Stuart Witt guns the motor of the white SUV known as Mojave One and drives it up a dun-colored mound of earth. From atop his wind-swept perch, the CEO of the Mojave Air and Space Port surveys a fleet of graders and other heavy equipment churning up 19 acres of dirt beneath a blue desert sky.At the moment, it’s just a sprawling construction site, but within two years, work will be completed on a pair of hulking buildings....
Media Platforms Design TeamAs far as most people—and by consequence, manufacturers—are concerned, a screen is a screen. It’s both common and reasonable to buy displays like you might by airplane tickets: Price trumps everything, so long as the product meets your basic requirements. So it’s not that often that we see a novel display, and even less often that said display does something both new and compelling. The announcement of Sony’s PlayStation 3D display, with its unusual design and wild multiplayer multiplayer mode, which shows two wholly different images, one to each player, was certainly a surprise....
Media Platforms Design TeamIt was almost a year ago that we brainstormed with Jamieson and Peggy Jones to map out the first segment of a three-part project called Digital Family. The concept: The Connecticut couple and their kids, Ben and Nina, would put a broad assortment of electronics to the test and report the findings of their living lab. In the first round, we laid the foundation with a network of personal computers....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Pete Travers, the visual-effects supervisor at Sony Imageworks, got the call in early summer 2007 to work on the film adaptation of Watchmen, he had never heard of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s groundbreaking graphic novel. “Honestly, I think by the time Watchmen came out, I was done with comic books and had moved on to girls,” Travers admits. Travers had to read the graphic novel in a day....
Media Platforms Design TeamForget vinyl. Music just sounds better as you float through a 3D virtual-reality universe. That’s the thought behind The Who’s upcoming app for the Oculus Rift. Tied to the band’s 50th anniversary, the app will first be available on Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. The Oculus Rift app will be released early next year.The band’s app sends you flying through the 3D world of The Who, as the band’s lyrics pop up before you and different elements of the music begin to play when you turn your head to look at certain instruments....
Despite the legal headaches that can come from destroying other people’s property and the general danger of firing guns in residential areas, folks blasted recreational quadcopters out of the sky over their property. Snake River Shooting Products and Consulting Inc. (SRSP) is keen to encourage the bad behavior with its Drone Munitions shotgun ammo. The 3-inch, 12-gauge, anti-drone branded ammo comes in two flavors of steel, number 2 shot and BB....
Cruise missiles are about to get a whole lot faster. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, engine manufacturers Rolls-Royce Liberty Works and Williams International are both developing small turbine engines for a new generation of faster cruise missiles. How much faster? How about five times faster?As part of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) supersonic turbine engine for long-range (STELR) program, both are working on compact jet engines that would propel cruise missiles at speeds of up to Mach 3....
These ludicrous Hummers are not Hot Wheels. They are two very really, very intense, hybrid electric vehicles. And soon, they will be making a trek across the frozen wastes of Antartica to reach the South Pole. Plug-In Hybrid Electric Polar Traverse Vehicle 1 (PHE PTV1) and PHE PTV2—blue and orange, respectively—began life as totally stock, gas-guzzling Hummers before they were heavily, heavily modified into the combo electric, biofuel-powered monstrosities you see above....
Hello, historians of the future. I can only assume you’ll be reading about March 12, 2014, because it proved to be a crucial day that witnessed the escalation of nearly every world conflict. No matter what happens next—war, economic collapse, reordering of global power, or welcome but unlikely pullbacks from the brink—future analysts, pundits and students will want to know what the Western World was thinking as everything slid towards the abyss....
A More Targeted Warning SystemTraditionally, whether a tornado shows up one mile away or thirty, if it’s in your county, a siren goes off. But rarely is an entire county at risk, which means that people become accustomed to hearing the siren without seeing a tornado. After a few false alarms, it’s easy to stop taking the sirens seriously. To combat this, in 2007 the National Weather Service began targeting polygons, geographic areas as much as 80 percent smaller than entire counties....
Media Platforms Design TeamStar Trek Two-Disc Edition (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamJ.J. Abrams, the man behind shows like Fringe and Lost, reimagined one of TV’s biggest franchises for the silver screen. Abrams’s reboot of Star Trek was both a critical and commercial success and may have even added some new Trekkies along the way. Star Trek is the eleventh installment to the series, and even though the film follows the earliest adventures of James T....
ISS astronauts Scott Kelly and Kjell N. Lindgren will sample some out of this world food today, chowing down on a little lettuce grown entirely in space. The livestream begins at 11:15 a.m. EDT. The red romaine lettuce was planted in May 2014 by astronaut Steve Swanson, and was sprouted and grown in the Veg-1 module on the International Space Station. It’s a step toward long-term human exploration of deep space, where the weight of fully grown food would weigh down an already heavy launch and tax fuel supplies of the Space Launch System en route to Mars....
Media Platforms Design TeamBack in early 2007, Congress was working on the to address the problem of inefficient lightbulbs. When word got out that they planned to ban incandescents, forcing everyone to buy expensive compact fluorescent lights (CFLs)—those flickering bulbs that look like pig’s tails—people were outraged. Many resorted to hoarding, buying up as many incandescent bulbs as possible before they were gone for good. Energy Independence and Security ActThere was one problem: The government never banned incandescents....
Every day, a few hundred thousand vehicles cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, their drivers barely aware of the small, rectangular land mass lying just to the north. From where I am standing, on rocky Yerba Buena Island, I can both hear the traffic thundering overhead and look across a narrow isthmus to the long-forgotten patch of real estate in the middle of the bay: Treasure Island. Home to an abandoned Navy base and a small population of low- to middle-income residents, the 400-acre property hardly lives up to its prosperous name....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat’s so special about your stove? Give me your elevator pitch.Our stove advances the state of the art in heating by providing a computer-optimized dual-combustion system that requires no catalytic converter, electricity, or sensors to produce efficiency and emissions levels that far exceed an ordinary stove. We are capturing the heat from this combustion system using masonry materials in a new, low-cost construction technique that we have developed....
Dean Potter, one of the best-known extreme athletes in wingsuit flying and BASE jumping, has died in an accident after jumping from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park in California this weekend. He was 43. Another jumper, Graham Hunt, was also killed.Potter lived life on the edge, dropping out of college to pursue BASE jumping and free climbing. BASE jumpers leap off high edges and cliffs while wearing a parachute, while free climbers forgo the use of harnesses and other safety devices to scale a surface untethered....
Legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens recently detailed his plan to wean America off foreign oil by blanketing the Great Plains with wind turbines. But Pickens also has a lesser-known plan that is centered on another commodity, one every bit as vital to America’s future as energy–water. If it all works out, his water plan could remake Pickens as a whole new kind of baron.Pickens is in the planning stages of a $1....
Media Platforms Design Team(All Photos by Nicholas Calcott)BREAKTHROUGH WHO David Farnsworth Roger Krulak New York City FIELD ArchitectureACHIEVEMENT Building the United States’ first modular skyscraper.At the 461 Dean construction site in downtown Brooklyn, there is no barking foreman. There’s no screeching chop saw or pounding jack hammer. The loudest thing you hear is a hand-driven pulley, rattling like an anchor chain through a hawsehole as a lone worker in a hard hat uses it to tension the lift cables attached to what looks like a particularly sleek trailer home....
Paul Ceglia, the accused scammer who sued Mark Zuckerberg for 84 percent of Facebook’s profits under false pretenses, invented a rather novel way to avoid house arrest. He attached his GPS-equipped house arrest bracelet to a motorized contraption (see below) to give the appearance that he was moving around the house.If you don’t remember Ceglia, he’s the man who claimed that Zuckerberg agreed to pay him 50 percent of Facebook’s profits plus interest when Zuck worked on Ceglia’s site, StreetFax....
Media Platforms Design TeamAs anyone who follows the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant knows, there have been a number of radiation statistics, expressed in various units, coming from different sources—including organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which released regular updates of radiation levels. The IAEA made it clear that levels further away from the reactor site are not dangerously high, but as a scientist and a former Navy nuclear power technician, I was curious to learn more firsthand....
