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Arizona’s recent passage of a law vastly expanding the power of local law enforcement agencies to detect and detain possible undocumented migrants has helped spark national debate on immigration policy. Currently, the centerpiece of that policy—in which nearly every party on every side says fails to address the fundamental economic and social issues that lead to migration in the first place—involves the building of border barriers that attempt to physically prevent frontier crossings....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs a lone dirigible hovers over a city, silently watching and recording tens of square miles below, a call comes into the police-run control center—a child has been snatched from a grocery store parking lot. The operators punch in the time and place of the reported abduction, and the recording shows the scene unfold. A white van is shown leaving the scene. The operators flag the van as suspect, and the video recognition algorithms track the vehicle as it heads down the freeway....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe first racing game I ever played was a quirky sportscar shoot-em-up called . The objective was simple: Get to the end of the course without running on empty. The neon palette suggested a story set in some weird future in which street racing daredevils barreled down highways avoiding oil spills and obliterating opponents with machine guns. Sometimes in the distance, there would be these futuristic cities resting on the horizon just out of reach....

Soon I will celebrate the fourth anniversary of buying my first home. Yes, my home. All mine! My walls. My roof. My oak and pine hardwood floors. My lawn and fragrant flowerbeds. And, um, my mortgage. My stack of bills. My mice in the basement. My unsightly algae on the north side of the house. My gradually growing wasp nest outside the upstairs bedroom window. My broken attic fan. Ah, homeownership....

Your Pinterest account is about to be safer than ever. EyeLock, a company known for making iris scanners for security checkpoints at banks, recently introduced an at-home device called Myris ($280). It stores your passwords locally, instead of in the vulnerable cloud, and encrypts them. The only way to access them is by scanning your eyeball.Setup is simple: Plug the palm-size Myris into your computer’s USB port and look into the camera....

Media Platforms Design TeamAn official with Special Ops revealed Wednesday that the U.S. recently launched mini-satellites that could clandestinely track high-value targets, like al-Qaida terrorists. “We sent up four satellites to demonstrate passing TTL [tagging, tracking, locating] data,” Doug Richardson, a civilian official at U.S. Special Operations Command, told an audience on Wednesday, referring to a December launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying the CubeSats—inexpensive satellites so small they can fit in the palm of your hand, and which have been used for scientific missions for a number of years....

Do you know how many possible snowflake shapes there are? 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000.That’s how many. That’s a one followed by 768 zeros (count ’em—we dare you), an estimate supplied by Jon Nelson, a physicist and formerly an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, Tucson, who tells us—quite convincingly—that the chances are “essentially zero.“✅ More Math Stories You’ll LoveHow To Use Math To Wrap GiftsHow to Use Math to Beat Your Friends at PoolThis Math Can Stop Quantum Cyberattacks*This article origionally appeared in the December 2016/ January 2017 issue of Popular Mechanics....

Media Platforms Design TeamI love that word: “Breakthrough.” I give a lot of lectures talking about a lot of elements of breakthroughs, and I’ve got just a few minutes, so I’ll share some of those with you tonight. First of all, this is the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, October 4, 1961—45 years ago. It’s also the two-year anniversary of us winning the X Prize, and today the X Prize people have announced their new prize for human gene mapping, and I’ve been honored to be a little bit—a part of that....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Jean-Yves Bruel/Getty Images)When Brooklyn, N.Y., resident Nick McGlynn stepped into a Chase bank in April, he quickly noticed something was wrong with one of the ATMs. “I saw a mirror that looked out of place,” McGlynn says. “It was in the center of the ATM, above the keypad. So I pulled on it and it came right off. Then I pulled on the card reader and it came off too....

Media Platforms Design TeamHaving spent most of their 17-year-old lives underground, billions of Brood II cicadas are emerging throughout the mid-Atlantic states for a few weeks of noise-making, mating, and egg-laying. Though their time aboveground will be brief, around four to six weeks, they’ll surely make their presence known. As many as a million could emerge from a highly vegetated area the size of a football field. MagicicadaWorried? Don’t be. Even at their worst, they’re more bothersome than troublesome....

Evolution takes place slowly, with thousands of often impercetible mutations over millions of years. But it doesn’t have to. You can make whole generations take mere seconds, and watch evolution take place before your very eyes. Also you can do it with strange tiny 2D two-wheeled cars. This simulator—humbly titled “HTML5 Genetic Algorithm 2D Car Thingy”—is a browser based widget designed by Rafael Matsunaga that randomly generates a road and then spawns 20 randomly generated 2D cars (or motorcycles, I guess) to drive on it....

View full post on YoutubeAny bona fide gearhead with 10W-40 coursing through their veins knows that hot rod culture was born from a primal drive to squeeze more performance from otherwise milquetoast vehicles. What many modern horsepower enthusiasts forget, however, is that the 1950s-era tuner movement was intertwined with the so-called “Lowbrow” art movement. Midcentury “Kustom Kulture” icons Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, George Barris, and Dean Jeffries single-handedly proved that creativity could be found beyond pinstripes and hammered sheetmetal, into a multidisciplinary mesh of music, art, and mayhem....

Media Platforms Design TeamPeople are still shooting and uploading plenty of photographs with their trusty Canons and Nikons. But Apple and Samsung continue their incredible growth as camera brands of choice thanks to the amazing new optics built into their flagship phones.Flickr just released data showing the makes of the cameras that took photos appearing on its site, and how that mix of brands has changed over the last couple of years....

There could be some bad news on the horizon for the F-35 Lightning II. Senior Air Force staff are saying that cost overruns might cause an automatic Congressional review of the F-35 program—-already the most expensive weapon procurement program in U.S. history, at about $300 billion. The news is roiling an ongoing debate over the future of U.S. warplanes: The F-35 (developed under the Joint Strike Fighter program and still in development) is on one side....

Team: FVT RacingCar: eVaro Class: AlternativeDrivetrain: Plug-in serial hybridEnergy Storage: Lithium-ion batteries, gasolinePM Says: An aggressive and outlandish-looking machine with a neatly designed hybrid package.Odds to Win: 4 to 1The Future Vehicle Technologies (FVT) three-wheeler is like the upcoming Chevrolet Volt—it runs on batteries most of the time. The gas engine—cribbed from a 1980 Honda GL1100—turns a generator to keep the electrons flowing when the batteries go flat. Shaped like a cross between an F-16 and a hammerhead shark, the car has a small frontal area and low-drag wheels that give it a 125-mile range and a sub-5-second sprint to 60 mph, the Vancouver-based company claims....

When we think about fast our internet is, we tend to think about one facet of it: the speed of the connection. How fat is your pipe? How much data can it slurp down? Make it bigger, make it faster. But there’s another, different way to go about making the internet faster. Make everything on it smaller. The newest tool in the data-squishing toolbox is Google’s Brotli algorithm. Officially unveiled and released to the world at large today, it’s the successor to a different compression algorithm called Zopfli, which Google published in 2013....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt happens like clockwork. The weather cools and people come to PM with heating questions. One of the things they ask a lot is why they never seem to have enough hot water to shower. While it’s slightly annoying to shower in less than optimal water temperature in summer, the sensation is downright unpleasant in winter. And with the approach of the holidays, you’re more likely to wash extra (and large) dishes in the kitchen sink, where hot water is the key to spotless pots and pans....

Daniel Johnson has a unique composition out there. On the surface, it sounds like a simple MIDI tune. But Johnson didn’t write it or play it – a Recurrent Neural Network did. The RNN, best understood as a very primitive (but powerful) cloud-computer brain, was fed a series of short compositions and music excerpts to teach it the language of music, roughly. After adjusting the algorithm to ensure that the output wasn’t too messy, Johnson let the RNN do it’s thing....

To hear more from the editors of Popular Mechanics, download this week’s episode of ‘How Your World Works’ here, and be sure to subscribe and comment on iTunes!http://i.imgur.com/c1gSHUj.jpg><span id=Andy Weir’s The Martian, a self-published science puzzler about an astronaut marooned on Mars with only his wits to save him, came out in book form in 2011. On October 3, it hits the big screen as a star vehicle for Matt Damon as the astronaut Mark Watney, courtesy of sci-fi legend Ridley Scott....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn March 11, 2011, Andy Palmer-Felgate was on his way to work in England when he first heard the news. A major earthquake and tsunami, and a subsequent nuclear meltdown, had hit Japan. As the country struggled to recover after , he knew it was time for him to get to work on a problem that probably wasn’t in the news.FukushimaPalmer-Felgate is a Verizon project manager who engineers and directs submarine-cable repairs all over the world, on about 80 cables leased or owned by Verizon....