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CANNES, France— Some might say that March 1, 2005, was the day the world changed for Honda in Europe. Instead of the company’s usual brilliantly engineered but rather snoozy-looking cars, the Geneva Motor Show featured a disarmingly sharp concept hatchback in a very fetching shade of metallic bronze. This is Honda? The unannounced new Civic concept crashed the headlines like an anvil through a greenhouse roof—it was a hot one, to be sure....

One Thing Most Houses Had in Common: Water DamageOne thing most of the affected houses have in common is water damage–either through floods, leaks or humidity. A fire chief in Chalmette, Louisiana, found out that even moisture in the air can cause hydrogen sulfide to leak out of drywall. But he wasn’t the only one:“A remediation specialist retained by the consumer’s attorney conducted a visual examination of the home’s air conditioning unit....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn a Thursday morning last January, a team of engineers gathered in a hulking concrete hangar in the Orange County suburb of Tustin, Calif. The hangar—once used to build and store massive blimps that patrolled the coast during World War II—was an imposing sight, an anachronism amid the manicured pods of suburban town homes and outdoor malls nearby. The vehicle inside, a prototype airship known as the Aeroscraft, was just as much of a spectacle: 266 feet long and 96 feet wide, with a rigid aluminum and carbon-fiber skeleton covered by a thin skin of shimmery silver Mylar....

On a bright, sweltering Saturday afternoon at Talladega Superspeedway, in a shiny new Ingersoll Rand hauler located 20 yards from the Sprint Cup Series garages, pit crew tire changers trickle in and out, picking up or dropping off their scuffed yellow-and-black Ingersoll Rand Thunder Guns. Each man is met with a warm smile by Jim Hurd, the one person who knows their guns as well as they do. “These are race-day-only guns,” Hurd explains....

The government of new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to fulfill a campaign promise and to cancel his government’s 65 plane order for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 was to replace Canada’s aging fleet of 138 CF-18 Hornets.The main reason for dropping the plane is its cost, which has been reported to Canadian taxpayers at somewhere between $175 million (the cost quoted by Trudeau’s Liberal Party) and $75 million (the cost quoted by Lockheed Martin....

The File-by-File Method1. INDIVIDUAL FILES ELIMINATED, SOFTWARE REMAINS INTACTIf you are giving your computer to someone else, you don’t neces-sarily want to eliminate all the valuable software along with your private data. Dumping individual files in the ordinary way doesn’t make them unrecoverable; it only makes the space on the drive occupied by those files available for overwriting. To completely destroy a file, use a data-shredding program such as Digital File Shredder from StompSoft ($30)....

Google has been researching a solar-cell plane named Solara 50 for the past few months, testing it for an ambitious internet connectivity project. Apparently, though, the plane crashed in the desert on May 1, a fact that has been kept quiet but is now coming to light as the National Transportation Safety Board launches an inquiry into the event. The unmanned plane launched from a private airstrip outside Albuquerque, N.M.. According to Bloomberg, it was a test plane for Google’s ambitious plan to bring Internet to the ground from the stratosphere via a series of solar airplanes and high-altitude balloons....

It’s happened to all of us. You’re just sitting around the house, trying to stream some video or cruise through Facebook when suddenly KA-CHUNK; your internet screeches to a halt for a few irritating seconds. It might not last long but it happens far too often, and good old FM radio might be the solution. When there’s more than one Wi-Fi network in an area—like an apartment building—their packets of data can crash into each other, seizing up connections at the worst possible moment....

“I’m not a killer, I’m a butcher,” says Joshua Applestone as he prepares to sever the leg from a 90-pound half-pig flayed and displayed on a white tablecloth in the courtyard of a New York culinary cornerstone, the James Beard House. “The slaughterhouse is a separate operation.” Applestone demonstrates hog-hacking during a Wusthof knife product launch on June 16, cleaving Boston butts from spare ribs in front of a packed house of chefs, knife makers, apprentice butchers, prep cooks, journalists and one lucky circling fly....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’m remodeling our kitchen, one bathroom, and the laundry room. While moving appliances around, I damaged our vinyl floors in two different places. I hid the laundry room tear by slightly repositioning the washer, but the damage in the kitchen is still visible. First, how can I fix the flooring? Second, how should I move appliances next time?Media Platforms Design TeamSmall repairs to vinyl floors are relatively easy to fix with a kit....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs you look to get your chimney serviced this fall, be wary of dishonest sweeps who try to dupe homeowners into unnecessary or shoddy work. “There are some bad actors in the business,” says Ashley Eldridge, director of education at the Chimney Safety Institute of America (CSIA). “They typically will hire unscrupulous people who are being paid a commission; it’s in these people’s interest to diagnose huge problems, regardless of whether they exist....

Recap: On Saturday morning the Space X Dragon cargo capsule successfully launched into space at 4:47 a.m. ET, and docked Monday morning with the International Space Station. The historic barge landing — the first real world attempt to make commercial spaceflight cheaper through reusable rockets — didn’t go quite as well. The uncrewed Falcon 9 rocket hit the drone landing barge too hard, but Elon Musk tweeted that the “ship itself is fine....

Mister Handy utility robots were first released back in the halcyon days of 2039. A joint venture between RobCo and General Atomics International, the hovering, buzzsaw-weilding, nuclear-powered butlerbots were an immediate success. Despite early hardware issues (fixed in a second-run hardware revision in 2039), Mister Handy became a staple of upper-middle-class American life during in the years before the Great War and nuclear holocaust of 2077.Of course, Mister Handy doesn’t exist outside of the fictional universe of Fallout....

View full post on YoutubeChainsaws offer brute cutting power, but they aren’t the most accurate tool in the shop. Nevertheless, you can make a level cut with your chainsaw using this simple technique.Stumps, logs, and telephone poles can be used as work tables or supports, but they require a flat surface—which is difficult to achieve using a chainsaw. You can build a basic square jig using 2 x 4s and a level, and then slide it over the log or pole you want to cut....

Media Platforms Design Team"It was the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen," says Steve Allen, who has seen 50 years of sunsets in central Texas. “That’s what I first thought.” It was Jan. 8, 2008, and the trucking entrepreneur was sitting around a fire outside the Selden, Texas, home of Mike Odom, his friend since first grade. Then he saw the lights–orbs that glowed at first, then began to flash. “There was no regular pattern to the flashing,” he says....

BREAKING NEWS ON THE LATEST NAVY TECH* PLUS: 4 Challenges for the Navy as More Unmanned Drones Go Underwater* TECH WATCH: Will New Weapon Advances Cause a Naval Power Crunch?Early next year the Office of Naval Research’s Office of Transition will release requests for proposals to fund its advanced naval technology programs. The office’s initiatives have a shelf life of five years, with an expectation that real-world products will reach the fleet by the end of that time....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe logic goes something like this: Carbon-based energy is finite. Cars burn too much of that limited resource. So the cars of the future should, maybe must, devour less and less energy. Ultimately, fingers crossed, vehicles will be powered by what our benighted present-day brains might as well just call magic. Barring that, they will sip whatever fuel we continue to wage war over. This is not opinion....

Media Platforms Design Team24 3-D printed livers in a multi-well glass dish. (Photo Credit: Organovo)The worlds of pharmaceutical testing and 3D printing are coming together, and here’s the newest, craziest example of bioprinting: tiny, printed mini-livers.The human liver provides the body with an important detoxifier; thus, it’s important to know when testing new drugs how the liver will respond. However, many of the options for doing liver tests on pharmaceuticals, such as using lab rats or bits of tissue, haven’t given a full picture of the potential toxicity of drugs....

E15 is shorthand for gasoline (Unleaded 88) blended with 15 percent ethanol. This type of E15 gas is often cheaper, but it’s limited during the summer travel season because of its environmental effect.But E15 got more attention in 2022 when gas prices rose because of Ukraine’s war with Russia. But earlier this year, President Biden allowed for more E15 to be sold during the summer to provide a cheaper fuel source (E15 sells for about 10 cents a gallon less than E10)—also noting it will not cause immense harm to the environment....

Media Platforms Design TeamMost of us grew up thinking our fathers had encyclopedic knowledge, particularly about those things important to a young man coming of age – sports, women and cars. But as we learn from experience, we realize that much of what we thought was gospel when Dad spoke was wrong. Not only were some of his nuggets based on misinformation, the automotive technology he was talking about has changed tremendously over the years....