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The term arrived with all the muscle and blue-collar authority of a bulldozer: “shovel-ready.” As in, infrastructure projects that are ready or almost ready to begin, the antithesis of some dimly imagined earmark or budget-sucking bridge to nowhere. Then-president-elect Obama used the term on a December 7th visit to NBC’s Meet the Press, describing the kinds of projects that would be supported by the upcoming economic stimulus bill. Soon the phrase was being repeated by policy-makers only an almost daily basis....

GIFs that illustrate the inner workings of a gun are a tried, true, and terrific art form. It’s impressive to see (and hear) a blast, but there’s a different sort of engineering beauty to the springs and gears and levers that pull the bullets into place and fire them. The blog C&Rsenal along with its Youtube channel has been delving into the mesmerizing inner workings from a select family of guns, the ones most used in The Great War....

Unearthed in the wake of the Germanwings air crash is this now-eerie training video, which demonstrates how to use the numeric keypad to lock and unlock the doors of the cockpit.As the pieces of the story come together, it appears that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the other pilot out of the cockpit before intentionally crashing the jet, killing all 144 passengers and six crewmembers. As the demo shows, a pilot can put in a code for entry if they get locked out....

The fluorescent green mantle of biofuel savior has come to rest upon algae–slimily, sure, but for good reason. Algae grows in fresh water or salt water or sewage, rather than competing with food crops for land or resources. And algae actually sucks out the pollution from coal-fired power plants, with a theoretical yield of oil per acre that’s hundreds of times greater than, say, corn. But after all the hype–and there’s been plenty of it–the fact remains that nobody has yet proven they can cheaply and reliably transform the stuff from a thick, green slurry to a finished fuel capable of making a dent in America’s 870 million-gallon-per-day petroleum habit....

Media Platforms Design TeamHere are two things you should know: First, there is a secret world populated by devotees to Amiga, a computing system born in the 1980s that largely disappeared from view. Second, a developer named Simon Keogh is developing his own version of Minecraft for the OS. Called Amicraft, it’s still a work in progress, but it’s amazing.For the uninitiated, the Amiga was the next-generation computer from the Commodore corporation, which faded away in the early 1990s....

Media Platforms Design TeamSummer is just around the corner. And while many of us will use that time for vacation, home invaders will be working harder than ever—it’s the busiest season for break-ins, according to the Burglary Prevention Council. The best way to ward off thieves: common sense (and maybe a decent alarm system). But in lieu of those, here are a few clever (and sometimes silly) products for keeping your home safe....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’re getting the hang of home brewing and thinking about making the jump from using malt extract to using all grain, you’ll need a mash tun. The mash tun is a large-scale filter in which the grain used in your brew will sit while the starch converts to sugar. Following the conversion process, a properly built tun acts as a basic filter that allows the brewer to strain the sweet liquid from the grain....

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: 7/10AGES: 10+BUILD TIME: 2 HoursPARTS COST: About $50TOOLS AND MATERIALS · 9-volt battery clip · 12 VDC 2000mA 2A switching power supply, 2.5-mm plug (optional) · 8 AA battery holder; 8 AA batteries · 6 feet 3.5-mm male-to-male stereo cable · 2 Dayton Audio DAEX25 Sound Exciters (speakers) · 1 Dayton Audio DTA-2 Class T Audio Amplifier Module · 2 ferrite rings, ½-inch diameter · 2 ceramic-disc capacitors · Soldering iron · Solder · Loaded glue gun · Boot box · Duct tape (optional) HOW TO BUILD ITWire the Amplifier1....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn the 21st century we face all sorts of problems: environmental, economic, political and military. But sometimes a little creative thinking can turn a problem into an opportunity.One big problem—brought on by the expansion in global trade and travel that transplants people and other creatures willy-nilly around the world—is the rise in invasive species. These species, from Asian carp to kudzu, may fit nicely in their original ecological niches, but transplanted to a new place where they have no established predators, they can explode in number, crowding out valuable critters and plants and ruining things for people....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubeFor more than a year now we’ve been awaiting the arrival of Gravity, a Hollywood extravaganza for space lovers. The film by director Alfonso Cuarón stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts who endure a harrowing encounter with space junk as a collision with orbital debris nearly destroys their space station and leaves Bullock’s character clinging to life, holding on to avoid being cast into the abyss....

View full post on YoutubeMitch Kapor got his start in the technology sector by designing Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet program that made the personal computer an indispensable tool for businesses—so he knows a thing or two about what businesses need. He followed his instincts to San Francisco in 1999. But three years ago, those same instincts told him it was time to move to Oakland.His current ventures, Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Change, seek to link technology to the public good....

Media Platforms Design TeamKepler is down, NASA says. But it’s not out just yet.The prize planet-hunting telescope, which has discovered more than 2700 planet candidates and 130 confirmed new planets since it began scanning the stars in 2009, went into safe mode on Sunday. Kepler scientists found out when they tried to reach the telescope Tuesday night. They saw that reaction wheel number 4, one of the four instruments in charge of precisely aiming Kepler at its targets, was not spinning, team leaders told reporters in a teleconference this afternoon....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a reason the Lotus Motorcycles C-01 looks like it might have driven out of the Tron universe and into the real world: Its designer, Daniel Simon, builds bikes for movies and created the light cycles for the 2010 sequel Tron Legacy. This isn’t some never-to-be-realized concept bike, though. In partnership with Kodewa, Lotus will build 100 of them.To provide just the basics of the mouth-watering specs, the Lotus bike will carry a two-cylinder four-stroke engine making 200 hp (the same as a Subaru BRZ), mated to a six-speed transmission....

Media Platforms Design TeamUpdate 8/13, 8:51 a.m. ET: The New York Times is now reporting that the death toll has reached 44, with over 500 injured, 52 critically. The exact cause of the blast is still unknown, but the Times notes the building was licensed to store “a witches’ brew of hazardous chemicals.” Update 8/12, 5:33 p.m. ET: Chinese state media is reporting that 7 are dead and at least 300 injured....

Drones: they’re not just for snowboarding videos anywhere. Now they’re for spraying protestors in the face.Lucknow, a city of 4.8 million in northern India, has purchased five drones capable of blasting protestors with pepper spray. The drones cost $4,400 apiece and can carry up to 4.4 pounds of the stuff. No need for police to hit protesters will billy clubs or shoot canisters of tear gas at them the old-fashioned way....

Media Platforms Design TeamFinding a way to keep snoops from tapping into other people’s information is a challenge that has gone to the subatomic level. First proposed in 1984, quantum cryptography (QC) promises to send coded messages that are, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, impossible to crack. The technique relies on a principle of modern physics called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that it’s impossible to measure something at the subatomic level without altering it....

Mark Blenner wants to recycle human waste products in space. But don’t get the wrong idea. “There’s no poop involved.“Poop or no poop, what Blenner is doing could lead to a smart way for future deep space explorers to recycle their bodily waste into nutritional supplements to keep them alive and even useful building materials to keep the ship up and running.Given the title of Blenner’s proposal for a NASA project—“Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel”—you can see where people would get the wrong idea about recycling poo....

Media Platforms Design TeamImage: X Prize FoundationThe organizers of X Prize have just announced their newest target: global education. For this new contest, each team must “develop open-source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and arithmetic,” by two years from now.X Prize competitions put forth multi-million-dollar prizes to encourage teams of engineers, designers, and dreamers to take on the big problems....

Clyde Tombaugh may have introduced the world to Pluto in 1930, but five years before, the Carnegie Institution for Science snapped a photo of the icy dwarf planet without quite knowing it. But don’t worry, we don’t need to rewrite the history books. This isn’t the first time this has happened. In fact, it’s called precovery – the process of discovering astronomical bodies in older photos and data from before their official discovery....

The wrist provides a lot of flexibility, even for robots. And when you’ve got robots doing surgery on humans, you want those bots to be very, very flexible. A group of doctors and engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory have been working on a mechanical wrist that could seriously change the kind of robotic micro-laparoscopy (or needlescopic surgery) that’s currently possible. The ability to easily shift around in such a small space is a game-changer....