VALENCIA, Spain—When it comes to throwing money and brain power into winning a race, it’s hard to beat Formula One for its ceaseless application of bleeding edge technology, wind tunnel worshiping and CFD trickery. But the America’s Cup to blows car racing to carbon-fiber splinters. We’re out in Valencia, Spain, home of the 2007 America’s Cup, to see what it takes to build a boat capable of winning this multi-billion race to win the so-called Holy Grail of sailing....
Media Platforms Design TeamLincoln’s booth wasn’t stuffed with new MKS’s, MKT’s, Navigators or any other new cars. Nope. Lincoln brought out a half dozen classics from the company’s glory days. This 1956 Mark II was a design benchmark in its day. The largely handmade luxury coupe packed a 285 hp 366 cid V8 under its long hood and was owned by at least two of Hollywood’s most elite—Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley....
Apple’s antique iOS music player is slated for a major revamp. In its latest beta release to developers, the newly designed Music app includes a mini player, a powerful search function, and the ability to swipe through menus.The centerpiece of the new Music app are its three pages: My Music, Playlists, and Radio, accessible by swiping between them. There’s a new search tool that not only offers “live” results but is organized in a Spotify-like manner (by Artist, Album, Songs and Playlists)....
Media Platforms Design TeamNo one would accuse Gears of War 2 of excessive realism. The sequel to 2006’s successful third-person shooter is about a war of extinction between humans and a race of albino-like subterranean aliens. Instead of a bayonet, you have an underbarrel chain saw. You can survive a hail of gunfire, with what looks like gallons of blood sluicing out of your bullet-riddled body, through nothing more than true grit....
This article was originally published in May 2010, shortly after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier this week, an oil pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara ruptured, spilling more than 20,000 gallons of crude oil over a 4-mile stretch of ocean. The leak has been stopped, but the damage is likely to affect wildlife in the surrounding areas. Initiatives to scrub the Gulf of oil are moving forward....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn a then-classified 2002 war game called , the Red Team, commanded by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, sent waves of small boats, some loaded with explosives, to overwhelm the defenses of the Blue Team, representing the U.S. Navy. The results were grim. Blue Team lost 16 major warships—including a carrier. But the game was immediately restarted and Blue Team was eventually declared the winner.Millennium ChallengeVan Riper complained at the time that lessons were not being learned....
Media Platforms Design Team(All Photos Self Assembly Lab, MIT)In Skylar Tibbit’s world, clothes adapt automatically to the world around them. Furniture assembles itself. So do water systems, robots, interactive retail spaces, and space infrastructure. When you’re the director of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, just about anything can adapt on its own.“We think the applications are currently limitless,” he says.Tibbits, leads an MIT team of designers, scientists, architects, and engineers who are exploring what they call 4D printing, which takes 3D materials and adds another dimension by having them adjust to their changing environments....
View full post on YoutubeResearchers at Duke University have engineered the first lab-grown muscle capable of contracting. It’s a big step toward doctors being able to restore mobility to atrophied muscle groups, create custom muscles tailored to a patient, and test medicine without endangering human subjects.While previous studies have created such lab-grown tissue, those earlier projects were only a proving ground to show that lab-grown muscle was possible; it was not yet functional....
POPULAR MECHANICS contributor Ben Hewitt will keep readers updated online as he researches a series of print articles for the magazine on alternative-energy technologies–using his own home as a test lab. Hewitt and his family live off the electrical grid in northern Vermont; in the coming months they will be experimenting with ways to improve their lifestyle, while reducing their dependence on fossil fuels —The EditorsOkay, my holiday blogging break is officially over....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn a call with reporters today, the founder and the current head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., painted a bleak picture for the future of NASA’s manned spaceflight program based on its current direction. Their comments came on the eve of Congressional authorization for the space agency’s budget.“The sense of drift or the sense of lack of consensus is still fairly serious” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute, said of the political debate over NASA’s course....
The fact that you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a landmark achievement in hype. This superstar among particle accelerators, buried hundreds of feet below Switzerland and France, is the rare scientific undertaking that arrives in a frenzy of publicity. This summer, protons will begin colliding in the LHC’s 17-mi.-long circular tunnel. If everything goes according to plan, the accelerator could supply some of the biggest, most elusive pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle, from details on the elusive mass of dark matter that physicists have long sought, to the framework for a Grand Unified Theory....
Philip FriedmanCapacityOur test load included a framing hammer, a small push saw, an 18-volt drill, a 55-yard roll of duct tape, and a few other items found in any well-equipped DIY toolbox.DesignWith an eye on ergonomics and features that just make the toolbox easier to use, we watched blindfolded testers open, fill, shut, and carry each product.DurabilityToolboxes make good step stools. We had a 200-pound man stand on the empty carriers, adding weights and a backpack to test them at 260 and 310 pounds....
Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on TwitterHere’s a new gripe you can expect to hear from airline passengers in the coming years: The robot next to me is hogging the armrest. Athena, a robotic creation of the Max Planck Institute, is flying to Germany from LAX today, becoming the first paid robotic passenger to take up a seat on a commercial flight. While it’s doubtful she paid for the seat with her own money (robot labor laws leave something to be desired), it’s a step into a new, weird flying future....
Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s the indispensable tool for shop, garage—and barn. You can get a typical wet/dry vac for around $100.They look like small garbage cans on wheels, and their appetite for workshop waste is nothing short of voracious. Designed to pick up debris a household vac would choke on in seconds, wet/dry vacs also inhale liquids with blinding speed and have cleanup compartments measured in gallons, rather than the small bags used in a typical household machine....
Longevity in the auto industry is hard to come by, and even more elusive is the sort of model persistence that lasts decades. The Chevrolet Corvette and Porsche 911 have enjoyed an exceptional half century plus of success, especially remarkable considering their discretionary nature and niche sports car focus. Nobody needs these performance cars in their lives, but these two are so fiercely loved that they’ve managed to become the longest running sports car platforms on the planet....
After much delay and fanfare, Microsoft has finally released Vista. We’ve played with beta incarnations of the operating system for months, watching it evolve from a glitchy mess into a relatively polished product. But now that Vista is in stores, should you update to the latest OS? Vista isn’t perfect, but it has a lot of new, desirable functionality. First, it just looks better. With Aero graphics you can flip through translucent windows like cards in a Rolodex, and photos have easy-to-resize previews–in other words, the system looks a lot like Apple’s OS X....
Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: flickr / brewbooksIt’s a story that makes sense: After the recession began in 2008 fewer Americans could afford the costs of owning and driving a car, leading to a drop in car ownership and driving rates in the U.S. Yet America’s economic funk may have only exacerbated trends that already existed, says transportation researcher Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan. According to Sivak’s research, many stats suggest that the country’s love affair with the car—or at least the total amount we drive—peaked in 2004, four full years before the economic downturn....
Media Platforms Design Team Affalterbach, Germany–It’s been over a half-century since Mercedes-Benz unveiled its iconic 300SL Gullwing, and we just got a sneak peek at an AMG sports car we think might be bold enough to properly honor that landmark two-door. But don’t expect the new SLS AMG to simply parrot the past; this curvaceous creation is the first vehicle designed and developed entirely by AMG (Mercedes-Benz’s performance arm). As you might imagine, the SLS is just as high-tech as AMG’s brawny, handbuilt powerplants....
I’ve learned a lot about how to drive an RV over the past two years. In 2012 I took a Winnebago Via out for a spin, hauling my entire clan (plus the dog) out to Colorado. We lost only part of an antenna when I brushed a little too close to some overhanging birch trees in a state park. Last week I decided to put my hand to the steering wheel of a 2014 Winnebago Trend motorhome—24 feet of luxury living for a cool $92,179....
ChechnyaThe two brothers identified as the Boston marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar, are ethnic Chechens who probably lived in nearby areas in Central Asia before immigrating legally to the United States. Because the region is known as a breeding ground for radical Islamic terrorists—Chechens have been connected with terrorist attacks in Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa—this connection will be a focal point of the investigation into their motives, if indeed the brothers are confirmed as the Boston bombers....
