Media Platforms Design TeamA trip through the stunning Simpson Desert in the Australian Outback covers more than 320 remote miles through deep red sands and towering dunes. It can take up to five days to traverse, and that’s on top of the nearly three days it takes to travel there from Sydney. Traveling the Simpson is a huge trip, but with the right equipment, preparation, and knowledge, it can be done....
Media Platforms Design TeamGoogle is leasing some property from NASA for a cool $1.16 billion. The deal will give the company access to hangars at Moffett Federal Airfield in California’s Bay Area, a base that’s been used by NASA, the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force.Home to the Ames Research Center, Moffett also houses the megastructure Hangar One, which was originally built for airships. Google plans to bring many of its Google X-style advanced research projects to the site, including its work on space travel technologies, robotics, communications technology, and possibly Google Loon, the vision to create balloon-based worldwide 3G internet....
LAS VEGAS—That may not be the sound of desperation you hear coming from the engineering and design labs in Maranello, Italy, the home base of Ferrari, but it’s close: The headquarters of the Prancing Horse is awash in a mix of uncertainty and anxiety, nerves and excitement as the first race of the most unpredictable Formula One season in decades approaches.Ferrari has not won a driver’s championship since 2007 or a constructor’s championship since 2008—an enormous gap for a prideful carmaker that is by far the most popular F1 team in the world....
Media Platforms Design TeamIt takes more than just a vehicle to convince consumers to adopt electric cars. Recharging their batteries has to be as easy as filling up a tank of gas. Israel-born entrepreneur Shai Agassi, the founder of the startup company Better Place, is relying on robotic quick-change stations to swap out depleted batteries for fresh ones in the electric cars he is servicing. Drivers will enter a station when their battery pack gets low and have the battery replaced faster than it would take to refill a gasoline tank....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhen did the console wars start?In the late 1960s, Ralf Baer, an engineer at Sanders, a defense contractor, invents the concept of video games. But Sanders doesn’t have any business in the video-game market. So they license the idea to Magnavox, which creates Odyssey, the first commercial game console. This inspires Noam Bushnell at Atari to create Pong, and it’s a major hit. Arcade games become popular, home consoles become popular, and all of this becomes a billion-dollar industry....
It’s been a bad month for train derailments. Canada and France recently suffered two of the worst railway accidents in each country’s history. And Wednesday in northern Spain, a passenger train crashed at the bend of a tight corner, killing more than a third of its 200 passengers. The train was reportedly traveling at twice the 50 mph speed limit for the curve.Train derailments, especially the dramatic and deadly ones, are fairly uncommon....
Media Platforms Design TeamIowa State’s Interlock House, which breaks down into six modules, is without a doubt high-tech. A quick look at the inverters inside its mechanical closet shows the home’s two kinds of solar panels–crystalline silicon and thin-film–are producing 1952 watts of electricity. An evacuated tube solar thermal system sends heat to the HVAC system or to radiant tubing in the floor. It also recharges a desiccant system for removing humidity from the air....
When a computer glitch at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) snarled air travel around the country last week, it was a headache for thousands of fliers but an opportunity for the two presidential candidates to sound off on the state of air travel. “Airline passengers are sick and tired of delays and cancellations,” said Senator Barack Obama. “It’s time we overhauled the system.” Senator John McCain said the incident “once again highlights the need to reform and repair a broken system....
Media Platforms Design TeamNASHVILLE—At the first North American ride-and-drive for the Nissan Leaf, one set of route-book instructions really stood out: “Notice gas stations on the right—DON’T STOP.” Jokes aside, it was an intriguing thought: A world where gas stations—those fumy purveyors of dinosaur juice and junk food—are pushed into obsolescence would not be unpleasant.“A mom-and-pop bookstore in Texas just installed free electric charging stations,” says Mark Perry, head of Nissan’s product planning and advanced vehicles....
Media Platforms Design TeamFirst, Facebook admitted it was screwing with your “friend”-ships. Now OkCupid has admitted it’s been screwing with your hookups.The dating website said yesterday that, like Facebook, it experimented on users without telling them. But unlike Facebook, OkCupid is unapologetic about the experiments. Co-founder Christian Rudder put it bluntly in a blog post: “If you use the internet you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site....
28-year-old Adam Fritz has been paralyzed for five years, but thanks researchers at Southern California’s UC Irvine he was recently able to walk. Not through the help of an exoskeleton or crutches or other tech that helped to carry him. He walked by using his own two legs and a brilliant computer system that sends messages from his brain down to his legs over Bluetooth instead of through his spine. Fritz’s slow and labored 12-foot jaunt was not especially easy or pretty, but it was still a triumphant victory after 19 previous, failed attempts....
Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamFive days into her 23-day prison sentence, socialite Paris Hilton has received a “Get Out of jail Free” card: The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has reassigned her to house arrest because she was perilously close to a nervous breakdown, according to TMZ.com. To ensure she doesn’t leave her house, police will add DualTrak’s snap-on electronic monitoring ankle bracelet to Hilton’s stylish ensemble for the next 40 days....
A bold, new combat aircraft designed by the legendary Sukhoi Design Bureau and now undergoing tests in Russia has taken aim at America’s next-generation fighter, the F-22. The Russian challenge comes in the form of the single-seat Sukhoi S-37, the world’s first combat aircraft to successfully exploit forward-swept wing (FSW) technology.First word of the S-37 leaked to the West in 1997, and took Western defense analysts by surprise. Now, after more than 120 test flights at the secret Zhukovsky Flight Test Center near Moscow, it is clear that there is nothing like this bird flying anywhere in the world today....
Media Platforms Design TeamMatthew Ragan/FlickrReplacing your worn-out and banged-up front door with a shiny new one far outpaces most other projects when it comes to resale value. After all, it’s one of the first things people see when they come to your home, and first impressions matter.Remodeling Magazine’s Cost vs. Value Report has been polling real estate and construction professionals annually for years—I remember first the reading the annual report more than fifteen years ago....
(Published in the September 1999 issue)More: The Volvo Open 70 Offshore Sailboat is the latest in sailboat technology.Speeds of 20 knots on a sport sailboat? Impossible. A 40-ft. sailboat that beats 70-ft. racing yachts? Not likely. A yacht that can sail without heeling over, yet go faster than anything its own size? Hard to believe. Well, check out the DynaFlyer 40 Red Hornetand start believing. What sort of magic is this?...
Ten years ago today, the first iPhone was set loose on the world a few months after Steve Jobs stood on stage in front of the crowd gathered for the Macworld 2007 convention at Moscone Center and made an unmistakably world-changing announcement. The iPhone (the potential of which Jobs probably undersold as merely “an iPod, a mobile phone, and internet communicator”) proved to be so much more than the sum of its parts....
Media Platforms Design TeamLeonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor who on October 29, 1969 headed a team that sent the first message over the ARPANET. Getty Images.The first message traveled over the internet on Oct. 29, 1969, 45 years ago today. It failed after just two letters.ARPANET, the U.S. government-funded 1960s precursor to the modern internet, was a network made up of four computers located at UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, the University of Utah, and UCLA....
We’ve tested a couple of electric motorcycles. And as fun as they were, they were lacking in a certain, umm, bravado. Ditto for most of the electric cars and hybrids, the boutique audience of the Tesla notwithstanding.Until now. Schneider Electric is a global supplier of electrical components, and the brand you probably would recognize first is Square-D, a brand emblazoned on electrical circuit-breaker boxes in basements the world over. Schneider engineers, in concert with the talented staff at Orange County Choppers in Binghamton, N....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 by the team at CERN was one of the biggest discoveries in science in recent years, confirming the existence of an elusive, almost mythical particle that imbues the universe with mass. But things could have turned out much differently for the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider. They almost got scooped by three guys at NYU.A professor, a grad student and a post-doc with about $10,000 between them almost scooped the big particle smasher in finding the Higgs....
In the Boston suburb of Westwood, there’s a railway bridge with a clearance of just 10 feet and 6 inches. And it and box trucks really do not get along.In the footage above, an empty produce truck attempts to squeeze under the bridge and does not quite make it. WCVB Boston reports that nobody was hurt, and nearby residents view have become somewhat inured to the crashes.“I have lived here my whole life, and at this point, we are just used to it,” Stephanie Murphy said....
