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Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Dimitri Gerondidakis/NASA) As if a new administration and the rise of the private space industry weren’t enough, it’s suddenly become an even more critical time for NASA, with its ambitious plans to send manned missions to the moon and Mars while facing mounting fiscal and political realities. The Orion spacecraft at the heart of the agency’s next-gen Constellation exploration program is being designed to resupply the International Space Station and fly to the moon, but the space shuttle fleet is due to retire in 2010 and Orion won’t be ready to fly in time....

There are so many car buying and selling websites nowadays that it can seem like a maze, and with the 2021 used car market being what it’s been this year, you’ll want a gameplan before you start looking to sell or buy your next vehicle. So we’ll walk you through some of the best used car sites for shopping right now, based on your needs. To See Past Sales of Similar Cars: eBay MotorsI bought my 1998 BMW M3 convertible on eBay....

Fresher blood is better than stale: It carries more oxygen and, when transfused into patients, speeds recovery. Military medics are all too familiar with this problem in the field, where donated blood may take two or more weeks to reach soldiers who need it immediately. But medical researchers—also known as blood pharmers—are working on manufacturing the red stuff on the spot. With a machine the size of a few refrigerators, the Defense Department’s advanced research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) envisions liter upon liter of fresh blood churning out, destined for the veins of injured soldiers....

SKIP TO TODAY’S LIVE REPORTING. REPORT FROM SATURDAY, JULY 1, 2006: 4:32 PM EDT: Just spoke with Tom Jones, who had a moment to chat in between Fox News segments. I asked him about todays scrub. “It is a fairly common thing,” Jones tells me. “Unfortunately, it’s part of the life of an astronaut. I’ve had two scrubs over my four missions, so I’ve had to strap in six times. Overall, there’s probably about a success rate of 60% for scheduled launches....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo be clear, I did not drive the . What I did drive was Nissan’s proof-of-concept behind the BladeGlider: a test mule mocked up with a similar narrow-front-track suspension arrangement. It’s meant to demonstrate the virtues of this unconventional setup to Nissan engineers and executives, and a handful of journalists. Nissan BladeGlider conceptLet me be clear on another point: This car changes everything—forget what you thought you knew about sports car handling....

The newest friendly competition between Apple and Google isn’t about iPhone and Android, nor about Apple TV and Chromecast. It’s about wind and solar.Google today announced a plan to power 100 percent of the Googleplex, its home campus in Mountain View, CA, with wind energy. The tech giant will buy about half the juice that the Altamont Pass wind farm makes, enough to power the entire campus 50 miles away. As part of the deal, Wired says, wind farm owner NextEra Energy will upgrade many of the old turbines with new models that produce twice as much energy....

Media Platforms Design Team A Bombardier Superscooper in action during an earlier fire.In the past three days, wildfires fanned by 70-mph Santa Ana winds have destroyed at least 1500 homes in Southern California and forced an estimated 300,000 people to evacuate. Firefighters continue to battle 17 blazes that have burned more than 350,000 acres; a dozen fires rage out of control. In the mountainous terrain in sprawling Los Angeles County, water bombers are a key tool for fighting the flames, says Capt....

India is less than a week away from launching its first space observatory. The Astrosat will launch on September 28 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center aboard the PSLV-C30 spacecraft. The craft works with multiple imagers, including ultraviolet, visible light, and high / low energy x-ray simultaneously. This will enable it to see not just stars and galaxies, but also dimmer, cooler objects like brown dwarves and dying stars in ultraviolet, as well as black hole emissions in x-ray....

Media Platforms Design TeamNASA today decided to fund a new Mars mission called InSight that will plumb the depths of the planet, seeking clues to Martian geology and planetary formation. The lessons it could learn would help tell scientists how Earth formed. The mission is scheduled to land on Mars in September 2016 and to operate for two years; it will be under the auspices of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which just completed the landing of Curiosity....

Invented to make secret codes at the end of World War I but made famous by the Nazis (and by the British cryptographers who eventually deciphered its encryptions), the Enigma machine is a marvel of early computing technology. Now a rare three-rotor Enigma has sold for $232,015 in a Sotheby’s auction.Engima machines are quite scarce, as retreating German military personnel destroyed them before they could fall into enemy hands at the end of World War II....

Media Platforms Design TeamMORE NEW COVERAGE FROM THE ARMS RACE* TECH WATCH: Inside the Black Market for Antiaircraft MissilesHow Governments Sell WeaponsU.S.: Arms vendors have two ways to sell to other nations. Foreign Military Sales are government-to-government agreements negotiated by the Pentagon. Direct Commercial Sales are negotiated between manufacturers and buyers and are licensed by the State Department. Congressional approval is required for sales over $14 million; some allies enjoy a higher limit....

Media Platforms Design Team Nikon D90 & 18-105mm VR lens kit /// $1,299 ($999 without lens) The Promise: Nikon’s new D90 is the first digital SLR that can capture both still images and high-definition movie clips with sound. Because digital SLRs use a mirror to reflect light onto the eyepiece, the mirror needs to be moved out of the way in order to record video. To do this, the D90 employs its Live View mode to lock the mirror back so the camera can shoot HD clips directly from the imaging sensor....

Media Platforms Design TeamPopular Mechanics: Does NASA’s investment in private space validate competitions like the Google Lunar X PRIZE?Peter Diamandis: I think so. Contracting with entrepreneurial companies and focusing on core technology is going to be critical to NASA being able to achieve its goals more flexibly, more reliably and much more cheaply. I think we’re going to see incentivized competitions used as a tool to try and get new players and new approaches to areas that are difficult, that we don’t know how to solve....

Video by Doug Weinstein (surface) and Richard Bailey (underwater)A while back, I reported here on rebreather technology, but for most divers, traditional open-circuit scuba is still the way to go. Modern scuba gear is relatively cheap, rugged and reliable. Nonetheless, things do go wrong, and although divers generally have both a regular and a backup second-stage regulator (the part that goes in your mouth), those both connect to the same first-stage regulator and the same tank of air....

In the mid-1950s, the U.S. Army was looking for ways to increase individual soldier mobility. This was the age of the so-called “nuclear battlefield,” where nuclear weapons were expected to be used liberally. Anything that gave U.S. soldiers the ability to move rapidly and avoid nukes was given consideration.Helicopters were the new thing in warfare, having been used for search and rescue and casualty evacuation in the Korean War. The DeLackner company of Mount Vernon, New York had an idea: what if every soldier could have his own helicopter?...

I learned to drive a stick shift from my dad, who summoned all the patience he could muster while I stalled out the Ford Escort over and over again. If that kind of teaching strategy is not sufficiently hardcore for your lifestyle, though, then may I suggest this video by Riffshop. It’s a two-and-a-half-minute shredfest dedicated to teaching you proper manual transmission technique. It’s always safety first with death metal bands, you know, so Riffshop yell-reminds you to put on your seatbelt and adjust your mirrors before moving on the the finer points of operating the clutch....

Painter Robert Xavier Burden creates still lifes using some of the stillest subjects he can: action figures. Whether the subject matter is Battlecat from Masters of the Universe, Hulk Hogan, Voltron, or Slimer from Ghostbusters , he faithfully paints murals befitting a church window as much as a toy store. His latest project is one of his most ambitious, paying tribute to the franchise that helped popularize the toy tie-in. He’s created a mural dedicated to those three-inch Star Wars figures Kenner released in the 1970s and 1980s—iconic, low-articulation figures ready to excite the nostalgist in all of us....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Yale Poison Ivy Rope (120 feet), $120 Unlike rock climbing, tree climbing requires nonstretching, static rope. Poison Ivy, rated to 6500 pounds, is a favorite of arborists—it’s flexible and holds knots well.2. Petzl ELios Helmet, $66 It’s easy to forget about safety with your head in the clouds. Petzl has you (and your skull) covered. The helmet is lightweight and lets the breeze reach your noggin via ventilation slots that slide open....

A faint, tinny hum tickles my ears shortly after I exit the interstate in Hercules, Calif. Hum grows to buzz as I pull into a business park of sprawling asphalt and scrawny saplings. Stopping in front of a low-slung office building, I kill the motor and pop open the car door. Suddenly the din is phenomenal, a concerto for remote-control airplane, weed whacker and chain saw.It’s the sound of pocket bikes....

If Fox’s Fringe is full of junk science (including people who walk through walls and communicate with the dead), then Lie to Me, the network’s newest law enforcement-themed drama, is just the opposite. At the show’s center is Cal Lightman (Tim Roth), a scientist whose expertise is detecting and interpreting “micro” expressions—involuntary facial expressions that last just a moment—a useful skill if you want to want to figure out whether someone’s lying, and why....