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It’s a standard Hollywood cliché: In the heat of a gunfight, one guy grabs another and uses him as a shield from the hail of bullets. And in last night’s episode of Lost, “Sundown,” flash-sideways Sayid did just that: When confronted with two thugs and boss Martin Keamy—Widmore’s right-hand man in the universe we know, who is still demanding interest on a fully repaid loan from Sayid’s brother in the alternate universe—Sayid punches a thug in the gut, grabs his gun, then uses him as a shield when Keamy’s other thug takes a shot with a handgun....

No more footprints and flagpoles. This time around, NASA aims to stake lunar soil with something a little more permanent – a long-term scientific and exploratory outpost. The agency anticipates that four-person crews will start making one-week visits to the moon in 2020, supplemented by robotic cargo drops. A permanent base and rotating six-month astronaut duty tours will follow in 2024.+ Click to enlargeMedia Platforms Design TeamNASA lunar landerThe base will be located in the vicinity of one of the poles, where near constant sunlight can provide solar power....

Media Platforms Design TeamRace fans usually enjoy soaking up on-track speed from the bleachers or– if they’re lucky, the hospitality suites. We caught a different glimpse of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca after chatting with Gill Campbell, who has served as the track’s CEO and General Manager for the last 11 years.Unlike other circuits, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca is technically a county park, which means there’s little to no infrastructure to support the logistical hurdles of large-scale racing....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen there is more than $10 billion in weapons sales at stake, marketing can trump diplomacy during NATO air combat training.NATO pilots routinely participate in war games with its members, during which flights of “red team” airplanes play the opposition and square off against NATO pilots in realistic encounters. Recently, a squadron of pilots of the Spanish air force flew Eurofighter Typhoons, a multirole airplane with good dogfighting abilities, in mock combat against U....

When North Dakota House Bill 1328 legalized the police use of pepper spray, beanbags, and other nonlethal weapons from unmanned aircraft last month, headlines sounded the alarm: Soon, cop drones would surely be hovering over and tasing us.But there are two things you should know. First, despite warning of “Taser drones,” there are no plans to field such aircraft. And more importantly, building a police drone that fires non-lethal ammo is more challenging than you might think....

The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered hundreds of new planets around faraway stars, but those discoveries have come with an unexpected side effect. They’ve made us realize how weird our solar system is.We’ve discovered configurations we couldn’t have fathomed, like hot Jupiters orbiting their suns faster than Mercury. And we keep finding a class of planets we’re calling super-Earths and mini-Neptunes that don’t exist in our solar system. They’re worlds that fall right on the borderline between giant rocky bodies and some kind of ice giant or gas dwarf....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design TeamOn most mornings, my walk to Popular Mechanics takes me past the Central Park Zoo. Most of the animals are tucked out of sight, but if I’m patient, I can usually spot the seals swimming in their tank. It’s a nice start to the morning. It’s nice, that is, until I start thinking about zoos, and whether it’s a good thing to keep all of these exotic animals in captivity....

Media Platforms Design TeamExternal appearances aside, the inner workings of the new Model 700 EtronX are nothing short of revolutionary.Consider it a shot in the arm for factory sporting rifles. Remington’s new Model 700 EtronX centerfire target rifle and pesky varmint bagger is more than just another gun. It’s the opening salvo in what could well be the next revolution in firearms. What Remington has done is take the mechanical trigger and related hardware required to energize and release the firing pin of its standard Model 700 and replace it with an electronic trigger and an electronic, versus the usual percussive, ignition system....

Microsoft has been making its hybrid laptop-tablet Surface devices for years now, and they’ve evolved to pretty fantastic devices, but they’re not laptops. Close, but not quite. The Surface Book? This is a laptop. The Surface Book is kind of hard to describe. Technically it’s a tablet with a detachable keyboard, just like the army of so-so to total-garbage convertible laptops that have come before it. Tablets with keyboards that feel like an afterthought, or with operating systems that aren’t designed with that sort of control scheme in mind....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe business of SXSWi is business: There are panels and attendees focused on such broad topics as disaster relief and the future of creativity, but the dominant theme is how to launch and grow companies. The Collegiate Digital Media Entrepreneurial Tournament is a good place to see this preoccupation in practice. I attended the final round, which featured three student teams being grilled, none too gently, by a panel that included Jim McKelvey, the founder of Square, an engineering director at Google, and executives at smaller companies....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere it is, 2025, and Dan Gilbert still feels a pinch of incredulity when he looks out his office window at the bustling streets of downtown Detroit. Less than 20 years ago, this part of the city was a ghost town. Now office workers fill the sidewalks during the day, and at night the walks are alive with people going to restaurants and bars, theaters and nightclubs, art galleries and sporting events....

Are you a fan of both classic literature and modern action-packed sci-fi? Do you geek out at the sight of spaceships and/or giant flying whale monsters? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, stop whatever you’re doing and watch this new short/proof of concept by Irish filmmaker Ruairí Robinson (Fifty Percent Grey, The Last Days on Mars).The Leviathan takes place in the early 22nd century, after humans have colonized multiple worlds, and are now on “the hunt” for a giant monster who apparently loves to hide in the clouds....

Media Platforms Design Team[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/NOMYjiCiTYg&hl=en_US&fs=1&[/youtube]DO• Brake. Brake once, don’t pump or ride the brakes. This will only heat up the brake pads, potentially overheating them and making them fail. It will take more force than you’re used to to make the vehicle stop. Use both feet if you need to.• Shift. Move the gearshift into neutral. If the throttle is truly stuck, the engine will redline and make a lot of noise, but it won’t be damaged....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: NASA)We can all breathe a sigh of relief. A batch of whisky that was floating in space for the past three years has safely returned home. The collaboration between NanoRacks, which provides research space on the International Space Station, and Ardbeg Distillery, a scotch whisky maker, had a simple purpose: Ardbeg wanted to see how whisky matured in microgravity. So, they took whisky terpenes (hydrocarbon chains that appear in ethanol) up to space with bits of charred oak mixed in to simulate the maturation process of whisky barrels....

Even at 84, Willie Nelson still spends about 150 days a year on the road (again). At the helm of the Honeysuckle Rose, his tour bus, are Gates “Gator” Moore and Tony Sizemore, who’ve split Willie’s driving duties for nearly 40 years. Calling from a hamburger joint in Nebraska, they offered their tips on driving without GPS.UnplugGATES: Don’t be afraid to override the GPS. We did it last night. We’ll go 30 miles out of the way to bypass a city we suspect will have heavy traffic by the time we get there....

Media Platforms Design TeamGive me your stove’s elevator pitch. What’s so special about it?The Walker Stove combines the best features of a rocket mass heater, a masonry heater, and a wood stove. It utilizes the unique burn chamber of a rocket mass heater to completely burn the fuel. The metal radiator, like a traditional wood stove or a rocket mass heater, radiates intense heat to the living space, providing that warm, welcoming feel most are familiar with from a cheery wood stove....

Media Platforms Design TeamEveryone Will Be a ScientistToday, science is the bastion of the elite—only those with degrees who have access to expensive state-of-the-art equipment at government facilities and universities are considered real scientists. But Tantek Çelik, Ariel Waldman, Dr. Kiki Sanford, Jessy Cowan-Sharp and Natalie Villalobos—the speakers at SXSW’s Open Science panel—think citizen scientists are the way of the future. They envision a time when science is deinstitutionalized and scientists and citizens openly collaborate in the name of discovery....

Back in 1979, fossils turned up in China that have baffled scientists to this day. Although the bones date to just 11,000 years ago, anthropologists say their features resembles those of pre-human species thought to have disappeared much, much earlier. According to a new study out this week in PLoS One, the thigh bone from Maludong, China, that was analyzed seems to have features of very, very old relatives—species as old as the Homo genus itself....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Internet can teach you how to build a gun that launches ping-pong balls at a few hundred miles per hour. Big deal—where’s the fun in shooting projectiles at subsonic speed? To kick it up a notch, a team of mechanical engineers at Purdue University has reconfigured the ping-pong-ball gun into a supersonic bazooka. to watch as it turns four aluminum cans into shrapnel.Click hereFor years, Mark French has been using the regular subsonic version of the gun to teach kids about physics....

Proving that the golden age of lithium-ion power tools is just getting started, Bosch’s Litheon 36V 1651 Two-Speed Reciprocating Saw ($349) sets a new standard for both speed and endurance. At its top cutting speed of 3000 strokes per minute, it can slice through 1.5 in. of 1.5-in.-thick particleboard per second, and the 36-volt battery should last 25 percent longer than equivalent saws. The Litheon is a lesson in industrial ergonomics, with a wide, accommodating handle and a compact, 18-in....