Two weeks after their beloved boxer Dylan died, British couple Laura Jacques and Richard Remde turned to SooAm Biotech for a radical solution to their heartbreak: they wanted the dog cloned so they could have that same pup again. That exact clone of their dead dog was born yesterday. It didn’t come cheap. The price tag for most procedures like it is $100,000, according to a September NPR story. It’s also not the first....
Even the cheapest blender is a ravenous beast, tearing through ice and fruit in a matter of seconds. But what happens when a model has just 10 seconds to make a frozen margarita (ice plus margarita mix), shave some ice, and power through whole fruit, skin and all (an orange, banana and apple, to be precise)? Our triathlon of high-speed blending produced a winner, but it wasn’t pretty.Media Platforms Design TeamCuisinart Smart Power Premier ($100)Specs: Basic, easy-to-use 600-watt blender....
Comcast customer service just keeps circling the drain. Last month came the news that an employee had renamed a customer “Asshole Brown” in the computer system. Now comes another PR disaster: A different employee renamed a different customer “Super Bitch.“Mary Bauer reportedly called Comcast a few times about cable reception issues. To finally get things working right required speaking to 39 Comcast technicians. Then she stopped getting bills. Well, for a while....
Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamLast week, I wrote about home servers in a column that eventually got posted on Slashdot, which, predictably, led to an all-out nerd pile-on by venomous legions from the geekosphere who took issue with just about everything I said. (Hint to aspiring tech pundits: Don’t ever question a future wherein Google is anything short of the ultimate arbiter of every bit of information on earth....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe way most of us surf the web now, traffic takes a pretty direct route. The request you make for a website goes directly from your computer to a server and comes back again, delivered in the form of whatever website you’re visiting. And everything is out in the open, which means anyone who wants to catch a glimpse of your location can do so. But when the request is more like an onion, wrapped in layers of encryption and moved around a roundabout route from your computer to the end server, it becomes almost completely anonymous....
Media Platforms Design TeamSmartphones and navigation systems have taken a lot of the guesswork out of driving: They can help us pinpoint the nearest gas station, navigate to an obscure destination, and avoid heavy traffic and construction. Nabbing a parking spot on a crowded downtown street, on the other hand, has remained a matter of luck and the occasional fearless maneuver. But now, new intelligent parking systems are poised to make that easy, too....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat does a pomelo have to do with cars? Well, some of the biggest leaps in auto innovation are being hatched in the material sciences—and for engineers inventing new materials, Mother Nature has some pretty nifty inspiration. When you’re trying to remove them to reach the tastiness within, the peels of citrus fruits are a waxy annoyance. This is especially true of the pomelo, a type of Asian grapefruit....
Fuel Additives: Myth vs. RealityQ: Are fuel additives a waste of money? I think Stabil works, but what about the others—the ones that claim to “clean” the carb and valves and give you better mileage and enable the fuel to burn more efficiently? Have you, or anyone you could direct me to, done any testing on this?A: Stabil is one brand of additive intended for engines (lawnmowers and chainsaws and other stuff that goes into storage)....
At its core, hard cider is an agricultural product, an alchemical alliance between the apple and the land where it grows, shaped by the maker’s skill. Unlike beer, cider is not made from grain, so it does not require brewing. Made with fruit, like wine, it only ferments. And because it ferments, craft ciders—those made with local orchard apples—have terroir, or a regional fingerprint reflecting variables of climate, soil, terrain, and tradition....
The first project: a climbing wall. Commercial walls are towering structures requiring ropes and harnesses, but a shorter bouldering wall can be just as challenging, and it doesn’t require as much safety gear. 1. Climbing WallPlanning the WallMedia Platforms Design TeamUnless you are building a free-standing wall, you’ll need to attach it to a strong existing support structure. Jon Popham, of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, constructed this bouldering wall for his 10-year-old son, Kye, using the side of his recently renovated garage....
This amazing nanoinjector created at Brigham Young University can penetrate a cell wall and deliver DNA right inside. The clever device does this by drawing negatively charged DNA to its positively charged lance. It then penetrates a cell and reverses polarity, injecting the DNA in the process.The uses in nanomedicine could be huge, especially in areas such as treating cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, where gene therapy could lead to more effective treatments....
Media Platforms Design TeamDirector Doug Liman (inset) did some DIY jump-cut teleportation in his office before digitally zapping Hayden Christensen around the world. (Images courtesy of 20th Century Fox)Teleportation has long been the object of real-world desire—not to mention sci-fi speculation, from Star Trek to The Twilight Zone to Heroes. Though scientists have actually had some success in the lab, the fact remains that you can’t spontaneously disappear and travel wherever you want....
Popular Mechanics contributing editor Jeff Wise, a private pilot and long-time aviation writer, takes on his biggest challenge yet: Flying withoutan engine. Follow along as Jeff learns that no matter how experienced the pilot, getting a glider license is no easy sail. It’s a beautiful summery day as I pull into Freehold Airport in upstate New York, with traces of cirrus wisping the sky. Located just north of the Catskill Mountains, this sleepy grass airstrip is home to the Nutmeg Soaring Association, a 50-year-old glider club that was originally founded in Connecticut, but moved to Freehold a few years ago....
Media Platforms Design Team Pilots and amateur aviation enthusiasts alike use desktop flight simulators like Laminar Research’s design our own fantasy planeX-Plane to polish their skills and fly new aircraft in different places—we’ve used it to. As long as you’re piloting from your desktop, why not fly in some very far-out places?In X-Plane, users can modify the planet’s gravity and atmosphere to simulate flight conditions on other worlds. And in the real world, NASA researchers have actually designed an aircraft to fly on the Red Planet....
Media Platforms Design TeamIllinois has been at the forefront of next-generation fuels—but on Tuesday, the state was chosen as the home for a next-generation facility that burns decidedly low-tech fuel: good old-fashioned coal.The town of Mattoon beat out three other finalists as the site for the FutureGen coal gasification plan, which aims to convert coal into hydrogen and electricity while capturing and storing the carbon dioxide 3000 ft. underground. The U....
Adding a Second ChimeThe chimes for my house are located in the front foyer, which makes it hard to hear them when we are in the back of the house, especially in the den. Can I attach another set of chimes to the existing system and install them in the rear hallway?S. BERENBERGLOUISVILLE, KYThe simplest solution, which doesn’t require running any wires, is to install an electronic speaker and transmitter such as the Dimango Carlon Extend-A-Chime ($46 and up; dimango....
Dreams of off-the-shelf high-speed personal submarines came closer to a reality today when Hawkes Ocean Technologies, the creator of the Super Falcon personal submersible, announced it would team up with Virgin Galactic entrepreneur Richard Branson to build the next-gen winged exploration vessel.Hawkes has also unveiled a new carbon-fiber winged prototype that will be used, at first, as a pleasure vessel for Branson. Like the Super Falcon, the new Necker Nymph (or Deep Flight Merlin) ferries two passengers and a pilot and carries a high price tag for a ride–$113,000 for a week of water play....
They’ve found a new planet that looks a lot like our own, and it’s so close to us that you could see its star from your backyard with a cheap 10-inch telescope.Today a team of astronomers led by Zach Berta-Thompson, an exoplanet researcher at MIT, has announced the discovery of the closest Earth-sized rocky exoplanet by far. The new planet, temporarily named GJ 1132b, is only 12 parsecs away. That’s roughly 39 light years (or one Kessel Run, if you’re Han Solo), and three times closer than the next nearest Earth-sized planet....
1976 Porsche Turbo CarreraMedia Platforms Design TeamWhatever you call it - 911 Turbo, Turbo Carrera, Turbo Porsche, 930, or just plain Turbo - this is it: The great icon of the turbocharged art. It’s more than merely a Porsche 911 with a turbocharger, it’s a cultural touchstone for anyone who grew up during the ’70s. It’s the car that inspired teenagers to put a poster of it up in their dorms next to that one with Farrah Fawcett–and the Lamborghini Countach of course....
Media Platforms Design TeamI wrote here last week how improbable it was that electromagnetic interference (EMI) could fool the Hall-effect sensors that were the subject of the massive recall of 2.4 million late-model Toyota and Lexus vehicles. Specifically, I talked about how the sensors were redundant and isolated, and how it was extremely unlikely that random radio waves could induce spurious signals that trick the engine computer into commanding the engine to go full throttle....
