Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat requiem do you play for a dying star? Creative agency PARTY released this sparse, haunting musical arrangement based on the radio waves emitted by R Sculptoris, a red giant 1,500 light years away that was probably once a yellow dwarf, much like our own sun.The data from the star—which has a small, distant companion—is converted into points on the disk of a music box. The star’s pulses become the beats; variations in the strength of its radio waves guide how the music changes....

Media Platforms Design TeamBelieve it or not, this fantastic AT-ST replica is made out of paper. The creator, some brilliant soul going by uhu02, seems to have not only a deep love of science fiction and real spacecraft, but some incredible paper-crafting chops.It would be enough to marvel at the perfect exteriors of these models, but remove the paper outer shell and your can see the meticulously crafted mechanical interiors. In addition to crafts and robots from sci-fi adventures like 2001, Star Wars, Automata and Battlestar Galactica, uhu02 also assembled a replica of the Apollo moon landers....

Media Platforms Design TeamJamie, you’re usually pretty unflappable but in this episode when you try to cross the bridge, you were noticeably shaken. JAMIE HYNEMAN: Yeah. (Laughs) It was basically, by the time Adam was done crossing, it was basically like walking across a tight rope with no balance beam or anything else cause the handrails became basically almost unusable. Erecting the bridge on the site let us pretension it to some degree before we put it in place and get those things all tuned....

Preliminary imagery from Space Shuttle Discovery’s launch and immediate post-launch segments of flight show no damage to the orbiter, mission manager team chair John Shannon said in a press conference this evening. “The performance was really good,” he said. Although there were some cases of separating foam (including a long strip) from the external tank (ET), none of it occurred at a point in the flight that could pose danger to Discovery....

An EMS Synthi 100 was rare when it was produced in 1971, and is even rarer today. Only 30 units were built in the decade before the company went under, and only three are known to survive. Australia’s Melbourne Conservatorium is working on bringing one of those back in working order.Perhaps the EMS’ most famous use was in “The Sea Devils,” a 1972 “Doctor Who” serial, where it provided the creepy incidental music....

A microwave relay dish used to relay telephone calls and television signals between nearby cities. Not the microwave cannon in question.Media Platforms Design TeamThe newest weapon in Russia’s arsenal is apparently a microwave cannon, according to state-owned Russian media. The gun can reportedly disable drones and warheads at a distance of up to six miles and is scheduled to be demonstrated in a series of private tests this week.A representative from (state-owned) United Instrument Manufacturing Corp that built the weapon described the device to (state-owned) Sputnik News this way: The new system is equipped with a high-power relativistic generator and reflector antenna, management and control system, and a transmission system which is fixed on the chassis of BUK surface-to-air missile systems....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’re not familiar with fat bikes like the or , think of a two-wheeled monster truck with you as the motor. Salsa MuklukSurly Moonlander"Fat bikes allow people to ride bicycles in places that previously were simply not possible," says Peter Koski, product development engineer at Salsa.Fatties have been around for more than a decade but have only captured the mainstream cycling world’s attention over the past couple of years because of their versatility and a rise in extreme adventure races....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe eFlyBook’s stylus lets pilots write directly onto stored images, such as maps and forms. Because it has no backlite, it runs for up to 10 hours per charge. (Photograph by Dan Saelinger)Electronic paper has to live up to a lot of hype. Billed as the end of the printed page as we know it, the technology uses an electric charge to make tiny particles of dye rise to the surface of a screen, forming crisp letters or images....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Fourth of July is almost here. It will be a day of pies, picnics, grills and anticipation of the sky darkening into a perfect backdrop, because there are few things Americans enjoy more than fireworks bursting in air. Plenty of people are busily stocking up on everything for the perfect backyard display: sparklers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, fountains and finales. But every year, some of these backyard pyrotechnic displays run afoul of the law....

View full post on VimeoBillionaire Jim Clark built the 100-foot monohull superyacht Comanche for just one reason: speed records. If he wins races and knocks off rivals along the way, so be it, but this boat is all about going faster than any yacht ever has.Currently headed to Australia, Comanche will go racing for the first time this December in the speed-hungry Sydney to Hobart race, a contest that’s been dominated for the past seven years by Bob Oatley’s Wild Oats....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt has been a source of contention between the United States and Pakistan since the 2011 raid in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden: How could the world’s most wanted fugitive hide in a country that was supposed to be committed to catching him? The relationship between the two nations was sour before the raid—U.S. authorities didn’t notify Pakistan about the bin Laden raid for fear of alerting the target—and the humiliation of the armed action damaged the relationship even further....

Is the Apple Watch really just the Casio Calculator watch reborn? No. But when you get to the heart of it…maybe also still no. That said, wouldn’t it be fun if you could turn it into one? Naturally, you can. Geek Watch is an app for the iPhone, iPad, and of course the Apple Watch which will give you the freedom to turn your new-fangled multi-hundred dollar device into a touchscreen replica of a fun ~$20 gimmick from the 80s....

View full post on YoutubeAn international team of cave divers has unearthed a giant underwater graveyard. The fossils may represent the largest single collection of lemur remains ever found.The hundreds of skeletons were hidden in three large underwater caves in a remote desert region of Madagascar. “It’s really an enormous number of fossils all in one place,” says study co-author Alfred Rosenberger, an anthropologist at Brooklyn College in New York. “They’re very complete, which is unusual in paleontology because you get broken bones frequently, or you get different parts of the body separated from one another....

I know the feeling of face-melting acceleration—on two wheels, at least—from years riding Ducati and Triumph motorcycles. But cars are different. There’s the weight. There’s the loud, large engines. Most importantly, there’s the vast sheet metal that the manufacturer sculpts into an aerodynamic shape to hide the excess under the hood. So when I finally got my opportunity to get behind the wheel some of the coolest cars on the planet, I knew I was in for a surprise....

Officials confirmed that the wreckage of missing Trigana Air Service has been discovered in Indonesia’a Papau region.The plane, which carried 49 passengers (five of them children) and five crew members, took off from Papau’s capitol city of Jayapura at 2 p.m. local time on flight scheduled to the city of Oksibil. The flight should not have lasted more than hour, but failed to arrive.Media Platforms Design TeamSpeaking to press, air transportation director General Suprasetyo said: “The aircraft that lost contact has been found at Camp 3, Ok Bape district in the Bintang Mountains regency....

Space lovers has a reason to be nervous about The Martian, in which Matt Damon stars as a marooned astronaut who must figure out how to survive alone on a hostile planet, and maybe, just maybe, get rescued. Andy Weir’s bestselling novel unfolds as a lonely space procedural. Astronaut Mark Watney, with nobody else to talk to, spends an abundance of pages on log entries that walk the reader through how he solves every problem about staying alive on Mars....

Media Platforms Design Team Browse expert reviews and compare info on F-150 at the Media Platforms Design Team IRVINE, Calif. — We just spent a day with Ford checking out the 2008 F-150 Foose Edition, which we saw earlier this year at the New York auto show, and testing out the all-new Harley-Davidson F-150, which is just a total beast. Both trucks are supercharged—that’s the big news. The blower comes standard on the Foose and is a $6500 option on the H-D....

Media Platforms Design Team LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. — This ride has a seriously devoted following. You know the Forester people, don’t you? They’re those outdoors-y types who hunger desperately all week long for that three-hour mountain-biking mud slog on the weekend. You say “vacation,” and these people say, “Let’s take a 15-day backpacking trip in Yosemite.” And camping to them means that they won’t mind sharing the forest floor with all variety of clawed beasties....

You’ve been waiting for months, and the day has finally arrived: The new Microsoft Zunes are out!Wait, why are you making that face? These are some pretty sophisticated machines. They’ve got wireless syncing to your computer, there’s a new 80GB model and some smaller 4GB and 8GB flash-memory Zunes. And they have this snappy new interface called the Zune Pad, which lets you browse through music with a flip of the finger....

More than 80 years after the company derived its name from an abbreviation of two Danish words that mean “play well,” LEGO has been called the world’s most powerful brand. It’s a status cemented by last year’s wildly successful The LEGO Movie, the wealth of pop-culture-licensed toy sets flying off shelves, and a wealth of goodwill toward the company. The new documentary film A LEGO Brickumentary (out July 31) attempts not only to celebrate these iconic bricks’ history, but also to chronicle their ever-expanding legacy, which nowadays includes providing inspiration for architects and artists alike....