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Click here for the Saturday Mechanic archive.Friday night. It’s yet another traffic light in front of the strip mall. And the pimple-faced hat-backward driving the lowered rice rocket next to you is revving his throttle menacingly, eyes bright with the possibilities of conquest. Fortunately, you know your V8 musclecar can handle his blender-motor skateboard. Green. Throttle. Squaaawwwk followed by a ding, ding, buzz, gurgle, hiss. You’ve just sawed a hole in your radiator hose with your fan–your engine mounts have failed....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou’ve just bought a small bench-top and ripped a few boards to width with it. But that barely begins to describe what the machine can do. Here’s what you need to get the most out of this tool.table sawSafety EssentialsYou never want to use a table saw without wearing a pair of safety glasses, preferably a pair that’s comfortable and has wraparound protection, like Honeywell’s. You also need hearing protection....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe sun gives the Earth life, but it also poses a planetary threat. X-ray bursts and magnetically driven explosions of solar material can wreak havoc by knocking out satellites, causing power failures and emitting radiation surges that require airline flights to be rerouted. To keep an eye on our local star, this year NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite. “Imagine a weather system where instead of the water cycle, with rain and snow, it has magnetic fields,” SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell says....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the movie “Top Gun,” Tom Cruise’s mode of earthbound transportation is a motorcycle. And it’s not because he can’t afford a car. It’s because two wheels are generally twice as much fun as four. Way more. If you want to be bad and fast and free when you’re not in your F-14, then straddle some real horsepower and watch the asphalt disappear under your front tire.The final ingredient of this endorphin-popping recipe, of course, is your favorite somebody else as company....

Media Platforms Design TeamDevon JarvisPrice: $1500At PopMech, we want to prepare our readers for anything. And I do mean anything—even having a timepiece that can alert its wearer to nuclear radiation.Known for making some of the world’s toughest watches for people who expect their wrist wear (and wrists) to endure some serious abuse, MTM now sells a collection that includes radiation detectors. RAD watches use a Geiger-Muller Tube to detect gamma rays and will sound an alarm when you hit a preset radiation level....

Honda showed the CR-Z coupe, powered by a conventional gas/electric hybrid powertrain. But it was the i-DTEC engine on display that caught our eye. This engine family was first unveiled a few months ago at the Frankfurt suto show. The engine on display here in Tokyo is the same 2.2-liter inline Four that we’ll see in the upcoming Accord diesel next year. Honda says they’ve boosted the power over their first-generation diesels by optimizing the combustion chamber and shortening the injection time for the common-rail fuel injection system....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you can’t tell by those superhuman 74-centimeter (29-inch) quads, Robert Förstemann is a powerhouse. Now the Olympics cyclist has met his match: A piece of toast.In the video below, the organizers of the environmentally conscious Toaster Challenge asked the track cyclist to find out whether he could toast a piece of white bread with nothing but the power of this grotesque, gigantic legs. Förstemann huffs and puffs on the stationary bike, generating in excess of 700 watts at any given moment while climbing a grade that approaches 40 degrees....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe idea of bypassing the air and sending sound waves directly through your body to your ears is nothing new—bone conduction technology has been around in some form or another for years. However, these headphones take it to a new level of ridiculousness, with some wonderful side effects.Hang the Outi ($110) like a pair of clip-on earrings, and the sound reverberates through your earlobes. Because the “headphones” rely on sending the sound through your cartilage—instead of blowing waves at your eardrums—it’s very difficult for you to unintentionally damage your hearing....

Media Platforms Design TeamMoab, Utah—The Polaris Razor S rides high on long-travel suspension and meaty knobby tires. At first glance, it looks like the perfect vehicle to act out off-road racing fantasies. And that’s pretty much what it’s designed for—high-performance off-road driving. On a recent sortie to the off-road playground surrounding Moab, Utah, we nabbed a spin in the Polaris Razor S. Let’s see how it performs. The SpecsAt $13,999, the Razor S costs as much as a new car....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/BDAfX2TbbLY?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]Less than a year after devastating tornadoes swept across portions of the southeast United States, families are again facing loss and, for some, lost loved ones, after Friday’s outbreak of tornadoes across the Tennessee and Ohio River valleys. These tornadic supercells of March 2 were formed by the same kinds of ingredients—abundant moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, rapid jet-stream speed, and an advancing cold front—responsible for the wild outbreak of twisters on April 27, 2011, when several hundred people were killed across the U....

View full post on YoutubeThe wreckage of a World War II Soviet plane, believed to have been shot down in combat with German forces in January 1945, has been recovered from the mud of the Bzura river in Poland. The remains of two crew members were also found, complete with at least some of the gear they were wearing at the time, and the plane fragments have been spirited away to a museum in Wyszogrod for further examination....

Media Platforms Design Team One week ago, a Chinese train departed the city of Yiwu, heading for Madrid, Spain. At the end of its three week journey, it will have made the longest freight train route ever, clocking in at 6,200 miles. The China-Europe Block Train starts in East China, then cuts through parts of Kazakhstan and Russia before entering Europe in Belarus. It then winds through Poland, Germany and France before arriving in Spain....

Media Platforms Design TeamBAGHDAD, June 30 — The first thing I notice is the smell. There’s only a trace of that rank, indefinable, unforgettable odor that seems to pervade all hospitals. When I visited here two years ago, the air was a lot thicker in Ibn Sina, the building Saddam Hussein built as a clinic to care for his friends, relatives and the Ba’athist elite. Now the U.S. military fully runs the joint, as the 28th Combat Support Hospital—and, boy, are they revamping the place....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamDETROIT — We’ve solved the mystery of the first Chinese car on American roads: It’s not a Chinese-made Buick Park Avenue, as we surmised about a month ago here. A bunch of our readers picked up right away on this good-looking car that may be worthy of the Park Avenue moniker, but is actually the Chinese Buick LaCross (sic). Only three-plus months old on the Chinese market, LaCross is helping make GM a big success in the Far East market....

Media Platforms Design TeamContaining a runaway nuclear reactor is a marathon, not a sprint. As the world watches Japan struggle to control the reactors at two earthquake- and tsunami-damaged nuclear power plants, engineers in the Ukraine are still dealing with the aftermath of the ­Chernobyl catastrophe.Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, spewing radiation across Europe. The shell that Soviet workers hastily erected to enclose the reactor has since cracked, releasing traces of radiation, and an international effort to build and place a new containment structure may soon begin construction....

Francesco Schettino, the captain of the ill-fated Costa Concordia, was found guilty of manslaughter today. He was in charge of the ship when it struck rocks and sank in 2012, a disaster that claimed 32 lives.The court sentenced Schettino to 16 years in prison: 10 for multiple manslaughter, five for causing the shipwreck, and one more for abandoning his passengers. He’s expected to appeal.Francesco Schettino at his trialMedia Platforms Design TeamSays the BBC:Investigators had severely criticised his handling of the disaster, accusing him of bringing the 290m-long vessel too close to shore when it struck rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio....

Media Platforms Design TeamHomestead-Miami Speedway—Not every team at DARPA’s Robotics Challenge built its own robot from scratch. Seven competitors, including Worchester Polytechnic Institute’s (WPI) Team WRECS, are on the so-called software track; they wrote the code and DARPA provided them with a Boston Dynamics Atlas bot.Team WRECS modified its hydraulically powered Atlas with a proton backpack, giving the humanoid nine degrees of freedom, three more than it comes with. The team, made up of 30 students from WPI and Carnegie Mellon, wrote 200,000 lines of code for the competition....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe CTS Coupe is dead. Long live the ATS Coupe.With the CTS going upmarket and upsize, the excellent compact ATS is being massaged into open segment gaps. The latest evidence is the 2015 Cadillac ATS Coupe. It is exactly what is says on the packaging, an ATS with two missing doors. Not quite the wild child of the now-discontinued CTS Coupe, the ATS Coupe is styled with more upright greenhouse and an elegantly tapering C-pillar....

It’s coming home. High-capacity fiberoptic lines have been shuttling data around the Internet backbone for years, but only recently have Internet service providers started running them to consumers’ homes. For $40 to $160 per month, telephone companies are now offering fiberoptic-based broadband service that exceeds the capacity of their cable rivals.2. There are two flavors. Verizon and AT&T are the major players in residential fiber, and each company offers something different....

Hybrids have a chance to make a real impact on our environment–not to mention our oil dependence. But it won’t happen if the focus is only on the smallest and lightest vehicles. Nope. Automakers can see far greater positive results by applying the technology to the thirstiest vehicles that sell in the highest volumes. GM is doing just that with the two-mode hybrid system it jointly developed with BMW and the former DaimlerChrysler....