Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Sale Date: Now Price: $199 (per speaker) and $50 for the bridgeThey grow up so fast, don’t they? After little more than a decade in the market, Sonos delivers an audio system that could be the go-to amplifier for audiophiles on a budget—a cheap, high-fidelity speaker under $200, competing with Bluetooth portable systems like Jawbone’s Jambox or Logitech’s UE Boom. The Play:1 is the third installment to the Sonos’ “Play” suite of products, and it shows that the company has learned a lot from past releases, the Play:5 and Play:3, about appearance, setup, and user-friendliness....

Media Platforms Design TeamSanta Monica, California, 12 AM, August 4, 2020. At midnight, your car wakes up. The hefty, 15-pound charging cable tethering the front of the vehicle to a 220-volt outlet in your garage goes live, pulling 5 kilowatts of power from the grid. In just 5 hours, it will nearly double your home’s average daily electrical consumption. Across California, hundreds of thousands of plug-in hybrids and pure electric vehicles are doing the same, sipping electricity from a power network at rest....

Media Platforms Design TeamDawn is breaking as six members of the A-Team gather for physical training (PT) at an empty trailhead in Yakima, Wash. The men, dressed in MultiCam desert camouflage, deploy from a white government-issued van and immediately start unloading rucksacks and doing leg stretches.Only half of the 12-man detachment, part of the 1st Special Forces Group, is available to stalk Rattlesnake Hills on the edge of the city for this morning’s PT....

Caltech’s David Boyd has done what scientists have been struggling to do for years: He says he’s figured out a cheap, easy way to make graphene, and to make a lot of it. The kicker? He’s using technology from the 1960s.Cooking up grapheneGraphene was a wonder material first theorized in 1947 and not actually proven in the real world until years later, when scientists did it in the strangest of ways in 2003: by rubbing a pencil across some Scotch tape....

It will be weeks before we know what caused Tuesday night’s fiery explosion, in which the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket blew up during an attempted launch at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. But if you’re looking for likely suspects, start with the rocket’s aging, Soviet-built engines.For starters, they’re old. They are refurbished liquid oxygen/liquid kerosene-fueled leftovers from the Soviet Union’s race to the moon in the 1960s and early 1970s....

Media Platforms Design TeamRemember active thermal camouflage, the military technology that seemed so, well, hot a few years ago? In May 2010, an Israeli startup called Eltics wowed YouTube with a video showing a special tiled system that, when tacked on to a vehicle, could render it invisible to infrared (IR) sensors—or, with the push of a button, disguise it as something else. Not to be outdone, the defense giant BAE Systems unveiled its own ADAPTIV solution, which the company said would be production-ready in about two years....

It’s been a brutal winter for many of us in the United States, especially those on the East Coast. At the time of this article’s publication, Boston was just two inches away from breaking its highest recorded annual snowfall total in history: a chilling 107.6 inches that fell in the winter of 1995-1996.The recent arrival of warmer weather in the East Coast and Midwest feels like a long-overdue reprieve for those of us who’ve spent the past few months entombed in snow and ice....

Media Platforms Design Team"The motorist is a source of revenue," says Richard Diamond. And it’s become his life’s obsession to change that.By day, Diamond is the managing editor at The Washington Times. But by night, he is a relentless advocate for drivers. It started when he was 16 and got a speeding ticket from a California cop hiding in a speed trap. What Diamond considered an unfair tax and nasty constraint on his newfound mobile freedom has grated on him for 26 years....

The original concept of taking a gun, bending it in half and attaching a digital camera to it so you can shoot around corners is one of those ideas that seems so obvious I would never have thought of it. So why not do the same thing with a 40mm grenade launcher? Military.com has an example of just that, from Corner Shot. But I have to wonder how it works. While in the Army, I remember soldiers coming back from the M203 range with black and blue shoulders from shooting off a couple dozen rounds....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs Popular Mechanics reported earlier in the week, reports have surfaced that police in Michigan are using an electronic device, the Cellebrite UFED, that can pull data off a variety of cellphones and smartphones, including Android devices, iPhones and iPads. According to Cellebrite’s website, its UFED can obtain email, Web bookmarks, Web history, SIM data, cookies, instant messages, Bluetooth devices, GPS fixes, call logs, contacts and much more from your phone....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis morning, Chrysler and Sirius Satellite Radio held a pre-New York auto show press conference on the Army recruiting office traffic island in New York’s Times Square (we’re still puzzling over the significance of the location). Execs from both companies announced the launch of the long-anticipated Sirius satellite television service called Backseat TV. Chrysler will get to be the first OEM to include the service across the company’s line of cars, and they will launch it in July in the new Town & Country and Dodge Grand Caravan minivans....

The FAA has the power. Now the question is, can they actually put it to use?According to a November decision by the National Safety Transportation Board, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has the power to issue and enforce safety regulations on small drones and RC toys—basically anything that flies 10 feet off the ground, including motorized paper airplanes. The question now, though, is how the FAA plans to enforce such an expansive mandate, especially as pilots are reporting more drones in the sky....

Q: I drive an 2006 Dodge Magnum 3.5L and I use 89 octane gas. I live in the northeast. Until the car travels 3 miles or more there is a ’ticking’ sound in the upper manifold. DTC reader (great recent article) doesn’t indicate a problem and it doesn’t sound like the valves. When I use a gas additive it seems to go away–for awhile. But every 3,000 miles is expensive. Winter months there is much less a problem, if at all....

“In this kind of weather, if you land in the water, you’re going to die,” Visa Parviainen said to the hot air balloon’s pilot. Parviainen was clinging to the balloon’s basket last autumn, flying high above the small lakes near Lahti, Finland, on his way toward 7000 ft. His plan upon reaching that height was to detach himself from the balloon and fly over the landscape, as parallel to it as possible....

Doctors in London successfully used a gene-editing technique called TALEN to eliminate lymphoblastic leukemia, an aggressive from of blood cancer, from an infant girl. The young girl, Layla, had not responded to traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant. As a last-ditch effort to save the girl, doctors took immune system cells called T cells from a donor and genetically engineered them not to attack the girl’s own body, and be more effective at finding and killing leukemia cells....

While the embers burn from Russia’s high-tech assault on Georgia, network war steps to the forefront as the new battleground of the 21st century. As editor of RBNexploit, Jart Armin covered this week’s Eastern European digital attacks from the inside-out, and we catch up with him on how to make Internet countermeasures work. Plus, PM contributing editor and Danger Room editor Noah Shachtman continues totrack the defense industry’s ins and outs with a behind-the-scenes look at why the Pentagon suddenly (if temporarily) pulled the plug on its much ballyhooed Air Force Cyber Command, and Dave LaBarge walks us through the modern security tactics of safecracking....

Bob Lutz is one of the most charismatic of all the auto execs, a guy who can always be counted on to provide a straight answer. As GM’s Vice Chairman of Global Product Development, he’s been credited as the guy behind many of GM’s vastly improved products like the Pontiac Solstice, Chevy Malibu and Cadillac CTS. His credibility among car guys stems from the fact that he’s one of us, a true enthusiast who loves cars, and he was also part of the team that revived Chrysler 15 years ago....

Most of the biofuels on the market now fall into one of two categories: bio-alcohols, such as the ethanol made primarily from corn in the U.S., and biodiesels, which are made from fatty acids. Both are no more than additives in gas or diesel, unless an engine is specially designed to run on them.The next wave of alternative fuel hopefuls could be synthetic analogues—fuels created by genetically engineered bacteria, designed to be completely compatible with engines that run on fossil fuel....

In 2005, Paul Octavious, then a graphic design student at Central Connecticut State University, bought his first digital camera and began posting pictures he shot for fun on the photo-enthusiast Web site Flickr. This past October, he got a job as a professional product photographer. “I was totally experimenting when I started,” he says. “I needed photography for my class work, and stock photo sites are so expensive.” He gained a following on Flickr by creating innovative digital photo compositions using his G5 Mac and a whole suite of Adobe software, including Photoshop and Illustrator....

Media Platforms Design Team1. The SetupIf you bought a computer within the last few years, you already have the beginnings of a good home studio. Either a PC or Macintosh will work equally well. The important thing is to max out your RAM–it takes plenty of horsepower to work in a multi-track environment–and get an external hard drive with at least 160 GB of storage to hold your tracks. Beyond that, you’ll need mixing software and a good audio interface–look for multiple audio inputs and a USB or FireWire output....