If you were to take a list of the most popular cars in each state in the U.S., it’d be a pretty monotonous list. A bunch of Ford F-150s, some Chevy Silverado and Ram pickups, the odd Honda Accord or Toyota Camry here or there.But we were curious: What car was the most distinctive in each state? What model of car did, say, California buy far more often than any other state in the Union?...
Media Platforms Design TeamGetty ImagesChina is no stranger to mind-bogglingly big construction projects, so why not build a railroad across the length of Asia? On Thursday the Chinese government confirmed its plan to build a 7,000-kilometer (4,350 mile) high-speed rail line to connect Beijing to Moscow.View full post on TwitterThe route would run through Kazakhstan and cost an estimated 1.5 trillion yuan, or $242 billion. It would cut the trip between the two capitals from five days, the fastest current train trip, to just two....
Media Platforms Design TeamSince John James Audubon first tied a string around the leg of a migrating bird in 1803, scientists have used metal bands, padded collars, and radio transmitters to track animals ranging from wolves and caribou to manatees and monarch butterflies. But advances in sensors and in computer analysis since the 1990s are allowing animals to send back invaluable data from places where humans cannot easily travel, such as the depths of the ocean....
Naked, unabashed speed. That’s what sells 2-seater muscle PWCs. Scooting around on a machine that makes you the absolute lord of the lagoon translates into personal watercraft market share. Last year, Yamaha’s GP1200R WaveRunner was at the top of the PWC heap, outselling all the other muscle craft. Those 3- and 4-seater PWCs may be all right for family fun, but hop on Yamaha’s new 3-cylinder, 2-stroke GP1300R sizzler, with room for you and one terrified passenger, and you’ll leave your family on the dock while you get a well-deserved adrenaline rush....
MAJORCA, Spain—This Mediterranean island off Spain is one of those places where you either have a lot of money or none at all. If you’re one of the lucky few with a lot, driving a shiny new Mercedes-Benz is a great way to ensure that people are aware of the fact—but because Majorca is a sun-drenched island in the middle of the Mediterranean, you’ll probably prefer to have not just a new Mercedes-Benz, but a new Mercedes cabriolet, like the brand-new E350 or E550....
On Sale Date: Late May in California, New York, and New Jersey. An additional 16 markets will be added to the mix by the end of 2012.Price: $39,995 before subtracting government rebates and adding a home charging station. Competitors: Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Volt, Mitsubishi I-MIEV, sensible shoes, and bicycles. Powertrains: AC electric motor, 144 hp, 188 lb-ft; 23 kwh lithium-ion battery pack; direct drive, FWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): Equivalent mpg of 110/99What’s New: The five-door Focus sheet metal is familiar, but practically everything else is new....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe Ford Motor Company has been manufacturing the best-selling pickup in the United States for more than three decades, so they know something about making a product customers want. But for the , Ford is abandoning the tried-and-true, all-steel, body-on-frame-construction pickups it has built since the turn of the century and created an all-aluminum body atop a steel frame.2015 F-150From what we’ve seen so far, the aluminum decision appears to be a win-win-win for fuel economy, corrosion resistance, and durability....
Media Platforms Design Team(Illustration by Loguy)Hard drives could reach their limits by 2015 unless researchers can find new ways to cram more information onto their disks. These drives use electrical pulses to create magnetic patterns on grains stored in rings on disks; when the disks spin, a scanner reads the patterns of electrical resistivity to retrieve the information. The storage capacity of the hard drive has risen from less than 0....
A music box works by rotating a metal cylinder with protruding pins that pluck the individual prongs of a steel comb. The sounds that resonate from the vibrating prongs are the notes we hear—lower notes from longer prongs and higher notes from shorter ones. Some more complicated music boxes even contained a small drum or little bells.Music boxes have been around since the 18th century. Some were the size of a loaf of bread, others as big as a dresser....
Media Platforms Design TeamThrough the chaos of the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas, one thing seems clear: digital television is still evolving at a lightning pace. LG started off the day with the announcement of 20 new LCD TVs, nine plasma models and six microdisplays (both LCoS and DLP). LG seems to be focusing on two major advances with its new TVs: 1080p high-definition resolution (most HDTVs on the market now are 720p or 1080i) and integration of tuners and digital video recorders....
Media Platforms Design TeamCommuters coming into New York City’s Grand Central Station from Connecticut endured hours of delays this morning. The culprit: Bender Bending Rodriguez. Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.The Metro-North rail system suspended service on the Fairfield line after spotting a suspicious package abandoned at a station. According to the Stamford Advocate, that package turned out to be an eighth grader’s wood shop project—a clock designed to look like Bender the robot from Futurama....
You can fold some pretty impressive and sophisticated paper airplanes out of a single sheet of paper, but once you get some cardstock and a razor blade involved, you’ve opened up a whole new world of complexity. That’s what paper plane modeler Luca Iaconi-Stewart has done for this Airbus A380, and while it (obviously) can’t fly it is still super impressive. Built for an advertisement by Singapore Airlines, the 1:20 model is made up of 3,000 components and took over 1,000 hours to assemble....
You’d think that the world’s most powerful weapons—the ones that could virtually exterminate life on this planet—would get the best funding and most modern equipment. Think again. Newly released documents from the Pentagon show that, once again, the U.S. is going to try to modernize its again intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile (ICBM) arsenal in the cheapest way possible. Here’s what you should know about upgrading America’s nuclear infrastructure—and why doing so is a construction, strategic, and political minefield....
For more about the U.S.S. John Warner and a story on how air conditioners helped the U.S. outsmart the Soviets, download our new How Your World Works podcast, out today on iTunes, Soundcloud, and here.Last week the Navy introduced its newest submarine to the fleet–the 337-foot, 7,800-ton, $2-billion U.S.S. John Warner. Armed with 12 Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as MK48 torpedoes, the submarine can launch underwater drones or teams of Navy SEALS without leaving a trace....
Media Platforms Design TeamWe here at the magazine were so thrilled with tonight’s premiere of our new film series, “The PM Screening Room.” At the Hearst Tower’s Joseph Urban Theater, we showed ThinkFilm’sRon Howard Presents In The Shadow Of The Moon, a new documentary that brings together—for the first time—crew members from every Apollo mission that flew to the Moon, and features these astronauts telling their amazing stories in their own words....
Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez are what one might call entrepreneur’s entrepreneurs. After dealing firsthand with the frustrations of overseas manufacturing, and seeing how all-consuming production on a hyperlocal level can be, the pair co-founded Maker’s Row in Brooklyn in 2012, a site dedicated to matchmaking businesses with American manufacturers.Leveraging their backgrounds in industrial design (Burnett, 29) and operations (Menendez, 26), they’re making it easy for entrepreneurs to produce goods locally, via a simple six-step process that takes them from basic concept to final product....
“What’s that feature over there, papa?” “Why, that’s Mount Spock.” “Where did it get that name?” “From the humans, before we slaughtered them.” So said the first robot on Charon.After working with the SETI Institute on the crowdsourced Our Pluto project, the NASA New Horizons team has drawn up a list of names for features on Pluto, even though we don’t really quite know what the features are yet. And there’s something for every kind of fan....
Media Platforms Design Team LAS VEGAS — The Samsung booth is big and fancy and all about flat-screen TVs. There were two things going on that I found especially interesting. One was Samsung’s prototype OLED TV. It’s a 31"—bigger than Sony’s—and the picture looked very good, though I had to look closely to form an opinion because they had it on a rotating pedestal to demonstrate how thin it is (answer: very thin)....
We’ve been searching for life on other words for 55 years, but haven’t found more than cosmic table scraps. While the Fermi Paradox asks us why we haven’t heard from the aliens, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has a simple answer: they’re smart enough to encrypt their messages. In an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast, Snowden says, “You can’t distinguish a properly encrypted communication, at least in the theoretical sense, from random noise....
Good news if you wanna get away this fall: Southwest Airlines is in the midst of a major sale on dozens of its routes, covering travel between August 25 and December 16 of this year. It’s a 72-hour fire sale, though, so you’ll have to act before the end of Thursday (June 4) to take advantage.Says USA Today:Travelers can snag advertised round-trip fares as low as $98 on short routes. Many routes, such as Chicago-Minneapolis, Los Angeles-San Francisco and Atlanta-Richmond, Va....
