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Media Platforms Design TeamThe Claim: “Soften your clothes, sheets and more every time you dry with the National TV Products’ Dryer Balls! These incredible small round fabric softeners take the stiffness out of clothes, sheets and towels naturally, with no chemicals or toxins. Durable construction lasts and lasts for hundreds of uses and actually helps your clothes dry faster. These handy dryer companions will keep all your fabrics feeling soft and fresh use after use....

“Mark Zuckerberg and I met three years and a handful months ago,” says legendary architect Frank Gehry. “With incredible speed for this size of construction project, [Mark’s] moving into the building this month.” The building Gehry is referencing is “MPK20”, Facebook’s expansion of their Menlo Park, CA headquarters. It is, according to Facebook, “simply one large, open room - a direct reflection of Facebook’s open and transparent culture.” At just over 430,000 square feet, the building is LEED Gold certified by the U....

In-flight Wi-Fi: It sounds so sweet. But the slow and shoddy service that’s been available on many airlines frankly isn’t worth the fees or the headaches, unless you desperately need to send that work email in the middle of a flight.Why is service so poor? According to Vox, it’s because most airlines aren’t thinking straight about how to do in-flight internet.Vox points out JetBlue and Southwest as two airlines with better-than-average internet speeds....

In the early 1980s, when AIDS deaths began to ripple across the U.S. in force, most people—including healthcare professionals—had never even heard of the virus behind the outbreak. It was a distant infection on African continent. Few predicted it would explode into a pandemic that would baffle scientists into the 21st century.Now, researchers are piecing together HIV’s full origin story: how it went from a simian virus in chimps to a human one that has infected an estimated 75 million people worldwide....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe police blotter at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey reads like a pulp-fiction plot: On a steamy Sunday morning in August, Transportation Secur­ity Administration (TSA) personnel pull a female passenger off a checkpoint line and swab her hands with a plastic wand that’s part of a bomb-­detection device. When the machine alarms, confusion descends on the screening checkpoint, and the woman vanishes. A massive search party scours bustling Terminal C, which goes into lockdown for 3 hours....

Media Platforms Design TeamFirst things first, you need to find out if your TV is 3D-capable. Because it’s still a fairly niche feature, TV manufacturers often don’t state whether their sets come loaded with the capability. Still, a surprising number do. In fact, every single new DLP set is 3D-capable, and a fair number of new plasmas are. (Samsung is making a big push in this area.) If you’re unsure about your set, call customer service or check the instruction manual....

Media Platforms Design TeamI am shocked—shocked—to find that competitive business is going on here.The Kansas City Star recently reported that Comcast has been boosting internet speeds in the Kansas City area. Those paying for 25 megabits per second are getting free upgrades to 50. Those with 50 mps are getting 105, and 105 customers are getting 150. Time Warner Cable, which serves other parts of the K.C. metro, is doing the same, according to Consumerist....

A car has eyes and a face. Why shouldn’t it have a heart?This glowing sports car you see before you is a concept version of the Lexus RC-F coupe that can display the very heartbeat of its driver. The paint is electroluminescent, meaning it lights up when it comes in contact with a charge. Behind the paint are body panels with electronics connected to sensors inside the car that track the driver’s beats per minute....

When we finally make it back to the moon, it would be nice if some air and water were waiting for us. That’s the goal of this digger bot, built by Lockheed Martin as part of NASA’s PILOT (Precursor In-situ Lunar Oxygen Testbed) program. It will use a bucket-wheel, cameras and laser rangefinders to scoop up oxygen-rich lunar soil and autonomously carry it to a processing plant. The extracted oxygen would be used for air or combined with hydrogen to produce water....

Tallying lightning strikes from thousands of miles away may be the key to measuring the strength of hurricanes before they get close to land. “There have been big advances in predicting where hurricanes will go,” says Kirt Squires, the co-author of a recent paper studying lightning patterns in hurricanes. “But ways to determine how strong they will be are still lagging.“Currently, the only way to get real-time information on wind speed inside the eye wall is to send in an airplane....

There’s been a lot of traffic of late at the intersection of technology and politics. Last weekend, President Obama announced his chief technology officer for the U.S., Aneesh Chopra, previously secretary of technology for the state of Virginia. Chopra’s new role seems a far cry from the strong, almost cabinet-level position that many thought was coming in the Obama administration. Chopra will work closely with his former colleague, Vivek Kundra, who is now the nation’s chief information officer, when it comes to promoting White House tech policy....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design TeamResearchers in Antarctica drill for subglacial lake samples. (Photo credit: Reed Scherer, Northern Illinois University)Researchers have discovered a vibrant lake ecosystem under a half-mile sheet of ice in Antarctica. According to Nature, it’s the first definitive evidence of life underneath the Antarctic ice sheet.The very idea of a lake existing underneath Antarctica only came about in the 1990s, when technological advances in radar and seismic mapping uncovered more than 200 of them....

Media Platforms Design TeamA snow thrower is an indispensable machine in many parts of the country this winter, so long as you can keep it running. If you own one, or if the piles of snow where you live have you thinking about buying one, you’ll need some gear to go along with it.The EssentialsBasic upkeep of the snow thrower will require a few tools you might already have in your box, including a socket and combination wrench set, screwdrivers, and a spark plug gap tool....

Media Platforms Design Team What happens when you pair up unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the very latest in photovoltaic cells? The result is two new UAV prototypes: an upgraded battlefield microdrone with more than four times the normal air endurance, and a giant, high-altitude “atmospheric satellite” that can fly months, even years at a time.This week at the annual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) conference in Washington, D....

POPULAR MECHANICS BREAKTHROUGH AWARDS* COMPLETE COVERAGE: Live from 2008 Breakthrough Awards Events* PLUS: The 4 Best (Fictional) Video-Game CitiesSESSION 1 /// 1pm NEXT STEPS ON MARS In recent months, the Phoenix Mission has confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars and dramatically advanced our understanding of the red planet. Phoenix team leaders discuss the future of Mars exploration and what these findings mean for the search for life throughout the solar system....

Raised garden bed with storageMedia Platforms Design TeamTaking our own raised bed how-to a step further, this project adds much-needed storage beneath the bed.2. Cheap, chic modular DIY furnitureMedia Platforms Design TeamIf you can build a box, you can build furniture–build as many as in this Instructable and you can furnish a room.3. Honey harvestMedia Platforms Design TeamHats off to the growing nation of amateur beekeepers–an ambitious commitment on its own....

What’s better than a weak, meatbag human and a clumsy DARPA robot? A machine that mixes the two; a robot with a human brain. That is exactly what MIT is trying to make with the help of its new mech suit.Instead of trying to make a human-brained robot by a more sci-fi brain-in-a-jar method, MIT’s prototype contraption allows a human pilot to put on a suit that will ten remote control a robot doppelganger like a big ol’ metal puppet....

Eight steel cables, each with 1.4 tons of tensions, hold aloft a caged platform with a seat for one person. Using a wireless VR headset, that person can simulate experiences like flight while being zoomed in dozens of different ways. Eight retracting cables connected to a winch pull on the cage. It’s like a giant, flying VR jungle gym.Professor Heinrich Bülthoff and his research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics showed off their handiwork, the CableRobot Simulator, at a conference in Tübingen, Germany on September 16....

When it comes to transporting big files, USB flash drives are leaving clunky, scratch-prone DVD-Rs on the shelf. Thanks to these lipstick-size data sticks, hundreds of vacation photos and MP3s can live in your back pocket. But whoever said your pocket was a safe place? We put three supposedly durable drives to the test, simulating a drop in the toilet (60 seconds underwater), a roast on the dashboard (60 minutes in a toaster oven at 200 F, which is as hot as a sun-drenched dash can get) and a full washer-dryer cycle in a pair of jeans....

The hit movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier features flying war machines literally rising from Washington D.C. to reassert Nazism in the 21st century. These machines, created by United States and its international allies, will be the tools to suppress all dissent across the globe. It’s a crazy, paranoid fantasy that makes as much sense as most comic book plots. But watching the movie, which opened on Friday, I couldn’t help thinking that the themes echo the views of Russian president Vladimir Putin....