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When Dean Spatz began his introduction-to-engineering-design class as a sophomore at Dartmouth in 1963, reverse osmosis, the process of filtering water through a semipermeable membrane, was only four years old. Working with a team, Spatz used RO to create a prototype for turning undrinkable brackish water into a potable liquid. The commercial applications were obvious, and Spatz dedicated the rest of his time at Dartmouth to developing the nascent technology. After graduating, he founded Osmonics, Inc....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn response to the wildfires burning throughout Southern California, which have forced the evacuation of almost 1 million people, the Department of Defense is preparing to deploy a wide range of personnel and assets. For the military, the situation is already hitting home — one of the five people killed by the fires was a Defense Department civilian employee, and 3000 Marines have been evacuated from Camp Pendleton....

Media Platforms Design TeamHigher fuel prices and increased carbon emissions have been giving a boost. So far this year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received licensing requests for 19 . That number could increase exponentially, along with the number of suitable sites for a plant, if the NRC approves a brand-new design for portable modular units developed at Oregon State University. nuclear energynew nuclear power plantsInterest in minireactors has grown over the past few years, according to Felix Killar at the Nuclear Energy Institute....

Media Platforms Design TeamRachel Z. ArndtThe most telling part of the Nvidia Shield is the faux-metal “shield” on the back of the screen. Remove it to reveal the serial number, put it back on to create a color contrast with the hulking black controller (or spend $20 to trick out the Shield with a plate in carbon fiber or black). And that’s it. What’s the point?The same can be asked of the Shield itself....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamKepler-10c, a mega-Earth. Illustration: CfA/David A. AguilarEither an amazing scientific discovery or the greatest marketing campaign for a film ever, scientists have discovered what they’re calling a Godzilla planet, a world composed of the same material as our Earth—but its mass is 17 times greater. This gargantuan world is known more formally as Kepler-10c, and as its name points out, it was discovered by the Kepler space telescope....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Mars MAVEN mission. Credit: NASA.Future Mars expeditions may not need to worry about hitting a particular launch window to get to the Red Planet. Instead, they may fire a spacecraft into the planet’s path, and then wait for Mars to catch up.The idea is called ballistic capture. In a new study, researchers Francesco Topputo and Edward Belbruno propose that this approach would make Mars missions cheaper and more efficient....

Media Platforms Design TeamA spacesuit is not Felix Baumgartner’s typical attire. He’s used to moving freely, his arms and legs swimming easily through the air, his thin flightsuit rippling against his skin in the sky over Taipei, or Rio de Janeiro, or Warsaw; he usually feels wind rushing across the square cut of his jaw. Late on a Friday night in February, he moves across the small room stiffly, one appendage at a time, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, or a boy in a very, very thick snowsuit....

Q: My camera phone claims to have 3 megapixels, but my pictures always come out looking blurry and generally terrible. How can I take better shots with my camera phone?A: Megapixels are a measurement of one thing and one thing only: how many millions of pixels a camera’s sensor is capable of shooting at a time. And while having a lot of megapixels is essential for printing larger pictures, it is a poor indicator of overall picture quality....

A well-designed movie theater is just about the perfect environment to listen to a movie: An insulated box, lined on all sides with a massive array of high-wattage surround-sound speakers and enough bass to add a few wrinkles to your skin. This is the best place to watch a movie–and it’s the one moviemakers have in mind when they edit and mix their films’ audio tracks.But an audio mix that will fill an auditorium beautifully can present problems for DVD- and Blu-ray-watching home viewers, who typically listen to movies using relatively puny speakers at low volume....

Everyone loves planes that fly faster than the speed of sound, but they don’t love having their windows shattered by sonic booms, which makes supersonic civilian transportation sort of problematic. Now Japan’s a bit closer to solving that problem. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully tested an experimental plane designed to reduce the shock waves created during supersonic flight for a quieter sonic boom. At Sweden’s Esrange Space Center on July 24th, the plane was dropped from a balloon at an altitude of 30 kilometers (roughly around 18....

The internet isn’t just cyberspace. It’s also cables and pipes and trenches full of wires out here in the real world. All of this infrastructure crisscrosses across the entire continental US, but you’ve never been able to get a good look at it until now. While the internet itself is a public resource—like a digital town commons—most of the physical infrastructure that makes it up is privately owned. Long-haul fiber cables that reach out across the midwest might be owned by AT&T or Verizon, and they don’t have to tell you where they are....

Media Platforms Design TeamPentagon scientists have determined why an experimental vehicle, flying more than Mach 20 at the edge of space, intentionally terminated its inaugural flight. In April, the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle became unstable and, directed by its onboard computer, flew into the Pacific Ocean 9 minutes into its first test. Seven months later, the Air Force released details of the incident—with news that it will launch an improved HTV late this year....

This past weekend, I dropped in on the Singularity Summit at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see what kind of discourse goes on at the intersection of computer science and science fiction. The idea of the technological singularity defies easy explanation, but I’ll give it a shot: Imagine a techno-futurist rapture (according to some theorists, in the near future) when computer processing and storage has improved to the point where artificial intelligence becomes smarter than human intelligence, and computers are able to improve and refine themselves at an accelerated pace....

Media Platforms Design TeamA few weeks ago I had the happy fortune to pilot Audi’s new Allroad around the Rocky Mountains. It’s a sporty, all-wheel-drive wagon with a slick cockpit, excellent road manners, and a turbocharged motor that throttles to peak torque just above idle.In my review I said that given all the Allroad delivers, Audi doesn’t really have many rivals. You can get an Outback for way less, but that Subaru is basic all-wheel-drive transportation with prodigious cargo capacity—and nothing more....

Media Platforms Design Team1. Learn how to make your own candles, and then break out the power tools to fashion a new Wooden Candle Holder to keep them organized. Instructions on the candle holder helpfully provide a snack break during step three, and include the disclaimer: “Use common sense or succumb to evolution.“Media Platforms Design Team2. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of our duct tape abusive lab test was the failure to evaluate the tapes’ potential as textiles....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis is Mark Van Buskirk’s C/GR (C/Gas Roadster). It has an early Hemi engine for power and was on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine in the 1950’s.>RELATED STORIES* FIRST LOOK: British Steam Car Hits Road for 170 MPH at Bonneville* COMPLETE COVERAGE: Follow Daily Galleries From Speed Week 2008!Media Platforms Design TeamEvery vehicle that races at Bonneville must pass a stringent technical inspection. Look at the different racers here in the tech lanes....

Media Platforms Design Team Get this: With a fuel economy improvement of as much as 50 percent over the standard V6 Vue, General Motors says that adding its new Two-Mode hybrid system makes this Green Line the world’s most fuel efficient V6 SUV. And after the way Two-Mode performed in our abusive mileage test last month, the 2008 hybrid Vue is sounding pretty good to us, what with its 500-mile-plus range and 7....

Media Platforms Design TeamInfiniti’s plus-size QX56 may be a hard sell during these mpg-obsessed times, but the Japanese manufacturer hopes more buyers will take the bait of 25 percent more power, 10 percent better fuel economy and the same pricing as the outgoing 2010 model.Starting at $56,700 and $59,800 with four-wheel drive, the second-generation QX56 is the first Infiniti to feature the company’s new Hydraulic Body Motion Control system, which reduces body lean....

Media Platforms Design TeamToday’s Netflix-streaming, videoconferencing, Angry Bird–tossing smartphones have an almost insatiable appetite for data. These devices don’t just sip bits, they gulp them down in a movable feast of apps, video and Web browsing.But all that data has a downside: Surfing the once-wide-open 3G freeways can now seem like slogging through rush-hour gridlock. At times, even basic tasks on a smartphone can bring you back to the dial-up days, when Web pages took minutes to load....

After a week of ramming through sea ice up to 8 feet thick, the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy is expected to reach Nome, Alaska, today—with a Russian tanker loaded with a winter’s worth of heating oil and gasoline on its tail. The ships have been battling through 300 miles of ice, wind, and cold to re-supply the isolated coastal town of 3500, which needs the fuel to power snow plows, ambulances, fire trucks, police vehicles, and heat 1000 homes through what’s so far been an unusually cold and harsh Alaskan winter (yesterday’s low: −36 degrees F with wind chill)....