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Media Platforms Design TeamThis is Luke Galyan’s idea of fun: Take two novices on a canyoneering trip in California’s Death Valley National Park. From a diabolical lineup of gorges-Bad, Hades, Styx-choose the most ominous-sounding one, Coffin. Lead the beginners from a 4500-foot ridgetop into a treeless chasm of crumbling red rock. Warm up with a couple of 20-foot rappels. Then, when the canyon sides rise into cliffs and squeeze around a blind left turn, announce that “you guys should go first here....

Media Platforms Design TeamDirector Kathryn Bigelow—whose action flick Point Break inspired both a live stage show and a portion of the Brit cop comedy Hot Fuzz—is back in theaters with The Hurt Locker, her first film since 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker. Based on a script by Marc Boal, about a journalist embedded with Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams in Iraq in 2004, Bigelow filmed Hurt Locker during the red-hot Jordanian summer to create what she calls a “fictional but faithful” depiction of EOD teams....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt first glance, the exterior of the University of Kentucky’s Sky Blue house appears perforated with a seemingly random series of holes. Lit at night, though, the machine-milled pinpoints in the cement fiberboard cladding evoke the rolling landscape of the Bluegrass State. It’s a moving sight. During a visit to the home, PM overheard one Kentucky engineer ask of another, “Is this the Lido deck?“Inside, a clerestory window around the home’s perimeter lightens up the rich wood paneling covering most of the indoor walls....

Media Platforms Design TeamUPDATE: An extensive, year-end spending bill passed in December 2011 includes a rider that effectively . While the original language of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 remains on the books and intact, this rider prevents any money from being spent to enforce the so-called “ban.” Some—and possibly most—distributors and retailers may choose to follow the laws anyway. Anyone who would like to ignore them, however, will be free to do so without impunity until at least September 30, 2012....

Media Platforms Design TeamCAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Sometimes the cliché fits: It looks like a bomb went off–not necessarily in this lab, but somewhere, with the aftermath seemingly carted here. The gutted remains of a sedan, its engine exposed, the seats ripped out of the frame, sits encased in cables. At other workstations the focus is a single part–an isolated camshaft, an alternator hooked up to test apparatus. It would be easy to misinterpret this place and think that researchers at MIT’s Lab for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) are either piecing back together some shattered car or entering the Automotive X Prize....

Over its six decades of taking on dangerous missions, NASA has suffered thankfully few tragedies that resulted in the loss of life—the Apollo 1 accident, plus the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters. NASA’s Johnson Space Center is now paying tribute to those shuttle missions, STS-51 and STS-107, in a new exhibit that displays debris from the shuttle disasters as a memorial to the lives lost. This is the first time wreckage from either disaster has been put on public display....

Joey Arbogast’s first reaction about Hummer’s sale to Tengzhong was relief. Arbogast is director of marketing for Superlift Suspension Systems in West Monroe, Louisiana. The company makes suspension system kits for Hummers (and other vehicles), and Arbogast says that he was concerned that Hummer would never find a buyer and end up in the scrap heap like Pontiac. “We thought Hummer was dead,” he tells PM. Manny MacMillan, who’s fixed Hummers for more than a decade and sits on the board of The Hummer Club, echoed that sentiment, saying he was glad to see that the brand has found a lifeline....

The building doesn’t look like much—one of several nondescript hangars alongside an airstrip on the edge of the Everglades, baking in the eternal monotony of the central Florida sun. This is the home of Sikorsky Aircraft’s Area 31, where the company works on its most advanced rotorcraft projects. Like Area 51, the famously clandestine Air Force base in the Nevada desert, this airfield is home to experimental aircraft being built and tested....

Media Platforms Design Team(Image Courtesy of University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies)The deadliest hurricanes tend to be those named after women, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. On average, 23 will die in a storm named after a man, while 45 will die in a storm named after a woman. And that’s even after researchers threw out deadly storms like Katrina that skewed the data....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a big ocean under the ice crust of Europa to explore, but most of the ways to explore it get pretty complicated, like an autonomous submarine. NASA JPL is working on a simple solution to get a sense of the deep ocean first: it’s working on what amounts to an upside-down rover. The concept is called the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration. As you can see in the below video, JPL tested it in choppy, methane-rich waters in Alaska....

What will cellphones look like in an Android world? (If you’re waiting for that joke about sci-fi humanoids with cellular telephony implanted in their brains, it’s not going to happen–too important a subject here.) I am, of course, referring to Google’s announcement this week of its impending cellular handset operating system and the surrounding developer network, the Open Handset Alliance. Details are sketchy about what to expect from Android, but one thing’s for sure: The hardware won’t look anything like photos of the so-called “gPhone” that have been circulating around the Internet since the rumor mill got fired up a year ago....

When a South African pilot accidentally dropped his MacBook Air out of his plane at 1,000 feet up, he probably figured that was the end for his little laptop. But while the computer came back battered and a little broken, but still powers on, monitor and all. It just might need a new trackpad and cooling system. As the pilot, named Carl, relayed on Reddit, the canopy of the plane popped open mid-flight, throwing some luggage out of the aircraft....

Good news, everyone! A bus that is powered by poop just set a land speed record with a confirmed speed of 76.785 mph.Now for the caveats: “Bus Hound”—the aforementioned bus that is powered by poop—is not powered by poop directly, but rather by biomethane that itself is derived from cow manure (i.e. poop). The land speed record that the poop-powered Bus Hound broke is specifically for top speed by a regular service bus (whether or not said bus is powered by poop, or a fuel derived from poop)....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf it were possible to sum up in a single number the auto industry’s response to all of the slings and arrows of its recent fortune—an economic recession, subsequent bailouts, and spiking gas prices—that number would be 23.8. According to a recent annual EPA report on carbon dioxide emissions and fuel economy trends, 23.8 mpg is the average fuel economy of all the cars on U.S. roads. It’s the highest collective milage figure to date....

Media Platforms Design TeamYesterday Uber announced UberPool, its new ridesharing service. Putting people who are going to the same location in the same cab is something taxi drivers have been doing for decades, but Uber wants to do for ridesharing what it’s done for hailing taxis—make it cheap and digital.The service works much like regular UberX, except instead of just telling the app where you are so that the car can pick you up, you also tell it where you want to go....

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles have created the first accurate simulation of a projectile-caused leg injury to help train combat medics. The simulation demonstrates what happens to a human leg when a projectile passes through it, allowing medics to see the consequences of the wound in real time, inside and out. The simulated leg model was designed with a permeable layer of tissue underneath a layer of impermeable skin, all surrounding an anatomically correct model of the bones in a human leg....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe insane quest to top 1000 mph in a car is right on schedule, says Richard Noble, the 68-year-old, perfectly sane-sounding head of the Bloodhound SSC project. “We’re on plan,” Noble says. “And not just on time. We’re also on financial plan.“In our March 2014 cover story, PopMech covered the journey of the $69 million Bloodhound, a 7.5-ton vehicle powered by a turbofan and a jet that deliver the combined equivalent of 135,000 bhp....

Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: Getty ImagesIf you’ve looked at the periodic table of elements recently, there’s a good chance element number 115 was filled in. But it’s not an official member of the club. The element, known as ununpentium in dull scientific parlance, is among a group of artificially created, highly numbered elements that had appeared to scientists fleetingly, but not for long enough to become official members of the table with all the inherent rights and privileges....

Apple Watches, Android Wear. We know what smartwatches look like on Earth, but what should they look like …in space?! If you’ve ever wanted to design something for NASA to use on the International Space Station, now is the time.The space agency has posted a contest at Freelancer looking for interface designs for a smartwatch app to be used by astronauts. They want “picture (PNG or JPEG) wireframes” that showcase how the interface would look and function rather than a full app, so no real coding experience is required....

The image of George Jetson and family zipping about town is at once nostalgic and frustrating. Like George, most of us push buttons for a living. But so far, few of us commute in a flying car.As with many of the technologies we “don’t” have (where’s my jetpack?), flying cars do exist. The roadable aircraft of today are basically small planes that can be driven legally down a road, usually because of a retractable-wing system....