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Although the European Space Agency’s Philae comet lander has been incommunicado since July 9, today marks what’s easily one of the most significant days in the lander’s lifetime. That’s because scientists across the globe working with the plucky robot have just released their first wave of discoveries and scientific research collected during Philae’s slow rendezvous and inadvertently bouncy landing on comet C-G last fall. The research is published in seven papers in the journal Science....

Waste MismanagementIMPACT + ONE DAY It takes only 24 hours for debris to spread along the destroyed satellite’s sun-synchronous polar orbit. The force of the impact drives debris into higher and lower orbits, but most of the wreckage remains at the satellite’s original altitude.JULY 2007 The debris ring broadens and begins to mix with satellites and the abundant trash in low Earth orbit, which extends to an altitude of about 1240 miles....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe endurance record for a human-powered plane is nearly 4 hours, set in 1988 when an MIT-built plane pedaled 70 miles from Crete to Santorini in Greece. The longest a human-powered helicopter (HPH) has been able to stay aloft? Nineteen seconds.This pretty much tells you what you need to know about the challenge of building a human-powered helicopter, which remains one of aviation’s great unsolved challenges. Aeronautical dreamers, however, are a dauntless bunch....

Stuart TysonMy father is notoriously frugal, and I tell him he should replace his old dry-rotted tires even though they still have plenty of tread. Can you please explain why I’m right? I think our dads might be brothers. Tire replacement is pretty straightforward to the cost-conscious: when the tread wears down or a hole can’t be patched. The reality is more nuanced than that. Tires are complex components that undergo amazing stresses during even the most mundane of drives....

A trail guide in Costa Rica might stop to flick the thorns on an acacia shrub. The thorns are wide and hollow and grow in pairs, like a demonic two-fingered peace sign. And when the guide agitates them, ants scurry out. This particular ant, Pseudomyrmex ferruginea, is a hard-biting acacia defender. It protects the plant from other insects, bigger animals and well-meaning trail guides. In return, the acacia feeds the ants a protein from its leaflets and nectar from its stalk....

So my column for the magazine in a couple of months is on new approaches to air travel. In the course of writing it, I spent a day with the pilots, engineers and designers of an aircraft that’s meant to bring about just that sort of new approach: the HondaJet, a fast, comparatively cheap five-passenger Very Light Jet that Honda hopes will not only appeal to the usual run of corporate-jet purchasers, but that will also promote an entirely new way of flying, one that’s capable of bridging the gap between cheap-but-unreliable commercial jet travel and swanky-but-expensive corporate jet travel....

Media Platforms Design TeamI just got a new laptop. I know I can move all my data over. Can I duplicate preferences too?It’s fairly easy to duplicate your preferences as long as you’re staying in the same OS universe. Macs won’t understand PC preferences and vice versa. If your old computer still works, you can transfer everything directly to the new one. (Note: You’ll be computerless during the process.) For PCs, you’ll need to buy a cord, called the Easy Transfer Cable for Windows, to link the two machines and then run a program paired with the cable....

It seems like just yesterday when Hurricane Katrina, with her huge footprint and devastating storm surge, flooded New Orleans and devastated the Gulf Coast. Get ready for round two: Hurricane season officially starts today.Over the past seven months, over 150 of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers from government, academia and private industry have been painstakingly studying what, exactly, caused the levees to fail last August. Today, the Army Corps of Engineers, along with several other national, state and university research teams, will release their findings and recommendations on how to better defend New Orleans from the inevitable: Another storm, perhaps greater in size and power than Katrina, hitting with little notice....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo upgrade an electric range → Induction is an ideal upgrade from a dated electric range. Installers connect a 6- or 8-gauge wire to a 40-amp circuit breaker, which existing electric ranges may already have. Induction is more efficient, but the switch makes little difference on the electric bill. Up-front costs are another story—a 30-inch electric range/oven combo goes for about $500, an induction cooktop (with no oven) can top $2000....

Buick unveiled Enclave, its crossover vehicle of the future, in The Motor City to mixed reactions from both inside and outside the company. Showgoers thought the styling was fresh and unique, especially for a car entering the booming crossover field so long after competitors have made their mark (think RX 330, Murano, Edge, MKX, R-Class). They point to the Enclave’s fender “eyebrows” as highly distinctive. But the name Enclave–roughly defined as “closed neighborhood”–had observers scratching their heads....

Media Platforms Design TeamHuge primordial gas clouds made of elements untouched since moments after the big bang have been discovered by a group of scientists, offering a glimpse into what the universe looked like in its infancy.The clouds aren’t the oldest celestial objects astronomers can see—they’re from about two billion years after the big bang, and astronomers have spotted parts of the universe that date to less than one billion years after the event....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe animal kingdom is full of strange, horrifying, but true stories of zombies: A wasp that takes over a spider’s mind and forces the spider to build a silk cocoon for the wasp’s offspring, or the worm that forces its pill-bug host or wander into the open and get eaten so the worm can continue its own life cycle inside a bird.San Francisco State researchers are trying to understand another example: zombees....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe StargazerReader: Dan DuriscoeMaterials: $1800Time: Two monthsResult: 250x magnification and bragging rights to the biggest binoculars in the National Park Service.* See the Binocular Telescope Runners-Up* Submit Your Own DIY ProjectAs a teenager in the 1970s Dan Duriscoe was inspired by astronomer John Dobson, who was then gaining fame for making telescopes from found parts. More than 20 years later, Duriscoe finally cobbled together his own creation, on a massive scale....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe bought some very inexpensive but beautiful face-frame kitchen cabinets at a store that sells recycled building materials, but nobody we’ve talked to agrees on the size and type of screw for attaching them to each other or to the wall. Please help.That makes sense. There are many different cabinet types and materials, and there isn’t one size or type of screw that will work with all of them....

For years, outside observers have made a peculiar observation: many Chinese weapon systems look an awful lot like their American counterparts.These dopplegangers from the Asian mainland tend to come out five to ten years after their American versions, with Chinese engineers vehemently stating any resemblance was strictly—strictly—coincidental.A gallery of images on the Chinese web site tiexue.net titled “Sino-US equipment: Only Genuine Army Fans Know” shows more than a dozen side-by-side comparisons of Chinese and American gear....

Wait. What?Yep. Really. “It’s definitely going to take a lot of neuroscience and computer science to do,” says Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. “But from our perspective, it’s not that crazy.“How would that work?It helps to think of a person’s soul as a -collection of information, Sandberg says. The challenge is that our brains aren’t as organized as computers. “By midcentury we may have a way to copy information from our brains, but putting it into a biological brain is probably going to be very tough,” he says....

Media Platforms Design TeamChevrolet is aiming high with the all-new 2008 Malibu—very high. The Malibu is designed from the ground-up to be “best in class,” according to GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. The previous model, Lutz himself will admit, had the simpler goal of basically “just participating in the class.” Chevrolet has made a significant design and engineering investment in the new Malibu and its platform mate, the Saturn Aura. So much so, Lutz told PM, that the folks at GM “don’t know how to do any better than this....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design Team SAN DIEGO — “Please keep in mind these are prototype vehicles not representative of final build quality or tuning.” That’s the line we get every time we drive an early test car of an upcoming model. And for good reason: Prototypes are usually rough, cobbled together mules with rattling interiors and powertrains that make noises that are, well, not exactly good noises. But we got no such speech yesterday from the Chevy guys....

LAS VEGAS — My assignment here is pretty enviable: to wander around and find things that interest me, and then blog about them.I thought this Yamaha Disklavier Mark IV (pictured at right) was cool. It’s a $50,000 concert grand piano, but with the addition of the ability to record and play keystrokes. That’s been around a while, but this new model adds video synchronization, and a much more sensitive sequencing system than regular MIDI....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s clear from the extent of the camouflage on this prototype Escape that Ford is planning to overhaul the appearance of its compact SUV for 2013. Nearly all of the exterior surface areas are newly designed, as evidenced by the black canvas covering everything but the windows and a front section of the roof. But try as Ford test engineers might to keep their work under wraps, there are still a number of clues to read into the exterior form of the new vehicle....