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When we talk about email, how much of our online communications are truly private?I think everybody today needs to assume that if theyre communicating electronically, somebody is listening. Over the last 20 years weve been communicating across the Internet with a level naïve innocence that has been lost forever. One big issue is that todays electronic communication systems have gotten so complex that they are all but impossible for private citizens to understand....

Next-Gen Hair TransplantMedia Platforms Design TeamScientists at Atlanta-based Aderans Research Institute are researching a way to create a nearly inexhaustible supply of hair plugs. Instead of merely transplanting hair cells from a patient’s tissue, researchers extract the cells and grow them in a lab, multiplying them about a hundredfold before injecting them into the scalp.Availability: Projected within five years. 2. Invisible Hearing AidMedia Platforms Design TeamMost hearing aids are bulky and unsightly....

Cold seeps through the layers of my clothing as a few lonesome snowflakes skitter from an overcast sky. Everywhere I look there’s nothing but ice and snow, a flat, monotonous landscape with the gentle slope of a low hill here and there. By arctic standards, it’s a beautiful spring day.I’ve come to northern Quebec to learn the art of igloo building at the Nunavik Arctic Survival Training Center, where Inuit instructors teach wilderness skills....

A shiny new pinball machine with all the bells and paddles will cost you more than $5,000. That’s not exactly affordable. But the PinBox 3000, which just met its Kickstarter goal of $10,000, wants to bring that price down to about 1 percent, or $50 for a new machine. There’s just one small corner they cut: The whole thing is made of cardboard. The plan is to retail them at $50, at least for pre-orders....

The 21st-century muscle car wars have a new superpower to contend with: the Mustang Shelby GT500, the baddest of all Mustangs. This 540-hp street terror will rocket through the quarter-mile in just 12.6 seconds– trouncing its Detroit competitors by a wide margin. Even better, Ford’s Special Vehicle Team made sure the GT500 sticks to the corners and stops like a proper sports car. The chassis is wonderfully competent and makes it just as fun to attack the back roads as it is to tear down the quarter-mile....

Media Platforms Design TeamWinter is an exciting time of year for boating enthusiasts. It signals the start of the boat show season–a chance to climb aboard and take a close look at a variety of boats and accessories before you buy. While you’re looking, keep in mind that many boats are designed for a specific purpose, so it’s important to decide what you want yours to do before you plunk down any money....

Q: I would very much like to buy a hard copy of an original shop repair manual used by a dodge dealership mechanic for a 2001 Grand Caravan. Please, any ideas on where I could purchase a reprint of such a manual? The dealers tell me their not available to the public. Others have said they do get reprinted for after market sales? Any help would be greatly appreciated.A: You can get factory authorized service manuals for just about anything from: helminc....

Last Thursday, Georgian troops attacked pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Defying expectations and escalating the pitch of the battles to come, the Russian army fought back–with massive firepower. Tanks deployed, jets flew top cover, and the once-mothballed Black Sea fleet sailed toward Georgian ports, while Russian hackers took down Georgian networks.The fighting, which claimed as many as 2000 lives, represents a sort of hybrid war for the 21st century: a chaotic, fast-moving conflict that combines cutting-edge technology with old-fashioned brute force....

Media Platforms Design TeamMobile bioremediating device. Image: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.The key to saving our planet’s endangered ecosystems may be bizarre genetically engineered microorganisms.In her new exhibit, Designing For the Sixth Extinction, designer and artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg envisions a world based around synthetic biology repairing existing ecosystems. The semi-artificial creatures include flatworms whose job it is to rebalance acidic soil, seed dispersing caterpillars, fungal spores that explode with remedies for ailing trees, and tree biofilms that absorb pollutants from the air....

Shoes, underwear, and now cellphones—there’s no limit to the dark creativity that goes into finding new ways to take down airliners and kill hundreds of people. Based on reports of emerging terrorist threats, the TSA will now ask those traveling on international flights from certain points of origin to turn on their mobile devices before boarding a U.S.-bound airplane. Agents want to make sure that your iPhone 5 is a real device, and not a cleverly disguised phony phone packed with, say, PETN (so make sure you have plenty of charge before you leave home)....

The big players in aviation are pinning their hopes on twin-engine jetliners like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which promise greater efficiency due to their groundbreaking composite designs. But with these planes set to take over more and more transoceanic routes, those two engines could be a problem. To follow the “great circle” routes that are the most direct routes between cities, which can save hours and lots of fuel on ultra long-distance flights, planes can fly far from land over remote stretches of ocean....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the 1990s, pilots trying to fly into Juneau, Alaska, experienced several different episodes of severe turbulence. During one, a gust of wind lifted the wing of a Boeing 737 airliner and swung it past vertical. The pilot was able to get his passengers safely back on the ground, but it was obvious that the next flight might not be so lucky.Pilots flying in and around Alaska are used to dealing with sudden swings in Mother Nature’s temperament....

Over a life of pushing cars to their limits, I have discovered that a ‘99 Dodge Grand Caravan will go 125 miles after the low-fuel warning light glows, while the experimental Ford electric van from the ’90s went 41 miles despite a range gauge that predicted 35 miles. I’ve learned that test cars—especially quarter-million-dollar Italian exotics and tuner-modified hot rods—are prone to blowing engines, exploding transmissions, and bursting into flames. And I’ve found that jumping a car high in the air to please a magazine photographer isn’t the best way to keep it running....

Fixing damaged plastic bumpers involves grinding, sanding, sculpting and painting. But it’s worth the effort for repairs that would cost less than your deductible.There oughta be a law: If there’s a post in a parking lot—any post—it should be high enough to see when you’re backing up. Unfortunately, the law we usually see applied is Murphy’s, and the resulting body-damage repairs will cost just a few dollars less than your insurance deductible....

German firm Bureau Oberhaeuser has a new concept for Tesla’s interface that takes a cue from the world of smart devices and tablets, allowing multiple apps to be tiled at once and moved around at will. Founder Martin Oberhäuser was inspired to build it after having a rather tepid reaction to Tesla’s real design.As he reports on his Medium blog:While the UX has some promising rudiments, the visual design could be from the early Web 2....

It’s almost a given now that, 3.9 billion years ago, Mars had lakes of water on its surface. But new research from a Caltech team, published today in Nature Communications, seems to point to one thing: Mars never had that much atmosphere, so those lakes were probably less like a tropical paradise and more like the desert regions of Antarctica. “I think it clarifies the picture in our head that maybe Mars was always cold and arid,” Bethany Ehlmann, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and coauthor of the study, said....

The MythBusters show is all about the crazy stuff that happens when technology meets man. In fact, we go out of our way to think of creative ways to play with technology. My MythBuster partner, Adam Savage, has just about every kind of iPod, iPhone and iPipewrench he can get his mitts on. But there are times when innovation produces aggravation, and when that happens, technology can flat out drive us nuts....

The amateur drone enthusiasts at Flite Test have accomplished an impressive feat of drone-ception: launching one drone off the wings of another.To accomplish the feat, they built a modified quadcopter they call the “Heli-Carrier” (picture what the international spy organization SHIELD flies in the Marvel Comics Universe). While Flite Test’s creation isn’t quite on the scale of the comic book airborne aircraft carrier, it takes off and hovers just as the Heli-Carrier does....

Quality testing a new, ultrasensitive weather radar requires a room that is guarded from any conflicting emissions. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Imaging Radiometer, HIRAD, needs some electromagnetic tranquility to test its ability to scan the ocean from an airplane or satellite, researchers place it in an anechoic chamber at a NASA research center in Huntsville, Ala. Because the sensor calculates wind speed using microwave reflections off the ocean’s frothy waves, the instrument’s accuracy must be tested in an electromagnetically silent room....

Of the major games in the Mario Brothers franchise, Super Mario 64 gets perhaps the least love, and it’s not hard to see why. While revolutionary at the time, 64-bit graphics were swiftly surpassed and quickly felt dated and blocky. Even Goldeneye, the Nintendo 64’s standard bearer, can’t quite hold up today.Now, one intrepid designer has given a glimmer of hope for a game that was locked in 1996: Erik Roystan Ross has remade the first level using the Unity game engine....