Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamLocated a few steps outside our basement door, partially obscured by cherry whips and spruce boughs, are four 100-gal. propane tanks, all linked to each other and to a water heater in the basement. To a family living off the grid, relying on solar energy and trying hard to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, the tanks are an eyesore. They represent a measure of defeat in terms of self-sufficiency, not to mention a financial drag....

Spring, 2010: I’m driving a new Lincoln MKT EcoBoost in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood when I spy a parking spot. I pull past and put the car in reverse, initiating the familiar dance of the urban parallel park. Except now, for the first time in my life, my hands aren’t on the wheel. Ultrasonic sensors on the bumper measure the space and tell a computer, which calculates the angles for a perfect park....

A good chunk of today’s AI research goes into creating neural networks that recognize faces and objects. So perhaps it was just a matter of time before a company like Camio came along. Camio is a security system with a twist: it uses neural networks to learn common visitors, animals, and objects and applies them to recognizing who’s at your door. The surveillance system connects to a tablet, phone, or other handheld device, providing a live stream of where ever the camera is set up....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhich of the following features offered in the $48,800 2013 Audi Allroad Prestige model seems like more trouble than it’s worth? Power leather seats, panoramic sunroof, adaptive xenon headlamps, 14-speaker Bang & Olufsen audio, voice—controlled navigation system, rearview camera, radar-based blind-spot detection, or a six-month subscription to the Audi Connect T-Mobile in-car Internet system with a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot—which costs $30 a month after that. In-car Internet access and built-in Wi-Fi aren’t entirely new....

LOS ANGELES–Lotus founder Colin Chapman was famously obsessed with trimming weight from his race cars, and his philosophy of eliminating unnecessary poundage also yielded surprisingly fuel-efficient sports cars. The supercharged, non-intercooled Lotus Elise SC produces 29 more horsepower than the naturally aspirated base model (for a total of 218), but the blower’s real benefit is torque–156 lb-ft of it spread broadly across the powerband. That allows the Toyota-sourced 1.8-liter four-cylinder to work less hard, a significant benefit when trying to cull more miles per gallon in real-world driving....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design Team NEW YORK — The Koreans take their gizmos very seriously. Sure, local electronics behemoths like Samsung and LG use their homeland as a proving ground for cutting-edge wares—meaning many of the coolest gadgets and tech trends get years of use out East before they make it to the States. After all, this is a country where everyone’s been watching television on their cellphones for years—while riding the subway, no less—and where video gaming is a major spectator sport on those very TVs....

Raking is a fine way to rid your lawn of dropped leaves—if you have the time and energy. If you’d rather get your yardwork done quickly, a leaf blower is the answer. One problem, however: Blowers can be noisy. But you can use one to clean up without disturbing the peace.UpgradeToday’s leaf blowers are quieter than older models, with some updated versions claiming to dull the noise by several orders of magnitude compared with older models....

Simon Isaacs noticed changes happening in U.S. households. Two million men are becoming stay-at-home dads. They’re responsible for childcare and 52% are in charge of the grocery shopping. Yet Simon wondered why pregnancy newsletters were written exclusively to moms. Dads seemed just as invested. And these days, increasingly so. With this in mind, Simon launched the men’s parenting site Fatherly in 2013. Media Platforms Design TeamAs the first parenting site focused on men, Fatherly has already doubled its subscribers....

Unpacking the car after a vacation weekend is never fun. Less fun, even, than cramming the family’s idea of “just enough clothes for a summer’s weekend at the lake” into a modern compact car’s diminutive trunk. Were those ski parkas really necessary? At long last, you head cheerily to the office on Monday morning, glad to be back to the grindstone. At least until you notice, by the cold light of day, the trunklid of your car sitting a good half-inch askew....

Media Platforms Design TeamWar zones are risky places and not solely because of bullets, bombs, and other man-made weapons. U.S. soldiers also face the perhaps surprising danger of bites from animals, some exotic, that medics are not prepared to handle. High on the list of offenders are monkeys that Afghan soldiers, civilians, and U.S. troops keep as pets. “We felt like this was an unrecognized risk,” says Capt. Luke Mease, a medical investigator for the Army Health Clinic in Utah....

Citing new data about the potential health risks associated with the active ingredients in most antibacterial soaps, the Food and Drug Administration announced this week that it is asking soap manufacturers to prove that the benefits of antibacterial soaps outweigh the risks—or take them off the market. The new proposal comes in light of recent data suggesting that the active ingredients in most antibacterial soaps, triclosan (in liquid soaps) or triclocarban (in bar soaps), may affect hormonal systems, according to animal studies, coupled with new evidence that humans may be exposed to much higher levels of these drugs over a lifetime than researchers previously believed....

Media Platforms Design TeamDuring the 2013 Breakthrough Awards conference panels, three hardware innovators answered questions on the booming DIY network, the future of the innovation economy, and why small startups are vital to the future of American manufacturing. Moderated by longtime tech journalist Joel Johnson, here are the five best quotes and conversations from the panel.“We started when my co-founder John Ulmen built a [Boosted Board] because he wanted one. It was only because people were chasing us and saying ‘hey can I get one of those’ we thought that maybe we should start building these....

Media Platforms Design TeamAlexander Mankowsky is not your typical auto executive.With his unbuttoned leather vest and curly locks of grey hair, you’d expect to see him at the Conscious Life Expo than mixed in with CES’s hodgepodge of Google-glass donning enthusiasts and suit-clad execs—which is exactly why we were drawn to the 25-year Daimler veteran at this year’s event.Beneath the din of blaring music and product demonstrations at the Las Vegas Convention Center, techy chatter about bleeding edge hardware usually drowns out big picture discussions about behavioral science, the convergence of man and machine, and the social network of visionaries who will bring that tech to life....

UPDATED 12:51 EDT — It’s been over nine months since Hurricane Katrina and the unprecedented devastation it left in its wake rocked the Gulf coast. The Interagency Protection Evaluation Task Force has taken that devastation, recreated the environment that caused it with supercomputers and scale models and studied it. According to IPET’s Draft Final Report, New Orleans’ protections systems were nowhere near ready for the record waves and storm surge caused by Katrina....

Media Platforms Design TeamVesta as seen by Dawn. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechSomewhere in the Asteroid Belt, NASA’s plucky spacecraft Dawn is on its way from Vesta, the second-largest object in the belt, to Ceres, the largest. Having finished with the spacecraft’s time at Vesta, scientists are now parsing the mound of data they accumulated about the big rock and uncovering some surprises. One of them: It’s got water. According to a couple of complementary studies that appear in the journal Science today, Vesta was thought to be bone dry....

Media Platforms Design TeamA noted downside of our modern mobile-device world is that everything has (and needs) a charging cable. Unless you are a neo-luddite, you are no doubt drowning in the damn things, and cramming them into some horrible junk drawer somewhere until you need to extract one from the tangled mess. There’s good news, friends. Cable Hive could solve that for you. Inspired in part by that old “store your cables in an old toilet paper roll” lifehack, Cable Hive is a small, square shelf unit for keeping all your cables organized and out-of-the-way but still handy....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhite Sands National Monument is Earth’s largest gypsum dune field, and it may be the product of the same geological processes that created similar landscapes on Mars, NASA researchers say. “They’re studying our dune field to understand the dunes on Mars,” says Rebecca Wiles, the monument’s chief of interpretation.To get there, take U.S. Highway 70 west from Alamogordo, N.M. Drive about 15 miles out of town through the New Mexico desert and you will see white hills of sand glistening in the sun up ahead, hills that reflect the way this country looked millions of years ago....

Media Platforms Design TeamExactly how deep can a human being travel underwater using current technology?The deepest point ever reached by man is 35,858 feet below the surface of the ocean, which happens to be as deep as water gets on earth. To go deeper, you’ll have to travel to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, a section of the Mariana Trench under the Pacific Ocean 200 miles southwest of Guam. And you’re going to need a shovel....

By then I was able to keep the plane steady as we raced down the centerline. I was able to climb out in a coordinated and measured way, searching the sky for traffic, until I hit our cruising altitude. By then I could arrest our climb with forward pressure on the yoke—a modest achievement as piloting goes, but one that really pleased me. A climbing plane wants to keep climbing, you see, and a hard nudge on the stick implies a willful hand and a made-up mind....

Media Platforms Design TeamNASA today unveiled the first images taken of the lowest layers of the sun’s atmosphere by the IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) spacecraft, revealing a “multitude of thin, fiber-like structures.“Using a combination ultraviolet telescope and spectrograph, the 7 by 12-foot IRIS has been able to peer into the sun’s interface region, the boundary between the surface and the scorching-hot corona that surrounds it, and pick out previously unseen small features, even ones only 150 miles across....