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Q: How many AA batteries would it take to start a car?A: AA? We prefer AAA—as in the American Automobile Association, which, for a nominal yearly membership fee, will gladly send a mechanically inclined gentleman in a well-equipped truck to start your car for you if you ever get jammed up with a dead battery. But maybe you’re stranded outside an Eveready warehouse with no phone service or you’re just determined, for reasons of your own, to get all MacGyver with it....

Media Platforms Design TeamApple is holding its annual September event on Wednesday in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium.The location is a first for Apple, and it’s a massive space, so we’re expecting some pretty epic announcements.September’s event typically focuses on the iPhone, and this year should be no different. However, we’ll likely see a lot more. The invite to the event references Siri, something many are attributing to a long-awaited refresh to the Apple TV....

Media Platforms Design TeamBURBANK, Calif. – Jay’s garage is going green. Like most of us, Jay Leno has been taking a hard look at his footprint on the planet. So in a long-term project with Popular Mechanics, Jay will be upgrading his nearly 20,000-sq.-ft. garage with the latest environmentally friendly shop equipment and products.Over the next year, we’ll work with Jay and expert consultants in a variety of fields to analyze the garage’s energy usage and come up with some alternative energy systems....

Want to go to Mars but can’t quite figure out how you’d manage to get there? NASA’s giving you another opportunity: Send your name instead.If you’re interested in planetary exploration, you can sign up to have your name added to a microchip currently hitching a ride to Mars via the InSight Mars lander, scheduled to launch in March 2016. The current schedule has the lander touching down on September 28, 2016, so it’s possible you could be out there (sort of) in just over a year....

As I reach into my desk drawer for another thin mint (my eternal thanks to Brownie Scout Hannah Beilinson), it’s occurred to me how much the troops have changed since my own days of peddling sugary treats. And I’m not just referring to slicker sales pitches. Twelve Girl Scouts from the San Francisco Bay area recently joined forces with NASA.The Space Cookies—as the troop dedicated to math, science, engineering and technology dubbed itself—recently entered the international FIRST Robotics competition, which gives teams of high school students six weeks to build a robot that meets specific challenges....

Bombing down the interstate, you glance at the odometer and realize you’ve just reached an automotive milestone: 100,000 miles with no major repairs. Time was a car that had passed its belly over that much real estate was considered pretty much used up, but yours still runs great and looks practically new. Amazing how technology has advanced.Then you notice the temperature gauge. Holy smokes–pegged! You put it in neutral, coast off onto the shoulder and shut her down....

In case you haven’t heard, this week physicist Stephen Hawking announced a bold idea at a black hole conference. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, humans could survive a black hole, but if they did, they’d be transported to another universe on the other side, with ours never accessible again. It’s an outlandish claim and a bit of a nightmare scenario, what with that whole “entering a new realm with variant states of matter and all new laws of physics....

Media Platforms Design TeamSurrogates (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamJonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, like James Cameron’s FX masterpieceAvatar, deals with humans artificially interacting with their world. However, unlike Avatar the human characters inSurrogates aren’t on a hostile planet in a galaxy far way, but are still here on Earth. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Surrogates was adapted from a well-received graphic novel of the same name, and given the Hollywood treatment. In the near future, affordable, high-tech robotics will allow the majority of humanity to experience the world virtually through the use of surrogates....

Media Platforms Design TeamXavier, why did you want to make this movie?XAVIER GENS: In the beginning, I wanted to do a movie in a contained environment about human beings. I received that script, and I offered to rewrite it and make it kind of like a nightmare, because I have nightmares about contained environments all the time. We spoke with the writer, Eron Sheean, and we started to write the story....

Media Platforms Design Team Brave Neutron WorldBY KAREN C. FOX Photograph by Ofer WolbergerThis isn’t your father’s particle accelerator. When it’s completed this year, the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will produce neutron pulses at least 10 times as intense as any other accelerator’s. But it’s not just an atom smasher. Its half mile of underground tunnels generate particle beams that can map the molecular makeup of anything from geological samples to living cells....

Media Platforms Design TeamDid you know immediately, off the bat, how you were going to do the lightsuits?Christine Clark, associate costume designer for Tron: Legacy: The answer is a resounding no. We were completely freaked out by it. I think the collective response was, Oh my god." We had no idea what technology would be able to satisfy what the filmmakers neededlight that can move and stretch and not break. We could have put light on something inanimate, but to put it on moving bodies with a self-contained power source had never been done before....

It seems everywhere we turn these days, we see that distinctive Victory Motorcycles taillight. And this is in the New York metro area, so that means something. These bikes are obviously appealing to a lot of folks. Well, what’s not to like? They’re production models that look like customs. Hmmm, sounds like Harley’s Screamin’ Eagle (CVO) line. Bingo.Anyway, even though we’ve covered most of Victory’s lineup in our New Cars column both here online and in POPULAR MECHANICS magazine, we felt it was time to take a closer PM....

Media Platforms Design TeamG.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Two-Disc Edition (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s safe to say that 2009 has been a banner year for Hasbro with not one, but two blockbuster films based on their lines of 1980’s action figures. However, with multiple script rewrites and real-life conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, G.I. Joe did not have an easy road to the silver screen. After a leaked early draft was criticized by fans online, Larry Hama, writer of the G....

Harvard University’s been working on this awesome robot bee since at least 2012. The current incarnation of RoboBee still needs to be wired to an external power source and it can’t control itself on its own, but it has one cool new feature: It can swim like a tiny little submarine.RoboBee doesn’t actually need any changes to its construction to swim. It’s so small, however, that the water’s surface tension can actually prevent it from moving under the water....

Adrian Lane of Gloucestershire, England, got in touch with the International Space Station the other day. Thanks to impeccable timing and a prime location under the ISS’s path above the Earth, Lane was able to have a brief conversation with space station’s crew via ham radio. It must be surreal to have a casual chat with humans who are floating up there in the void, but technologically, it’s really not even that hard....

This is my 1988 Porsche Carrera Targa. The car is all factory original, except for some modifications to boost performance from the 3.2-liter Six. There’s an Autothority high-performance chip and a K&N free-flow intake. Because Porsche builds all its cars as race cars, extensive mods aren’t really needed. I’ll change wheels and tires for school races at the track but that’s all. My car has over 60,000 miles on the original transmission and it runs like new....

1997 was the first year for the power cruiser to hit the streets. I first saw the bike in an Anchorage showroom in spring of 1997. To my surprise, they let me sit on her and start ’er up. At that moment I knew I had to own this beast. As luck would have it, someone else bought it before I could come up with the funds. Two years later, the original owner put her up for sale and I just happened to run across the deal....

DETROIT — Hyundai has traditionally been, at least in North America, a low-cost provider. And, frankly, I steered people away from Korean marques, with their reputation for sketchy quality and bargain-basement dealers.That was then. This is now. I’ve been driving a Hyundai Azera for a few weeks, and it’s the equal of any near-luxury car from Acura, Lexus or Infiniti. It’s also 5 or 10 large less expensive.Enter the Veracruz crossover SUV....

Media Platforms Design Team Browse expert reviews and compare info on Mercedes C-Class at the Media Platforms Design Team Mercedes-Benz has truly mastered the art of creating beautiful automobiles with uncompromising luxury and high-performance driving dynamics. Case in point: the new C63 AMG. Unveiled over the July 4th holiday, this uber-powerful saloon isn’t your typical C-Class, Mercedes’ smallest line of four-doors. It was created to challenge the BMW M3 for its undisputed King of the Road title—a very formidable task, indeed....

Click to enlargeMedia Platforms Design TeamA new Lancer means a new powertrain – including the first use of a CVT for the car.Of all Mitsubishi’s vehicles, the best-known is the least driven – in the real world, that is. For years, millions of video-game players have been virtually steering the hot-rod Evolution sedan (aka the Evo) in the Gran Turismo series and other games. The new Lancer cashes in on the Evo’s fame....