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Media Platforms Design TeamAt first, the central event in eerie auteur M. Night Shyamalan’s latest effort, The Happening, appears to be a terrorist attack leveled at New York City: A toxin released into the air blocks the neurotransmitters responsible for self-preservation, causing disorientation and, eventually, death (by the victims’ own hands, no less). Later, scientists pinpoint the toxin as a natural compound–and recognize the disaster’s scope, from Boston to Maryland, as far too large for a single terrorist action....

View full post on YoutubeOne problem with finding life in our solar system, or even beyond, is that most of our tests assume biology familiar to our own. To detect microorganisms under a microscope, for example, scientists typically feed them and look for signs of their metabolism, or use dyes that react in specific ways with known bacteria.But researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have come up with a new way to look for life—one that doesn’t require us to serve them lunch and hope they crop up, and one intended to find life unlike our own....

Jens StengerCambridge, Mass.Age: 40Years on Job: 6 When physicist Jens Stenger joined the Harvard Art Museum in 2004, the staff was consumed by a mystery–why was a set of murals, painted in the 1960s by artist Mark Rothko, changing color? Stenger’s team determined that Rothko’s homemade pigments and adhesives had chemically reacted with one another over the decades. Now, he’s trying to restore the murals so future generations can enjoy them....

Media Platforms Design TeamStock UpNothing adds value to an item like firing it from a cannon. To make sports fans scramble for a shirt, use the items from the materials list above to build an air tank, barrel and trigger.Assemble PipeSolvent-weld the pipe and pipe fittings together to make the barrel and air-tank assemblies, using purple PVC primer and cement to make the connections. The idea is to reduce the 3-inch (air tank) and 2-inch (barrel) pipes to fit the 1-inch solenoid valve openings....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat do you think is the most important science and technology issue to be addressed by the next president? What’s the biggest issue he should take on?Is it energy? Genomics? Is it bird flu? Is it the polar capsare they really melting? Is it terrorism? You pick the crisis du jour: The answer to all these issues is going to be an educated, competent global society. This country ought to lead the world, for lots of reasons....

Just after midnight on August 23, 2014, the Dearborn Truck Plant, on the site of Henry Ford’s legendary Rouge factory, went offline to begin the largest transformation of any manufacturing facility in the company’s history. Ford’s decision to change the body of the F-150 — the company’s most valuable and iconic vehicle — from steel to aluminum alloy was a four-year process that involved no shortage of nail chewing, because to pull it off required, essentially, building an entirely new factory where a perfectly good one was already standing....

Media Platforms Design TeamLandscape lighting describes a large and varied family of outdoor lighting fixtures. These versatile, weatherproof lights can be used to illuminate pathways, flower beds, trees, fences, driveways, stone walls, doorways, and more.Some landscape lighting systems operate on “line voltage,” the 120-volt current from your house. For DIY installation, though, we highly recommend low-voltage systems that operate on just 12 volts. They’re less expensive, easier to install, safer, and use less energy....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off August 10, 2001 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Photo Credit: NASA via Getty Images) After 45 years and innumerable blastoffs, NASA has just retired the iconic countdown clock at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.It’s easy to see the retirement of the 26 foot wide clock—which premiered at the Apollo 12 moon landing launch in 1969—as yet another sign of the changing times....

The Phoenix Mars Lander, now only nine days into its breakthrough mission, is already causing scientists to buzz about what it has found. Images taken by Phoenix and relayed back to Earth show what appears to be a chunk of solid ice at the landing site. Scientists didn’t confirm the presence of ice at a briefing on Tuesday, but since ice is the reason the $420 million mission was launched, researchers certainly are hoping the Phoenix was lucky enough to stumble upon some....

Colors have great symbolic power. They make a difference in how we distinguish certain items (blue for cold, red for hot) and even in how we understand certain moods (think red for anger). But for the estimated 285 million people who suffer some form of visual impairment, colors don’t make the same kind of difference. The Feelipa Color Code is intended to make colors newly accessible. It’s color you can touch....

Media Platforms Design Team Remember Rhys Millen’s brash attempt to back flip a truck? It was supposed to happen in Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve 2007. But the New Zealand-born stunt driver, drifter, and all-around adrenaline junky suffered a hard landing last December during a practice session for the jump, fracturing a neck vertebra, breaking his back, and wrecking the truck in the process. The official event in Sin City never happened....

The problem, perhaps, with calling your company Hacking Team is that you’re pretty much begging to get hacked. Which is what happened this Sunday, when someone dumped 400 gigabytes of leaked Hacking Team data onto torrent networks (as first reported over at CSOOnline), with that data quickly getting mirrored at several different sites.The Italian company became notorious for working as a sort of cyber arms dealer, selling off-the-shelf hacking tools to law enforcement and government officials around the world....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’ve ever had a Google search return a web page or pages that you’d already visited, you might have been disconcerted to see that little bit of gray text underneath a suggested site that tells you exactly how many times you’ve gone to that page and the date of your last visit. At this point, we’ve long been accustomed to the idea that our individual computers keep a history of our visited web pages—we are reminded every time the browser offers to auto-complete the URL we’re typing....

SuborbitalMedia Platforms Design TeamSpaceShipTwoManufacturer: Scaled Composites ➡ Size: 60 feet long, 42-foot wingspan ➡ Seats: Two crew members, six passengers ➡ Propulsion: Carried to 50,000 feet by the WhiteKnightTwo plane, then propelled to a maximum altitude of 68 miles by a hybrid liquid/solid-fuel rocket. ➡ Launch Plans: Scheduled to begin flights by 2013 from Spaceport America in New Mexico.Media Platforms Design TeamLynxManufacturer: XCOR Aerospace ➡ Size: 35 feet long, 24-foot wingspan ➡ Seats: One pilot, one passenger ➡ Propulsion: Lifted by four liquid-oxygen-and-kerosene rockets to just above 62 miles....

September 1, 1985, 1:05 a.m., the North AtlanticRobert Ballard is belowdecks on the R/V Knorr, a 279-foot research vessel owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, staring at a bank of screens. He wears a blue cap and a blue shirt and his face is lit by the humming blue glow of the monitors. At forty-three he has completed more than seventy expeditions as an oceanographic explorer and discovered sprawling geologic phenomena, entire species, whole undersea worlds no one knew existed....

The next generation of ground-based telescopes will be able to peer into some of the most distant reaches of the universe, and even maybe directly image a few exoplanets, too. Now the Thirty Meter Telescope is one step closer to breaking ground, thanks to a $243 million injection from the Canadian government. Right now, the biggest telescope is the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands of Spain. But the Thirty Meter Telescope is one of three planned telescopes that will blow away that size....

Media Platforms Design TeamJapanese astronaut Koichi Wakata (top) and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin pose with the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic torch as they board prior to blast-off to the International Space Station. Credit: AFP/Getty ImagesWith the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia fast approaching, the Olympic torch is already a month into its journey from Greece to the site of this winter’s games. This year, the Russians decided to take a side trip to where no torch has gone before....

This behemoth is Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko’s newly-built Sailing Yacht A.Not to be confused with Mr. Melnichenko’s 394-foot Motor Yacht A, this boat is 438 feet long, a staggering 300 feet tall, and weighs 14,224 metric tons. The massive vessel is operated from a black-glass-panel touchscreen on the bridge and the diesel-electric engine can get to yacht up to a swift 24 mph. A gigantic single piece of curved glass, one of the largest ever made, was designed for the keel....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Osprey’s 38-foot-diameter, three-blade prop rotors, which generate high-speed winds that are said to push sailors and other airplanes off flight decks, knocked down tree limbs and injured 10 bystanders during a public demonstration in Staten Island, N.Y. Blasting currents of air is only one problem with operating the airplane off flight decks: Last year the Marine Corps reported that leaving the engine idling could raise temperatures as high as 350 degrees and melt the flight deck in 10 minutes....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe cockroach—groggy from anesthesia—wakes up. It takes account of its new environment, finding itself in a forest. The roach, seeing darkness, begins scuttling toward a shadowy patch behind the trees, as roaches do.But this forest is a fiction. It has no smell, sound, or texture. In truth, the cockroach is in a lab, tethered to a wire by a glob of beeswax and resin, its six legs perched atop a large hollow sphere kept afloat by an imperceptible current of air....