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Media Platforms Design TeamThis Sunday, May 20, the moon will pass directly between the sun and the Earth, casting a shadow across the western United States, Canada and eastern Asia. Most people in western states , like a moon-shaped bite has been taken out of the Sun. But those lucky enough to be in a 185-mile-wide swath from northern California through western Texas will witness the sun transformed into a spectacular ring of fire in a rare event known as an annular eclipse....

Media Platforms Design TeamWASHINGTON, D.C.—The search for worlds like Earth around other stars marches on at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) winter conference this week. Scientists for NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission report that the orbiting space telescope has nabbed five new worlds, the first several of many that astronomers hope it will eventually discover. Meanwhile, other researchers have determined that stars a bit cooler and smaller than our sun, called orange dwarfs per their color, may be the best kind of stars for hosting planets with advanced, intelligent civilizations....

Media Platforms Design Team LAS VEGAS–At LG’s press conference today, the company unveiled a range of products that was both impressive and bizarre. First, LG’s LHX TV will be the first with built-in uncompressed 1080p HD wireless transmission. The TV is also 1 in. thick, has new 240 Hz image processing to smooth motion blur, has dynamic LED backlighting to allow variable contrast across the face of the screen and has direct-to-TV streaming of Netflix movies and YouTube videos, as well as the potential for onscreen Yahoo widgets (no pricing was mentioned on the set during the conference, but we’re expecting the LHX to be high-end)....

Media Platforms Design TeamHistory was kind to the last BMW motorcycle concept unveiled at the Villa d’Este Concourso d’Eleganza: The Concept Ninety, whose brawny retro style endeared it to crowds and critics, spun off into a production version soon thereafter dubbed the R NineT. Pleasingly, the bike that hit showrooms delivered a reasonably honest interpretation of the concept bike’s café racer-inspired style. The great thing about that presto-change-o switch-up from mockup to reality?...

10:33–Final thoughts…No real product news here today. It was rumored that Apple might leave MacWorld with a whimper, and it seems to be so. Schiller tried his best, but if Jobs won’t give up his best material–iPhones, new computer platforms, etc.–it’s hard to give a compelling keynote. Now for us at Pop Mechanics, it’s straight to the airport to catch a plane to Vegas for CES. See you there! 10:32–That’s definitely it, cause they just brought out Tony Bennett “The Best Is Yet To Come....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe mission of the telescope mover is like that of NASA’s Crawler space shuttle transporter: move a nearly irreplaceable piece of equipment very carefully and very slowly. (Photograph by John Burcham)Big machines rule the Earth. There are about 6.7 billion people on our planet, and they all need to be fed, housed, moved and supplied with power. These herculean tasks require either an army of small machines working independently or a handful of really, really big ones....

This weekend, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage–otherwise known as the MythBusters–took the stage in front of 2000 fans dressed as superheroes, monsters and illustrated stars at San Diego Comic Con. In addition to previewing clips from the new season of their Emmy-nominated show MythBusters, the television personalities premiered their cover of the September issue of Popular Mechanics for the first time. Hyneman and Savage were guest editors in the issue–the first in PM’s 107-year history....

Variety reports that Paramount Television is working on a Galaxy Quest TV series. The original 1999 film subtly spoofs and honors the voyages of Kirk and Spock, and featured a surprisingly strong cast with Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, and Sam Rockwell. And none other than Justin Long and Rainn Wilson got their feature film debuts in it. The original movie follows the largely washed up cast of a Star Trek-like television show, which gets caught up in an intergalactic battle....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast Friday was a mixed bag for fans of the fastball. Early in the day, the Washington Nationals announced that phenom Stephen Strasburg, who hurled a 101-mph pitch in his debut in June, would likely require for his injured elbow; a procedure that could sideline him for up to 18 months. But later that night Aroldis Chapman, a 22-year-old Cuban defector pitching for the Cincinnati Reds’ triple-A affiliate in Louisville, captured baseball fans’ attention when he threw a ....

Media Platforms Design TeamLike Twitter in its early days, confuses before it enlightens. The new 6-second video-sharing app is in the same kind of frontier position Twitter once was: populated by pioneers trying to figure out what it can do. So far, very few Vine users have managed to garner mass followings, and the network remains like most things on the Internet: . On the plus side, you still have a chance to seize the day from the felines and become a Vine superstar....

Media Platforms Design TeamMotor oil is often one of the most popular topics in my car care column, especially around the times when the American Petroleum Institute (API) changes its classifications. Folks also get an itch for this topic whenever the car manufacturers lower the viscosity requirements. And they all seem to do this within a model year of one another. I have a stock answer I give to everyone: Use the grade and viscosity of oil that the owner’s manual calls for, regardless of what your Uncle Charlie uses in his car....

Media Platforms Design TeamClick here to download a FREE pdf showing the six phases of the Elwha Dam project.“TEARING DOWN THE DAM IS THE EASY PART,” says fisheries biologist Brian Winter, gesturing to the 108-ft.-tall, moss-streaked concrete wedge of the Elwha Dam, which plugs a forested river valley on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. With a wave of his hand, Winter dismisses the three-year effort required to remove the spillway gates, the hoists, the crane, the enormous steel tubes that channel the river into the hydroelectric plant below, the plant itself and the reservoir that stretches up the valley, not to mention the 210-ft....

A report in this week’s issue of the journal Science details a new robot that might give our Breakthrough Award-winning BigDog a run for its money—and on only three legs. The bot begins with no knowledge of its form and eventually builds an understanding of its own design, allowing it to adjust to losing a leg—just the latest promising sign for robots on the battlefield. –Erin McCarthyAnd if that isn’t enough evidence for you, we were ahead of the curve on GPS capabilities in cell phones, too, which made a big splash yesterday when start-up company Loopt Inc....

All Eyes on MarsBY ALEX HUTCHINSON Photographs by NASA/JPL-Caltech/CornellBoth of NASA’s Martian rovers passed the two-Earth-year mark in January, far exceeding their expected lifetime of 90 days, thanks to dust storms that unexpectedly cleaned solar panels, careful driving through treacherous sand traps, and a bit of luck. Opportunity and Spirit have scoured hills, craters and sandy plains in search of water, the key to past or present life on Mars. And they’re not alone....

2010 marks 70 years since the closing of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a far more significant event than its opening. That was the year when a living vision of the future instantly became–to those of us born decades later–a myth. The day the Fair closed marks the end of the world of yesterday and the beginning of the postwar world we still live in today. Pictures of the World’s Fair don’t really do it justice....

Lance Abernathy is going to need a lot of popsicle sticks to build a tool shed for his tiny tools. While he previously had a functional tiny drill, he’s now back with the world’s tiniest circular saw. The gadget is more of a proof of concept than a ready-to-cut saw, as the blade itself isn’t yet exactly sharp. However, Abernathy is working on that. (Tiny metal cutting?)The saw is built from four 3D-printed components put together, with a safety guard just a half-millimeter thick....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s an old nursery rhyme that starts “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost” and culminates in the loss of a kingdom. Fortunately, the outcome wasn’t that bad for SpaceX early Saturday morning, but the failure of a part that probably cost just a few dollars has delayed the long-awaited inaugural flight of the Dragon capsule to the International Space Station until at least early Tuesday morning....

Media Platforms Design Team LISBON, Portugal — In this scary spring of $4/gallon gas back home, we really wish that the handful of tiny, oddball econoboxes we just spent two days driving here would make it to dealers in the United States. Sadly, they probably won’t see American soil—at least for a while. Why not? Well, as efficient as some of these smaller Nissans may be, they don’t meet our exacting crash-test safety standards....

We get it. The Avengers: Age of Endless Sequels is a titanic force to be reckoned with. But as Marvel and DC continue to mine the depths of their comic book properties, and Fox pushes to churn out more X-Men movies to make Disney mad that they didn’t get the licensing rights first, there are a big depth of comic book properties that deserve a screen treatment.The thing is … these often aren’t going to be superhero comics....

Media Platforms Design TeamForget constantly stopping to refill your water bottle on long bike rides. This designer has come up with a new way to quench your thirst on the go.Kristof Retezár, a student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, has invented a little thing called Fontus, which he calls a “self-filling water bottle for your bicycle.“Media Platforms Design TeamAccording to Retezár, “This device collects the moisture contained in the air, condenses it and stores it as safe drinking water....