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Media Platforms Design TeamYou could forgive Webcrawler, Netscape, and Excite if they looked around in the mid-1990s and thought they would rule the internet forever. How quickly things change online.The Washington Post just published this look back at web dominance over the past two decades, built by compiling data from comScore showing the 20 most popular websites in December of every year from 1996. The chart is a fascinating look at more than 15 years of tech giants rising, falling, and consolidating as the web evolved....

If you’ve ever wanted to ride a speeder bike of your own, this project’s for you. If you’re a small child, anyway.Father and Instructables user Tez_Gelmir decided to go all out for his daughter’s first birthday. What does “all out” look like for someone that regularly builds stuff? A rocking horse that looks like a speeder bike from Star Wars, that’s what.View full post on YoutubeFor the most part, the rocking horse is modeled off concept art for the movie prop, but he also consulted other models for specific details....

Marshall Banana wasn’t quite content with the LEGO offerings for a Millennium Falcon, so he built his own. One year later, it’s done. All 7,500 bricks of it. Stretching across three feet, the whole thing weighs in at 22 pounds. The inside of the ship isn’t quite an exact replica: in order for the whole thing to work, Banana had to fill it solidly with bricks so it wouldn’t fall apart....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile Bilbo Baggins’ sword Sting lit up to warn of Orcs, this cool real-life replica illuminates to warn its wearer of something a little less evil: wireless signals. This Hobbit-themed DIY project, featured on Make, involves taking a toy replica sword and adding a Spark Core unit. By taking advantage of already-existing tech in the replica Sting sword (including light features, motion sensors, and actuators), users can modify it to light up in the presence of Wi-Fi....

Yearning to sit on the couch and play some Super Mario Bros like the good ol’ days? Or wait, no, Sonic 2. Wait jk Crash Bandicoot! Lakka’s got your back. In just a few minutes it’ll turn virtually any PC into a dead simple all-in-one emulation machine. More streamlined than installing a whole bunch of different emulators onto your laptop, Lakka is a custom Linux distribution that crams nearly every retro emulator you could want into one bundle with a slick UI....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design Team As the old TV commercial says, there’s a lot riding on your tires. Indeed, tires could well be the most important system on your vehicle, given that they affect every performance parameter from handling and acceleration to braking and ride comfort. So it’s no surprise that maintenance on your tires should command as much respect, if not more, than on all the other parts and systems of your car....

In my last column, I helpfully laid out the top five robots that you can own. Those five robots—some affordable, some not—were harmless, fun and available for sale to civilians. This week, we’re changing course and stepping to the other side: Prepare to look at a few robots that do not come with fake fur, instruction booklets, or the ability to giggle. Now, in reverse order of hazard, allow me to present the top five robots that own you....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed he saw gleaming aircraft he later described as “saucerlike objects.” He had no photos to bolster the first and most famous report of a flying saucer. In Fate magazine, Arnold wrote: “I would have given almost anything that day to have had a movie camera.” His vision of saucer-shaped craft was quickly embraced by popular culture, showing up in comics, movies, even children’s toys....

View full post on YoutubeWhen most of us imagine coming face to face with hot, molten lava, we envision ourselves getting swallowed up, Pompeii-style, by a smoldering cavern of doom. But the viral video above from neuroscientist Alex Rivest shows that lava actually has a gooey, gummy-bear-like texture — not the waterfall of fire that the cartoons of your youth might have led you to believe.However, this does not mean that the liquid rock (which can burn anywhere from 1292 to 2192 degrees Fahrenheit) wouldn’t kill you....

Headcase DesignIt’s not just you. Hotel TV systems are a constant pain point for frequent travelers. A partial checklist of complaints I’ve heard (and, frankly, voiced): There is rarely an interactive onscreen channel guide, every time the TV is turned on it resets to an information channel (with the volume jacked up), and it can take a second or more for the TV to change from one channel to the other....

Media Platforms Design TeamLOS ANGELES — Here at the L.A. Auto Show is the first new large sedan from Ford’s luxury division in decades. Due to go on sale later this year, the MKS will be Lincoln’s flagship vehicle, next to the Town Car, of course. But unlike its crosstown rival Cadillac, Lincoln uses front- or all-wheel drive instead of rear drive. The MKS rides on a version of Ford’s D platform....

SONOMA, Calif. – When driving is limited only by the laws of physics and the vehicle’s performance envelope, it’s quite an exhilarating feeling. No speed limits, no stoplights, no cars crowding the road in front of you. Just you, the car and the gas pedal planted firmly to the carpet. Of course the best way to push a car to 9/10ths of its (and your) potential, is without breaking the law....

Media Platforms Design TeamUPDATE (2:00p.m., April 4): On April 3, French crash investigators—aided by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts—announced that they had found the remains of Air France flight 447, as well as bodies of some the passengers. According to the Wall Street Journal, this was the fourth mission to hunt for the wreckage of the Airbus 330, which disappeared nearly two years ago after taking off from Rio de Janiero on a flight bound for Paris....

A huge leak just went from bad to worse for health insurer Anthem. Earlier this week we heard that data for 80 million customers had been hacked. Today, the company revealed that they hadn’t encrypted customer information. Millions of stolen records from customers and employees included names, dates of birth, social security numbers, and home addresses all in plain text. Anthem says that customer information is encrypted whenever transmitted out, but while the information sits in the database, it’s unencrypted....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Friday, French accident investigators released a much-anticipated report on Air France 447—actually . Many rushed to pin the blame squarely on the pilots. Indeed, as details of the document trickled out in the days after the recorder was pulled up from the depths of the Atlantic, the phrases “human error” and “pilot error” appeared frequently in headlines atop numerous news stories around the world.a dry recitation of the flight’s final minutes It is not hard to see what’s behind the finger pointing....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’ve dedicated months or maybe even years of your life to a project that is a grand vision, technically impressive and maybe a little off-beat, we want to know about it. We’re looking for propellor bicycles, Hydrogen powered Sherman Tanks, backyard rockets, crazy plane designs (that actually fly), jet-powered go-karts and garbage-powered ferris wheels. If you show us your project (it must already be built!) and we’re impressed, you and your invention will end up in the September issue of Popular Mechanics....

Media Platforms Design Team"What good is an automobile refrigerator that only works when the car is running?" So asks Boing Boing in a recent post highlighting one of the “low moments in how-to history,” these plans to build an automobile-sized refrigerator. Writer Matt Maranian doesn’t bother to ID the source of this silliness, but I happen to spend a lot of time clicking through the wonderful and the inexplicable from the Popular Mechanics archive, and I would know that technical illustration style and typeface anywhere....

Electric cars have gained a lot of street cred over the last year and a half, evolving in the public imagination from the milquetoast General Motors EV1’s of the 1990s to modern electric supercars such as the Tesla Roadster. Yet even with their new high-performance image, electric cars still have an aura of inaccessibility to them. These vehicles are either expensive (Teslas run about $100K) or still somewhat notional (Ford’s Edge HySeries isn’t expected until 2010—and it isn’t a full-electric car anyway)....

Media Platforms Design TeamEngineers working on San Francisco’s ill-starred Bay Bridge have fingered a culprit in the repair job that went awry Tuesday evening, forcing the bridge’s closure: metal fatigue caused by harmonic resonance. The phenomenon, in which small vibrations at key frequencies gradually build up until they are large enough to damage a structure, is the scourge of bridge architects everywhere. At first, many experts had fingered wind as the culprit in the accident....

Two Russian boys reportedly escaped from their kindergarten in the city of Magnitogorsk with a mission to buy a sports car. Not just any sports car, mind you. They had their hearts set on a Jaguar.An AFP report sources the Komsomolskaya Pravda, a daily Russian tabloid, which says the boys disappeared from the schoolyard while on a walk with their group two weeks ago. They’d apparently been plotting for some time and had used spades from the sandbox to dig underneath a fence....