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Media Platforms Design TeamNASALet’s be honest. The chances are that you or I will even walk on the moon are slim. Humans haven’t made a lunar touchdown in more than four decades. Even among the Apollo astronauts who flew there the numbers weren’t great. Of the 24 that made the trip, only half(!) ever got out of a lander and moon-walked.With this in mind, take a moment to appreciate the fact that right now scientists are gunning to bring you that first-person view of the moon that only a dozen humans have ever experienced before....

Media Platforms Design Team LOS ANGELES — With NBA legend Jon Salley by his side, Volkswagen head of technical development Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg unveiled the Space Up! Blue electric-powered concept car to a large crowd here—its first in North America. Small in stature, Hackenberg warned us not to judge a book by its cover: “There is plenty of interior space for four full-size people.” Styled after the classic Samba Bus from the 1950s (a hippy favorite), this slick looking, zero-emission van is powered by an electric drive system that includes a 45-kW motor, 12 lithium-ion batteries with a total of 12 kWh, and a hydrogen fuel cell....

Dodge drops a new 8.4-liter aluminum V10 engine in the Viper SRT10 variant for 2008 to deliver 90 more horsepower and zero-to-60 mph acceleration time of under four seconds. The latest version of the Dodge super coupe/convertible proudly carries a horsepower rating of 600 and a startling torque delivery of 560-ft.-lbs. With all that power, you can’t ignore stopping, and the Viper has that in good measure—also world-class in 100 feet from 60 to zero mph....

On-Sale Date: February 2012 Price: $20,000–$26,000 Competitors: Honda CRV, Ford Escape, GMC Terrain, Kia Sportage Powertrains: 2.0-liter I4, 160-hp (est.), 155 lb-ft; six-speed auto or manual; FWD or AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/highway): 24–27/31–34 (est.)What’s New: A compact crossover designed to infuse Mazda’s “Zoom-Zoom” spirit into the mainstream, the CX-5 will be introduced at the Frankfurt Auto Show on September 13. Rarely are the words “all new” used as truthfully as they are when applied to the CX-5....

Mars[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/8DASBmOnuCI&hl=en_US&fs=1&[/youtube]On its face, Mars is a romantic comedy—but it’s also chock-full of real science. “I have a double major in mathematics and philosophy with minors in history of science and language studies,” says director Geoff Marslett, but “I decided not to go into physics and go back to film school.” Mars begins with a real-life event—the failure of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Beagle 2 in 2003—and, 11 years later, follows three U....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Clean After You MowDamp grass clippings cling to the underside of a mower deck and form a soggy layer that quickly turns into a moldy mess. If your mower has a washout port, then by all means use it to clean the deck. But even after you’re done, scrape the deck clean with a putty knife, being particularly careful to clean the lip where the deck edge curls under....

When the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, all matter as we know it went from a single point of near-infinite energy to an ever expanding tapestry of matter, anti-matter, dark matter, photons, neutrinos, and more. In those early moments, the quark-gluon plasma emerged, a kind of matter that can only be created at supremely dense and hot states unseen since the universe burst into existence.But now, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island have recreated the quark-gluon plasma, briefly bringing back to life a state of matter rare in the universe today – if it exists at all....

Media Platforms Design TeamAmericans Robert J. Lefkowitz and Brian K. Kobilka won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry this morning for research that helped to reveal how cells communicate.Semi-permeable cell membranes are one of the most astounding features of life, allowing many cells to coordinate into organs, organ systems and organisms. Cell membranes at once protect the fragile contents of each cell and maintain contact with other, sending and receiving signals and communicating across barriers....

Media Platforms Design Team
Take the Euro-only Mercedes CLA 45 AMG hatchback, put it in the the weakest taffy stretcher on the planet to raise the roof marginally, and tweak the nose and tail. Now you have the 2015 Mercedes GLA 45 AMG. This new pseudo-hot hatch/ crossover/wagon/buzzword just debuted at the Detroit Auto Show.Mechanical bits are identical to the Euro car: A screamin’ hot transverse-mounted 2.0-liter turbocharged inline-4 making 360 hp and 322 lb-ft of torque, mounted to a 7-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission driving all four very generously sized 18-inch wheels....

Later this year, Google will begin testing drones built by Titan, a company it recently acquired. It’s part of Google’s big dream of internet from the sky. This isn’t a replacement for Google Loon, the project to send thousands of internet-streaming balloons into the straosphere, but rather a plan to compliment and augment it.Titan, which Google bought just under a year ago after a mini bidding war against Facebook, builds ultra-lightweight unmanned drones....

The “home of the future,” like fusion energy and the next good Ben Affleck movie, has always been just over the horizon. Well, today’s robots aren’t yet scrambling eggs or walking the dog, but any couch potato armed with a PC and a hundred bucks or so can direct his lights to dim, his music to play, and his security system to turn on and off by using a single remote control....

Go to your computer and email your local congressman right now. Why? Because thanks to archaic headlight-brightness regulations, possibly the most groundbreaking feature on BMW’s highly innovative i8 plug-in hybrid isn’t legal in the United States. That’s right—no laser headlights for us. And get this: BMW says its lights are 30 percent more energy-efficient than LEDs and illuminate up to double the distance, about 2000 feet. They aren’t as precise as LEDs, though, so the i8 still uses that technology for low beams....

Media Platforms Design TeamI’m so inundated with emails, messages and notifications that I’m starting to miss stuff. Is there any way to set special alarmslike a text message or a callfor, say, important emails?I’m always hesitant to recommend solving a noise problem with yet another layer of noise, but there is a way to do this. A new site called If This Then That (ifttt.com) lets you set triggers for specific events online, and then assign personalized actions to follow them....

DETROIT — We’ve already shown you Lincoln’s MKR concept. But until you see a car in the metal—you can’t really get a sense of a car’s real world presence. Well, after attending the Lincoln press conference we can tell you that the MKR is quite a stunner. In fact, from our vantage point, as we took it all in, we couldn’t help but think—Bentley. This Lincoln concept looks a lot like the Bentley Continental GT in profile....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs more robots find near-permanent homes on land and in space, they are also starting to settle in for long-term living in the ocean.SOLO-TREC, the latest breed of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), features an engine that produces renewable energy from water temperature fluctuations, allowing it to spend more time in the water.The new technology, developed by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC-San Diego, offers a major improvement in powering AUVs....

Media Platforms Design TeamUpdate, January 29: The countdown to New Horizon’s approach is officially on, with the craft already taking pictures for its closest approach in July. There’s a counter on NASA’s page if you need the info down to the second, but in the meantime, we should soon have images of the once-and-not-so-future ninth planet (or second dwarf planet).The on-board telescoping camera Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager will take hundreds of snapshots of the icy world to get a better estimate on its distance....

Media Platforms Design TeamWar tensions have been high since last week’s announcement by the South Korean government that a 60-foot North Korean submarine fired a torpedo that sank a South Korean corvette and killed 46 sailors at the end of March. The South Koreans stated that a Yeono-class (alternatively spelled “Yono”) midget submarine fired the torpedo in March. (They also field a larger midget submarine, the Sang-O, that fits 15 sailors....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast month, a Metro-North Railroad train plunged off the track while taking a sharp curve at 82 miles per hour, killing four and seriously injuring 20. In the aftermath, some experts said the disastrous results could have been prevented by positive train control (PTC). An automatic braking system built to slow down dangerous trains, PTC has been available since 1990. But the lifesaving tech remains widely unadopted.“The Metro-North accident claimed four lives,” says Robert Sumwalt, a vice chairman at the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB)....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs anyone who’s ever put too much of the pungent green paste on a sushi roll knows, wasabi is hard to ignore. A taste of the stinging stuff sets off alarm bells on your tongue. And a Japanese team has now taken advantage of that fact for their real but really crazy-sounding invention: the wasabi fire alarm.The research team was trying to come up with a solution to the fact that most people who are killed in building fires are asleep or elderly—either way, they don’t hear the alarm....

The Nintendo Wii U wants to be a smartphone. It also wants to be video-game console. It lands somewhere in between, occupying a weird space somewhere between a Nintendo 3DS and a clunky Microsoft Xbox.The identity trouble with this device, which debuted yesterday, November 18, begins when you turn on the device and begin using the GamePad, Nintendo’s brick of a touchscreen controller. The GamePad is a hybrid: It’s part touchscreen, but also part traditional game controller with joysticks and regular buttons....