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Media Platforms Design TeamImagine two homeowners: One is a wealthy investor building a vacation house near Lake Tahoe in California. The other owns a middle-class home outside Burlington, Vt. Both are interested in keeping their energy costs under control—and helping the environment while they’re at it. The owner of the Tahoe ski palace installs an expensive solar-energy system to power his lights and appliances, covering his roof with photovoltaic panels. (He uses natural gas for heat....

You can’t exactly drop somebody into an underground tank filled with thousands of gallons of radioactive sludge and have them wipe it clean. But at the largest nuclear waste cleanup project in U.S. history, a smart machine is on the job. The Mobile Arm Retrieval System (MARS) is a robotic arm that officials hope will speed up the process and dramatically cut down the costs of radioactive waste cleanup.The site of this high-tech cleanup is the Department of Energy’s 586-square-mile Hanford site, located in the desert of southeastern Washington state....

Media Platforms Design TeamWelcome home. Credit: NASAThere’s a deflating sort of pain that comes from paying cash not for the thing you want, but just a chance at the thing you want. Think of application fees for trying to get an apartment—that’s just cash you’ll never see again. Even so, hundreds of thousands of people have now ponied up good money for their shot at leaving the planet, which certainly says something about both the human spirit of adventure, and perhaps reveals a little more about the state of affairs here on Earth....

Media Platforms Design Team3D printing has been around for three decades, but its recent democratization has forever changed modern manufacturing. And the auto industry isn’t escaping unaffected. Perhaps, the most radical poster child for automotive 3D printing is the Urbee 2, an experimental green vehicle and official entry in the X Prize created via 3D printing. PopMech met up with one of the car’s creators, Jim Kor, in late October to talk about his Urbee 2 cross-country trek....

Media Platforms Design TeamAbout two years ago I bought a rusty 1950 Packard Super Eight Deluxe with the sole intent to race it in the La Carerra Panamericana. Anyone aware of the Packard brand and the legendary road race through Mexico probably knows just how bad of an idea this is.The car was owned by someone who was going to hot rod it but didn’t have the time. I bought it for $1200 cash and drove it home....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Star Wheel: A human-powered, mobile Ferris wheelTime: Three months designing and three months welding at night after workCost: Cost: $7000Paul Cesewski describes his nearly 2000-pound, 22-foot-tall Star Wheel as a pedal-powered, interactive sculpture. Each of the three chairs located within the larger, 20-spoke wheel is equipped with a seatbelt and a bicycle drivetrain. “When you’re pedaling you’re pulling the chair around a fixed sprocket,” says the 43-year-old plumber....

Halloween is practically upon us, and as the holiday approaches, my thoughts are filled with clever costumes, candy and pumpkin carving (which Popular Mechanics editors do in their own special way). But if your favorite part of Halloween involves hearing the screams of Dracula’s victims, you’re in for a real treat this year.Tomorrow, cable giant Comcast is launching “FEARnet”, a multiplatform service comprised of Web, cable and mobile branches that will include everything horror-related....

Media Platforms Design TeamFour hundred light-years from Earth, a vast field of dust particles the size of pencil tips hangs off to one side of Oph IRS 48, an adolescent star. In this 10-billion-mile-wide dust bunny, something strange is happening: The dust flakes are floating in their slow orbit rather than spiraling into the star, as astronomers would expect. Because of this, researchers believe the dust cloud offers an important clue in understanding one of the biggest remaining mysteries of how planets are formed....

The first lunar rover in more than 40 years has uncovered a new type of moon rock.A team of geologists and planetary scientists behind the recent Chinese Chang’e-3 moon mission just announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of basalt on the moon. The team, led by Zongcheng Ling—an astronomer at Shandong University in Weihai, China—identified the rock using a pair of optical spectrometers on board the mission’s Yutu lunar rover....

Generally speaking, the way chess engines like IBM’s Deep Blue work is by brute forcing every single possible move, running all of the possibilities, before picking one. There’s no real evaluation of positions with these machines, no narrowing down of potential options to only those most fruitful.That’s where the chess engine called Giraffe comes in.Rather than use the brute force method, Giraffe uses a deep neural network to examine possible moves....

DETROIT – In case you hadn’t noticed, the U.S. car market is a true supermarket of brands, both domestic and imported. So it shouldn’t have come as any surprise last week when we learned that, for the first month ever, imported cars accounted for more than half the vehicles sold in the U.S. There are more brands and stiffer competition from foreign brands than ever before, and it was inevitable that the Detroit Three (Chrysler, Ford and General Motors) would have to give up some market share as the sheer number of quality foreign cars hitting our shores increased....

Media Platforms Design TeamLesson 1: Be OptimisticHarvard graduate Jessica Matthews understands the spirit of hacking hardware together on a budget—not the $80 million dollars her co-panelist Daniel Andrews of NASA had to deal with, but a student-sized budget. In a dim dorm room with Britney Spears blasting, everything was game as she and her classmates cobbled together tape, salt and pepper shakers, and scraped together leftover wires from the engineering building to create their first prototype....

Heavy-duty pickup trucks are becoming much more than merely the Clydesdales of the automotive world. Extreme torque, towing capacity and off-road capability are still the cornerstones of this breed. But now it all comes wrapped in stylish sheetmetal with refined handling and a near-luxury-car interior trim. The new Chevy Silverado HD is the best example yet of this new American workhorse. A 6.0-liter gasoline V8 comes standard with 353 hp and 373 lb....

Media Platforms Design Team CHICAGO — An absence of 35 years from the American musclecar market has made the all-new Dodge Challenger one of the most anticipated new car intros of the year. We’ve been waiting pateniently for this bad boy since 2005, and the Hemi-powered musclecar is destined to be the star of this year’s Chicago Auto Show. That’s to say nothing of the SRT8 on the road, so click here for our full driving impressions....

Though the 2011 New York International Auto Show came with the standard car-show glitz—a bevy of A-list celebrities sprinkled here and there (Stephen Colbert, Kiss, etc.) and lots of high-gloss production values—the message of this year’s show was something decidedly less sexy: fuel economy. This is, to put it mildly, a departure from an event that has perennially been targeted to luxury and a relatively well-heeled suburban New York buyer. To wit, the night before the show opened to the press, Porsche rolled out a replica of the circa-1900 Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus, what the German carmaker claims was the first-ever hybrid....

Last month, DARPA announced the latest breakthrough in brain-controlled artificial limbs: a robotic arm that a user can actually feel. It works via neural implants that connect to a computer through an interface top of the user’s skull, and sends singals from there to the arm telling it how to move.This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard of such a thing. Over the past several years, teams around the world have devised brain-machine interfaces that make the seemingly impossible a reality....

Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, has a message to Earth: it’s time to go to Mars. He’s been broadcasting it loud and clear for years, but now has made his mission even more majestic by posting this picture of himself taken at Stonehenge. Aldrin, an Apollo and Gemini astronaut, turned into vocal space exploration advocate in the years since he visited the moon. Aldrin has been pushing NASA and other space companies toward a Mars expedition in recent years....

Media Platforms Design TeamTypeface geeks, avert your eyes. Someone came up with the idea to ruin the old-school charms of a typewriter by adding cringeworthy Comic Sans.Designer Jesse England says he invented what he calls the Sincerity Machine after reading a typewritten document, and realizing there was nothing stopping him from giving the words a different look. In a demonstration video, he explains his philosophy behind trolling every design snob on Earth....

Media Platforms Design TeamSpace shuttle Atlantis and her crew—Chris Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim—are poised for the 135th and final mission of a program that began in 1981. The STS-135 mission will cap 30 years of shuttle flights by delivering four tons of vital supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station (ISS), where two Americans with four other astronauts await Atlantis’ arrival. The shuttle taught NASA how to conduct complex and extended operations in orbit, where crews launched science probes, repaired the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites and built a football-field-size international research outpost....

It was already a busy news week for Saturn’s moons–more evidence revealed liquid water exists on Enceladus–when Rosalyn Lopes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made the case at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco that icy volcanoes exist on Titan. Lopes, an expert on volcanoes throughout the solar system, studied differences between pictures that the Cassini spacecraft took of an area on Titan in 2004 and again two years later....