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Media Platforms Design TeamThe big picture for diesel truck pollution versus gasoline emissions is bleak but improving, says a just-released study by UC Berkeley which was funded by the EPA and the California Air Resources Board.The article entitled “Elucidating secondary organic aerosol from diesel and gasoline vehicles through detailed characterization of organic carbon emissions” was authored by Drew R. Gentner, and examines the release of secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) which have been linked to health hazards and climate change....

Suspiciously Short CircuitQ: On my car radio’s installation instructions, it shows only one red wire (hot) going to the positive side of the battery. How do I complete the circuit without a ground wire? I am installing it in a boat.A:You’ll need to run a ground wire to the metal case of the radio. Car radios are normally grounded by their mounting hardware. Actually, the shield wire on the antenna will also provide a ground path....

Media Platforms Design TeamWay back when, you needed a dedicated cycling computer to track your pedaling. Now all you need is a smartphone (and maybe a handlebar mount). Cycling apps abound that can measure distance, speed, elevation, and track your route on a map. Most of them also have some kind of social tie-in, for comparing (or competing) with your friends.Unlike bike computers—which count rotations of the pedals or the wheels to track mileage, and require calibration—smartphone apps rely on GPS, making them a whole lot easier to set up....

Media Platforms Design TeamSomething was killing young salmon in the dams of the Pacific Northwest. Every spring, tens of millions of them would swim through the hydroelectric dams of the Columbia River on their way to the ocean, and every year as many as 10 percent emerged bloodied or suffocated. For years, the exact cause remained elusive.Tom Carlson, a fisheries specialist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, was so frustrated at how little was known about what happens inside the the dam turbine that he invented his own solution—a robotic swimmer called the Sensor Fish....

Media Platforms Design TeamAn epic dishwashing session following a particularly messy omelette changed the way I’d been using my auto shop for the past 20 years. As I scrubbed at dried egg, it occurred to me that my kitchen is just another workshop. But many of my more successful culinary routines and organizing techniques were isolated in the galley—even though the principles of good kitchen design and work practices apply to the garage....

When three weather patterns combined to sweep from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico for the storm of the century 14 years ago, no one could have expected a mountain in Tennessee to receive the most snowfall. But there was Mt. LeConte, covered in 5 ft. of snow. Kenny Monger, a maintenance worker for the Tennessee Department of Transportation, worked with road crews up to their waists in snow trying to clear the streets of nearby Knoxville with perils, he says, unlike any storm the town has ever seen....

Media Platforms Design Team MALIBU, Calif.—Modern motorcycles use all manner of technological trickery to extract maximum performance from minimum engine displacement. It’s astounding that the most advanced bikes today develop as much horsepower as some fairly powerful cars did not that long ago. But every now and then a manufacturer goes against the grain and decides to keep it simple: the TU250X from Suzuki is one of those bikes. Built with subtle modern touches and a big nod to the past, the $3799 retro-style TU250X (available in every state but California for 2009) takes an atypical approach, offering a fresh, hip bike for beginner riders or those who simply yearn to get a taste of the past without huge horsepower—or a huge outlay of cash....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: NowPrice: $196,800Competitors: Porsche 911 GT3 RS, Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Carbon Edition, Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 SuperleggeraPowertrain: 5.2-liter V10, 560 hp, 398 lb-ft; six-speed automated manual transmission, AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/highway): 13/19 mpg What’s New: The R8 GT is a very expensive and very limited edition of Audi’s supercar; only 333 will be produced for the world, and a mere 90 will come to America. Engineers whittled down the weight with extensive use of carbon fiber....

Media Platforms Design TeamRapper/entrepreneur 50 Cent and MTV’s Snooki graced the floors of CES today, adding to the pumping bass of Las Vegas. I talked with each of them about their headphone lines to find out how they fit into the growing slew of celebrity-endorsed audio products.This is 50’s third CES, and he’s here to show off the SMS by 50 headphones he and SMS Audio launched last fall. 50 is a thoughtful businessman, and he stressed how important his hands-on involvement in the headphones’ development is to their success, and to getting them to stand out in a crowded field....

Media Platforms Design TeamStep No. 1Make Sure It Looks Good on PaperMedia Platforms Design TeamIf science is the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth, then it stands to reason that mad science is the completely irrational pursuit of a nutty project that the rest of the world will never completely understand. Popular Mechanics has a reverent journalistic respect for those who practice serious research. But on our own time, we like to dabble in the mad sciences....

A Bad Day at the OfficeLast February, NASCAR driver Clint Bowyer wasn’t thinking about Newtonian physics when his No. 7 Jack Daniel’s Chevrolet flipped over several hundred yards from finishing the Daytona 500. He wasn’t thinking about much of anything: “One second I’m in the clear. Next thing, bam, I’m sliding across the checkered line on my roof.” Though Bowyer’s experience was gut-wrenching, it was not all that unusual. According to USA Today, there were 1320 wrecks on the NASCAR Cup circuit between 2001 and 2006–that’s about six crashes per race....

Media Platforms Design Team Another Qantas flight made an emergency landing today, this time in Adelaide, Australia. Just four days after Flight QF30 made an unscheduled landing in the Philippines, Melbourne-bound Flight 692 was interrupted 10 minutes after takeoff by a rattling noise, passengers told the Australian press. Although the Boeing 737-800 was not in any apparent danger of crashing today, engineers advised the pilot to return to the airport after a problem with the door covering the plane’s landing gear....

View full post on YoutubeWhat if you combined two generally reviled tech features and marketed them with Apple’s sense of casual cool?A recent YouTube spoof imagines Siri– Apple’s famously recalcitrant digital assistant– coupled with a voice activated automous driving system, to predictably disastrous results. Filmmaker John Dabrowski tells Popular Mechanics that he and partner Mark Odlum found initial inspiration while working on a sports spoof video near Google headquarters in Palo Alto, where they heard about Google’s autonomous vehicle testing....

https://vine.co/v/OjqeYWWpVWK/embed/simpleVia Rose Pasatore.Earlier this month SpaceX came up just short of its goal of landing part of a Falcon 9 rocket on a sea-faring barge, which would have paved the way for reusable rocket stages, one of Elon Musk’s major goals for bringing down the cost of space travel. But as these images of the failed landing that Musk just tweeted, the company still has a lot of work to do....

It’s the exact sort of gadget you would assume the government already has in a garage somewhere: a big, black SUV that can detect the presence of radioactive material. But this modified Chevy Suburban XL, delivered to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by Raytheon last month, claims to be the first of its kind: a highly-sensitive, self-contained system that uses the same spectroscopic analysis technology that’s found in advanced cargo inspection scanners....

Media Platforms Design TeamCalifornia is in the middle of one of the in recorded history. Things have gotten so serious that this Thursday the state legislature attempted to ease the pain by passing a $687 million relief plan for drought-stricken communities. Even NASA has stepped in to lend its space- and sky-based science, hoping to assist the state’s Department of Water Reclamation with deciding where to dole out its water reserves and identify the areas in most need of aid....

WARNING! Medium spoilers ahead!Wormholes. Time dilation. Black holes. Generation ships. The Grand Unified Theory of particle physics. Tesseracts observed from the fifth dimension. Computer AI so humanlike it knows when to lie for efficiency’s sake.Did I leave anything out? Possibly. But each of these geektacular talking points figures prominently in Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated outer space epic Interstellar.With this film, the overused buzzword “epic” is wholly earned. Everything about this two-and-a-half-hour picture is big....

Media Platforms Design Team Falcon Pistol Grip /// $20 (grip only), $190 (bundled with Falcon & games) /// Available later this summer The Promise: First-person shooters feel more personal when there’s realistic haptic feedback every time you pull the trigger. In Practice: When it comes to technology, haptics—the science and study of touch-based interfaces—is undoubtedly one of the next key frontiers. At its simplest, the field involves a vibrating cellphone. At it’s most complex?...

Media Platforms Design TeamSki patrollers protect skiers on avalanche-prone slopes such as Big Sky Resort’s Black Rock Gully, shown here, by using explosive charges to pre-emptively trigger slides.The bomb is the size of a soup can, bright orange, stuffed with two pounds of pentolite–a chalky mixture of TNT and an even more powerful explosive compound known as PETN. Ross Titilah, a 31-year-old ski patroller at Big Sky Resort in southern Montana, ties the bomb to one end of a short nylon rope and triggers the igniter....

Masterbuilt Butterball Indoor Electric Turkey Fryer$120, masterbuilt.comMedia Platforms Design TeamTurkey-frying devotees swear there’s no better way to cook up a bird, but the flammable oil displaced by a 15-pound turkey can easily overflow onto a propane-fueled flame (Editor’s Note: To properly fry a turkey, heat the oil and then turn off the flame!); the resulting flare-ups have left numerous homes and decks in ruins. Unlike other fryers, the countertop-friendly Masterbuilt Butterball Indoor Electric Turkey Fryer ($120) is safe enough to be used indoors....