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Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie that should not work. It has characters familiar to no one but diehard comic fanboys, a heavy, intricate storyline, and a character that repeats one line of dialog. Yet this space western is so fun and (we’ll say it) heartwarming that you’ll wish it came out when you were a kid.Here’s a plot run-through with minimal spoilers: On the eve of his mother’s death, our soon-to-be-hero Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is captured by space pirates....

You take your car in for an oil change every 3000 miles, have its tires rotated and get the engine tuned up from time to time. Yet while we all make sure to maintain our vehicles, most of us don’t bother to perform similar tasks on our personal computers, even though we may spend more time in front of our PCs than we do in our cars.No, you don’t have to take your PC into a professional for regular service....

Media Platforms Design TeamRemember former corporate defense lawyer Heather Peters, who took Honda to court because her 2006 Civic Hybrid couldn’t achieve more than “41 to 42 mpg even on its best days in the best conditions”? Peters won the first round, but her victory in the small claims lawsuit was reversed today by California Judge Dudley W. Gray II, who concluded that Honda’s fuel economy figures are in compliance with EPA standards....

Nobody woke up one day and said: “I want to invent Scotch.” Perhaps our most revered of brown spirits began life the same way as so many things on this planet: A happy accident born from whatever spare parts were laying around, perfected over years of trial, error, and blind luck.The barley that serves as the spirit’s chief ingredient? A crop that had long littered the Scottish countryside. “Like many distilleries around here, ours started out as a farm,” says John Campbell, distillery manager at Laphroaig....

When Windows Vista launched earlier this year, half of the PCs in American offices didn’t meet the minimum requirements to run the basic version. A similar fraction of home computers faced the same problem: instant obsolescence. Fortunately, a simple RAM upgrade brings 41 percent up to snuff–and keeps them out of landfills.Step 1Go to Start>Control Panel>System to find out how much memory you have, then consult crucial.com or kingston.com to find out what type and size of memory you can install in your machine....

“Stuff” is only as crappy as how you’re using it. At Lifehacker, making crappy stuff awesome is about identifying hardware, operating systems, furniture, or whatever potentially awesome thing we can find, divining the right application of said thing, and supplying the necessary know-how (that’s the special sauce in awesome). In equation form, that’s something like (Crap + Idea) ^ Know-How = Awesome. (My math’s not great, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like that....

The brain never really loses its ability to act young—it just uses a brain receptor to turn that ability off, a new study suggests.In a young person (or a young mouse, in the case of this study), brain circuits are more plastic—they’re highly moldable, reorganizing with ease and making new connections to learn new tasks. As we get older, our brains become hardened, which is why it’s harder and takes longer to learn new skills when you’re older....

Media Platforms Design TeamToyota’s latest robot isn’t bumping around a lab or, like Honda’s Asimo, taking trips to Disneyland. Robina (short for Robot as Intelligent Assistant) has a job. It guides visitors through the Toyota Kaikan Exhibition Hall in Japan. The 4-ft.-tall, permanently coifed bot is fully autonomous and can navigate around obstacles, chat with visitors and even sign autographs without human assistance. Which is all well and good, but Robina’s true mission is to help gather data that could benefit robots still in development at Toyota, such as household cleaning bots and so-called personal mobility bots....

Media Platforms Design TeamNASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has found two more planets that each orbit dual stars. , the work of a team led by William Welsh of San Diego State University, leads scientists to believe that alien worlds where two suns burn in the sky are far more common than once thought. And it just so happens that many of these planets may be in their solar systems’ habitable zones....

In 2010, Japan’s space agency, JAXA, sent a probe to Venus. Akatsuki would have studied the climate and atmosphere of the hot, hot, hot world. Except it failed to insert itself into orbit and drifted off into space. But in December, the probe will have a second chance to enter orbit around Venus. The probe originally faltered due to thermal problems during its insertion burn which caused a nozzle to fall off....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs well as being the largest jet in commercial service, the Airbus A380 represents a bid by Europe’s EADS to take from America’s Boeing the title of world’s most advanced commercial aircraft manufacturer. Critical to that endeavor is the aircraft’s ability to not crash, come apart in midair, or generally imperil the lives of the public. Unhappily for Airbus, Qantas A380 was taking off from Singapore on November 4, 2010, when its number two engine exploded with a loud bang....

Media Platforms Design TeamEvery year there are at least 2.3 million tons of polystyrene (in the form of Styrofoam cups, plates, packing film and CD jewel cases, to name a few) dumped into the nation’s landfills, in large part because the petroleum-based plastic waste is difficult to recycle. A study to be published in April’s American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology, demonstrates that this may no longer need to be the case....

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania team are researching the possibility that shocking the brain could help memories form. Their work with small electrical pulses, which is supported by DARPA, hopes to find the area of the brain where memories are formed so they can better target the pulses.The subjects of the Penn study are actually epilepsy patients in a separate study. For that research, they had a piece of mesh implanted that studies their brain activity to see what happens when the seizures occur....

Off in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of the Baru Peninsula of Colombia, a ship missing for 310 years has been found again. And on board that boat, the San Jose, there may be up to $17 billion in loot to plunder. The San Jose was sunk in a bitter civil war between Spanish forces loyal to the Hapsburg Dynasty and those loyal to Prince Phillip, a nephew and next in line for succession....

If you want to break the ice with a bunch of high school kids, a Nissan GT-R Nismo is a good way to go. Two minutes after I roll into the parking lot at Freedom High (about a half hour from Green Bay, Wisconsin), a tall, ruddy kid named Cole Woods walks up to introduce himself, his eyes on the car. The Nismo isn’t completely out of context, since this is the Freedom Auto Club’s annual end-of-the-year car show, an event where the kids showcase their projects and the local horsepower fiends show up en masse to clear the carbon out of whatever high-strung machinery’s been slumbering in the garage over the long Wisconsin winter....

Media Platforms Design TeamI think design is becoming more and more important because once technologies become comparable from one brand or one company to another, once engineering becomes comparable, once quality, reliability, they almost become givens… Design is now very much the key differentiator, since it resonates on an emotional level.I don’t believe you can ever design by committee. If you listen to too many points of view, you’ll end up with mediocrity....

While the flying car may never get off the ground, XTI Aircraft is hoping to bridge the gap with its new take on a light jet that will transport you door-to-door.The TriFan 600 is the brainchild of David Brody, who in 2012 began dreaming of true long-distance point-to-point air travel. He has since gathered an elite team of aviation experts—including Jeff Pino, former president of Sikorsky, and Charlie Johnson, former president of Cessna—to plan the first commercially certified, high-speed, long-range airplane capable of vertical takeoff and landing....

This is General Electric’s Evolution Series Tier 4 locomotive, the brand’s latest model, built to produce minimal emissions according to new federal standards for trains. Before going into production, GE puts it through trial runs. Lots of them.Near Norden, in California, where the elevation is nearly 7,000 feet, and the locomotive goes through a tunnel named “Big Hole,” an unventilated passage that climbs 2,400 feet over 2 miles. The walls are about two feet larger than the locomotives that pass through it....

We were recently invited to experience some gear we’ve been looking forward to for months—and what could be the most anticipated motorcycle helmet ever produced—the Skully AR-1. Skully is an augmented reality helmet that uses a built-in rear-view camera to provide a 180-degree view of what’s behind the rider, which is projected on a heads-up display (HUD) in front of the rider to radically enhance situational awareness.Now, we didn’t get a chance to test the $50,000 prototype helmet on the street while riding a motorcycle—that, Skully CEO Marcus Weller says, will come later....

Media Platforms Design Team If you think the rise of robots on Earth is scary, then here’s a thought for you: they might be the most prevalent lifeform in the universe. University of Connecticut philosophy professor Susan Schneider certainly thinks so. In her new paper “Alien Minds,” she proposes that by the time civilizations are able to communicate by radio, they’re a few short steps away from developing artificial intelligence. One they reached that level of advancement, they may have opted to upgrade their biology to something that’s a biomechanical hybrid or something entirely synthetic....