Posts

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator could become a nifty little LEGO toy. The Large Hadron Collider set, currently up on LEGO Ideas, recreates the inner workings of the giant collider. It includes each component of the 17 mile track where the Higgs Boson was discovered, and where the CERN team is actively working to unlock the mechanisms of the universe. Each module in the LEGO set would be a detailed model of part of the collider....

As the decades-long debate over missile defense rages on, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) just marked a milestone. This past April, a Navy guided missile cruiser detected a dual threat, two missiles launched simulta­neously over the Pacific Ocean. They were dummies: a ballistic missile target fired into space from Hawaii, and a simulated cruise missile fired by a Navy aircraft. Minutes later both dummy weapons were knocked down, intercepted by two missiles launched from the cruiser....

Media Platforms Design TeamA new study from Emory University explains why I was grinding my teeth during the last Presidential election. Researchers applied functional MRIs to a group of staunch Democrats and Republicans to see which part of their brains were active when presented with threatening information about their candidate.The reasoning test required subjects to consider statements clearly contradicting their candidate’s words or deeds, and then rate the extent to which those words or deeds were contradictory....

Media Platforms Design TeamChester, New York—At the risk of stating the obvious, Mercedes-Benz is not a new company. The firm literally invented the automobile—125 years ago next spring—and it has spent a lot of time reminding us of that fact, making hay of every corporate anniversary to come down the pike. Much of this gets written off by pundits as tasteful self-promotion, the kind of throwaway PR that smart brands do in their sleep....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt 11:27 pm tonight, NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) science mission to the moon. Currently tucked in the tip of a Minotaur V rocket at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the unmanned system will reach the moon within a month, enter an elliptical lunar orbit, and then spend 100 days studying the moon’s atmosphere and environment before crashing into the lunar surface....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe crash last week that killed former Senator Ted Stevens was not the end of the bad news for Alaska’s aviation community—as I found out myself in a particularly unpleasant way. The day after Stevens’s plane went down near Dillingham, I wrote about the risks inherent in bad-weather bush flying, and included a long quote on the subject from John Graybill, a legendary pilot who I profiled for a ....

Media Platforms Design TeamBuzzwords describing vehicle dynamic controls seem to multiply overnight, and Ford’s newest addition to the torque vectoring/stability/traction vocabulary mix is “curve control.” To put a finer point on what that technology du jour means, we cornered Don Ufford, Ford’s Chief Engineer of Vehicle Engineering, at a recent press event. Here’s what he told us.“Unlike stability control, which comes into play under more extreme parameters,” explains Ufford, “Curve control is intended as a more anticipatory way to help maintain vehicle control....

Media Platforms Design Team One of the largest machines in the Air Force’s arsenal during the 1950s wasn’t a weapon, but a multi-segment research system known as the the Air Force Missile Test Center. Spanning 1000 miles from Florida to Puerto Rico, the missile-tracking system was designed to advance the Air Force’s understanding and development of push-button warfare. Reporting on the facility in July 1952, PM wrote that “Missile launching and flying is one of the most complicated operations on earth....

The World Cup isn’t the only global soccer tournament raging in Germany. In the northern town of Bremen, most soccer players have four feet instead of two, and lines of code trump fancy footwork. Welcome to the world of RoboCup, where teams of robot dogs seek their own glory on a modified, wireless-enabled soccer pitch.The annual five-day event has drawn nearly 350 teams of roboticists and their robots from 40 countries this year....

Media Platforms Design TeamDish Network’s newly announced Hopper and Joey set-top boxes are innovative products in their own right, but they look even better when compared to the miserable state of cable set top box technology.Hopper is the satellite TV provider’s central DVR/Tuner set-top box, with a huge 2 TB internal drive, which Dish claims can hold 2000 total hours of programming, and three tuners. It’s also got a fast, slick new interface, and includes a Zigbee wireless remote that doesn’t require a line of sight the way traditional infrared remotes do....

Update (12/13/17): Alex Garland’s Annihilation now has a full trailer, but should be viewed with caution if you want to go into the movie with fresh eyes.View full post on YoutubeThe first teaser trailer for the adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has finally dropped—and it looks incredible.View full post on YoutubeAnnihilation, the first of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, presents many challenges to any would-be film adaptation. The exploration of a tract of radically changed land along the northern Florida and Georgia coasts, the book traffics in metaphysics and the human conception of language as much as it does gothic horror and betrayal....

Kirby Chambliss is a two-time Red Bull Air Race World Champion and a five-time U.S. National Aerobatic Champion. He began flying at 13, and by 24, became the youngest commercial pilot at Southwest Airlines. (He didn’t do any snap rolls while flying for Southwest.)The Project: Snap-Rolling A Stunt PlaneA snap roll is a 360 degree auto rotation or “horizontal spin.” The idea is to stall one wing of the plane, causing a high-speed roll....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s a naturalist’s dream come true—and potentially a way to transform your next walk in the park. The iPhone and iPad app LeafSnap is an advanced computer-vision technology that allows users to identify a tree species from a photograph of its leaf. Point and shoot a photo of a leaf and your iPhone will compare the photograph to a central library of 8000 images. Its algorithms establish the contours of your leaf and use the same kind of software employed in face recognition to find a match for it....

Media Platforms Design TeamChris Hackett’s face and broad hands are marked by scars, the evidence of a dozen years of explosions and scrapes. Some are thin, flat lines, while others are deeply grooved or as thick as calluses and discolored. Hackett is showing me around the workshop of the Madagascar Institute, where he collected many of those scars. The shop occupies the ground floor of a decaying townhouse in Brooklyn, just a few yards from New York City’s famously fetid Gowanus Canal....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe world of 3D printing is getting some new materials to work with, creating the potential to print some really innovative objects.At CES, MakerBot just announced a new move to allow customers to print with metal, wood, and limestone. To be sure, these will be composite materials, with the metals and other printed materials alloyed with the plastic. But it means that users will be able to create functional tools through 3D printing, moving the technique beyond gorgeous sculptures, toys, and trinkets....

LAS VEGAS — CES 2007 press conferences should really come with popcorn because it’s all 1080p TVs with surround sound, all the time. Philips used clips from the Fantastic Four (not, not the Queen, this is a sci-fi crowd) to show off its home-entertainment offerings, including 30 new ambilight LCD models, which have improved image processing. Mentioned in passing was the fact that the backlighting comes from LEDs. These ultra-efficient lights are taking over the world, in case you didn’t know already, and while there are some picture advantages, what’s really cool (to me, at least) is the energy efficiency....

Media Platforms Design TeamClassic race livery sells. If you doubt that fact, visit any vintage motorsports gathering from Limerock to Le Mans and you’ll see cars, t-shirts, and countless memorabilia branded with long abandoned logos from the likes of Gulf and STP. The stuff is undeniably sexy, and evokes a romantic era when cars were endowed with extra servings of soulful panache.Porsche is certainly in touch with its own rich history....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen you and Evan Goldberg were writing the script, did you know that you wanted to use the original car?No, actually, we didn’t at all. To be totally honest, in one of the early versions of the script, we assumed that we would be forced to make a new, fancy, futuristic car. But we always liked the idea of using the original, so there was an early version of the script where we build the futuristic version of the car and then, for the big, last-finale set piece, we’re forced to use an older version of it, which is the original one from the TV show....

Media Platforms Design TeamCan you tell me a little bit about Radiance?Alan Alda: [Brian and I] have been working together on the World Science Festival since the beginning. In the second year, I thought it would be fun to get actors together for an evening for one of these events and read letters from Marie Curie to the people in her life. And then I found out her letters are still radioactive, so I switched to Einstein, and we did an evening of Einstein’s letters....

Media Platforms Design TeamLong-range strategic bombers from Russia struck Islamic State targets yesterday. The bombers struck targets inside Syria with bombs and cruise missiles. Some of the planes, mainstays of Russia’s nuclear forces, were used for the first time in combat. In the first phase of the operation, fourteen Tu-22M3 (NATO cod name: “Backfire”) bombers dropped unguided gravity bombs on targets in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. The Backfires flew from Modzok Air Base in southern Russia, just 600 miles north....