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Media Platforms Design TeamMARK THESE WORDS: We are living in perhaps the last great era of the automobile. If you account for inflation, cars have never before been—and may never again be—faster, cheaper or more comfortable than they are now. Waltz into your Chevrolet dealer, you can buy a 638-hp Corvette for $110,300 that cushions like a Cadillac. March down the street to the local Ford shop, you can have a $13,995 Fiesta that rides and handles better than many cars costing twice as much....

The headlines over the weekend were all too familiar: yet another commercial aircraft taking off from an Indonesian airport in foul weather crashes in a remote location; all aboard are presumed dead. This time, it involved Trigana Air Service, a small carrier little-known outside the archipelago nation, but one with a dubious safety record–four crashes and 14 incidents in two decades. On Monday, Indonesia’s government confirmed that a Trigana ATR 42-300 carrying 54 people was missing, after departing from Jayapura, in Papua province on the island of New Guinea, enroute to Oksibil, about an hour’s flight away....

Media Platforms Design TeamKia has released three sketches of its upcoming rear-wheel-drive sedan codenamed the KH. The KH will be Kia’s first RWD four-door and is expected to be the carmaker’s premier vehicle. Borrowing design cues from the newest Optima and Kia’s GT Concept that debuted at the 2011 Frankfurt Auto Show, the KH will expand on Kia’s already successful new design language.The Korean automaker has not released any details regarding the powertrain, but the KH is sure to have something saucy under the hood (we’re keeping our fingers crossed for the GT’s twin-turbo V-6) and will most likely be built on the Hyundai Genesis platform....

Lenny Kravitz got his first Leica camera as a gift from his father when he was 21. Now he’s making his own. The camera company announced a limited edition “Correspondent” version of the Leica M-P digital rangefinder designed by the rocker himself.Kravitz meant for his new creation to echo the classic, weathered look of his old camera, and to that end the lenses have been artificially aged by hand to look like they’ve endured years of use....

The man’s deep voice booms from inside his office, his accent thick and Ukrainian and a little menacing. “I want to show you the black market,” he says. He is big—a few inches over 6 feet, round in a sturdy way, goatee trimmed short. He strides around his desk, his feet and belly leading the way. He wears shiny black shoes, black pants, a black pinstriped suit jacket.His name is Alex Holden, although that’s not the surname he was born with....

While Pluto and Charon have been at the forefront of New Horizons’ first discoveries, the smaller moons have only been hinted at so far. New images released today are helping Hydra and Nix finally come into view.The two moons are the second- and third-largest moons in the system, though they’re dwarfed by Charon in size. Hydra is estimated to measure just 34 by 25 miles, while Nix is about 26 by 22 miles....

1953: A New ThreatThere is a secret military base near the Russian town of Kapustin Yar where conspiracy theorists claim Russian government keeps its UFOs. The true story—including its role as birthplace of the still-booming Russian anti-aircraft weapons industry—is nearly as strange.The base’s desert rocket test range has been the subject of international espionage attention since the early 1950s, when the Soviets had rounded up German scientists involved in rocket programs–like the V-2 cruise missile and the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile –and picked their brains to reverse-engineer their own weapons....

Saturn’s F-ring is an ever evolving, distant, strange, and narrow band of material, especially when compared to the planet’s innermost rings. Now there may be an explanation for why it’s so unusual: It’s what’s left after two moons crashed. The likely culprits are Prometheus and Pandora, two shepherd satellites located within the ring. Proposed in a paper in Nature Geoscience by Keiji Ohtsuki and Ryuki Hyodo of Kobe University in Japan, the model creates a different picture from the inner rings, which were likely formed by moons that wandered within the “Roche Limit,” an area where the gravitational pull of Saturn tore them apart....

Media Platforms Design Team1: Neptunic SharksuitsThe Neptunic Sharksuit is a type of armor invented by marine biologist Jeremiah Sullivan in the late 1970s. Since then, the steel mesh protection has been developed into a variety of forms, including soft and hard suits, for different purposes. Sullivan says that testing has proved this is “the only product in the world to limit if not entirely prevent injury to divers who must work in dangerous circumstances....

Computers can now knit together circuits (seriously!), potentially leading to electronic fabrics that are stretchable, permeable, durable, and washable. The researchers behind the study suggest their work could lead to wearable electronics for applications such as smart armor.Circuit boards normally consist of electrically conductive foil laminated onto electrically insulating boards. For this project, the scientists developed what they call fabric circuit boards, which they fabricated using computerized knitting machines. Elastic yarns knit together with electrically conductive copper fibers coated in electrically insulating polyurethane....

(Published in the March 2003 issue)Join the Mythbusters for fun with supermagnets.It casts enough magnetic force to slow a locomotive from a quarter-million miles away–the distance of the Earth from the moon. The “magnetar,” or magnetic neutron star known as Soft Gamma Repeater 1806-20, is the most powerful known magnetic object in the universe. Only 10 of these unusual objects have been discovered. With a magnetic-field strength of 100 billion teslas, it dwarfs that of the Earth, whose magnetic field measures just 0....

Developer Malik Dellidj did a very dangerous thing when he tweeted out his latest contraption — a virtual console that lets you play the chorus to Daft Punk’s ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ on your keyboard. And now that you know about it, say goodbye to productivity.Finally done, #DaftPunKonsole of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger http://t.co/zqYFjmgsX8 via @Codepen— Malik Dellidj (@Dathink) February 10, 2015Just choose your keyboard (QWERTY or AZERTY), hit the spacebar, and start jamming....

The Lost Lake in Oregon is a natural wonder, and a mystery to scientists. It’s a here today, gone tomorrow body of water that disappears each winter and heads for parts unknown, though an underground aquifer is the likely destination.What we do know is that the water escapes the lake bed via a lava tube formed long, long ago (it’s like a tunnel formed by a lava flow). The sudden drain of water happens because the main inlet freezes every winter, depriving it of refilling....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Larry Taylor)A rock smaller than a baseball, extracted from a mine in Russia, contains more than 30,000 diamonds. The stones are too small to be worth much on the diamond market. So the owners of the Udachnaya diamond mine who unearthed the find donated the rock to science. To geologists this rock is pure gold, so to speak. When University of Tennessee researchers took a look inside, they realized they’d found something geologically rare....

Tyler Skrabek, creator of posters of fire engines of the world and rockets of the world, is back with a new simple guide: crewed capsules of the world. This is everything that’s taken men and women to space, with one big exception. “Why no Space Shuttle? Everyone knows the Space Shuttle and everyone knows how big it is because they’ve seen it on top of a Boeing 747,” Skrabek said in an email....

Media Platforms Design TeamFRANKFURT — And now for something completely different: Toyota’s design gurus in France have come up with the world’s smallest four-door passenger car—and boy is it mini. Just over 9 feet long, to be exact. That’s nearly 31 in. shorter than a production Toyota Yaris, though just as wide and as tall. Aimed at drivers with limited means and/or urban conditions to drive in, the IQ and its three-plus-one seating arrangement should give VW’s Up!...

Media Platforms Design TeamThis antique armoire was easily–and rather inexpensively–transformed into a highly organized computer workstation.For several years, I had a love-hate relationship with our home computer. I loved having it available for the whole family to use for research, e-mailing and downloading. But, I hated the fact that it created a cluttered mess in our family room. Stacks of discs, books and paper spilled off the desk and onto the floor, while the latest accessories filled every remaining space....

In 1980, the DeLorean Motor Company manufactured three gold models of its futuristic DMC-12, the car most notably used as a time machine in the Back to the Future movies. Now, to celebrate Back to the Future Day (the day Doc Brown and Marty McFly travel to in the future), multinational company 3M has released this weird, nostalgic video showing you how to “prepare your car for the future."[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmS0niy5ClA&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]In it, an employee in a lab coat awkwardly narrates the use of 3M’s 1080 wrap film to turn a DeLorean gold, evoking an ’80s feel that’ll make you want to barf glitter and marathon all three Back to the Future films on VHS....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Berkeley Biomimetic Lab is building some pretty crazy little bots. They’ve got the X2-VelociRoACH, which can scurry along most terrains at speeds up to 16 feet per second. They’ve also got the H2Bird, which flies like a bird into the air. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before someone got the brilliant idea to combine the two into an amazing Megazord robot. First, the researchers put the H2Bird on the back of the VelociRoACH, then had the roach get a running start....

Fifty years ago, humanity got its first up-close look at Mars. It was a profound disappointment—at least, for anyone who harbored dreams of a sister world just like Earth. NASA’s first Mars flyby, executed by Mariner 4 in 1965, revealed the (mostly!) dry, red desert we know today.Despite this blow to our hopes for Martian life, famed scientist Carl Sagan convinced NASA to install an astrobiology mission on the Viking landers, NASA’s first probes to touch down on the Red Planet....