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Media Platforms Design Team(Credit: All photos by James Joiner)Road trips often prove clichés true. From the moment you set foot in Denver, you are indeed on a high. It’s the overwhelming urge to jump on a mountain bike or strike out hiking toward the looming wall of the Rockies. It’s subconscious at first. You may find yourself magnetically drawn toward the lodge doors of a Patagonia store. But it grows the longer you stay, an Into the Wild energy pulling you toward nature, until you drown it out with that other high, a gallon or two of locally produced booze....

It’s only been a week since Bush announced the Auto Industry federal bailout plan and already there’s a treasure trove of second guessing. In particular, the $4 billion for Chrysler has raised the most eyebrows. The word on the street in Detroit is that Chrysler is on borrowed time. Cerberus, the private equity firm that owns Chrysler, recently offered to forfeit its stake in the company if someone would just take it....

If Burt Rutan stopped innovating right now, he would have a firm place in aerospace history for his dozens of radical aircraft designs and their many records. He created the first plane to circle the globe nonstop (Voyager, in 1986) and the first private craft to take a pilot to space, twice within two weeks – SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.Now, Rutan is working to make space travel cheap enough-and safe enough-for ordinary people to experience....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt might just be the race of the year: After years-long builds and rough-and-tumble qualifiers, 11 unmanned vehicles are set to take to the streets for the 2007 Urban Challenge. PM contributing editor and resident geek Erik Sofge is race-side in Victorville, Calif., with play-by-play coverage and live updates throughout the day. Stay tuned for more!UPDATE: Carnegie Mellon and GM’s Boss Wins 2007 Challenge EARLIER: Tough Road Ahead in Secret-Filled DARPA Urban ChallengePREVIEW: Behind the Scenes of the Hardest Robot Race Yet (with Video)PLUS: Carnegie Mellon vs....

Dark matter killed the dinosaurs. Maybe. At least, NYU’s Michael Rampino is proposing that it’s possible. Here’s how it works: Over many, many millions of years, our solar system orbits the center of the galaxy. But its path is not perfect— it oscillates up and down during its long journey. Every 25 to 30 million years, it passes through the dust disk on the galactic plane. Coincidentally, every 25 to 30 million years, Earth experiences an extinction event, often via asteroid impact or volcanic changes....

The Kepler Space Telescope helped take our understanding of exoplanets from a few dozen to more than 2,000 planets outside our own solar system. In under a minute, with a few months passing in a second, Ethan Kruse illustrates the rate of Kepler discovery. As you can see from the video, many Kepler worlds zip around their star far, far faster than any planet in our solar system – many in just a few days....

Twist the key. Your car cranks for a second or two, springs to life, and then quickly settles down into a fast idle while it warms up. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. This morning, no dice. It’s dead, and there’s no obvious reason why. Here’s how to fix a car that won’t start. The best approach to finding a solution is to remain methodical. This is classic systems analysis....

It’s still not clear what caused the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501, but the revelation that a co-pilot with far less experience than the captain was at the controls before the plane crashed into the Java Sea a month ago is once again bringing up parallels with the 2009 crash of Air France 447. Both aircraft plunged into the sea from a cruising altitude during severe storms with more junior crewmembers were at the helm....

Media Platforms Design TeamAfter a three-day journey, circa 2020, the Apollo-like Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle orbits the moon unmanned. Astronauts descend to the lunar surface in the Artemis lander. (Concept render by Jeremy Cook)One hundred and eighty-five miles above the planet, suspended between curving, blue horizon and starry blackness, a four-man spacecraft floats in low-Earth orbit. The year is 2020, and the situation routine. Suddenly, a bright tongue of flame erupts from the rear of the craft, signaling a maneuver that hasn’t been attempted since before most living humans were born....

The water is rising. Already the murky, greenish sea is swirling around my feet, and it’s coming up fast. Fortunately, I’m staying dry inside a 54-in.-wide watertight acrylic sphere attached to the front end of a 3.5-ton canary-yellow submarine built by an outfit called SEAmagine Hydrospace Corporation. This craft is the prototype for a line of personal vehicles that its makers say could change the personal submarine business from a fringe toy for the rich to an industry....

NASA Looks to Avoid Y2K 2.0Space Shuttle Discovery is one step closer to liftoff. Early this morning under the starry Florida sky, the shuttle was transported from its assembly hangar to a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.With the big Hubble repair mission still a year-and-a-half away, Discovery is slated to return to space in December so its crew can continue construction of the International Space Station. NASA is considering a launch as early as Dec....

View full post on YoutubeIt sounds like science fiction—and it probably is—but a team of researchers claim that the Milky Way may have at least one navigable wormhole … if, in fact, the galaxy isn’t just one giant wormhole itself.Come again?The research by a team from the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy is based on the idea that we’re thinking about and looking for dark matter in all the wrong ways....

An Indonesian investigator has concluded that a cascading series of technical failures, compounded by crew error, brought down an Indonesian AirAsia jetliner nearly a year ago. The crash of Air Asia Flight 8501 killed 162 people on December 28, 2014.Related StoryDebris from AirAsia Jet Found in Indonesian WatersAccording to sources we talked to, this deadly crash could have been prevented—a fact that won’t do much to revive confidence in the aviation industry in Southeast Asia, which is already rattled by a string of incidents including Malaysia Airlines Flight 370....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow did you start studying crop circles? I grew up in the 1980s in the U.K. when these started to appear and was naturally interested by them. But there was one specific night in 1996 when I was traveling around southern England, staying above a country pub. I awoke to noise of these guys talking outside, looking over this big sheet of paper. The next day there were photos of this amazing crop pattern that had appeared in a field just down the road....

When it was released a decade ago, the BBC series Planet Earth was one of the best reasons to own a high-definition TV. The majestic scenes of seabirds and wildebeests and elephants, paired with David Attenborough’s beloved narration, propelled the rise of HD. Now Attenborough and Planet Earth are coming back, and this time the series will take advantage of the best technology 2016 has to offer. Planet Earth 2 filmed many of those sweeping overhead shots using drones....

Media Platforms Design TeamDuring the late 1980s Honda lead a wave of Japanese manufacturers that introduced four-wheel steering in some sports cars. Why steer all four wheels? At lower speeds, turning the rear wheels in the opposite direction to the front wheels results in a smaller turning radius and faster cornering responses. At high speeds, turning all four wheels in concert improves high-speed stability. The trend was short-lived, though, owing to the complicated mechanical systems and the sometimes scary handling....

Update: This week the Obama Administration said it has destroyed the Syrian government’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, and ahead of schedule. In this feature originally published on July 14, 2014, we outlined just how you going about disarming this terrible technology.The people closest to the poison gas as it burst from the rocket shells would have died almost immediately, first violently convulsing, then, after choking on vomit, expiring from respiratory failure....

Here’s Hackaball, a new toy designed with teaching coding to children in mind. The toy, created by Made by Many, is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. The programmable ball has an accelerometer, lights, sound chips, a microcontroller, a microphone, and vibrating devices inside.The makers wanted it to be a foundation for future coding, making it a relatively straight-forward machine to design. To that end, it can be programmed via an iPad app....

Skywatchers get a treat tonight, and they don’t need anything but their naked eyes to see it.The peak of the annual Lyrid meteor shower happens around 10:30 PM your local time, NASA says. At its peak, people will be able to see 10 to 20 meteors per hour streak across the sky. That’s less than some of the superstar meteor showers, like the Perseids. The good news, though, is that you won’t have to stay up all night to see the Lyrids peak, and you won’t need anything to see them other than a dark location, clear skies, and a little patience....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’m standing at the edge of a field in southern Florida, strapped to another man in a harness of aluminum tubing and nylon webbing like a pantomime horse. I’m in front; veteran paragliding pilot Paul Czarnecki is in back. It’s early morning, and the air is calm and quiet except for the roar of the 15-hp two-stroke engine strapped to Czarnecki’s back. Behind him, 230 square feet of ripstop nylon lies spread out in an arc....