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View full post on VimeoA drone armed with video equipment recently flew over the skies of Pripyat, a Ukrainian city that was home to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. After the disaster, the city was abandoned, though some curiosity seekers have explored the ruins of the irradiated city.Danny Cooke took the footage while working on a 60 Minutes segment, providing a rare aerial view of the city. Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl captures some startling contrasts, filming abandoned, decayed swing sets alongside resurgent plant life....

ThinkGeek has done what we thought was impossible and built a functional replica of the Back to the Future hoverboard. Unlike that one from Mattel, this one actually floats. But it’s only big enough for a Marty McFly minifig. The ultimately useless but fantastically cool desk toy works thanks to a quintet of rare earth magnets stashed in the base, and a board made out of pyrolytic graphite which can levitate in a magnetic field....

View full post on TwitterWhile the shaking caused by in-flight turbulence makes many air travelers uncomfortable, it’s rarely more than an annoyance. But not on a Delta flight from Boston to Salt Lake City on Friday night, which had to divert to a different airport because of a “severely damaged” windshield, according to a Fox 13 Salt Lake City report.The plane flew into an intense storm that caused significant turbulence, and then things got worse: Hail managed to crack the windshield of the Airbus A320 and force it to land at Denver International Airport....

As California withers through a third year of drought, state lawmakers have been recalled to Sacramento for a special legislative session to try and squelch a decades-in-the-making water crisis. California’s woes are a product of an expanding population, served by antiquated water delivery and storage systems, overtapping a static water supply–a situation that’s only exacerbated by global warming. With the current political interest, the crisis seems likely to force the first major revamping of California water policy in nearly half a century....

Gaming’s goodwill processor–the one inside the PlayStation 3–has proved once again that it’s around for more than just kicking butt in Grand Theft Auto. We’ve seen the system help fight cancer with protein-folding research and CT tumor scans. And now the same technology that, on a small scale, helps the careening cars in GTA IV skid, flip and crash like real ones is helping scientists on a much larger scale. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico have used microprocessors developed for the PS3 to power the fastest supercomputer on earth, the Roadrunner....

It’s Flag Day, which means you should know the right way to fold Old Glory. It takes two people to fold the American flag properly, without letting it touch the ground. Follow this illustrated sequence, tucking in the final fold so only the blue star field is visible.• Don’t let the flag touch the ground—which you learned when you were nine.• Despite what you’ve heard, it’s okay to fly it at night....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’ve tossed and sprinkled hundreds of pounds of de-icer, and I never found a really convenient way to apply it until I built this low-tech little spreader. It scoops the material out of a bag easily and shakes out an even layer of salt compound, rather than leaving stripes on your front steps. You can build it from stuff you’ve got laying around the house:Start with a big soup or coffee can and bore evenly spaced 7/8 in....

Q: How is it possible that a hybrid auto achieves better fuel mileage in city driving than highway driving tests? Regenerative braking does not convert 100% of the car’s KE to recharge the battery. Are the batteries fully charged at the conclusion of the city test by the gasoline engine? Is that fuel accounted for? Isn’t it true that ALL the energy used to propel the car is from the gasoline engine (either to power the car or to generate electricity to charge the batteries so that they can power the car)?...

Media Platforms Design TeamAny two-wheeled enthusiast knows the heart of the motorcycle is its engine – and so it’s no surprise Polaris, owners of the Indian brand, has been delicately but persistently teasing the powerplant that will motivate their new line of bikes which debut later this year.Polaris says the all-new engine “… reflects an unparalleled investment into researching the complete history of Indian Motorcycle power train development, including the review of volumes of historical documentation, miles of riding vintage motorcycles, and studying and dissecting a broad array of legendary Indian Motorcycle models....

Media Platforms Design TeamCAMBRIDGE, Mass. – It’s an odd-looking gadget–more like a free-standing safe than a self-contained DNA sequencer. This certainly doesn’t look like the kind of machine that could prevent diseases and save thousands of lives. And at the moment, the Polonator G.007 isn’t even sequencing anyone’s DNA. Its belly loaded with dye and front panel opened wide, the arcane inner workings of the box are exposed–not that that’s any less confusing, with fluid pumping through snaking, translucent lines....

Media Platforms Design Team Last night’s episode of Lost, “LaFleur,” finally ended the Left-behinder’s skips through time and landed them firmly in 1974—right in the midst of the Dharma/Others war. We welcome the break from dissecting time-travel theory to delve into another Lost subject we’ve been waiting to tackle: That darned sonic fence that manages to keep “Smokey The Monster” out of the compound while knocking out any human that tries to get through....

Media Platforms Design TeamToday at the Brooklyn headquarters of 3D Printer manufacturer MakerBot, the company gave the first official demos of the new Digitizer, a $1400 3D scanner that turns solid objects into digital models. The machine can scan any object less than eight inches in height and eight inches in diameter. The Digitizer uses two red lasers and a camera with a band pass filter to filter out all other colors of light....

It’s December, and Christmas is coming! As episode 8 of WGN America’s Manhattan opens, everybody in Los Alamos wants something—but these are things that Santa can’t bring.Liza Winter, whose biology experiments are going nowhere, wants a day job. Abby Isaacs, even though she’s Jewish and doesn’t celebrate Christmas, wants to see her parents. And Frank Winter wants more people to join his team that’s trying to build an implosion-style nuclear bomb....

(Published in the 2001 issue)Check out one of the Pentagon’s newest toys, the Hypersonic Cruise Missile. To the human ear, the sound of 180 bullets being fired in less than one-hundredth of a second is perceived as one enormous noise. And the fact that some people have heard that noise is testimony to the perseverance of one inventor with a unique vision of the future of weapons technology. “They say that half the engineers in the first company that I worked with wanted me to finish my coffee and leave as soon as possible,” says Mike O’Dwyer, recalling the way some of his far-reaching ideas were received....

View full post on TwitterA group of Siberian herders just stumbled upon a scientific oddity—quite literally—as they nearly fell into a gigantic hole. The crater measures between 60 and 100 meters deep, and is formed like a perfect cone. Herders in the remote village of Nosok sent photos to area scientists, who can’t come to a conclusion about what the hole actually is, the Siberian Times reports. And it’s the third such hole found in three weeks....

In a speech before members of the International Motor Press Association in New York, David Friedman of the Union of Concerned Scientists commented that “there’s no silver bullet for improving our dependence on oil.” His remarks echoes what PM’s Mike Allen wrote in our May 2006 cover story. But Friedman was optimistic about the possibility of greatly increasing fuel economy. “We have the current technology needed to double the fuel economy of today’ vehicles....

Media Platforms Design Team The ThreatHeavy Rockets North Korea has a variety of rockets mounted on trucks, mainly adapted from Russian and Chinese designs. These are direct descendants of the Katyusha or “Stalin Organ” rockets of WWII. They also developed some new rockets of their own. These are large caliber, 240mm (9.4 inch), and have a range estimated to be at least 25 miles. Each 17-ft-long rocket has a warhead containing about 100 pounds of explosives, though there are reportedly also chemical and incendiary versions....

Someone trying to sell a baseball allegedly signed by Babe Ruth in the early 1920s, or pass off documents as older than they really are, is up against a serious foe: The United States Secret Service.You might know that the Secret Service is on guard against counterfeit currency. You might not know, however, that it also keeps a one-of-a-kind International Ink Library with more than 11,400 specific writing ink fingerprints on hand....

Microscopic robots could swim inside blood vessels by moving like scallops, opening and closing a pair of shells to propel themselves to places within the body where they need to deliver medicines.Scallop-bots are a way to confront the challenge presented by the fact that most biological fluids are non-Newtonian, like quicksand, meaning their viscosity changes in response to pressure. For instance, the surface of non-Newtonian fluid oobleck will resist a quick tap but yield to a slow push....

Media Platforms Design TeamPittsburgh got a light show last night when a 500-pound, two-foot-diameter meteor streaked across the sky. Fragments of the object likely landed somewhere around Kittanning, NASA says. Visibility was lost at about 13 miles above the ground, but not before this video was captured.View full post on YoutubeThe video comes courtesy of the All Sky Fireball Network, a nationwide project that places 15 meteor-hunting cameras in public spaces....