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SPEED SKATINGHard Science of Ice CrystalsForget the 4-minute mile. Shani Davis has skated 1500 meters–the “metric mile,” or nearly 5000 ft.–in a world record time of 1:43.33, averaging more than 32 mph. It’s all about glide, enhanced by Davis’s superior body mechanics but made possible, of course, by the near-frictionless property of ice. Conventional wisdom says that the pressure of a skater’s blades melts a thin layer of ice crystals, producing a lubricating layer of water....

A YouTuber named Rulof Maker has figured out a way to convert crackly old lightbulbs into a fully functional coffee maker, further proving that anything can be hacked into something. What a world.Lots of little parts are needed to make this, including hollowed-out light bulbs, washers, a dropper, and superglue. It’s better to let Maker explain in the eight-minute video below, since this project isn’t for beginners.The post-apocalyptic coffee maker is heated by fire, which brings the water to a boil....

In the home –as in life–it’s often the little things that matter. And it’s amazing how many small structural things can go wrong around your house. Whether it’s the front-door lock that won’t let you into your own home, or the cracked window that won’t keep the cold out, small household problems can have a big effect. For most of these, there’s no need to call for a repairman– the solution lies in tapping your ingenuity and using a few common household materials in innovative ways....

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in 2010 and has been updated.It’s the greatest show you won’t see.When the clock hits zero at the end of the second quarter during Super Bowl LVI, this Sunday, football and music fans will focus on who is performing at the Super Bowl halftime show: this year featuring Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar. But the real drama really comes before and after those famous performers take the stage....

As practical as they are, minivans just don’t appeal to those looking for luxury transportation. And recently the lure of big, roomy body-on-frame luxury SUVs has been waning too. Families who visited the Infiniti showroom and needed the room of a minivan or large SUV but wanted car-like driving dynamics have been out of luck, until now. Infiniti America’s vice president Ben Poore says that three-row crossovers are one of the hottest segments in the luxury market....

Media Platforms Design TeamCan you tell me a little bit about your background and about your family?I am a seventh-generation member of the Wallenda family. My family started performing in the 1780s in Bohemia before going over to Germany. We came to the United States in 1928 to perform for Ringling Brothers circus. I started walking a wire at 2. That [was] just 2 feet off the ground; my parents would hold my hand and I would walk back and forth....

You can use Wi-Fi to count the number of people in an area down to a pretty good estimate. And this method doesn’t involve tracking their device. They don’t even need to be carrying connected gadgets, in fact.Here’s how it works: Essentially, two Wi-Fi cards are set up to talk to each other. Any interference in the signal gives a blip that suggests someone might be in the way. As you can see from the below video, it’s not 100 percent accurate....

Media Platforms Design Team Many know Abraham Lincoln as the president during the Civil War, an honest man with a stovepipe hat and a way with words, and the face on the one cent coin. But before he made his mark on politics, Lincoln devoted time and energy to another pursuit: inventing. During a journey from Niagara Falls to his hometown of Springfield, Ill., Lincoln developed the idea for a device that helped lift a boat in shallow water, PM wrote in March 1924....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis shot of a crossover may look familiar, but chances are you’ve never seen this particular Mercury model on the road. The vehicle, never named, was a proposed Mercury version of today’s Ford Taurus S (nee Freestyle). Mercury planned to introduce the vehicle as a 2008 model earlier this year, but abruptly dropped the project when the Sable was discontinued last year. Finding this sequence tough to follow?...

The song “Awkward Keystrokes of Y Cam” is a pretty simple composition. But below the surface lurks a star: Underneath the piano composition, there’s the accompaniment from the oscillations of the star Y Cam A, an eclipsing binary system. Created by astronomer Burak Ulaş of Izmir Turk College Planetarium in Turkey, the composition was published (with sheet music) on Arxiv. He first recorded the relative frequency, loudness, and starting time values of the star, then used Audacity to translate the oscillations into musical notes....

Private spaceflight, space tourism, private asteroid mining. All of these are in the works, or here already. But Alex MacDonald, program executive for NASA’s Emerging Space Office, wants a new first for private space exploration: privately-owned space stations. In a talk at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2015 conference, MacDonald says the idea is only 10 years away. All that’s in the way are bureaucratic hurdles.MacDonald envisions the private space community using privately-owned space stations as innovation labs, with NASA renting time aboard them for their own experiments, many of which would be conducted by the private personnel....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamThe squeal coming from the front end of your high-end German sport sedan is embarrassing. Not only do passersby do double takes, but when you recently gave your boss a ride across town, he couldn’t hear his cellphone ring. So you drop a handful of C-notes for a complete brake job. Afterward, though, that squeal and vibration are still there. What gives–did you get ripped off?...

Researchers at IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology announced today that they have surpassed the speed record for silicon-based chips by using a new semiconductor that operates about 250 times faster than those powering chips today.The team used liquid helium to “freeze” the chip to minus 451°F.—just nine degrees above absolute zero, or the temperature at which all atomic motion is thought to cease—in a cryogenic test station. “It allows us to make things faster,” says Dr....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe origin of the universe has been the subject of science—and science fiction—for centuries. NASA’s Stardust Mission, launched in 1994, aimed to put an end to the pondering once and for all by collecting samples from Comet Wild-2, which scientists believed might still contain materials from the universe’s conception (and which recently brought more details about the diversity of comets themselves). When the mission finally returned to Earth last year (and we tracked its landing from the air), the samples revealed the presence of osbornite, which indicates that the big beginning was hotter and more violent than scientists had previously imagined....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor Wikipedia to work, to fully achieve its goal as a free, open-source, comprehensive encyclopedia, it has to be everywhere. Anything less than global penetration, and Wikipedia will continue to be useful and ubiquitous, but only for the world’s more connected populations. Despite its lofty mission, the service is at risk of stalling, remaining a first-world luxury, instead of a universal good.Which is why Wikipedia Zero is so exciting....

What do you do if you’re operating the world’s biggest tunneling machine and something goes wrong? You’re digging along, everything fine, the machine’s five-story maw about to chew beneath the skyscrapers of one of the great American cities. Then suddenly one day things are not so fine. Bertha—that’s her name, in honor of Seattle’s first woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes—hits something. A few days later her temperature starts rising. Not good....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe first pieces of the U.S. Navy’s newest class of aircraft carrier–meant to be the cornerstone of American military sea power over the next hundred years–lie in the open air of a shipyard in Virginia. A misting rain is falling on the jumbled field of steel bulkheads, stacks of pipe and 200-ton sections of hull. It’s as if some gargantuan child broke apart his model ship and scattered the pieces on the ground....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast week, the Air Force’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, gave voice to a chink in the U.S. military’s armor, one that many know about but few like to discuss in public: Without satellites, modern militaries lose most of their edge. “It seemed critical to me that the joint force reduce its dependence on GPS (Global Positioning System),” he told attendees at a national security conference in Washington....

For months now, the Exploration Vessel Nautilus has been at sea, exploring the Gulf of Mexico, the Galapagos, and now the California Borderlands. Aboard the 64-meter research vessel operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust are some wonderfully high-tech toys, including a pair of remote-operated submarines. Right now, they are exploring the wreckage of the 1930s airship the USS Macon and you can tune in live . The two submarines that are actually doing the exploring are the Hercules and the Argus....

Q: I have an idea for a story in your magazine. I was thinking you guys could buy a Prius and pull the batteries and anything at all related to the hybrid portion of the car. Obviously this adds up to a lot of weight—dead weight on the interstate where many people do most of their driving. No doubt this car would then get much better highway mileage. If they built it that way, it would be much cheaper and have a much smaller “carbon footprint” due to much less energy being used to build it....