apple senior VP of iOS software Scott Forstall described the new Safari Reader function of iOS 5 (the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system), at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference this afternoon, a thought occurred to me and many other people watching: “Hey, that’s going to work just like Instapaper!” Then, a moment later, inevitably, “Hey did Apple just put Instapaper out of business?” And it’s not just Instapaper....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt this point, “Steve Jobs would never stand for this” announcements by Apple are becoming old hat. There was the introduction of the iPad Mini after Jobs said the company would never enter that small tablet space. There was iPhone 5c, the previous generation of phone tech dressed up in fancy colors. And today, the new $1099 21.5-inch iMac.How did Cupertino drop the price? The most glaring weakness of the less expensive iMac is processing speed....

Andy Weir’s novel The Martian stranded an astronaut on Mars. For his followup, he’s bringing a space traveller a little closer to home. According to the Huffington Post, he’ll put a female protagonist on the moon. He’d previously claimed he was writing a novel titled Zech involving faster-than-light travel and an alien invasion. So either plans have changed, or the moon is involved in the previously announced novel. Given that it takes place in a colony or city on the moon, it’s unlikely that it will be a rehash of The Martian....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Col. Chris Hadfield is afraid of heights. One might think this phobia would be a deal breaker for someone who’s spent so many hours in space beyond the confines of the spacecraft, watching the world go by beneath his feet at thousands of miles per hour. Yet, Hadfield writes, peering over the edge of a tall building means “my stomach starts tumbling, my palms sweat and my legs don’t want to move....

Whether you consider Portland, Maine a small city or a big town, it’s just the right size to “engineer collisions between people, ideas, and resources.” So says Jess Knox, founder of Main Startup and Create Week, and Statewide Innovation Hub Coordinator for Blackstone Accelerates Growth. “You can go into any coffee shop and run into entrepreneurs and CEOs,” she says.The day-to-day interaction among these people may be casual, but they’re all striving toward a common, if unspoken, goal: improving Portland through establishing new businesses, and making the city a magnet for innovators....

A Swedish tech hub is allowing employees of its on-campus firms to do away with RFID keycards by opting into something a little different: implanting an RFID chip under their skin. It allows them to open doors, use office machinery like the photocopier, and, eventually, buy their lunch on-site. (We say “allowing” because it’s optional. For now.)BBC correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones opted to be chipped along with the employees, saying that it didn’t hurt much more than a shot at the doctor’s office to get the chip implanted under his hand....

On May 31st—exactly 100 years ago—the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet met for battle in the North Sea off the coast of Denmark. Over the course of a day and a night, 250 ships (151 of them British, the other 99 German) exchanged fire and performed a complex set of maneuvers in the Battle of Jutland, World War I’s first and only major naval altercation. By the time it was over, more than 7,000 were dead and over 20 ships went down....

For anyone who’s ever wondered how they piece together the massive carbon fiber components of the wide-bodied Boeing 787 Dreamliner, British Airways was kind enough to record the process in detail, then speed up the video so we can all enjoy the amazing logistics in a wonderful time-lapse.This video details transportation of the wings and fuselage as they fly across the world in Boeing’s custom 747 Dreamlifter transport aircraft. The Dreamlifter is used exclusively for delivering 787 parts to Boeing’s assembly plants from suppliers across the world....

In an effort to do for a single species what Angelina Jolie has done for orphaned children everywhere (and inspired by a recent, brave pioneer who swam up the Hudson River, right past our offices) Popular Mechanics has adopted a manatee. We figure every office needs a mascot, and we can’t think of a better way to draw attention to a species that could use a helping hand.To understand the plight of the manatee, PM spoke with Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club....

Keyless Entry I managed to break off the key in the trunk lock of my Nissan. I can still open the trunk with the interior release, but I’d like to be able to use the key as well. A locksmith quoted me a cool $100 to repair it, and the dealer wants almost as much to replace the lock cylinder–and the new cylinder would not share the key with the ignition....

It looks like a house you’d order from Ikea. It sounds like a house designed by Apple. The I-House just might be the future-well, one future, anyway-of the housing market.Clayton Homes is one of America’s largest manufacturers of mobile homes and prefabricated housing. So when president Kevin Clayton wanted to go green, he gave his architects a free hand, instructing them to incorporate as many green products as possible and to produce a home that was super energy-efficient-the only constraint was that it had to be something that could be built in existing facilities....