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The world floats sideways as I press on the steering pedal. A mirror-smooth lake wheels beneath a dimming orange sky. A warm breeze rushes over my cheeks. It’s twilight, and the Florida air is still warm. I ease off the pedal and the craft lazily straightens out. Five hundred feet below, black cows graze in a paddock, ignoring the strange craft drifting overhead. This is the closest thing to flying the way it happens in a dream: just you, the air, and the Earth gliding past below you....

Media Platforms Design Team(Published in the January 2004 issue)More: One man who turned his vending machine into a robot.Hearing the sound of a can falling from a vending machine makes me happy. Maybe it’s because when I drop my change in, I’m usually salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs. If you’re the same way, you’re going to be really psyched about Maytag’s new SkyBox personal beverage vendor. Perfect for your family room, SkyBox is smaller than the usual vending machine....

Media Platforms Design TeamAdam Haig comes from a family of inventors. He’s tried to build his life around science and math in the hopes of solving problems that face his community. Haig’s been working on a couple patents, and last week he received $10,000 from the Lemelson-MIT program for one of his projects, a lake wave generator. Also: He’s still in high school. And Haig isn’t working alone. He’s part of an InvenTeam, one of 15 groups of high school students across the country whose proposed inventions have caught the attention of the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam initiative....

“Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” is one of the most widely known arguments that 9/11 was an inside job. It’s also one of the dumbest. This metalworker at purgatoryironworks was getting sick of hearing it, so he put together this little video to illustrate exactly how flawed that logic is: View full post on YoutubeOf course while his point that steel beams don’t need to literally melt in order to lose their integrity is solid and seeing it first-hand is neat, his process has a flaw: He openly admits that the forge he was using heated the steel beam several hundred degrees above the temperature at which jet fuel burns....

To the disappointment of more than a few people, when NASA announced the Europa Multiple Fly-by Mission, it had a big drawback: no lander. Instead, it would serve as an orbiter around Jupiter, with an orbit essentially set for a series of more than 40 fly-bys of the icy moon that hides a warm ocean under its crust. But rejoice, Europa fans: NASA is reconsidering. Maybe.At the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space 2015, JPL project scientist Robert Pappalardo said the agency was “actively persuing” a small lander to piggy back onto the orbiter, including soliciting collaborations with the European Space Agency on a lander or impactor....

Media Platforms Design TeamZeus has been around a long time. This towering eastern hemlock was here when Shawnee hunters in deerskin moccasins padded along nearby Mill Creek. It was here when Robert E. Lee rode through West Virginia, and when Gilded Age coal barons punched rail lines into this wilderness. But none of those travelers to the New River Gorge in south-central West Virginia saw Zeus the way I’m seeing Zeus....

What’s great about buying a saw from a legacy tool company like Skil is that you know what you’re getting—a sturdy, comfortable tool from a company that’s proved itself for more than ninety years. So it is not surprising that Skil’s newest circular saw, the SPT67WM-22, is solid, agile, and vibration-free, with a sidewinder construction and a magnesium motor housing and shoe. It’s more surprising that it has a heck of a lot of new design flourishes, including industrial-looking motor vents and ribbing reminiscent of the company’s flagship, the Model 77, which was introduced back in the 1930s....

LAS VEGAS — Not every press conference is front-page news. Some are actually kind of embarrassing. With around two conferences happening every hour during the press day at CES, every presenting company needs bring its best game. For Pioneer, that amounted to a lengthy assurance that its new plasma HDTVs are truly excellent. You see, thanks to “years of R&D” these TVs will have deeper blacks, richer colors, and a whole lot of image clarity....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington. (Photograph by Jeff T. Green/Getty Images) Next to the rusted remnants of a safe, an unassuming 60-year-old glass bottle with barely legible words scrawled in red crayon was the central focus of a group of researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The writing on the glass bottle was only partially legible, but for Jon Schwantes of the PNNL, there could be no mistaking the contents: This bottle contained weapons-grade plutonium....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library)“A Brief History of Failure” is what The New York Times Magazine calls this clever collection from its new Innovations Issue. But as a scroll through their gallery makes clear, failure can mean a lot of different things when it comes to invention.Some, like the longbow, don’t deserve to be called failures at all. This fantastic weapon was blasted into obsolescence when a new and better killing machine, the crossbow, came along....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe ballistic missile shield designed to protect Europe got its first real test during a live-fire exercise this week, and the U.S. and its NATO allies blew up a warhead in space and downed a cruise missile that fell into the water. The nine-nation exercise, known as At Sea Demonstration 15, was held at the Hebrides Missile Test Range, off the west coast of Scotland. A simulated ballistic missile, launched from the Scottish coast, was intercepted by a SM-3 Block IA ballistic missile destroyer from the USS Ross....

Having the nation’s ugliest deck wouldn’t seem to be anything to brag about, but Dave and Julie Owsinki of Kentwood, MI have learned otherwise. They not only bragged about their dilapidated structure, they were rewarded for it by entering pictures of it into the zany Ugliest Deck Contest sponsored by Sikkens, a manufacturer of interior and exterior wood finishing products.For their efforts (or the lack of them) the Owsinkis were awarded with a $10,000 deck makeover by Sikkens....

Twitter is about to allow tweets that are longer than 140 characters, according to a report from Re/code. It’s unclear exactly what this change will look like, and whether or not these new long tweets will be limited or set aside from more traditional short tweets in any way, or when the new capability will roll out. Twitter’s 140 character limit has been its most noticeable feature from the very beginning, and the constraints that limit imposed are what helped to make Twitter such a unique, yet cryptic and alienating community....

Media Platforms Design TeamEver hear of the Tatra?I didn’t think so. An expensive Czech equivalent to a Cadillac, the streamlined Tatra T87 was very fast for its day, with a top speed of 103 mph. But not many were sold outside Czechoslovakia. It’s hard to sell something before its time.My Tatra T87 sedan was built in the small city of Koprivnice, in 1938. It’s powered by a rear-mounted, cast-magnesium, air-cooled 2....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt starts with the Big Bang, re-creates the extinction of the dinosaurs, holds a jousting competition, flips over an album, and simulates World War II, a shuttle launch, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the alleged apocalypse in 2012. In its precisely executed review of history, “The Time Machine,” a Rube Goldberg contraption built by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, incorporates a record-breaking 244 steps—all to water a single flower....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Bonhams)One of the first Apple I just sold at auction for a record-setting $905,000, the highest price ever for one of the computers. The machine is thought to be one of the first 50 computers hand-built by Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’ parents’ garage in 1976. Its sale price back then? $666.66.One of the first personal computers ever sold, The Apple I helped to ignite the personal computer revolution....

UPDATE (March 26): Hands-on Review of the Samsung UpStage Phone (Formerly Ultra Music Phone), with VIDEOLAS VEGAS — As the Consumer Electronics Show hit its second frantic day, there were whispers, rumors and, at some booths, a mounting panic racing through the Las Vegas Convention Center. Because no matter how exciting, how innovative, and how newsworthy this year’s offerings have been, the iPhone had finally landed. Apple’s iPhone announcement took two much-talked-about but seemingly independent product rumors—that the video iPod would get a larger, touch-sensitive screen, and that Apple would release a cellphone that looks, navigates and plays music like an iPod—and combined them into a single groundbreaking mobile device....

Media Platforms Design Team ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Azure Dynamics calls its gas/electric hybrid commercial truck “part of the solution” to reduce our country’s fuel use. Most of the proposed fuel-economy policies center on cars, which makes sense because there are over 250 million of them on the road, and roughly 45 percent of our petroleum consumption is for personal transportation (Some 13 million barrels of oil per day). Cars make up a huge slice of the oil-use pie....

Media Platforms Design TeamCould the Mississippi Delta become America’s bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world’s largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel....

Media Platforms Design TeamPlayin’ In The MudI had the fluid changed in my transmission, and the mechanic showed me the oil pan when he had it off. He said that there was a lot of debris from the transmission gears in the pan, and the best thing to do was to rebuild the transmission before it failed completely. I didn’t have the money, so I just had him put it back together....