Posts

Central Link Section 710 Seattle, Wash.Media Platforms Design TeamThe Emerald Mole boring machine.Whether or not you’re a believer in the universal benefits of public transit, this project deserves respect. To build a passenger rail station in the Beacon Hill area, south of downtown Seattle, contractors had to create the largest and deepest soft-ground sequential excavation method (SEM) tunnels in North America. SEM refers to the practice of digging a tunnel in sections, supporting each segment as you go....

The trailer is doing a lazy samba behind your SUV as you drive down the highway, swaying side to side far enough to intrude into the neighboring lanes and tug at your truck’s rear end. It feels spooky and is, in fact, unsafe. Funny, the thing was as stable as an alpaca on a mountainside when you left this morning. Since then, the only changes you made were to fill the camper’s water tank and to load the rear with camping gear and luggage....

Q: I was reading about the SmartCar. Why is the British version is rated at 46 mpg city and 70 mpg hwy? The U.S. version is listed at 33 mpg city and 41 mpg hwy. I thought the British rating may be based on kilometers, but it specifies mpg. Is their rating system different? A: Imperial Gallons are bigger than US (avoirdupois) gallons. Q: I have about thirty quarts of 10w-30 SF SE oil, thirty-plus years old in metal and paper cans....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Nick Orenstein)A fire at a greenhouse way out in the Utah desert shut down part of a mock Mars mission meant to explore the possibilities of growing vegetation on the Red Planet.The surface of Mars is dry—very dry—which makes desert conditions the best test-bed for Mars rovers and other technology. But a power surge at the Mars Desert Research Station led to a fire in the habitation, with flames as high as 10 feet reaching into the desert air....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt first, I liked the original Verizon Droid. It seemed to have something for everybody—it was a big, bold, keyboarded phone that was, depending on how you looked at it, either a transformative handset or a serviceable stopgap until Verizon got the iPhone. Either way, when it came out, it was undoubtedly the best phone Verizon (or Motorola) ever had.But a lot has changed in the past nine months....

Yesterday, there was a mountain of press coverage on both sides of the bailout. Many, including trade paper Automotive News suggested that the industry honchos got a warmer reception in Washington yesterday than they did two weeks ago. An interview with Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli was the top story on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews last night. Nardelli was optimistic and said that the bailout money would help Chrysler “fuel a product renaissance going forward in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012....

View full post on TwitterThe Pentagon has confirmed what active social media users already knew: That a General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone crashed in the middle of nowhere in Iraq. The world got wise to the fallen drone because journalist Steven Nabil tweeted the above photo, including a drone selfie. According to Buzzfeed, the Gray Eagle crashed because of a communications failure while returning to base on the 16th of July, but it wasn’t armed:Along with surveillance missions, the Gray Eagle can also be armed with Hellfire and Stinger missiles....

Media Platforms Design TeamYour dad owns every tool under the sun. But does he own a beautifully illustrated family tree of every tool under the sun?PopChartLab, makers of completist prints and apparel that map out the connectedness of coffee machines, kinds of cats, and beer, have turned their attention to hand tools for this DIYer’s delight. The $26 two- by three-foot print (update: now $32) includes illustrations of more than 300 tools divided by family....

As a tyke I remember clamping a hunk of wood into my grandfather’s bench vise and cutting blocks. Later, it was fixing and building bikes in my mom’s garage. The bench vise and broken bikes led to my career as a building contractor, where I make my living using the tools I first picked up as a kid. I believe the lessons learned at the business end of a wrench are confidence, determination and success....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe International Space Station, which celebrates its 15th birthday today, has had an interesting year in orbit—and in fiction. Astronaut Chris Hadfield turned it into his recording studio. The first private spacecraft reached the station, signaling the dawn of a new era in orbit. And in the film Gravity, a fictional barrage of space junk tore the ISS apart.The anniversary of the November 1998 space shuttle mission that carried the first components of ISS into orbit is a good time to hop on the Wayback Machine, as the pages of Popular Mechanics are a window into the station’s birth and controversial life....

Media Platforms Design TeamRule 1:It was early, 9:00AM, and eerily dark in Poway, Calif., as 75-mph winds drove chaparral embers through the air and shook the bones of Frank Vaplon’s house. One ember lodged in his woodpile and set it ablaze. Most of his neighbors had evacuated, but Vaplon had decided to stay and fight the wildfire that was closing in on his property.Geared up in a mail-order firefighter’s outfit–helmet, bunker coat, respirator, the whole thing–Vaplon began his assault by shooting a high-pressure stream of water at the flames, but it just blew back against him in a hot mist....

Researchers at Harvard and Beijing’s National Center for Nanoscience and Technology have developed a technique to use a needle just a few millimeters long to inject mesh electronics directly into the brain. From there, the mesh can unfurl, providing a non-invasive way to deploy sensors and electronic brain-stimulating devices.The invention, published in Nature Nanotechnology, could open up a new frontier in cybernetic electronics. Such injected electronics could be used in brain monitors for patients with epilepsy, brain-computer interfaces for smart prosthetics, spinal cord connective tissue repair, and in monitoring heart arrhythmia....

A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot can be a life-saver on those rare occasions you really really need connect your laptop to the internet in the middle of the woods or something. But even when you desperately need one, most of the hotspots out there are sort of annoying to use. A new patent granted to Apple shows a nice, simple take on the concept that might make hotspots less of a pain, if this product ever becomes a real thingBasically it’s made up of two cylindrical halves, one to hold all the business bits of a mobile hotspot (antennas and a SIM card reader and whatnot), while the other holds the battery....

Spotting hidden nuclear materials is a bedrock of bilateral security agreements. In the case of the Iranian deal, based on their (and other nations’) propensity to cheat on these types of agreements, the idea is “don’t trust and make sure to verify.” Now the scientists at Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) have demonstrated that an ultra-high intensity laser beam to create a portable system to detect nuclear materials may help with that verification....

Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere don’t just cause problems on the ground; it’s devastating the ocean as well, driving up levels of ocean acidification and creating an inhospitable environment for marine life. It poses a big danger to a tiny creature with a huge role in marine life.Recent laboratory tests at the Austrailian Antarctic Division agency show krill eggs won’t hatch when exposed to higher carbon dioxide levels, the kind predicted by current climate models....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamOne FIRST team from Austin, Texas, isn’t just building robots. It’s also testing and developing a new concept for a knee brace that could help millions.It started with Larry Kravitz, a family practitioner and doctor for the NBA D-League team, the Austin Toros. Kravitz sees many patients with ailing knees. At the 2011 National Instruments Conference, he explained to a crowd of thousands that current knee-brace designs force the entire pressure on the body to the outside of the knee, away from the area where knee joint damage is most prevalent....

Media Platforms Design TeamBelts, chains, and gears: They’ve been the stuff of transmissions for 125 years. But today’s gearboxes have as much in common with the transmission on Henry Ford’s 1896 Quadracycle as your kid’s balsawood glider has with the gone-missing hypersonic Falcon HTV-2. Today, traditional manuals and torque-converter-equipped automatics share the road with continuously variable transmissions (CVTs), dual-clutch automated manuals, electrified automatics, and power-split electric motor transmissions. And though two- and three-speed automatics and four- to five-speed manuals ruled for decades, new transmissions offer seven, eight and even nine forward gears....

Media Platforms Design TeamFour years ago, when I was a magazine editor, I bought one of the first consumer 3D printer kits. It was one of the early MakerBot Cupcakes and it barely worked, but it blew my mind. It also changed my life. Today I’ve moved from media to manufacturing: I run , a drone company with a big electronics and assembly factory in Tijuana, Mexico. (Yes, a Tijuana drone factory....

Media Platforms Design TeamBackyards in Brooklyn are almost always blessed with these glorious bluestone patios. Massive slabs the size of truck beds hold entire Adirondack chairs, and in the rain, water runs along the rivulets it has slowly carved in the stones’ shimmering navy surface. Ask the owners where the stone was acquired, and the answer invariably comes back: “We just started digging, and there it was.” I wanted a stone patio too, and I envied my friends’ archeological good fortune....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubeGoPro videos are cool in theory but sometimes nauseating in practice. That need not be the case, Microsoft says. The company has a new algorithm that can turn lurching, perhaps boring first-person videos into a smooth, sped-up, polished product. The Hyperlapse version plays at ten times the speed of the original and eliminates many of the effects of camera shake.Ordinarily, speeding up a shaky video only amplifies the shakes....