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Media Platforms Design TeamEverything Apple is getting longer and thinner. The iPhone 5, announced earlier today and set to ship on Sept. 21, has a 4-inch Retina screen, giving it space for an extra row of apps. The new iPod Touch has the same new display. And the iPod Nano has stretched out to the point that is looks like a shrunken iPhone. If we’re to trust the demos, those beefed up screens are meant for horizontal video and games (and maybe some regular old productivity apps too)....

Sorry, human. My records indicate you have not burned the number of calories needed to unlock this brownie. Access denied.Okay, it doesn’t actually talk to you in Hal voice, but the kSafe has arrived. This connected safe/cookie jar/vice receptacle buttresses your willpower by allowing access to its contents only if you’ve met certain goals, which are set through the app.They might be fitness or activity goals, like a number of steps....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s a beautiful night in midtown Manhattan as PM’s 2006 Breakthrough Awards kick into high gear. Outside the Hearst Tower—an innovative feat in its own right—the lights are shining bright and the geniuses are pouring in.Lined up on Eighth Avenue is the new Lexus LS 460, one our Smartest Stuff product award winners tonight, demonstrating its virtually automatic parallel park function. Lexus PR guru and old friend Wade Hoyt kicked back and casually minded the break pedal—avoiding heavy rush-hour traffic in two coned-off lanes and turning the silver beauty around....

Up at the PM offices, we’re still waiting for this year’s Breakthrough Awards winners to arrive and sit down for a chat with The Popular Mechanics Show, our podcast that goes live with a video episode right here at approximately 4:00 p.m. EST. In the meantime, let’s catch up with some of the top innovators from last year’s inaugural awards to see how they’re still setting the bar for technology…. –Matt SullivanZoë: The Robotic Scientist (David Wettergreen)THEN: The solar-powered aluminum and carbon-fiber robot was busy searching the Mars-like desert of Atacama in Chile, while Wettergreen and his team at the Cargnegie Mellon Robotics Institute were hoping for Zoë to hit 2 km per day in new test environments....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe New York Times discovered emoji this weekend. In the article (which appeared in Sunday Styles, of course), writer Jessica Bennett explained that you can use emoji to emphasize words, to punctuate words, or to replace them.What she didn’t explain is that you can do the reverse, and turn emoji into words using the accessibility settings in iOS. The results are often hilarious, if only because describing the tiny icons aloud reveals their inherent absurdity....

Challenging assumptions leads people to discovery. Columbus challenged the prevailing notion that you had to sail around Africa to reach India’s lucrative markets, and he opened up a new world to the European powers. Every great scientist knows this to be true, as well. This is the kind of language that the two young physicists from Los Alamos, Charlie Isaacs and Helen Prins, are forced to endure as they watch the Manhattan Project’s plutonium reactor go critical, despite their safety concerns....

Media Platforms Design Team A team of researchers from MIT and Harvard has built the first origami-inspired robot that can fold and shuffle away by itself. According to a published today in the journal , the robot starts off as a flat shape with the area of an ordinary piece of paper, and then assembles itself into a 3D shape in four minutes. Its designers say that origami-inspired engineering could be used in search-and-rescue missions or even in space, and has the potential to change the way we manufacture robots and machines....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe new Othermill is a tabletop CNC milling machine that looks, at first glance, quite a bit like a Cube, MakerBot, or any of the others in the new breed of affordable 3D printers. It was created by a San Francisco R&D shop called Otherfab, which was cofounded by Saul Griffith, who is part of the westward MIT Media Lab migration that has fueled a lot of entrepreneurial, maker-oriented ventures in the Bay Area....

Media Platforms Design TeamJun Kaneko/FlickrBeat the BeachThe beach may be a great place to relax and catch up on your summer reading, but while sand won’t hurt your paperbacks, it’s dangerous for your iPad or Kindle. Although waterproof cases or even ziplock bags can help prevent sand and water from getting to your device, here are a few more ways to rescue tablets from sand without voiding your warranty.If you’re planning to spend the majority of summer seaside, stock up on gadgets built for the beach that will make you the envy of your summering peers....

Panama Canal Upgrade Wins ApprovalCitizens of Panama expressed their overwhelming endorsement yesterday for a plan to give a modern facelift to their famed canal. In a national referendum, the $5.25-billion expansion of the Panama Canal—one of the world’s greatest engineering feats of the last century—received backing from nearly 80 percent of Panamanians.We’ll be down in the border country this week to scope out the new plan, the major element of which is a third set of locks to double the capacity of the 50-mile waterway....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s a decade-old technology that still sounds like the future: TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, is a method of directing magnetic currents through the skull and onto the surface of the brain to physically change the way the neurons talk to one another… without all the mess of brain surgery.Today, in a study published in the journal Science, a team of brain researchers at Northwestern University have announced that they’ve successfully used TMS to improve memory in healthy adults....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat’s the logic behind the time travel in your movie?Mostly what I researched is not the science behind the reality of what time travel could be, but time travel in narratives. It’s completely separate from the science, but it’s just as fascinatingthe way that time travel has been incorporated into stories and fictions, and culture. And so I looked at a lot of movies to see how they dealt with time travel, and to see how the fiction of time travel has grown....

While the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch facility in Kazakhstan is still in use, it’s apparent that large swaths of the structure are all but abandoned—and home to some amazing pieces of Russian and Soviet Space history. That’s the case with this Energia M rocket, the smallest of the Energia class. Ralph Mirebs, last seen uploading pictures of the Soviet space shuttle, found this one standing in Baikonur.Intended as a replacement for the Proton rocket, Energia M was instead discontinued around 1993....

From everything we’ve heard and read over the last the week, we’re fairly certain that the Bush Administration will cough up enough money to keep GM and Chrysler afloat for the next month or so. It’s pretty clear that whatever plan emerges, it will be just a short-term solution. Obama and the next Congress will undoubtedly have some cleaning up to do. One of the issues complicating matters is Chrysler’s status as a privately held company....

PM: How does your wave-powered system work?Mark Thomas: The Seadog Pump is essentially a mechanical conversion device. What we’re doing is taking the energy resonant in the waves by having it flow through our device. When it flows through it, we’re able to set up a circumstance where we can convert the wave’s potential into mechanic energy. Once it’s mechanical energy, we use that energy to pump water. At this point, the system is just a pump that is fueled by the waves....

Within 24 hours, the leak of two documents has revealed a vast network of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance operations that were authorized by FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts with the oversight of the U.S. Congress. The first document, which Popular Mechanics detailed yesterday, was a FISA court order demanding all telephony metadata from Verizon Business Network Services over a three-month period, though it hinted at a much broader program of call log data mining....

LAS VEGAS — The Intel display—it’s way to grandiose to call it a “booth”—seemed to put a real stress on personal empowerment: Personal Media Creation, mobile hi-def video editing, etc. And tying it all together was Wi-Max, a long-range version of wi-fi. Sprint and Intel are cooperating on this. I talked to the Intel and Sprint representatives, and they told me that things are moving a lot faster than I had realized....

Media Platforms Design TeamCarmakers: You can stop trying to personalize our automobiles by offering myriad color options or synching our smartphones with the vehicle’s display. There is something better: Turning your head into a shifter.This project is simple but oh-so-inspired. As Instructables user hapnmaq notes, you really just need a scanner that can capture your face and a 3D printer that can create a mini-you. If constantly seeing your own head on a stick makes you feel like you lost the game of thrones, then print a head of a real or imagined rival....

These days, Christmas is all about excess: lots of gifts, plenty of cookies, and in many cases, over-the-top Christmas trees with all the trimmings. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, 28 million Americans purchase a live tree each December. Meanwhile, the National Fire Protection Association reports that 210 home fires a year start with those holly, jolly trees. This year, it wouldn’t hurt to check out these safety tips before you string the lights, hang the garland and break out the eggnog....

Add WeatherstrippingReplace worn-out weatherstripping. Pay close attention to seals on doors that get a lot of use–such as those on the front of the house or between the house and attached garage.2. Improve Windows If you’re not ready to spring for new windows, fix up the ones you have by replacing latches that don’t grip tightly, adding weatherstripping or making repairs to storm windows that are stuck open. You can even build simple wood-and-glass interior or exterior storm windows....