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Media Platforms Design TeamThe seemingly endless saga of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s woes have taken an unexpectedly automotive twist. Tesla founder Elon Musk has dispatched a series of tweets suggesting he can help with Boeing’s fire-prone lithium ion battery designs, and Musk should know: his perspective on the technology whose fires have grounded Boeing’s fleet of 787s indefinitely is based on his firsthand experience of incorporating lithium ion batteries, from the Model S sedan to his SpaceX Falcon 9 space launch vehicle....

Media Platforms Design Team GM CEO Fritz Henderson confirmed this morning that GM is killing Pontiac. “We didn’t think we had the resources necessary,” GM CEO Fritz Henderson said. GM’s “Excitement division,” as Pontiac was once called, will be phased out by the end of next year, and its two finest products, the G8 GXP and Solstice won’t be sold under another brand–a real tragedy for car enthusiasts. This latest move from GM is an indication of just how fast and fluid the company’s restructuring is....

Media Platforms Design TeamI was driving my Mazda5 to work when a pothole came out of nowhere. I avoided it with the front tire, but nailed it with the rear. Ever since there’s been a faint vibration that I can hear and feel coming from that area of the car. Is there something wrong with my suspension?Potholes can viciously assault innocent vehicles—you’re lucky it didn’t swallow the car whole. Unless you were going extremely­ fast, though, there probably isn’t any structural damage....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Richard Barenholtz/The Stock Market)The hedges are trimmed. You’ve got a full tank of propane for the grill and plenty of fixin’s. The cooler is stocked. Your neighbors are due over in a few minutes. Then you see it. A mysterious brown patch on your lawn that was not there a couple of days ago. Your good mood evaporates quicker than dew in a drought.The fact of the matter is that the harmful microorganisms that put a damper on your party didn’t just appear....

Q: I burned my vacation photos to a DVD, then played the disc through a DVD player on my HDTV, but the resolution looked far inferior to the same photos on my computer screen. Why is this?A: The native resolution of the DVD format is 720 by 480 pixels (at least in the States), whereas megapixel cameras produce photos at many times that resolution. Many programs, such as Windows XP’s Movie Maker and Macintosh iPhoto/iDVD, burn photos to DVDs as slide shows that are inherently restricted to the resolution of the DVD....

Three of the four rotors rose briefly above the artificial turf, but the trim was still not right, and after a few seconds Reichert set the machine back down again. Their time was up; they had just half an hour to break down the machine and stow it inside a semi-trailer parked outside, because at 5pm league soccer players would descend and begin kicking balls around the turf where the fragile craft now lay....

An unnamed welder friend of Destin Sandlin, host of Smarter Every Day, decided that the best idea on Earth was to build a bike that goes the opposite direction of how you turn the handlebars and see if people could still ride it. Spoiler alert: They can’t.As you can see in the video, the evildoers who hacked this bike added some extra gearing to reverse the direction of steering. So when the handlebar goes left, the wheel goes right, and vice versa....

Media Platforms Design TeamJay Leno is making plans with the team from PacWind (left) to install the state-of-the-art Delta II turbine (right) on the roof of his Green Garage.Wind power usually brings to mind those giant, prop-style turbines in Denmark or their much smaller cousins, like the 900-watt Whisper 100 that our PM’s off-the-grid Energy Family uses in Vermont. As those innovative solutions have proved, wind can be a great compliment to solar power–and the rest of this country is just starting to catch up....

Over at his Instapundit blog, PM contributing editor and An Army of Davids author Glenn Reynolds features a chat with two of our editors in this week’s edition of The Glenn and Helen Show podcast. While in Knoxville, Tenn., last week, PM Deputy Editor David Dunbar and Online Director Angela Diegel sat down with Glenn and his wife to discuss the future of media, specifically what we’ve been doing right here at PopularMechanics....

Media Platforms Design TeamQantas pilot Captain John Francis Bartels (right) looks at the hole of Melbourne bound Qantas Airways Boeing 747 after it made an emergency landing at the international airport in Manila on July 25, 2008. (Photograph by Edwin Loobrera/AFP/Getty Images) Thanks to the movie Rain Man, Qantas is known for its excellent safety record as an airline. But today engineers are investigating a gaping hole on the side of a Qantas Boeing 747 after an emergency landing in the Philippines....

Photographers Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan started their SKYGLOW project to show the effects of light pollution on the night sky over cities, but for their second project, they turned their cameras on three sites attempting to find life on other planets.The duo travelled to a trio of radio telescopes used in the SETI project: the Radio Astronomy facilities at Very Large Array Observatory in New Mexico, Owens Valley Observatory in Owens Valley California, and the recently developed Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, and set up a series of timelapse photoshoots, showing the night sky over each....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Russian RPO-A “Bumblebee” portable flamethrower system has been spotted in Syria. The bazooka-like weapon, which uses overpressure and heat to kill, was spotted by a Russian defense blog last month being carried by a Syrian Army soldier.First adopted by the Russian military in 2003, the Bumblebee is a single-shot rocket launcher along the lines of the American LAW or AT4. Once used, the launcher is thrown away....

Media Platforms Design TeamOffshore oil platforms face an existential crisis similar to the rest of the world’s: They’re in trouble when the oil runs out. But whereas people can turn to other forms of power, rigs are doomed. If they’re in the Gulf of Mexico, they’ll often be sunk in place for marine life to colonize. (Quite successfully too. A recent study found that rigs are among the most productive fish hatcheries on the planet....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere are two big environmental arguments against the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, the controversial infrastructure project that would carry Canadian crude from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. This is the project that currently is causing headaches for the Obama Administration, which has promised both to promote fossil fuel production and to curb greenhouse gas emissions. One environmental concern is that the pipeline would speed climate change, because extracting and processing the oil is particularly carbon-intensive....

Moon rocks that astronauts brought back to Earth more than 40 years ago are revealing new secrets today. They’re unlocking an era of the moon’s history, 3 to 4 billion years ago, when carbon monoxide-fueled fires spewed forth from our planet’s only natural satellite, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. Tiny nodules of glassy material in moon rocks brought back from Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 show signs of ancient fire flows, much like we see in Iceland today....

On its 956th Martian day, the Curiosity rover finally snapped a sunset in color.The gif above includes four images captured at Gale Crater about 7 minutes apart on April 15, 2015. Curiosity captured the images using the left-eye camera from its Mastcam. The images have been white-balanced, though NASA says that Mastcam generally sees color about the same way humans do, and is even a little less sensitive to blue than our eyes are....

Media Platforms Design TeamCornell University researchers are working on a robot that senses when it’s injured and responds figuring out how to keep walking anyway. The bug-bot adapts when it’s got a bum leg by determining which appendages are still usable and moving them in tandem to get somewhere. The machine learns from its previous experiences to figure out how to move on less-than-maximum leg power, something the researchers call a sort of “intuition” within the bot....

The Mars Helicopter is the latest in a line of ambitious, low-cost craft meant to revolutionize planetary exploration by taking to the air. A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on a prototype set for completion by 2018, adding a new dimension to exploring other worlds by allowing a robotic probe to take to the skies as needed.The autonomous, solar powered helicopter would work as a sort of scout for a rover, giving NASA teams a heads up to what they might encounter ahead and steering them toward the best possible location....

As if you needed more of a reason to be excited for Ridley Scott’s upcoming adaptation of The Martian, Andy Weir’s best-selling novel about a lone survivor’s struggle after being abandoned on Mars, here it is.About a month ago, we were given a home video-style introduction to the Ares 3 crew from astronaut Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon), followed shortly by a full first trailer for the movie we’ve all been waiting for (well, all of us sci-fi nerds)....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis is agony: a prolonged, unnerving, and cruel tease.Way back in January of 2012, Acura—Honda’s fancy-pants division—put the NSX Concept on display at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Finally, here was confirmation that a successor to the brilliant original NSX midengine sports car was under development. Then, in 2013, a second NSX Concept appeared in Detroit with a more completely realized interior and the promise that a midengine supercar similar to it in appearance would enter production in “about two years....