Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamLast winter, Congress set aside $8 billion for high-speed rail as part of the $787 billion stimulus bill, but the money hasn’t been spent yet–or even allocated. Speaking at a breakfast meeting for magazine editors today at the Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan, U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood said that recipients of the funds will be announced in January. “People want this,” LaHood said. “They come back from Europe or Asia, and people scratch their heads and say, why don’t we have high-speed trains here?...

The first Universe Sandbox game was a blast, allowing you to create a sandbox solar system and just as quickly destroy it by placing Jupiter where Venus is, adding a second sun, or putting the Earth in orbit around itself. This week, Universe Sandbox 2 came out and it was just as much fun but with even better graphics. The above image is what happens if you let Earth orbit Jupiter, then try to throw Saturn into the mix....

Media Platforms Design TeamAUSTIN, TEXAS—Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor whose leaks have forever changed the international security world, addressed a packed auditorium at SXSW from Russia via a virtual Google hangout. The livestream was relayed through seven proxies and featured Snowden’s floating head in front of a green screen; aptly, the background he chose was the U.S. Constitution. Also joined by Snowden was Christopher Sogohian, principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU program director Ben WIzner, who moderated the panel....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Burcu Avsar)“I thought you called and programmed the thermostat to turn on the heat,” my neighbor Helen Joy said to her husband, Dave, when they arrived at their Catskill vacation home after a 4-hour drive. “I did,” Dave insisted. “So why is it chilly?” Helen asked. The problem: A loose connection in the switch box for the furnace’s oil burner had melted a wire connector and shorted out the burner circuit....

The only thing we love as much as brilliant feats of engineering are bizarre marketing efforts. Hitachi today made an announcement about its upcoming TravelStar 5K160 perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) laptop drive. In addition to the high capacity (160 GB) offered by PMR technology, the drive’s read heads have been coated with an iridium-manganese-chromium (IrMnCr) alloy for resistance to environmental stressors such as heat, moisture and shock. The company has celebrated this advance by creating a Schoolhouse Rock-inspired cartoon of such extraordinary weirdness that it must be spread around the Internet for all to see....

Media Platforms Design Team You probably haven’t missed that every product in our lives is getting connected to the Web. Computers, phones, and tablets are old news; now it’s televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, yard sprinklers, home thermostats, and cars. And not just new cars—any car from 1996 on can get in on the act. Verizon’s Vehicle Diagnostics by Delphi—yes, the GM spin-off—is a device that plugs into any car with an On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port and sends a stream of vehicle and location data to the cloud....

Media Platforms Design TeamKell Robotics came to the FIRST championship to put its basketball-playing robot to the test. But the team members brought along another of their clever creations: a model of their robot that could one day clean up streams.In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that began April 20, 2010, the team from Marietta, Ga., designed a remote-control, oil-skimming robot it calls ORCA, or Oil Recovery and Capture....

Media Platforms Design TeamToday Ford announced an engineering dream team to help the automaker bring the self-driving car closer to fruition. Ford will be working side-by-side with MIT and Stanford University to solve some of the major problems that still stand in the way of autonomous auto technology. MIT will focus on safety by improving a car’s ability to predict the movements of other vehicles and pedestrians’ actions. Meanwhile, Stanford will investigate ways for cars to see around obstructions, according to a Ford’s press release....

Two murderers who escaped from an upstate New York prison two weeks ago are still on the lam, and despite the striking photos of their escape route through a pipe, how they cut the necessary hole is still something of a mystery. Their tools were almost certainly primitive—ones that could be hidden in a hunk of meat—so what would the process actually look like, and how long would it take?The New York Times took to recreating the feat using six different tools, from various grinders and saws, down to hand tools like a hacksaw....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou’re working on xenotransplantation, the moving of organs of one species into another. In this case, it’s transplanting pig lungs into human patients. Why? I got into biotechnology because our daughter, Jenesis, was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, pulmonary arterial hypertension. Although we’ve been successful in developing medicine that retards the progression of that disease, it doesn’t cure it and most [people] end up dying from it. However, in 100 percent of the cases, a lung transplant eliminates pulmonary hypertension....

Media Platforms Design TeamZubieYour car is now a computer, and that computer isn’t so secure, according to Argus Cyber Security. Hackers can take control of windows, doors, and instrument clusters. All it takes is an inexpensive dongle.The Zubie is a diagnostic tool that can alert drivers to potential problems. It also monitors driver behavior to help eliminate bad habits like hard braking. But what Argus discovered is that the device contains a not-so-secure connection to its cloud service, as reported by Hackaday....

Researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University are making a bold claim: an entirely new state of matter. The team, led by Kosmas Prassides, says they’ve created what’s called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting rubidium, a strange alkali metal element, into buckyballs, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape from a series of interlocking polygons (think of the Epcot Center, but in microscopic size.) Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities....

Netflix accounts for about a third of the traffic on the internet. Streaming video is no small feat, and Netflix does a whole lot of it. In order to keep from clogging up the internet too badly, Netflix has tried all sorts of things, up to and including offering copies of itself to internet data centers. But the newest weapon in its arsenal comes in the form of new algorithms and encoding....

Graham Hawkes has spent most of his life creating new ways to plumb the ocean’s depths. Earlier this year he publicly unveiled his latest vehicle: a sleek, winged submersible dubbed the Deep Flight Super Falcon, which operates on principles of lift and drag, like an airplane. The craft, which should provide unprecedented subsea speed and maneuverability, will be used to ferry policymakers and others into the country’s national marine sanctuaries. And the Super Falcon design is production-ready, so yachters and other wealthy nature lovers can buy their own....

Sewage treatment is a messy but necessary process, and dealing with its end products—concentrated sludge—is probably the sloppiest part. German-based company Thermo-System has created a robot to help cut through the (literal) crap. The “Electric Mole,” a stainless steel, four-wheel-drive, autonomous vehicle, cruises for up to 10 hours a day, churning sludge so that it can efficiently dry and be cheaply stored. The dried sludge can weigh up to 97 percent less than the original liquid version....

Media Platforms Design TeamJust a quick post during our lunch break. We spent the morning driving the augers for the windmill. They’re five feet long, which is long enough to hit plenty of rocks on the way down.Yesterday we got a bit more excitement than we bargained for. I’d ordered six yards of concrete to anchor the pole that supports the new pv array. It’s been raining for, oh, about two months straight, so I asked for the all-wheel drive truck....

Congress just took a major step toward encouraging private industries to explore and develop the final frontier. On Tuesday evening, the Senate passed H.R.2262, The U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, with unanimous approval. The bill safeguards a number of rights for private companies that plan to pursue expansion into outer space, including allowing U.S. citizens to own any “space resources” that they can harvest. Related StoryHow to Mine an AsteroidCongress defines a “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space....

Media Platforms Design TeamA very good electric scoreboard, for use in scoring basketball and other games played indoors, is shown in the illustration. It is constructed entirely of wood but should be lined with backing board or sheathing. The dimensions are a matter of choice, but one 4 ft. long, 2 ft. wide, and 18 in. deep is a good size.The back of the box is provided with two cleats, each 2½ ft....

Modern-day virtual reality is impressive the first time you put on the helmet. And systems like the HTC Vive make it even more incredible by letting you walk around your digital world. The catch is that you have to be careful not to run into any real life walls; even in cyberspace you’re confined to just one smallish room. But there could be away around this, all thanks to the fact that you can’t walk in a straight line to save your life....

Media Platforms Design Team[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/lZVUKyFNDik?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter wasn’t the only high-tech tool documenting Curiosity’s descent to the Red Planet. Curiosity itself actually took a series of photos recording its two and a half minute plunge to the surface, which NASA has released in stop-motion video form. NASA chose 297 shots from its “seven minutes of terror” to create the low-resolution one-minute video. Besides the spectacular subject matter, there are a couple particularly cool things about this video....