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Media Platforms Design TeamPopular Mechanics: Where did you get the idea for Splice?Vincenzo Natali: Splice, weirdly enough, was inspired by a mouse. It was a mouse that, by all appearances, had a human ear on its back. Remember that? I found the image so arresting and shocking and intriguing that I instantly felt I wanted to make a movie about genetic engineering. I must point out that the experiment that produced the mouse was not a product of genetic engineering, but it sure looked like it!...

Media Platforms Design TeamThe field of transportation is ripe for green tech: It accounts for two-thirds of U.S. oil consumption and generates one-third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Most research has focused on alternatives to gasoline-powered internal-combustion engines, but multinational biotechnology company Genencor is working on a more plebian car component: tires. Making Rubber from PlantsAbout 250 million tires are sold yearly in the United States. Each one is roughly one-fourth synthetic rubber (the rest consists of natural rubber, steel, nylon, polyester, assorted reinforcing chemicals, waxes, pigments and oils)....

Bahn-Burnin’ Hot Rods Mercedes-Benz introduces two new high-performance models at the Chicago Auto Show this week, the R63 AMG and ML63 AMG. Both vehicles, the SUV-type ML and the crossover-type R, offer a new engine developed independently by M-B’s in-house tuner shop, AMG. The horsepower rating is slightly over the top at 503 hp from a 6.3-liter V8. Torque is impressive, too, at 465 lb.-ft. Managing the performance is a seven-speed automatic transmission that offers three separate driving modes: Sport, Comfort and Manual....

Elon Musk has chosen to go public with his disagreement on legislation signed by President Trump, claiming that it does nothing to help NASA or his company, SpaceX, get to Mars.Musk, who is part of President Trump’s economic advisory team, has maintained a strategy of working with the president behind the scenes. Last month Musk claimed on Twitter he discussed both the administration’s various travel bans and climate change in private meetings....

Artificial lighting is delicate in its current forms–bulbs encased in rigid glass crack easily with anything stronger then a gentle grip. But imagine being able to shoot a bullet through a light bulb without plunging into darkness. That’s the promise of ultra-efficient organic light emitting diodes.OLEDs lit up the buzz machine when Sony debuted an 11-in. television panel that uses the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year. But the applications for OLEDs reach beyond the living room, with everything from solar collectors and sensors under development, in addition to lighting....

Hydraulic Cement Plugs LeakQ: After the last very heavy rain I noticed that water was leaking into my basement around the plastic conduit in the foundation wall. The conduit, which houses the inlet water pipe (from the street), was surrounded with a foam-type material that I removed because it was wet. I tried to caulk the area to stop the leak, but the caulk didn’t stick. Do you have any thoughts on how to stop future leaks?...

FLASH-DRIVE DROPMedia Platforms Design TeamWhere: Parking Lot Human nature can sometimes provide an easy end run around a strong firewall. An old hacker trick is to drop a USB drive in a public area, then count on the curiosity of passersby to do the rest. When a facility employee plugs the USB drive into his work computer to identify the owner of the device, the drive automatically installs hidden rootkit software that invites the bad guys in....

They’re the Amelia Earharts of clean energy: Starting in March, Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg will attempt to become the first people to circumnavigate the world in a solar-powered airplane. Their twelve-leg, 21,748-mile trip will take five months to complete, beginning and ending in Abu Dhabi, with stops in North Africa or southern Europe, and the United States. We had a few questions.Who are these guys?Bertrand Piccard is an aeronaut who copiloted the first nonstop trip around the world in a balloon in 1999....

What’s the best way to stop my toilet from rocking? I’ve tightened the bolts at the base, but it’s still happening.This is usually caused by a rotting subfloor. First, shut off water to the toilet and pull it out. If it is the subfloor, you’ll have to replace the portion that’s rotted, the flooring, the toilet-mounting flange, and the wax ring, which makes the watertight seal between the toilet and the pipe....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Jeffrey Westbrook/Studio D)The Cell processor inside Sony’s PlayStation 3 is a powerhouse that lets the gaming console render highly detailed graphics at blistering speed. That same chip gives the PS3 all the processing muscle it needs to become a fully functional computer. When we first heard this was possible, we were sure the procedure had to be illegal, or that it would at least void the warranty....

LAS VEGAS — Sure, you can surf the Web on your phone, but no manufacturer yet (and that includes Apple) has been able to fully replicate the swift PC surfing experience on a mobile device. That could change with this year’s release of a slew of pocket-sized devices based on Intel’s Menlow platform. The devices should come in various shapes and sizes, and come from a number of manufacturers. What they will all have in common is portability (they won’t be too much larger than your phone, and significantly smaller than the current generation of Ultra-Mobile PCs), and networkability (they will be some of the first devices to use Wimax, ensuring always-on, cable-like network speeds anywhere you go....

Media Platforms Design Team The crazy dual-screen W700ds laptop announced earlier today will likely steal all the attention at Lenovo’s CES booth this year, but the company will also have a few other wacky-but-brilliant bits of engineering on display. First, the IdeaCentre A600 (coming in April for $999) is an all-in-one desktop PC of the iMac, computer-in-a-screen vein. It’s sleek and attractive, and it has an ingenious optional 4-in-1 remote that works as a Wii-like motion controller for gaming, an air-mouse for moving the cursor, a standard button-controlled remote for entertainment duty, and a wireless handset for VOIP calls....

Media Platforms Design TeamJapan’s most active volcano, Sakurajima, rises 3664 feet out of the water to form a constantly smoking backdrop for the 600,000-person city of Kagoshima. Its daily eruptions—500 minor ones have occurred so far just this year—are part of the city’s normal background noise that nobody pays much attention to. Most amount to little more than a faint rumble and a wisp of smoke. That was until Monday at 4:30 pm local time, when Sakurajima let loose an ash plume that shot three miles into the air and then proceeded to coat much of the city in a fine gray film....

Our long-term Honda Fit has been a fun and useful runabout for the past couple months. I’ve really racked up the miles, and those miles have been easy on my wallet. If you drive the Fit for maximum fuel efficiency with very light throttle applications and you shift into the next highest gear as quickly as possible, the B-Car gets exceptional mileage. On our best tankful using this method, the Fit averaged 37....

Media Platforms Design TeamNASA Press Release:NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It may look like a broken sidewalk, but this geological feature on Mars is actually exposed bedrock made up of smaller fragments cemented together, or what geologists call a sedimentary conglomerate....

Media Platforms Design TeamI just got a new laptop with a solid-state drive that’s much smaller than my old computer’s hard drive, so I’ll have to move my music and movies to an external hard drive. Can I still play them in iTunes?Yes, but you’ll need to do some folder rearranging to get your iTunes library to turn to the media on your external drive instead of to the files in the iTunes folder on your computer....

Media Platforms Design TeamResearchers at Cornell and Stanford have created RoboBrain, a slice of the internet made just for robots. The hope is that robots will use this “comprehensive and interconnected knowledge base” to collect the context necessary to understand human speech, carry out tasks for us, and, more ominously, think.In their paper, “RoboBrain: Large-Scale Knowledge Engine for Robots,” the researchers offer the example of telling a robot, “bring me sweet tea from the kitchen....

If a robot surgeon is treating you, your life is in danger. That’s not due to any machine-borne malice, but because current research into autonomous surgery is focused on battlefield casualties barely clinging to life and astronauts injured on distant planets. To demonstrate how that research is progressing, Silicon Valley-based SRI International and the University of Cincinnati held a series of tests this past September that sound like a cross between a PR stunt and a B-movie: human doctors squaring off against a robotic surgeon aboard a nose-diving DC-9 aircraft....

Mating on the breeding ground begins at dawn, so University of California-Davis assistant professor Gail Patricelli has to have her female sage-grouse robot out of the concealing blind and ready to be wooed by suitors before the sun is up. Scientists like Patricelli are using animal doppelgängers to decode creature behavior and communication based on how real beasts respond to a robot’s mannerisms. Patricelli, who is studying sexual selection, outfitted her bird bot with a video camera and microphone to capture males’ auditory and visual cues....

On Sale Date: NowPrice: $299In the digital age, the wristwatch might seem obsolete, but I’m a watch guy. Nothing fancy, a $40 timepiece from Target does the trick. So I was intrigued when rumors began circling that smartwatches were the next endeavor for many gadget manufacturers. However, that’s just what they were: rumors. And these tech titans are like little kids poised on the edge of swimming pool. They’re dipping their toes in, testing the waters, but no one’s jumping—until now....