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Media Platforms Design Team At roughly 20 cents a pop, text messages are expensive. But it takes a bit of perspective to realize just how pricey they really are. Short-message-service messages (that’s the official name for text messages, often abbreviated to SMS) have a maximum of 160 bytes of data. Unless you purchase a bulk text-message package (which can cost as much as $20 per month), the 20 cents-per-message rate adds up to $1310....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe best camera is the one that you have with you. It’s a nice sentiment, and very often true: When it comes to capturing life’s most important moments, a camera’s first duty is to simply be there at the right time—everything else is a bonus. Flip-style cameras are small and easy to carry; smartphones, many of which are also serviceable video cameras, live in pockets and purses, perpetually within reach....

Media Platforms Design TeamFrom everything I’ve seen, people usually put sharks into slings and bring them into the boat to tag them, but in Jaws Comes Home you use a different method. What’s the reason for that? In any other part of the world, these animals are drawn to the tagging vessel by chum. In New England, it doesn’t seem like the sharks are attracted to the traditional chumming methods. So we have to get them while they’re hunting in shallow waters....

Media Platforms Design TeamLAS VEGAS—A lot of people think 3-D printing machines are still too bulky and expensive, especially if all they want to reproduce is a simple drawing in three dimensions. A company called WobbleWorks has an answer to that: a gadget called the 3Doodler. It’s the world’s first 3-D printing pen, which made its wildly successful debut on Kickstarter last year—it raised more than $2 million instead of its $30,000 goal....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou’ve done a lot of VFX work as part of this series. How did this sequence compare?Oliver: It was totally different. When we did effects before, they put a few little spots on our heads and [tracked our movements that way]. But they said they could get up to 2000 different face movements with [the UV paint].What was it like to wear the face paint?James: It was like tar on your face....

(Published in the September 1999 issue)More:super boats that flyWhen you’re all boated, ATV’d, motorcycled, PWC’d, ballooned, skydived and bungee-jumped out, what’s next on the try-something-different menu? Howzabout hovercrafting? Recreational hovercrafting, while popular in England and elsewhere in Europe, enjoys relative obscurity in the United States. But the time for riding on air may be at hand considering this country’s ravenous appetite for new and cool things to do. Most folks consider hovercraft oddities, if they consider them at all....

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal // Publisher: Ubisoft // Release: April 30, 2014 // Systems: Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PC // Price: $15Ubisoft’s Child of Light is many things. It’s a fairy tale, a story of a young princess in a strange, ethereal dream world named Lemuria. It’s also an homage to Japanese role-playing games, whose style inspired the game’s own watercolor artwork. And the game mechanics, storytelling, and design are all tied together with an indie sentiment, pulling cues from groundbreaking titles such as Journey and Limbo....

Media Platforms Design Team DETROIT— There are two types of concept cars. There are wild, gorgeous design experiments that have little chance to make it to production and then there are “concept” cars that essentially provide a sneak peek at what the next generation of that car will look like. The dead giveaways are in the details. See production-like door handles, window treatments and interior parts? Then there’s a good chance that the concept, wearing of course slightly smaller wheels and tires, is heading to a dealer near you within a few years....

Every day, scientists hoping to see an increase in solar activity train their instruments at the sun as it crosses the sky. This is no idle academic pursuit: A lull in solar action could potentially drive the planet’s temperature down, or even prompt a mini Ice Age.For millennia, thermonuclear forces inside the star have followed a regular rhythm, causing its magnetic field to peak and ebb, on average, every 11 years....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe City Dark really resonated with me, because I grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and moved to New York City. So what inspired you to make this film?I grew up spending a lot of time in rural Maine and forged this really strong connection with the stars, in ways that I’m still processing and unraveling. It spurred my imagination, got me very interested in science and even contributed to me becoming something of an environmentalist....

View full post on YoutubeForrest Robinson’s 1963 Batmobile was the first officially licensed, real-life Batcar, predating the Adam West / Burt Ward edition from the campy TV show by three years. When we last saw this amazing ride it was going up for auction; over the weekend, it sold for $137,000.Robinson and a friend built the Batmobile from an Oldsmobile 88 frame and a 324 Rocket engine, creating a truly custom car along the way....

We haven’t moved more than a hundred yards in the past 10 minutes. That might be okay in a car with air conditioning and an ice-cold Diet Coke in each holster. But my wife, Dale, and I are astride a 2008 Victory Vision outside Charlotte, N.C., and the V-twin is radiating heat like a supercharged furnace in the humid summer air. As I frogwalk the Victory at 1 mph, it feels like the flesh on my lower legs is about to melt off....

The first thing you should know about the car is that it’s two cars.Imagine a vertical line that runs down through the center of the steering wheel, cutting the Porsche Panamera S E-Hybrid’s digital speedometer in two. To your right you’ll find everything internal combustion: the fuel gauge, temperature, and the little arrow telling you to fuel up on that side. To your left is everything electric motor: Its level of charge, how much of its potential power the car is using, and the little arrow reminding you the plug-in port is to the port side....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamAssuming you’ve somehow lied, killed or mortgaged yourself into becoming an iPhone owner this coming Friday, you might be in for a nasty surprise: Some of your most prized iPod accessories, such as dockable speakers and high-end headphones, simply won’t work with the iPhone. Here are a few of note:1. The iPhone won’t work as a phone when docked into speakers. If you’ve ever left your phone next to speakers, you understand why—it triggers a bizarre, clicking sound, as RF signals create interference....

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in Ruckersville, Virginia, has a history lesson in the lobby. That’s where it displays the 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air that it crashed into a 2009 Chevy Malibu to demonstrate the progress in safety over the past 50 years. The Malibu’s front end is annihilated, but its passenger compartment looks practically undisturbed. The Bel Air, however, looks like it cruised straight out of one of those gruesome old driver’s ed safety videos....

Take a webcrawler, set it loose on the Internet, and tell it to scrape 10 gigs of images and video at random. What kind of images do you get back? As a German coder Samim Winiger found, “a good chunk” of it will be porn and graphic violence. Not that he was necessarily surprised. “Look up how much of the Internet is adult content,” says Winiger in an IM interview. “It’s staggering....

A national security and defense lab has created the fastest computer simulation of the human heart. Using a highly scalable code called Cardioid, which they created along with IBM, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory modeled the electrical signals travelling from cell to cell, triggering them to contract. Their digital mock-up can simulate an hour of heart activity over 7 hours. Doesn’t sound impressive? Previous models took 45 minutes just to simulate one beat....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/70kkB6GFQpo?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]The much anticipated reveal of the seventh-generation Corvette is still months away, but that didn’t stop Chevrolet from letting the public get a first taste from behind the wheel… in a video game. Released yesterday, a digital version of the C7 prototype is now available for download as a free add-on car for the PS3 racing-sim Gran Turismo 5.Chevy says that GT5 developer Polyphony Digital went to great lengths to replicate the prototype’s real-world driving character as it exists now....

Designed by Mark Clement, deck contractor and host of the radio program MyFixitUpLife on WCHE 1520 AM in Philadelphia and BlogTalkRadio.Media Platforms Design TeamAt the midpoint of your deck railing, affix a post and pulley arm made out of an I-beam assembled from three 2 x 4s. Where you join the post to the arm, miter it at a 45-degree angle for a nicer-looking, sturdier joint. Use weather-resistant structural screws for everything, and add an angle brace for strength....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale: JulyPrice: Three-Year Lease $389/Month or $36,625 Total Lease PaymentCompetitors: Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Ford Focus EVPowertrain: 92-kw electric motor, 20-kwh lithium-ion battery, 6.6-kw onboard charger (120/240-volt)Fuel Economy (City/Highway combined): 118 mpgeWhat’s New: Honda is dipping a cautious toe into the EV pool. The new Honda Fit EV will be offered as a three-year lease, and you’ll only find them in California and Oregon—states with the most built-out EV infrastructure....