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Give the world a new electronic device and, before you know it, modified products will pop up. Such is the way with gadgets, electronics and, yes, robots. Some manufacturers try to lock down such mods, either physically or through legal channels, but the robotmakers at iRobot have embraced crowd sourcing. Their Robot Developers Kit provides the hardware and software to help developers make their own upgrades and add-ons for the military PackBots that they produce....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou played Gollum, the first photo-realistic movie character created using performance capture, in The Lord of the Rings (2001). What was the process at that time?When I first started, there was no real modus operandi of how it would work. Motion capture had come out of the medical industrystudying joint-related illnesses and looking at knee and ankle movements for medical purposes. It was being used in video games at that point, but there was still a sense that it didn’t have much of a future....

The future of beer is already here. It’s just not in your glass yet.In genetics laboratories worldwide, brewing yeast—the microorganisms that transmute tepid grain water into tasty beer—have been genetically engineered to brew stranger and more flavorful brews than anything you can find on the shelf. However, as genetically engineered yeast has become easier and easier to create, a slew of ethical, legal, and marketing issues have kept these futuristic brewing yeasts from leaping out of the laboratory and into the brewery....

Media Platforms Design TeamCAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In a surprise development that could have implications for powering electronics, cars and even the military, researchers at MIT have created the world’s first batteries constructed at the nano scale by microscopic viruses. A much-buzzed-about paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month details the team’s success in creating two of the three parts of a working battery—the positively charged anode and the electrolyte....

Media Platforms Design TeamRussia’s Navy Day celebrations were a bit of a flop.At Crimea’s Sevastopol port, the Krivak-class frigate Ladny was supposed to do a little demo of the SS-N-14 Silex, a ship-fired anti-submarine missile (specifially, this was the URPK-5 Rastrub, modified to be used against both submarines and other warships).But instead flexing Russian muscle, the missile badly misfired. The four-stage missile’s boosters essentially went off on a joy ride, while the missile’s flight body and payload made a sad little leap into the sea....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn September 29, at the statistical height of its popularity, the music video for Psy’s "" received 12.8 million views on YouTube. That translates to an average of 8900 streaming requests for the video per minute, or 148 per second. And it’s not as though Psy’s was the only viral video on YouTube that day. Several other videos were trending, including Carly Rae Jepsen’s “,” One Direction’s “,” dramatic from a soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, and of lightning hitting a car—which were, collectively, also getting millions of views....

Forget Tennessee Avenue. How would you like the chance to own Johnson Space Center? Science fans can now purchase mission control in Monopoly’s revamped “Here and Now” edition of the classic real estate game. The NASA property, where PM tracks launches and which will oversee liftoff for the agency’s new Hubble mission, is just one of 22 new locations on the board. Americans voted in the spring to determine which nationwide landmarks would be for sale as the game expanded beyond Atlantic City....

There are many tried-and-true tools for removing a damaged fastener, and we’ve all used them: the cold chisel hit with a ball-peen hammer, the cat’s-paw, the claw hammer, the nail puller and the hacksaw. But sometimes even old favorites don’t work. The right tool and technique mean that you, not the fastener, will prevail.TechniquesMedia Platforms Design TeamRIPGrab a broken, partially removed nail with 10-in. tongue-and-groove pliers. Lever the tool against the curved jaw to rip the nail out of its hole....

View full post on InstagramOne of the quirks (and, let’s be honest, limitations) of Instagram has always been its insistence on making you post only square photos. No longer: The photo-sharing service announced today that you’ll soon be able to use landscape (horizontal) and portrait (vertical) images.Instagram says in its press release:Now, when choosing a photo or video, you can tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square....

Media Platforms Design TeamActor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio has been a famously early adaptor of alt-fuel vehicles like the Tesla Roadster and Fisker Karma, but he’s putting even more money where his mouth is by sponsoring an upstart team which will compete in next year’s all-electric Formula E series.Leo’s partners at Venturi Grand Prix join nine other teams including Andretti Motorsport, Super Aguri, and Virgin Racing in the fledgling series that kicks off with its first race on September 13, 2014....

What’s the next revolution (pun intended) in wheel technology? Carbon fiber. British wheel maker Dymag is already producing carbon fiber rims with magnesium centers for the Mosler supercar. But we stopped by ATR Group’s booth this morning to find out the current state of carbon fiber wheel technology. ATR built the carbon fiber chassis for the Porsche Carerra GT and Bugatti Veyron (among others) and already produces carbon fiber motorcycle wheels....

The flight crew of a fully laden Boeing 777-200ER had to take quick action after indications of an engine fire required an aborted takeoff on Tuesday. British Airways Flight 2276 was departing the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport yesterday evening for London Gatwick Airport when all 159 passengers and 13 crew were evacuated on the runway after a fire began to engulf the aircraft. View full post on YoutubePilots promptly informed the control tower that the takeoff was stopped, requested fire services and were evacuating immediately....

Welcome to PM/AM, PopMech’s morning briefing on the top tech stories for today.What We’re Reading"World’s oldest cheese found on 3,600-year-old Chinese mummies made with ‘ancient technology’" - [via International Business Times"Meteor spotted over midwest" - [via Weather.com"Two Microsoft executives to leave company: report" - [via Reuters.comWhat We’re WatchingAfter almost 17 grueling days, it’s finally over. This weekend, 650,000 gamers worked together to beat a cooperative version of Pokemon Red, hosted by Twitch....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s been nearly a year since the first iPad edition of Popular Mechanics arrived in the App Store. Since then, users have found video, interactive charts and graphics, rich animations and other kinds of extra content. The March issue even included a game in which you could design landing crafts for a missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. But this month’s issue brings perhaps the most exciting new feature yet: subscriptions....

Media Platforms Design TeamBREAKTHROUGH WHO NASA Mountain View, Calif. FIELD Spacecraft Design and CommunicationsACHIEVEMENT Modular, flexible construction; data transfer by laser.The machine that flew closer to the moon than any other unmanned spacecraft in history, collecting gas and dust samples that could one day help mankind reach Mars and sending valuable data to scientists on Earth every minute of its existence, was about the size of a sofa. It rocketed into space and orbited the moon for 100 days, reaching 3,800 mph and careening within just a few hundred feet of the craggy surface....

Yes, a man cave can be in the sky. The round room of wonder you see here was built in New Zealand by Jono Williams, who, along with friend and engineer Grant Ramsay, decided to build a solar-powered smart treehouse 33 feet off the ground.The $50,000 room contains 270 square feet of round living space and a host of Android-controlled features. The beer cooler, for example, texts Williams when it’s running out of cans....

Media Platforms Design TeamToyota’s ascension to the top of 2012’s sales heap hasn’t come without a cost: the newly crowned automaker has been fined $17,350,000 for not handling unintended acceleration issues with Lexus RX350 and RX450h SUVs in a timely manner.“It’s critical to the safety of the driving public that manufacturers report safety defects in a timely manner,” National Traffic Safety Administration head David Strickland said in a statement. “Every moment of delay has the potential to lead to deaths or injuries on our nation’s highways....

Jan. 5, 2005, was a slow day on Norfolk Southern’s R Line, a lonely 82-mile section of track that winds through rural South Carolina. So when the crew of a local train in Graniteville, a small town just northeast of the Georgia border, radioed in for clearance to make deliveries along the line, the dispatcher quickly gave his okay. In radio parlance, he “issued a track warrant.“The three-man crew finished up around 7 pm, and decided to park the train overnight on the short spur track that leads to the Avondale Mills textile plant....

No single device has done so little good and caused so much annoyance as the car alarm. Before we turn to just how ineffective that blaring bit of ersatz security is (and how effective other forms of anti-theft devices are), let’s examine first how this invention went awry.The approach of attention-as-deterrent dates back to 1918, when St. George Evans and E. B. Birkenbeuel of Oregon patented a device that would, “automatically signal an attempt to move an automobile by unauthorized persons....

It doesn’t sound like the smartest idea for a fire truck to carry around wooden ladders, but for the San Francisco Fire Department, it makes a surprising amount of sense.The Northern California city is infamous for its tightly packed roads and low-hanging power lines. San Francisco’s cramped quarters make the wooden ladders a “necessity,” as this four-minute video below explains. Compared to their aluminum counterparts, these ladders don’t conduct electricity and are easy to maneuver in small spaces....