Our resident astronaut says NASA is betting on the Moon after the agency announced last night its plans to build a permanent lunar base—one that may be used to prepare a manned trip to Mars.Despite a lack of resource-stocked ice sheets at the Moon’s top and bottom, NASA hopes to send manned missions by 2020 to the the open-sourced outpost at one of the lunar poles, where the base can harness increased sunlight....
View full post on YoutubeSome of the earliest video games used oscilloscopes as their graphical displays. Usually used for measuring voltages, certain electrical signals can use them as a sort of video game “monitor.“But the earliest games were more like Pong. If you’re going to give retrocomputing a go, why not go all out with it and get a little anachronistic in the process? Developer Pekka Väänänen has adapted the classic first person shooter Quake for the oscilloscope, creating a bizarre experience of monochrome, oscillating lines that make up the graphical level....
Media Platforms Design TeamOne-hundred-fifty-year-old ghosts rarely look so detailed. In 1862, two ironclad warships from opposing sides of the American Civil War blasted each other silly in the Battle of Hampton Roads. Although neither vessel could inflict much damage on the other, the Union’s USS Monitor and the Confederacy’s CSS Virginia opened a new era in naval technology as wooden sailing frigates gave way to armored warships with steam engines. The Monitor, however, didn’t have long to live; it sank in rough seas on December 1862 and sat for more than a century....
Media Platforms Design TeamAUSTIN, TEXAS—One problem wireless speakers have is placement. It’s hard to find a spot in a room where a speaker can sit without being obtrusive, yet still be able to deliver a great range of sound. Soundwall, however, has proposed an unusual solution. Here at SXSW, the company just launched speakers that integrate into the artwork you would hang on your walls.Soundwall uses a Distributed Mode speaker system, which hides inside the frame of a canvas....
At the top of your web browser and to the left of every tab is a tiny little icon. It’s called a favicon, and it’s usually only a few kilobytes in size. But thanks to a quirk of programming in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, it can also crash your browser.The bug was first spotted in the wild by Andrea De Pasquale:View full post on TwitterInstead of being tiny like a favicon should be, this one was 64MB....
Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: NowBase Price: $20,740 to $28,750 (excluding federal and state tax incentives)Competitors: Chevrolet Spark EV, Ford Focus EV, Honda Fit EV, Fiat 500e, Mitsubishi i-MiEVPowertrains: AC permanent-magnet electric motor, 74 hp, 96 lb-ft; single-speed automatic; RWD EPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 122/93 mpge What’s New: This is the third iteration of the Smart ForTwo Electric Drive, following two limited-run pilot programs in the U.K. and U.S. The newest Smart ED has a 74 hp electric motor and 17....
2015 BMW X6Price: $60,550Available: NowMpg: 19/27The original BMW X6, introduced in 2008, was a shocking vehicle, a jacked-up four-door hatchback that created its own genre. BMW called it a sports activity coupe, which is as good a description as any. The second-generation car, new for 2015, hews to the same formula: more expensive and stylish than an X5, less practical.BMW held the X6’s international launch at its plant in Greer, South Carolina, which builds X6s for worldwide consumption....
Digital video is great, especially if you are just chowing down on Netflix from the comfort of your very own couch, but there’s something majestic about physical film. The way movies work is simple on the surface; it’s just a series of stills in rapid succession. But how you get there from a strip of film is both surprisingly complicated, and surprisingly elegant. Bill Hammack—aka the engineerguy—dove deep into the mechanics of old-school film projectors by dissecting a 1979 Bell and Howell 1580 16mm projector, and explaining every step of projection, from the film to the screen....
View full post on YoutubeThere’s an underground sprinkler system that keeps the tiny dog park near my apartment in San Francisco watered on a regular schedule. It’s great, except that when it finally does rain, the system will still hose down our little grassy knoll, turning it into a mudslide that neither man nor beast should try to traverse for at least week.Giving your own lawn just the right amount of water can be tricky, too....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe summer of squishy bots continues. First it was the artificial jellyfish powered by a rat’s heart cells, then the indestructible robotic earthworm fabricated by MIT. Now, the chameleon robot.This latest product from the soft robotics program at Harvard University takes an earlier model known as the “squid bot” and adds the camouflaging capabilities of a sea creature in the wild. With help from researchers and a good bit of dye, the translucent squid bot can take on a new color that lets it either blend in with or stand out from its surroundings....
Over the last few decades the internet has moved from dial-up to high-speed, cables to wireless, and now it’s moving into the sky and underground. Today most major cities with subway systems—Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, London, and many more—are adding Wi-Fi to underground stations. It’s easy to pass over the technical difficulty of this modern-day miracle but thanks to temperature fluctuations and exposure to water, getting the internet under all those layers of concrete is even harder than you’d think....
The Airbus A380 is a marvel of engineering. With a wide-body double-decker design, it can take as many as 600 people (800 if there were no first class) into the sky at the same time. But while the largest passenger jet in existence is definitely impressive, it was also built with an outdated idea of air travel in mind. The future is small. As Wendover Productions explains in a great video on the economy of air travel, the gigantic A380 was built with the “hub and spoke” model of air travel in mind, where airlines connect smaller airports to bigger hubs that all the long, high-demand flights leave from....
Crystal Skull Vodka was already pretty fun, but one thing it didn’t have: actual filtering through crystal skulls. And while Outer Space Vodka was not, in fact, filtered in outer space, it used the next best thing: naturally occurring space junk, aka meteorites. Besides, apparently whiskey brewed in space smells and tastes like burnt rubber.A lot of vodkas, especially on the bottom of the shelf, are filtered through charcoal, a form of carbon....
MiningKiller asteroids? Try resource-rich boons to the fuel and manufacturing industries–even a tiny, 2-kilometer-wide asteroid contains more metal than man has ever mined. On Earth, most metals are buried among other elements in the crust, but an asteroid bares 10 to 30 percent of its “free metal” in the form of finely crushed and purified grains on its surface. As a result, a space mining craft could use magnetic extraction with minimal processing to collect minerals, according to John Lewis, a professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona....
Media Platforms Design TeamOpponents of Shell’s plan for off-shore drilling have a daunting list of concerns, starting with the months of darkness and severe weather in the Arctic Ocean. Should the United States allow drilling up there?Shell is talking about exploratory drilling in the summer months in very shallow water. From our perspective, that’s been done successfully throughout the world. In fact, there are a whole bunch of wells in the Chukchi that were drilled in the 1980s, and several in the Beaufort....
Media Platforms Design TeamFRANKFURT — Aston Martin, the old-line British favorite recently sold off by Ford to a syndicate led by Prodrive founder David Richards, introduced three new models here today.First, there was the new, top-of-the-line DBS (pictured above), which was unveiled at Pebble Beach only three weeks ago to a small audience of journalists. It’s very aggressively styled, with more scoops, vents and spoilers than any previous model, and it carries the most powerful Aston Martin engine ever—a 6....
Media Platforms Design Team LE MANS, France — With last month’s 76th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, Audi has won eight out of the past nine years. Impressive. But amazingly, for the past three years the German carmaker has been winning and innovating with diesel technology at the same time. In 2006, the R10 TDI became the first-ever diesel to win at Le Mans, and Audi did it with diesel again last year....
Media Platforms Design TeamSeven years ago this February, Aaron Cypess had an epiphany about fat. A fellow in endocrinology at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cypess happened to be attending a lecture in which a doctor presented images of human PET scans. At one point, Cypess recalls, the doctor indicated an area corresponding to the neck and said, rather dismissively, “Oh, that’s brown fat.” Cypess was taken aback. After the lecture, he approached the doctor and told him he must have been mistaken: Everyone knows there’s no brown fat in human adults....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhiskers are biological sensors—nature’s adorable answer to overcoming poor eyesight and allowing nighttime navigation. Capable of detecting even the slightest wisps of air, whiskers help cats hunt in utter darkness and allow insects to negotiate tight spaces.Given recent advances in biomimicry, it was only a matter of time before scientists granted machines a similar sensory power by outfitting robots with artificial whiskers. Ali Javey, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, has done it....
Alarmingly, the speedometer needle steadily winds down from 75 mph toward 50. Just as you uncurl your feet and try to accelerate back to traffic speeds, the vehicle downshifts with a lurch and abruptly climbs back to over 80 mph. So you tap the brakes and disengage the cruise control to avoid a conversation with one of the many law enforcement officers lurking behind every other billboard. Toggling the Resume switch settles things down, holding to a legal speed on both the uphill and downhill sections of the interstate....
