Media Platforms Design TeamBMW and Mercedes-Benz will soon bring small EVs to market with their i3 and B-Class. But Audi will take a different tack with the A3.The A3 e-tron will arrive in early 2015, as a plug-in hybrid that emphasizes a sporty driving experience. And it will only come in the Sportback bodystyle. Under the hood is a turbocharged 1.4-liter four cylinder that combine with electric power to produce 201 hp and 258 lb-ft of torque....
A retro yellow school bus idling in a cloud of diesel may not seem like the most cutting-edge ride. But on a rainy afternoon during the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Burlington, Vermont, I readily climbed into one for a quick tour of the future of fuel. First stop: A hydrogen filling station. If you want to top off your tank with the lightest element in the universe anywhere in New England, this is the place—the only place....
By early April, there was so much snow in Alpine, WYO., that it was hard to find Dan Adams’s snowmobiling school, the Next Level Riding Clinics. I was looking for a big black trailer on a small side road in a boom-and-bust town on the edge of the Tetons, the 12,000-foot mountain range that sits on the state’s border with Idaho. Forty minutes away, in the town of Jackson, you can find tofu burritos, a world-famous ski resort, Dick Cheney, and Sandra Bullock, plus tons of backcountry skiers who hike up untamed ridges on Teton Pass, then lay steep tracks back to their Subarus....
Media Platforms Design TeamWe’ve all seen the oily rainbow sheen in parking lot puddles after a storm. But it’s easy to forget what happens next: That oil finds its way to a storm drainage system, where it’s likely to be flushed untreated into local waterways, and could carry with it pesticides, household chemicals, PCBs, and nutrients that cause algae blooms.“Stormwater runoff is one of the biggest problems in America in terms of water pollution,” says Paul Edmiston, a chemist with ABSMaterials who won a 2011 PopMech Breakthrough Award for Osorb, a nanoparticle product that soaks up non-polar molecules and can remove 90 to 100 percent of water pollutants....
To monitor the entire globe for wildfires around the clock, NASA is turning to a fleet of 200 satellites to keep an eye on everything. Every last thing on the ground. Each of the satellites in the FireSat fleet comes equipped with an infrared camera to keep a continous eye on the ground. When a wildfire reaches an area of about 35 feet, it will alert personnel on the ground within three minutes, who can then create an appropriate response....
Media Platforms Design TeamOn July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first, tenuous steps on another world. This iconic moment marked the beginning of a new chapter of space exploration, but Armstrong’s famous first steps also highlighted the daunting challenge ahead: How to explore the immense surface of the moon when the astronauts had to struggle with every footstep.This summer marks the 40th anniversary of one of NASA’s solutions: The Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV)....
Media Platforms Design Team NEW YORK — In the very, very back corner of the makeshift pit in the Jacob Javits Center here, four contracted machinists are making cuts and putting the proverbial ice on the wounds of the FIRST Robotics Competition’s metallic contenders. Charged with the responsibility to drill, grind and weld the fallen back into fighting form, the group on-hand from NASA’s Robotic Alliance Project grinded out more than 110 jobs in a day and a half....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat can you tell me about Penn & Teller: Tell a Lie?PENN JILLETTE: It takes the basic format of Discovery, which is, you know, fascinating, unbelievable science stories. [Each show will have] six or seven of these science pieces, with us doing a lot of the demos ourselves, and one of them is a lie. It continues our obsession with critical thinking and skepticism. The formation of Penn & Teller was about the idea: Can you use magic to tell the truth?...
BAGHDAD, July 1 — Around 1115, a small convoy takes fire just past the Al Walid mosque in Baghdad. I’m getting the story in a treatment room back at 28th CSH, where Sergeant Jared Stern is visiting his wounded buddy, Sergeant Matt Rogers. “I hear Rogers yell ‘Stop!’ over the intercom,” Stern says. “I couldn’t hear the rest. The last truck got hit, and Rogers and our medic were wounded.” The medic took shrapnel to the face and upper arm, Rogers to his back, shoulders and arms....
Researchers at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands found an unexpected guest inside a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue: a mummified Buddhist monk sitting in lotus position. Found during CT scans of the statue, the body is believed to be Lin Quan, leader of a meditation school around the year 1,100 CE.The monk went through a grim and grueling process known as “self-mummification.” He would have eaten nuts and seeds for 1,000 days before eating only bark for another 1,000, then drank varnish to poison himself....
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/yDkEbo324Dk?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]Ken Block is an X-Game medalist and a Rally America and World Rally team champion. But if you recognize him (or his souped-up Ford Fiesta), chances are it’s from one of the five installments of his Gymkhana video series, each of which has garnered millions of YouTube views. (Click here to see the most recent one.)To accomplish all this, Block drives a Ford-powered Monster Energy car that’s as versatile as he is....
ZuneWMVh2.4We’ve got our beef with the iPod screen, but Microsoft still isn’t taking advantage of the Zune’s 3-in. display-as of now, there’s no video content on the Zune Marketplace download service. That lack of attention to TV shows, music videos, movies and YouTube clips is a huge concern, especially since PC users have had another high-powered, big-screen option for months: Creative’s Zen Vision W.The Zune targets would-be iPod refugees-PC users, one would think, who already pack a plethora of video on their hard drive in a half-dozen-or-so formats....
Media Platforms Design TeamTrick ‘r Treat (2007)Media Platforms Design TeamProducer Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X2) has delivered a delicious, candy-coated Halloween treat for horror fans a little early this year. Written and directed by Singer’s X2 co-writer, Michael Dougherty, Trick ‘r Treat is an old-school horror anthology in the Creepshow vein. Even with the additional star wattage from Anna Paquin and Brian Cox, Trick ‘r Treat sat on studio shelves for close to two years before being relegated to the direct-to-video market, where it will no doubt go on to become a perennial holiday classic....
Media Platforms Design TeamSafely handling a tire blowout at highway speed is sort of like going to class as a star athlete at a college-football powerhouse: Do nothing more than sit quietly and you’ll probably get a B. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is nothing.While working for a major tire company, I taught about 1500 drivers how to successfully handle a tire blowout. We affixed plastic explosive to the tire sidewall, which not only blew out the tire but also realistically simulated the petrifying noise of a burst tire....
The Pentagon’s mad-science wing, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has always marched to its own drummer. That’s immediately obvious in the acronyms it uses to describe its personnel, and especially in those used for the more than 200 programs it has running at any given time.“The names were acronyms made up by the program manager, who always tried to come up with ones which could be pronounced and still described the project,” says Tony Tether, DARPA’s former and longest-serving director....
PARIS—Recently, automakers have begun to successfully globalize their products in a way the market has never seen before. Through computing power and supplier resources, car companies can develop one platform for use in sometimes dozens of products around the world. Yet for all this globalization, there are still great cars, made by great manufacturers … that we’ll still never see here in the United States.And many of them are running fuel-efficient diesels, too....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn 2001, inventor Dean Kamen had the world’s attention. Something was coming, something code-named Ginger, with the potential to change the way cities were built and revolutionize transportation. Thus came the Segway Personal Transporter, or PT, which Kamen famously said “will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” Seven years and an endless heaping of scorn later, the PT remains a national joke....
Media Platforms Design TeamApple’s new iOS 7 brings a beautiful new aesthetic to its mobile operating system, along with a slew of functional improvements. The upgrade modernizes the iPhone by removing all vestiges of the early smartphone era, when buttons had to scream, “I’m a button!” and painfully twee skeuomorphic touches directed people to understand digital calendars and rolodexes. But Apple didn’t do enough to address nonaesthetic limitations. Here are some features iOS 7 is, unfortunately, still missing:Set Your Own DefaultsOn an Android phone, the first time you open a Web page from an email, you’re asked what browser you’d like to use and whether you’d like to make that the default Web-surfing app....
Media Platforms Design TeamHe was the first blogger allowed to cover a White House press briefing, and now Washingtonian magazine editor-at-large Garrett M. Graff is the author of “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House.” As primary season heats up, he spoke with PM to break down how technology and the Internet are changing the presidential game—from the YouTube debates and smear campaigning to leadership in digital infrastructure and the future of online voting....
Martin Vargic’s rending of over 500 exoplanets discovered before October 2015 (about a quarter of all the exoplanets we have observed) helps us get a sense of the vast diversity of the planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. Vargic, a Slovak graphic designer, meticulously created these images based on estimated radius and temperature, although he also considered age, density, and stellar metallicity in some cases. The spread includes some of the most fascinating and alien types of exoplanets we have discovered, including super-earths, gas dwarfs, water worlds, hot Jupiters, hot Neptunes, and super-dense diamond planets....
