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We’ve all seen it on TV: rainstorms of biblical proportions sweeping entire villages into the sea, and damp, devastated flood victims being interviewed in front of a pile of sodden furnishings and clothing. But then it happens closer to home—and this time it’s your car, not the entire village. There’s a high-water line halfway up the windshield, and several inches of mud in the interior and the trunk. It smells like a swamp, and it’s only getting worse in the hot sun....

DETROIT — Don’t be fooled by the rounded shapes and tight contours of the body on the Chrysler Nassau Concept car. In real terms, this is a full-sized car—powerfully equipped enough that it would sit at the top of Chrysler’s sedan lines if the company ever decided put it into production. Like Chrysler’s 300 in its uniqueness, the Nassau’s styling would be a standout at any price level.Numbers tell the story....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe year is 2025. Detroit, the poster child of the Great Recession, is emerging as a model of urban life. The transformation could be called a miracle but for the fact that the change was wrought by the very things that first made Detroit great: innovation, industriousness, and a will to win against all odds.The metamorphosis grew from desperation. In 2008, two of the Big Three carmakers were swirling toward the sinkhole of bankruptcy....

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, is part of a just-announced organization called OpenAI, a group that has the goal of ensuring peaceful artificial intelligence research. Sam Altman, founder and president of YCombinator, is Musk’s cofounder.Musk previously signed a letter on the dangers of AI not built for the common good. But the OpenAI initiative puts his money where his mouth is, promoting “digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to the blog post announcing the OpenAI partnership....

One of the most abundant elements in the universe is getting harder to come by.Helium goes into a lot more than balloons. Because the gas is inert and has extreme melting and boiling points—both near absolute zero—scientists use it in cryogenics, high-energy accelerators, arc welding, and silicon wafer manufacturing. A severe reduction in the availability of helium could force hospitals to replace costly MRI magnets or restrict patient access to them....

The Threat: Millions of acres of the U.S. burn every yearWhere: Sunbelt states and AlaskaWhen: June to SeptemberDon’t confuse a house fire with a wildland fire that’s about to overrun your house. If you didn’t evacuate earlier—and you probably should have—your house is where you make your final stand. Shutting your windows against flying embers is an obvious step, but just as important is to open the fireplace damper to ventilate deadly gas and smoke that will precede the fire....

Media Platforms Design Teambgcolor="#cccccc">Before You Start ScrapingCover UpRemove furniture, place dropcloths. Install outlet protectors.Wear ProtectionProtect yourself by wearing a dust mask and goggles.Spray the CeilingMist the texture with water to soften it and to reduce dust.Q: What is the best way to remove popcorn finish texture from my home’s ceiling?A: The best way to remove a popcorn ceiling finish is simply to scrape it off. That sounds easy, but it’s actually a tough and dirty job....

Late last week, NASA announced that its future heavy-lift cargo rocket—designed to haul lunar landers and exploration hardware to Earth orbit and beyond—will not be powered by the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), NASA’s workhorse rocket motor. The agency had originally planned to use five SSMEs to propel the core stage of the Cargo Launch Vehicle (CaLV), hoping to save substantially on development costs with an engine that has powered the shuttle for 25 years (through 114 shuttle missions, only one SSME has suffered an in-flight failure)....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe latest episode of Lost, “The Other Woman,” talked not of time travel and sat phones, but instead returned to one of the show’s original mysteries: What is it about the island that messes with women’s reproductive systems, putting their lives at such a constant risk?Back in Season 3, we learned that Claire was the first mother on the island; until her son Aaron’s birth, all pregnant women there died during their third trimester (in total, pregnancy has killed nine women)....

Q: I have a security/fire alarm system that links to an emergency call center via my VoIP telephone service. If the power goes out, will my alarm system be disabled?A. If you don’t have some sort of backup power system, both your alarm and the VoIP phone service it connects to will be kaput. To prevent a power outage from taking down your whole system, you’ll need some sort of generator or battery backup....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe first real sign that something is wrong is at night. After you pull out of the drive, your headlights are illuminating parts of the trees you’ve never noticed before. Then you realize the car rocks fore and aft for a few seconds as you stop at lights. But the real eye-opener is when you hit a speed bump you’ve encountered a thousand times before.And I mean hit....

Maybe you were fortunate enough to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals in Cleveland, but you definitely weren’t able to snap a pic like this. The Cleveland Cavaliers took a 360-degree group photo of Quicken Loans Arena before the game while both teams were warming up, and it’s way bigger than any image your regular DSLR can take. Fancam, the company that took the picture, claims its composite image resolution is typically around 20 gigapixels (much like last year’s group photo), which would make this picture too big to view in full resolution (unless you have a TV that’s 30 stories high and two football fields long)....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis plot shows the locations of 150 blazars (green dots) used in the EBL study. The background map shows the entire sky and was constructed from four years of gamma rays with energies above 10 billion electron volts (GeV) detected by Fermi. The plane of our Milky Way galaxy runs along the middle of the plot. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration.The universe started with a blackout. After the extraordinary burst of the big bang, scientists say, it was dark for hundreds of millions of years as scattered particles cooled....

Price: $19,999Available: NowThe first time you see the Polaris Slingshot coming at you, it looks like a set piece from some big-budget Marvel movie—this is a mode of transportation for someone with a secret identity and superpowers. There’s that wide arachnid front end -skimming the pavement with spats and spoilers and open-wheel fenders, a prototype racer from the future. Then the rest of the machine comes into view, and it gets even wilder....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe exterior of the 33-foot vessel sitting at the Miami International Boat Show didn’t look extraordinary or new, but beneath the creamy beige hull emblazoned with the name Greenline lurks a powerplant unlike anything else on display: This boat is a hybrid. Many builders have tinkered with hybrid technology, but Greenline is introducing the American market to a hybrid-from-conception yacht.Seaway, the Slovenia-based R&D firm behind Greenline, has designed motor yachts and sailboats for some of the industry’s leading shipbuilders for more than 20 years....

In 1988, Sony endeavored to release a Discman that could actually fit in your pocket. But since a device that can fit a whole, regular-sized CD inside it is virtually always going to be too large, Sony went a different route with its D-88 and released something smaller than a normal CD. The D-88 was chiefly designed for 3-inch CD singles, which were around at the birth of the CD format but were ultimately overcome by singles put out on traditionally-sized CDs....

Media Platforms Design TeamOne of the biggest news stories to come from Detroit this year, at least for hybrid fans, is that Toyota will be expanding its lineup of Prius vehicles. Toyota has seen the strength of Prius as a brand swell in recent years and it has long been speculated that the company would mine that value by making Prius a family of dedicated hybrids. The FT-CH compact hybrid could be one of the new dedicated hybrids within the Prius family....

Northrop Grumman released a concept drawing of a new sixth-generation fighter design. Although the fifth-generation F-35 is just starting production, designers want to get a jump on the airplane destined to replace the F/A-18EF Super Hornet, F-22 Raptor, and F-15E Strike Eagle. It’s unlikely to be like any fighter before it. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been in development for nearly 20 years, and a lot has changed in that time....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen it comes to putting a finer point on a car’s personality, there’s no arguing that test drives matter. But taking that concept one step further, I’d argue that geography puts an equally important spin on how our subjective automotive points of view are shaped.Case in point: my two separate Cadillac XTS test drives, which were spaced one year and 2,100 miles apart.Based on a drive through rugged, sun-soaked canyons of Malibu, California (top photo), my first review noted that the XTS “accelerates and handles twisting roads better than you might expect,” though I also suggested that its “mild V6 and front-drive setup may disappoint performance purists....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Prisoner: The Complete Series Five-Disc Blu-ray Set (1968)Media Platforms Design Team"I am not a number, I am a free man!" shouts Number Six, the titular character played by Patrick McGoohan in one of the UK’s greatest cult series. At the time, McGoohan was quite famous for portraying TV spy Danger Man (or Secret Agent Man, as he was known here in the U.S.). The Prisoner subverted McGoohan’s popular image with a dark and twisted tale of an agent who’s sick of cloak-and-dagger games and resigns....