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Popular Mechanics contributing editor Jeff Wise, a private pilot and long-time aviation writer, takes on his biggest challenge yet: Flying without an engine. No matter how experienced the pilot, getting a glider license is no easy sail.For the last week, clouds of uncertainty have been roiling metaphorically over my head. My instructor, Jeff, has signed me off to take my check ride with an FAA examiner. But am I ready? The process is anything but a rubber-stamp procedure: The last club member who tried failed twice before he finally got his license....

Media Platforms Design TeamBurj Mubarak al Kabir in Kuwait. (Photograph by Eric Kuhne and Associates)The Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest tower in the world, officially opened in Dubai on Jan. 4 amid an impressive pyrotechnics display that highlighted the tower’s 2716.5-feet of aluminum and steel, and its 26,000 hand-cut glass panels. The Burj Khalifa blows away the next-nearest skyscraper, which is Taiwan’s 1670-foot Taipei 101, and the building has even surpassed ultra-tall, ground-cable-supported radio antennas....

Q: Is the 2009 VW Jetta diesel station wagon strong enough to tow a 15’ long pleasure boat?A: VW doesn’t rate this vehicle for towing at all in the US. In Europe, they permit towing but only with a manual transmission. I imagine that a small boat on a trailer won’t be that heavy, so it should be fine, especially if you’re just going accross town. I might be able help more if you told me more about the car, boat, how much everything weighs and where you’re going to be towing....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: Late spring 2011Price: $19,500 (Pop); $23,500 (Lounge)Competitors: Mini Cooper Roadster, Smart ForTwo CabrioletPowertrain: 1.4-liter I4, 101 hp, 98 lb-ft; five-speed manual or six-speed automatic; front-wheel driveEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 27–30/32–38 mpg What’s New: The original Fiat 500 launched in Italy on July 4, 1957, but only recently has the modern reimagining of this diminutive classic entered the public imagination (especially in the U.S., where the new 500 debuted earlier this year)....

It’s an accepted notion that cars roll off the assembly line tuned perfectly for every condition. In reality, automakers need to meet specifications for a variety of parameters–ground clearance, crash testing, fuel efficiency, ride and handling, design, NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) and aerodynamics, to name a few. And to meet all these demands, cars are chock-full of compromises. For over 60 years, hot rodders (or “tuners,” as they’re now known) have modified everything from a ‘32 Ford to a ‘92 Civic for better performance....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs venomous snakes go, the coral snake is a clumsy biter. Unlike pit vipers such as rattlesnakes and cottonmouths, which have gruesomely efficient fangs that articulate forward during a strike and inject venom like hypodermic needles, the brightly colored coral snake has small, rear-facing fangs that guide venom into a wound. This process doesn’t always work well–experts estimate that 25 percent of coral snake envenomations are dry bites–which is perhaps why the coral is so unaggressive....

Media Platforms Design TeamAudi took a big step forward into the realm of high-performance road-ready sports cars with the R8. We’ve been fans since we first drove the beast a year ago, and then later subtly proclaimed it our favorite supercar in a comparison test. But Audi is taking a much larger leap at Detroit this year with a concept R8 that packs the company’s first-ever 12-cylinder turbo diesel engine. Based on the bones of the production Audi R8, this concept car could conquer just about anything on the road with its beastly 6....

When it comes to professional DSLR cameras and components, Canon makes some of the best in the world. The company’s latest development, however, is far too advanced and probably way too expensive to be available for everyday photographers. It’s a 250-megapixel sensor.For those unfamiliar with the guts of a camera, the sensor is what takes all the information of a photo (light waves, radiation, etc.) and translates them into the image you see....

Media Platforms Design TeamEvery spring, for over two decades, the Space Access Society has been sponsoring an annual conference in Phoenix, Ariz., providing a venue for those trying to reduce the cost of getting into space to meet, discuss, and plan prospects for achieving that to-date-unattainable goal. It’s one of the most interesting space conferences of the year, and perhaps unique in its mix of mainstream industry professionals, representatives from the newer industry upstarts, amateur rocket builders, and interested lay people, in a casual atmosphere designed to promote interaction among all these communities....

Media Platforms Design Team• HypothermiaRule No. 1: Exercise if you’re freezing cold. It will warm you up. Rule No. 2: Disregard rule No. 1 if you’re in the water. With hypothermia, blood vessels constrict, reducing the supply of warm blood to the skin. That keeps internal organs warm—which is what you want. But forcing those vessels open by exercising in the water pushes the warm blood to the surface, where it quickly gets chilled....

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a retinal implant that partially restores vision in patients with a rare form of blindness. The Argus II, a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award-winning device, is the first treatment available for people with retinitis pigmentosa (RP)—a genetic disease where the eye’s retina degrades over time, eventually leading to blindness in some cases.As PM explained back in October, the Argus II uses a sunglass-mounted camera to capture an image, then translates the image into a pattern of signals....

Media Platforms Design TeamOne moment he’s Paris Hilton. The next he’s Steve Jobs. Then Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, and any number of other famous faces.Fittingly, Faces is the name of the impressive, and slightly creepy, facial-projection technology that Arturo Castro built, and that recently became a Web sensation. After seeing the video of Castro getting an early start on Halloween by digitally morphing from one celebrity to another celebrity, we had to know how it works....

Media Platforms Design TeamTi sponge price per metric ton, adjusted for 2009 Dollars. 1975-76F-14 and F-15 warplane production reaches peak; engineers design larger passenger jets.1979-81Commercial airplane orders surge.1985-86Production of B-1B bombers.1991-93Post-Cold War reduction in military aerospace demand.1999F-22 Raptor warplane design sold to the U.S. Air Force.2003-04China invests heavily in its military; the Raptor reaches full-rate production.2005-06Commercial airliner orders boom; demand far outstrips supply.2008-09Global economic slowdown; excess inventories and airliner production delays pull prices down....

Media Platforms Design TeamWASHINGTON, D.C.—The search for worlds like Earth around other stars marches on at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) winter conference this week. Scientists for NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission report that the orbiting space telescope has nabbed five new worlds, the first several of many that astronomers hope it will eventually discover. Meanwhile, other researchers have determined that stars a bit cooler and smaller than our sun, called orange dwarfs per their color, may be the best kind of stars for hosting planets with advanced, intelligent civilizations....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/FHRGxkzHT7w?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium. All of the items from the classic Tom Lehrer tune are here in this Theodore Gray creation that unites two of Pop Mech’s passions: chemistry and DIY.Gray, a co-founder of Wolfram Research, has long kept up one of the best sites on the Web for elemental knowledge and trivia. Recently, the American Chemical Society put out a delightful video, seen here, of Gray explaining the Periodic Table Table....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamScientists explain that we are missing 80 percent of the light in the universe. Just writing that sentence felt weird.Scientists from CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy concluded after analyzing “tendrils of hydrogen” in space that something was amiss. A press release on CU-Boulder’s website explains: “When hydrogen atoms are struck by highly energetic ultraviolet light, they are transformed from electrically neutral atoms to charged ions....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)At one point on December 21, three days after GM announced it was planning to wind down the brand, “Saab” was in the top six Internet searches in Yahoo! If the Swedish car brand could have achieved that kind of curiosity in life, rather than it coming after the seeming death sentence handed out to the company by General Motors this week, we might not be looking at the business equivalent of a toe-tag hanging on Saab’s front bumper....

Media Platforms Design TeamThick black smoke rises from a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Stunned neighbors mill around the 10-foot-high walls as the Pakistani military cordons off the area. the still-burning wreckage of a U.S. aircraft litters the compound yard. Inside the building, four corpses, shot dead, lie in congealing blood.Itʼs may 2, and The world is learning that Osama bin Laden is dead, killed by a U.S. Special- operations unit during a nighttime air assault....

Media Platforms Design TeamYesterday, I faced a fierce opponent in the toughest competition of my life: a game of You vs. Cat, the first dual-species iPad app from Friskies.The game goes like this: Using your finger, you fling cat food and other objects toward your cat. If the object gets to the goal, you get points. But if your cat gets a paw on the objects first, he gets points. You vs....

Media Platforms Design TeamTake a long, slow lap around these new GM pickups, and you’ll see plenty that looks familiar. Yes, these big heavy-duty trucks now share sheetmetal with the recently redesigned light-duty pickups. And they are certainly handsome. But unlike the half-ton trucks, the new Chevy Silverado HD and GMC Sierra HD pickups aren’t mechanically new at all. Under the skin, these trucks have the same engines, frames, axles, and springs as the ones on sale now, which were last redesigned back in 2011....