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For the thousands of miles of canals in India, evaporation is a major concern. And for many citizens of India, inconsistent power is just a fact of daily life. Enter a new project the state of Gujarat in India: covering canals with solar panels.Working in partnership with SunEdison India, the Indian government plans cover the more than 19,000 kilometers (or about 11,800 miles) of canals in Gujarat with solar panels. For right now, the project is limited to a small pilot project, with just 750 meters covered, producing 1 megawatt of energy....

Media Platforms Design TeamScientists now have a draft sequence for the genome of , whose beans produce what’s known as robusta coffee, which accounts for 30 percent of the world’s coffee supply.Coffea canephora"The coffee genome sequence identifies virtually all of the hereditary blueprint of this important crop, provides insight into its function and evolution, and provides rich molecular tools for assisting in its further improvement," says Andrew Paterson, professor and director of the Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory at the University of Georgia, who was not involved in the sequencing project....

Media Platforms Design TeamRetro cars look best when they faithfully pick up on the styling cues that made the designs iconic the first time around. The Fiat 500 has always hit those marks and has grown to be a solid competitor for the Mini Cooper and the VW Beetle.The 1957 Edition Fiat 500, like a few of the VW Beetle’s retro editions, hearkens back to the earliest days of the model....

How many gallons of water does it take you to drive to work every day? That’s the question Michael Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, would like people to start asking themselves. The answer, of course, depends on how you get there. A 30-mile commute in a gasoline-powered car would require the withdrawal of 18.9 gallons of water, according to a study he co-authored this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhere did you get the idea for Moon?I read a book by Robert Zubrin, Entering Space. It was all about how we could financially justify colonizing the solar system; there was a chapter on colonizing the moon and using helium-3 as a source for fusion power. It did seem to be a very logical argument about why you would have a reason to set up a moon base....

Media Platforms Design TeamWow, tablets sure did get thin and light quickly! First the iPad 2 was introduced at a mere .34-inches thick and 1.33 pounds, and now here comes the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, an Android Honeycomb tablet that matches the iPad 2’s thinness and beats it on weight at only 1.25 pounds. That’s quite a feat, given that the Galaxy’s screen is slightly larger at 10.1 inches to the iPad’s 9....

Media Platforms Design TeamLong-term owners of laptops, smartphones, and other things powered by lithium-ion batteries are all too familiar with one quality of the world’s leading power-storage technology: eventually Li-ion batteries lose their charge. And eventually that same fate will creep into electric vehicles. Take Tesla’s first car, the Roadster. Back in 2006, Elon Musk’s automotive venture estimated that after five years of driving (averaging 10,000 miles per year), the charging capacity of the Roadster’s battery pack would drop to 70 percent of its original capacity—leaving owners with an ever-shrinking range....

For two years, the aviation world has been waiting to find out what the black boxes from Air France 447 would reveal about the doomed airliner’s fate. Today, French aviation authorities offered a first glimpse, releasing a four-page document that, while light on details, offered a summary timeline of events in the last few minutes before the plane crashed into the South Atlantic.The data recorders tell a chaotic tale: At 2 am Greenwich Mean Time on June 1, 2009, as the plane is about to enter an area of heavy thunderstorms, one of the two co-pilots makes an announcement over the PA system that the flight will soon be experiencing increased turbulence....

Last night, President Obama’s State of the Union focused on his domestic agenda. But today in Congress, to much less pomp and circumstance, the national security apparatus of the administration delivered its annual Worldwide Threat Assessment to the U.S. Senate—a grim litany of threats facing the United States. “We live in a complex, dangerous world,” National Intelligence Director Lt. Gen. James Clapper said.These are the people, places, and things keeping national security pros up at night....

Media Platforms Design TeamRegular followers of tech news will know that , and. But today, few of our battles—on foreign shores or in traffic—are won by , and I’m sad to say that I don’t know a single person with a robot maid who can fetch a beer. That’s why it’s time to ignore optimistic dreams of the future and pay strict attention to the robots that matter—the ones that we can buy now....

When southeastern China was struck by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake two days ago, it was the latest in a string of disasters offered the world over by Mother Nature. Now it has unraveled into a full-blown crisis. The official death toll has passed 12,000, but experts believe it will climb beyond 18,000. A number of factors are contributing to the fatalities, such as blocked roadways and a series of at least 30 aftershocks in Sichuan province....

Media Platforms Design TeamAndy Serkis is monkeying around—or aping around, as the case may be. It’s late September 2010, and we are on the Vancouver, Canada, set of the upcoming prequel to the classic franchise. Serkis hangs one-armed from the monkey bars of a jungle gym, grunting as he swings gracefully to the other side. The actor, who stars as the chimp Caesar, is decked out in a gray spandex suit studded with motion-capture markers, and wears a helmet equipped with an arm that holds four tiny cameras less than a foot away from his face....

Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $160At the end of July Chrome Industries—the outfit known for its messenger bags and other urban biking gear—released its latest hauler, the Barrage Cargo Backpack. Good timing: I commute by bike, and my right shoulder was sore from the weight of all the items I lug to and from work in an old Lacoste messenger bag.For the past few weeks, both shoulders shared the load as I hauled all sorts of stuff around Manhattan in the Barrage—up to 32 pounds’ worth, which is near the upper limits of what I’d want to transport in a backpack without a waist belt....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe 21st century has proven that eco-friendly drivetrains can peacefully coexist with high-end design: witness the E85-compatible Bentley Continental Supersport, the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid, and the fact that Rolls-Royce is even considering an all-electric version of the imposing Phantom.Riffing on the not-so-outlandish concept of a luxurious alt-fuels future, Cadillac’s XTS combines plug-in hybrid technology and plush, modern design. The XTS Platinum Concept is powered by Cadillac’s direct injected, 3....

Media Platforms Design Team Tuesday’s announcement of a proposed Chrysler-Fiat alliance seemed to promise new life for the struggling Auburn Hills automaker. The Italian Fiat Auto Group, which owns the Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Lancia brands, will receive an equity interest in Chrysler of at least 35 percent and could get a fast track to manufacturing and distributing here in the U.S. In exchange, Fiat Group will give Chrysler a shortcut to gas-saving technologies and sporty, small-car platforms....

Electronics don’t have to be rigid chunks of circuit board encased in plastic or metal. They can also blend in seamlessly with the world around you. And, as Google’s new Project Jacquard shows, they can also be woven directly into your clothes. Project Jacquard comes from Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects lab, one of the many wings of the tech giant devoted to doing really crazy stuff. But at its core, Jacquard is actually very simple; it’s just conductive thread....

Google Chrome has grown up from a stripped-down little browser into a beast that devours battery. Especially on Macs. The good news is that Google knows it. And on Google+, Senior Software Engineer Peter Kasting outlined some of the ways its about to get better. New versions of Chrome will already be blocking non-essential instances of Adobe Flash to try and cut down on unneeded processing power, but new Mac-tweaks will go even further....

Most of us have heard of cold weather testing for cars. Experts take vehicles to northern climates during winter months to sort out problems like heaters, defrosters, engine warm-up, lubricants—old stuff to test specialists. And now they have a new mission. Companies like BMW are using cold test sites to fine-tune driving dynamics of their newest stability control systems. Your car starts to slip sideways, or plows ahead when you want to turn faster than your tires can grip—automatic systems bring you back under control....

Subduction Zone[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/ep2_axAA9Mw?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0[/youtube]Subduction zones happen when an oceanic tectonic plate dives beneath a continental plate, as is the case beneath Japan. The friction between the two plates locks them together, forcing the upper plate to buckle upward. Eventually, the upper plate gives way, rebounding back over the lower plate violently to unleash an earthquake like Friday’s.The Looming Aftershocks[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/1jSHDa-7-cQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0[/youtube]John Rundle, seismologist at the University of California, Davis, says already-devastated Japan is probably in line for powerful aftershocks from the 9....

Media Platforms Design TeamMakerBot CEO Bre Pettis and Popular Mechanics Editor-in-Chief Jim Meigs at the 2013 Breakthrough Awards. Credit: Sarah ShatzStarting today, MakerBot is launching a major push to get its 3D printers into the hands of school students. This is a good thing, because when it comes to education, it’s easy to get the whole technology thing wrong. For example, some policymakers are heavily in favor of bringing laptops and tablet computers into the classroom, which is fine and potentially useful....