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Nanotechnology: Is it going to change the world? Or, as one article recently asked, is “nano” in danger of becoming the new “turbo”—a marketing term that doesn’t have much to do with what’s inside the box? The answer is both, I’m afraid, and that poses problems for investors, regulators and consumers.The idea of nanotechnology goes back a while. In a 1960 essay titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” physicist Richard Feynman noted that the principles of physics didn’t bar maneuvering things atom by atom....

For the past couple of years it’s been hard to ignore: Football hurts football players. And not in the sore-knee, it’ll-take-a-little-longer-to-get-out-of-the-lounger-when-I’m-retired kind of way. More in the way of Jermichael Finley, who had one hit end his 2013 season—and almost his ability to walk. Or worse, in the way of Junior Seau, whose chronic brain damage is widely suspected to have led to his suicide in 2012. Media Platforms Design Team(Photo by Plamen Petkov)But there is hope....

The premise is simple: Ferrari, along with Pininfarina and Alcoa, choose four top automotive design schools and ask their students to design the Ferrari of the Future. Four designers win coveted internships in Maranello. Ferrari gets a sneak peak at tomorrow’s designers, and we get a sneak peak at tomorrow’s objet d’amour. Everyone goes home happy. Ferrari calls the competition the “New Concepts of the Myth.” Alcoa (they supply the aluminum for Ferrari’s aluminum space frames) calls it “a showcase for the use of aluminum in a gran turismo car....

Media Platforms Design TeamDubious services and repairs can drain your wallet and do nothing for your car. Out-and-out scams are less common these days, but it’s hard to tell the difference between a good dose of preventive maintenance and a waste of money. We asked James Halderman, author of numerous mechanic’s textbooks, to weigh in on whether the following types of services are necessary.Flushing the Radiator or TransmissionIt turns out that vocabulary is important here....

Both King Midas and Goldfinger knew how deadly gold can be. But turning everything you touch into gold and coating Bond girls in glistening body paint aren’t the only ways this precious metal can be used for deadly purposes. Scientists are revealing the power of microscopic gold nanoparticles to kill bacteria.Tiny gold particles no bigger than a speck of dust can kill bacteria in several ways, says Hong Liang, a professor of materials science and engineering at Texas A&M University....

To hear more from the editors of Popular Mechanics, download this week’s episode of The Most Useful Podcast ever here, and be sure to subscribe and comment on iTunes!http://i.imgur.com/Bqmt77T.jpg><span id=You say you want to ride a ‘hoverboard’? Congratulations! Freely admitting that you’re open to embarrassment and potential injury are key to getting on a board with confidence. To ensure the rest of your first foray into hands-free Segway propulsion goes as smoothly as possible, follow these steps:Stop calling it a ‘hoverboard....

Reed Morano is the cinematographer behind such independent films as Frozen River, Kill Your Darlings, and The Skeleton Twins. She now has added something else to her resume: leader of a quixotic campaign against Big Television.Morano’s big problem is motion interpolation, a feature of big HDTVs also known as “smooth motion,” “auto motion plus,” and “motion flow.” It’s meant to reduce motion blur, making objects on-screen move smoothly. Morano doesn’t condemn the effect entirely....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’m helping out at my father’s auto-repair shop, German Imports, over the holidays, when a 2002 Porsche Carrera comes in with a fueling issue: The owner can’t fill it up with gas. We open the hood to diagnose the problem (the gas tank is in the front of a Porsche), only to be greeted with a bewildering mess. The cabin air filter, which supplies the a/c and heating, has been torn to shreds....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe 40 cm diameter WISE telescope is an all aluminum optical system that will produce images of the sky with 2.75 arcsec resolution in four infrared spectral bands. Here the lead optical test engineer attaches the back-end imager optics to the afocal. This entire telescope will be mounted inside the WISE cryostat and cooled to about 17K. The WISE telescope was developed by L3 Communications-SSG.1) Brown Dwarf Star RoundupOne benefit of scanning the universe with infrared detectors is that IR light waves pass through cosmic dust that obscures dim celestial bodies, even in our own galaxy....

Media Platforms Design Team Lamborghini’s smallest model has never been wanting in the horsepower department. But in the supercar world, you need to step up your game to remain a player. Well, the new LP560-4 does just that. The V10 has 40 more hp for a grand total of 552. Torque has risen from 376 lb.-ft. to 398. And thanks to a 40 percent quicker-shifting gearbox, the Lambo can hit 60 mph in 3....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat Is It? 2010 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG The Specs This five-passenger sedan is based on the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class and continues with one of the world’s best V8 engines. The 6.2-liter hand-assembled, double overhead cam mill puts out 518 horsepower—an increase of 11—without the use of turbos or a supercharger that can dilute an engine’s character. From previous experience, this snarling motor absolutely rips to its redline and the revised seven-speed automatic promises to effectively get all that power to the ground....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: Spring 2012Price: $27,395–$39,200 (including destination)Competitors: Chevrolet Malibu, Chrysler 300C, Toyota Avalon Powertrains: 3.5-liter V-6, 288 hp, 254 lb-ft; 2.0-liter turbocharged I-4, 240 hp, 270 lb-ft; 3.5-liter turbocharged V-6, 365 hp, 350 lb-ftEPA Fuel Economy (city/highway): 19/29 mpg (3.5-liter V-6); estimated 31 mpg highway (2.0-liter turbo I-4); 17/25 mpg (3.5-liter turbo V-6)What’s New: Ford’s aggressive product development has been keeping its lineup fresh, and the 2012 Taurus is no exception....

On-Sale Date: NowPrice: $39,600 to $48,800 Competitors: Acura TSX Sportwagon, Infiniti EX35, Cadillac CTS Wagon, Subaru Outback Powertrains: 2.0-liter four-cylinder; 211 hp, 258 lb-ft of torque; 8-speed Tiptronic auto, AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 20/27What’s New: If the Allroad name rings a bell, it’s because Audi sold it here in the U.S. from 2001 to 2005 (it never went away in Europe). The Allroad had lots of baubles and features in that previous lifetime, and it came with two engines: a twin-turbo V-6 and a 4....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Boston Marathon, one of the world’s most competitive 26.2-mile races, had the best runners from Kenya, Ethiopia, the U.S. and around the globe churning out 5-minute miles on Monday for over two hours. While all eyes were on the front-runners—notably the United States’ Ryan Hall (third) and Kara Goucher (third among female racers)—way back in the pack there was one person, Rick Roeber, who stole headlines with his unique running style....

You may already be carrying a high-speed wireless modem in your pocket and not realize it. More and more businesses are outfitting their employees with BlackBerrys, Treos and Windows Mobile smartphones for e-mail on the road, and, since e-mail is one of those unpredictable quantities, most companies set their employees up on all-you-can-eat data plans. Many of these devices are operating on 3G networks such as Cingular’s UMTS/HSDPA or Sprint or Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO services, which makes them capable of surfing the Internet at near-broadband speeds (usually around 400-700kbps)....

Today it’s easy for an algorithm to pick out human faces smiling at the camera. Just think of how Facebook spots people in your photos when it asks you, “Who’s this?”, which is definitely not creepy. Yet machines struggle with recognizing a face when the person is seen at angle or if the face is partially occluded, something that’s relatively easy for us and our human brains.Media Platforms Design TeamA new approach, created by scientists at Yahoo Labs and Stanford University, solves that problem....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhy are you doing this, and how have you prepared to pull it off?The reason why Im doing this: I like to challenge myself. I love projects where we have to start from scratch. This is what we did five years ago, getting the team together, finding the right people to work with. Were very lucky to have Joe Kittinger [the current world record holder for the highest dive] on board because hes the only one whos been there and done that, and he provides a lot of valuable data to us....

Over nine seasons, The X-Files brought tales of alien abductions, vengeful ghosts, weird mutants, and backwoods monsters (or inbred brothers) to primetime TV, becoming a huge cult success in the process. The series is returning in January, in case you haven’t seen that in a million places. And now we have our first look at the new footage. It comes after a bunch of old footage, and is a little bit “blink and you miss it....

The electric eel can generate deadly shocks up to 600 volts strong. Yet surprisingly little was known about the effects of the eel’s shock on prey, says study author Kenneth Catania, a neurobiologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “Before I started looking at the electric eel, I thought what most people thought, which is, ‘The eel zaps its prey and eats it—what more is there to know?’“Quite a lot, it turns out....

Media Platforms Design TeamMultiple justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—the people who will ultimately decide where the law stands on cyber-military issues—do not even use computers. P.W. Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, finds this fact absurd. His book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, tackles the perplexing, entertaining, and downright scary sides of cyberwar.What is it that people don’t understand about cybersecurity?...