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Media Platforms Design TeamBase Price: $26,245/$24,930A curious thing happens after you drive the Subaru BRZ: You can’t stop thinking about driving it again. When rumors first started swirling that Subaru and Toyota were working together on an affordable RWD sport coupe, the anticipation was immediate. And to everyone’s delight, the BRZ exceeded all expectations. Largely engineered by Subaru and styled by Toyota, the BRZ–and its sister car, the Scion FR-S–shares some suspension components with the Impreza, but those bits were modified....

Devon JarvisLooking at the cosmos through a telescope is a transformative experience. The rings of Saturn, the clouds of distant nebulae, and the familiar yet alien surface of our own moon all come to life. Build a simple smartphone mount and you can capture and share crisp images right from your backyard observatory—yes, smartphone cameras are that good now. Russ McAllister from Cabot, Ark., designed this rig for his iPhone and posted the plans on Instructables....

Dashboard cameras in police cars have changed America’s legal and cultural landscape. Installed in thousands of patrol vehicles nationwide, these devices have exonerated police and provided TV producers with harrowing footage of high-speed chases and roadside shootouts. Now Taser, a company better known for its (mostly) nonlethal weapons than for surveillance, has developed a product that takes the camera out of the squad car to where the action is, while worn by an officer....

Finding the Higgs Boson was the easy part.The Large Hadron Collider didn’t call it quits when it confirmed the existence of the long-sought-after Higgs in 2012. CERN is about to fire up the LHC for the second round of experiments, and the team is ready to go for the really deep theoretical physics stuff. You know, little things like supersymmetry, dark matter, and other dimensions.LHC had been scheduled to restart in March, but a scrap of metal stuck in the collider caused a short circuit....

The Philae lander has gone quiet again, halting its study of Comet 67P / Churyumov–Gerasimenko once more.Following its bumpy landing on the comet back in November 2014, the lander found itself plunged into darkness at an unlucky resting point, causing it to lose power and lose contact with Earth. The European Space Agency’s craft came back online about a month ago, but now has seemingly lost the sun again.The blessing and the curse of the probe is that it’s solar-powered, meaning it has an unlimited supply of power—so long as it’s in the sun....

Media Platforms Design TeamNew Horizons, NASA’s probe that visited the Pluto system earlier this summer, was the fastest rocket launch ever. Other crafts have reached higher speeds, like the Helios and Voyager probes thanks to some gravity assists. But no craft left the Earth faster than New Horizons, which launched at 36,000 MPH, and is in the process of cruising out of the solar system at about 31,317 MPH. Google’s Clay Bavor created this animation, showing you just how fast the craft launched, with a 747 and an SR-71 Blackbird for comparison....

A week after the Germanwings crash, many airlines around Europe and elsewhere in the world have swiftly adopted a new rule: There must be two people in the cockpit at any time. This means that if the pilot takes a bathroom break—as he did during the Germanwings flight—then a flight attendant or other crew member must enter the cockpit to prevent the other pilot from being in there alone.It’s a sensible rule meant to prevent a rogue pilot from ever again seizing the controls of a jetliner, and one the FAA already has on the books here in the U....

Media Platforms Design TeamMore than a half-century after the last bike left the factory in Stevenage, England, ­people still praise the Vincent Black Shadow. It was the fastest motorcycle of its era, widely considered the world’s first superbike, and it still holds its own on the highway. You’ve probably seen that famous 1948 photo of American motorcyclist Rollie Free wearing just a bathing suit, a rubber cap and sneakers while setting a 150-mph record on a modified Shadow at the Bonneville Salt Flats....

Media Platforms Design TeamHANDGUNS/>An example of the right tool to get the special ops job done is the Mk23 (Mark 23) .45-cal. ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) from Heckler & Koch. During the late 1980s, as the rest of the military was embracing its new 9mm M9 handguns, special operations representatives identified the need for an “Offensive Handgun Weapons System—Special Operations Peculiar.“Media Platforms Design TeamHeckler & Koch MK23 This offensive handgun weapons system is designed to provide ....

Media Platforms Design TeamPRINT “Hello World"There was a time when you could type those words into any home computer and get it to say “Hello World,” because virtually all of them came with BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). As a programming language, BASIC was generally reviled by digital elitists. But everyone had it, and it gave a lot of youngsters their start in computer science.Those days are long gone—Microsoft, for instance, stopped including BASIC in its PC operating system after Windows 95....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat is the arrow of time, and why has it baffled physicists for nearly a century?The arrow of time can be explained rather simply as the observation that we remember the past and not the future. We have access to history books and all other types of records about what’s come before us, but no such information from the other direction. Now, this may seem simplistic, but there’s a conundrum here....

DETROIT — Chevrolet accepts the challenge of Camry and Accord in the midsize sedan market with an all new Malibu for 2008, offering more expressive styling on completely new sheet metal—plus a number of important technical, comfort and safety features. Among the Malibu highlights that will appear in Chevy showrooms later this year are:a “dual port” grille design that defines the face of newer Chevy sedans;the return of dual round tail lamps;standard head-curtain side air bags with thorax air bags for front seat passengers;a refined 2....

In June, Harlem residents in New York City were treated to a strange sight: the home of founding father Alexander Hamilton, elevated high above its foundations. The National Park Service had hired Pennsylvania-based Wolfe House Movers to relocate the national landmark to a city park one block away, where it will be restored to its original blueprint. Hydraulic jacks lifted the two-story, 285-ton house in 1-ft. increments so workers could insert crosshatched crib beds that eventually reached a height of 40 ft....

ORLANDO, Fla — Robots vacuum our homes, search for landmines, perform surgery, and explore Mars. They’ve been taught to dance, play chess, arm wrestle, and ballroom dance. For all of this service and goodwill toward men, robots deserve credit, but fictional and cinematic slams are the norm. You know the plot: Machines rebel, humanity is enslaved, and Asimov rolls in his grave. One hears of no such silliness at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held this week at the Walt Disneyworld Hilton in Orlando, Florida....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the Canon Digital Rebel debuted in 2003, its price tag marked a watershed moment for digital SLR cameras. For $999, you could purchase the camera’s body and lens—the first time an SLR clocked in at under a grand, and a symbolic moment for the crossover of SLRs from the pouches of pros to hobbyists. In the years since, several other manufacturers have come out with sub-$1000 SLRs, but the Rebel (in all of its subsequent upgrades) remains the most iconic of the bunch....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the early morning hours of March 10th, 2012, my alarm spurred me out of bed to go and see a rock. 3am is not rock-watching hour in the Cantle house, indeed, rock watching itself takes a back seat to everything else. But this was a special thing, a big thing.This rock was a behemoth. It weighed in at 340 tons, and it arrived in my Los Angeles neighborhood cradled in red steel arms, rolling on 176 wheels and pulled and shoved along by two tractors....

Media Platforms Design TeamNow just the big jump remains. Wednesday, daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped from nearly 100,000 feet up, cruised to more than 500 miles per hour, and landed safely near Roswell, N.M., the AP reports. Baumgartner flew for nearly four minutes after jumping from his giant helium balloon before pulling his chute. This success is the next-to-last jump for the Red Bull Stratos mission. In the coming weeks, Baumgartner intends to complete his plan of jumping from 125,000 feet, or about 23 miles up....

Last year, TV manufacturers introduced sets with built-in gesture and voice controls. The interfaces were clunky and felt stapled on—both journalists and customers responded with an enthusiastic “huh?” It’s easy to see why TV makers would conclude that gesture and voice have a natural place in the television user interface, after all, TV menus are getting more and more complicated as “smart sets” try to do more and more. Plus, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 accessory, Kinect, showed that people really can get excited about gestural interfaces....

Media Platforms Design TeamPhotograph courtesy U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security On Thursday, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, spent the afternoon fielding questions from Hearst editors on topics of physical and cybersecurity, providing a glimpse of what DHS is focusing on five years after it was created. On future travel security measures: “In addition to commercial airliners, we are starting to look at private aircraft that are coming in from overseas, and there again we are collecting more information about the people who are coming in and we are ultimately looking at doing more of the screening of people who are taking private aircraft on a transatlantic flight at their port of embarkation rather than their port of arrival....

When using a chainsaw, an important aspect of the process is not catching any of your own bits with the blade. Along with standard caution, you’ll also want some safety chaps for your legs because you know what happens if you’re not wearing them and you slip? Nothing good.View full post on YoutubeThat’s what This Old House decided to demonstrate in a short segment with landscape contractor Roger Cook. In it, Cook takes a chainsaw to a mannequin with one leg being covered by just jeans and the other by jeans and safety chaps....