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Media Platforms Design TeamTerminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - The Complete Second Season Six-Disc Set (2008)Media Platforms Design TeamIn the high-stakes gamble that is prime time television, ratings matter and each of us have had beloved shows cancelled. For every success story like 30 Rock, there’s a Reaper cut down in its prime. However, after a shaky start things looked promising for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles with a full second season order paired with fan-favorite Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse....

Media Platforms Design Team[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/Ezn1ne2Fj6Y?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]These days we’re accustomed to quickly pulling up Google Earth and being able to zoom in on our own rooftops. But forty years ago this week, the very first Earth-observing satellite was on its way into orbit. The inaugural Landsat launched on July 23, 1972, back when the United States was still sending men to the moon, and the Landsat program has been surveying the surface of the Earth ever since....

Media Platforms Design TeamInvisibility, this week’s peer-reviewed hype would have you believe, isn’t just for pre-pubescent boy wizards anymore. But I wouldn’t start sewing your Harry Potter-­style magic cloak just yet, geeks and geekettes.Don’t get me wrong: Monday’s big news that the highly respected (and, when you think about it, rather boastfully named) journals Science and Nature will publish two separate papers this week on new advances in cloaking technology is exciting stuff for anyone who, like me, believes steadfastly in the promise of the future....

Media Platforms Design TeamHonda’s top-dog sport bike has undergone a fierce protein diet for 2008. Its engineers trimmed weight, added horsepower and wrapped it all around an aggressive new design. Clad with shorter overhangs and cleaner lines, the flagship liter bike’s mass is also more centralized for nimbler handling. We tested the CBR1000RR at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, and its blistering performance made us nearly forget that this monster is actually intended for street use....

Media Platforms Design TeamRomeo, Mich.—More cubes. More power. More flying. More fun.From the outside, there’s no external difference between a 2010 Ford SVT Raptor with the base 5.4-liter V8 and the new 6.2-liter mill. No hood scoops. No fancy exhaust pipes. Not even a dimensional badge on the tailgate. But it doesn’t matter. Whether anybody else knows your Raptor has the big engine becomes completely irrelevant once you mat the throttle....

Checking your luggage can seem playing like roulette. Will your belongings travel through a maze of sorting conveyor belts and eventually make it to your final destination? Or will you end up empty-handed at the luggage carousel, wondering where your suitcase is? We talked to Steven Lott from the International Air Transport Association to find out how luggage gets lost–and what you can do to minimize the risk. U.S. carriers “mishandled”–meaning the bag didn’t make it to its destination on the first try–7....

The United Kingdom is preparing to become a world leader in driverless cars. Its government is already crafting regulations to get autonomous cars on the road while creating four pilot programs to test the technology. This includes the pilot program of an autonomous shuttle bus in Greenwich and small pod cars in Milton Keynes and Coventry. Additionally, a Wildcat vehicle will be tested in Bristol. Regulation proposals to make it all a reality will be reviewed in 2017....

Media Platforms Design TeamJamie Hyneman (left) and Adam Savage build a newspaper boat, Yesterday’s News.A lot of mythology surrounds British inventor Geoffrey Pyke. He supposedly made people come to his bedside to see his designs because getting up and getting dressed took too long. It seems fitting somehow that such a quirky character could convince the British War Office in 1942 to test the concept of massive floating platforms made of ice–insulated and cooled “berg ships” up to 4000 feet long to be used as bomb- and torpedoproof aircraft carriers that would protect North Atlantic shipping lanes....

Saturn’s Titan is the only moon in our solar system with a significant atmosphere. Its chemistry resembles a prebiotic Earth. And there are liquid natural gas pools in lakes on the moon’s surface, which is home to more liquid than the entirety of the Great Lakes. If some form of primitive life or biochemistry hasn’t arisen on the moon already, then many researchers suspect it will someday. With so much to discover, many scientists eye potential missions to explore the surface of Titan....

BEST SOUND MIXINGTHE NOMINEES style=“border:1px solid #ccc;">The Dark KnightSlumdog MillionaireWantedWALL-E The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonThe Expert Richard Van Dyke, who has has mixed sound in 3:10 to Yuma, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Body of Lies.His PredictionWall-EThe Winner: Slumdog Millionaire “I’m happy to see that Slumdog Millionaire won,” Van Dyke says. “They recognized a more dialogue-driven film as opposed to an effects-heavy film. That to me shows that maybe they are looking more at these films....

Three…two…one…A concentrated roar tears open the desert silence as Kevin Lane’s V2 replica rocket comes to life. Eight pounds of igniting ammonium perchlorate rake the dry lakebed with flames, propelling the 8-ft. rocket skyward almost faster than the eye can track.Lane’s clean-shaven head swivels back and his long, squared-off beard juts forward as he watches his rocket’s smoke trail rise like a chalkmark being scratched onto a slate of blue yonder....

You know that text that’s going around? The one that will crash your whole iPhone if you get it? You may already know first hand, but it’s for real. Here’s how it works, as far as we can tell.The text that’s going around and crashing people’s phones has a couple of common forms:Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamBoth of these can crash your iPhone, though other versions with the linebreaks stripped out will not....

Media Platforms Design TeamQ:I used to drive an MGB with knockoff wire wheels, and I had this cool lead hammer to whack the ears on the big nut that held the wheels on. I used that hammer for other things, too. It was great for tapping almost anything made of metal, because it wouldn’t leave little hammer marks, no matter how hard you smacked something. Where can I buy one of these hammers today?...

San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour. Do the math and you’re zooming along at a speed of more than 600 miles per hour. That expedient California commute is what Tesla Motors and SpaceX chief Elon Musk is promising with his new project Hyperloop. At the moment, Musk is keeping mum on just about everything but the name and the boast, promising the big reveal of what he calls a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table” on August 12....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow did you get interested in what clothes astronauts could use on a 100-year-long trip into space?I had an NPR driveway moment when I heard Dr. Mae Jemison talking about the 100 Year Starship; I had to sit and listen to the whole thing. I immediately got this idea, and ran inside to email her saying, “Okay, youre planning this long trip, but have you thought about what youll wear?...

To measure the value of an event in terms of the human capital of those present, Popular Mechanics editor in chief James Meigs introduced a new metric at our fifth annual Breakthrough Awards in the Hearst Tower in New York City yesterday. “If a meteorite were to hit this building today,” he said, “I’d hate to think of the damage to innovation in our society.” On the space object annihilation disaster index, the Breakthrough Awards ranks high, as one of the few occasions where scores of such diverse scientists, engineers and technologists can gather, exchange ideas and receive a healthy dose of much-deserved recognition....

Media Platforms Design TeamRacing history was made forty-five years ago when the red Mark IV seen here claimed the second of four victories for Ford at the grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans. The car, which was driven by A.J. Foyt and Dan Gurney, celebrates that win by getting unleashed from its home at Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum and touring the Goodwood Festival of Speed and this weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans races....

Media Platforms Design TeamPopular Mechanics: Did the filmmakers know they wanted to do a wolfman in makeup right away, or did they need convincing?Rick Baker: The original director, Marc Romanek, felt very strongly that the wolfman should be a guy in a makeup, and so did Benecio [del Toro]. He’s a big fan of the original Wolf Man and the Universal horror films, and he really felt it should be a makeup....

The sign next to the door is not an omen. It shows a bright red figure in a protective suit, the kind of full-body gear you might wear when handling dangerous pathogens. Or, in this case, when entering a building housing an operational three-stage ballistic missile, freshly plucked from its silo. The sign is a reminder of the danger posed by the nearby missile’s fuel tank, which can release a toxic plume if damaged....

Media Platforms Design TeamDespite the ubiquity of chain coffee shops around the country, 86 percent of coffee drinkers still brew most of their java at home, according to the National Coffee Association of USA. But home-brewers have evolved from simple machines into high-tech appliances, some employing LCD screens, automatic milk frothers or even nitrous-oxide cartridges. The latest trend in the market has been the rising popularity of single-serve coffeemakers, with pre-measured, prepackaged pods that can fall short when it comes to taste, according to Kenneth Davids, the co-founder and editor of ....