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Not long ago, scientists at the University of Newcastle made the incredible discovery that praying mantis insects can see the world in 3D. To prove this, they used an extremely clever method. The researchers attached tiny 3D glasses to the insects, gluing them to their faces with beeswax, and showed them films on a screen. Just like in human 3D movies, the glasses would filter a separate image to each eye, to create an illusion of depth....

Media Platforms Design TeamPoint, Shoot, Lose 10 PoundsYou too can lose unwanted width in the blink of a sensor with the HP Photosmart R967’s ($449) “slimming” feature. One of a slew of in-camera effects that can be applied after the fact, it essentially squashes the image. This has a thinning effect (note the suddenly svelte watermelon above) on head-on portraits, but it also can distort other elements in the frame (note the watermelon’s shadow)....

Animals have certain advantages that humans lack—the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field is among them. But a new study from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) offer a surprising challenge to widely accepted wisdom. Under the right conditions, the paper says, a select few humans can detect the Earth’s magnetic field. In an experiment biophysicist Joe Kirschvink and his team hooked up 34 participants to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine while recording brain activity monitored from electrodes attached to their scalps....

More than a decade after the Concorde was retired, we finally seem poised to achieve commercial supersonic flight once again. Boom Technology, an aerospace company based out of the Denver area, just revealed the engineering design information for their XB-1 demonstrator aircraft—a two-seater supersonic jet that will serve as a one-third scale test aircraft to ultimately develop a 45- to 55-person passenger aircraft capable of achieving a cruise speed of Mach 2....

Media Platforms Design TeamFuelTop-fuelers burn a mixture that’s 90 percent nitromethane and 10 percent alcohol. Interestingly, a gallon of nitromethane, which costs $58, has less energy content than gasoline (14 kilowatt-hours versus 34). But nitro is an oxygen-rich compound that requires less air to burn, so the engine can consume more of it, thereby producing greater power. The 58 nozzles in the intake tract are always open, dumping about 5 gallons of fuel in a 4-second run....

Media Platforms Design TeamKERS stands for kinetic energy recovery system, and if you’re a fan of Formula 1 or LeMans series racing you know all about it. The concept is to use a highly developed flywheel to capture, store, and reuse vehicle inertia normally lost as heat during braking. Think of it as a mechanical hybrid that’s lighter and simpler than traditional battery and motor systems. Until now it’s only been used in racing, but Volvo has been hard at work adapting the idea to work in passenger cars....

Parts of it burn at more than a million degrees Fahrenheit—thank goodness it’s so far away. But what if we could take a small piece of the sun and bring it to Earth? What would happen?The Youtube channel Kurzgesagt set out to answer that question, examining the consequences of moving a few hundred cubic feet of sun into your living room:View full post on YoutubeUnsurprisingly, what happens depends greatly on which part of the sun you take your sample from....

The aviation industry is known for learning from tragedy, transforming cruel lessons from accidents into improvements that make flying safer. When Malaysian Airlines MH370 vanished in 2014, taking its flight data with it to the bottom of the ocean, airlines recognized that they needed a way to access recordings and flight data from a black box—no matter what. The two competing ideas—ejecting the black boxes during a crash (complete with tracking sensor) or streaming their contents to the cloud—are now the center of a competition to see who can build the next-generation black box....

There’s a lander on its way to the moon right now, and it wasn’t sent by any government space agency. Instead, it’s owned by SpaceIL, a private company in position to be the first to land a craft on another world. And thanks to a generous decision by the XPrize Foundation, the company stands to be $1 million richer if and when it can stick the landing.SpaceIL started the moon landing project as part of Google’s Lunar XPrize, which promised $20 million to the first team that could land a craft on the moon’s surface....

World Record HolderMedia Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamWorld Record Plane Plans (PDF)The enclosed .pdf, which comes marked with folding instructions, belongs to the paper airplane dynamo Ken Blackburn. On four occasions over 15 years, Blackburn has broken and re-broken the Guinness World Record for “time aloft.” So rest assured, it’s not just for kids–print, fold, and fly.Ken Blackburn had already broken and re-broken the world record for “time aloft,” at 16....

Paleontologists at Brigham Young University have made a rare discovery: a new pterosaur they have named Caelestiventus (heavenly wind) hanseni. One of the older such specimens ever discovered, the find is around 210 million years old.Pterosaurs were prehistoric flying reptiles that were neither bird nor dinosaur, but were the earliest known vertebraes to develop the power of flight. Until this discovery, only 30 known Triassic pterosaur had been discovered.Brooks Britt, a geological sciences professor at BYU, discovered C....

After decades of criminalization and a blatantly racist War on Drugs that has succeeded primarily in putting millions of people in jail, the tide is turning on marijuana. Today, on 4/20, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer came out in support of ending the federal prohibition on marijuana, one of many recent moves by politicians to decriminalize the commonly used, low risk drug. Back in 1938, long before this modern wave of acceptance and approval, Popular Mechanics was bullish on weed, though not for recreational purposes....

View full post on IframeA Cessna 172 carrying a flight instructor and two teenage students was forced to make an emergency landing on the beach at Robert Moses State Park on New York’s Long Island. Shortly after landing on Monday at about 9:30 a.m. EST, the plane was caught by a gust of wind and flipped over. Both 16-year-old students, a male and a female, were taken to the hospital, but no injuries have been reported from the incident....

Fewer human insurance adjusters may be needed in the field now. Instead, drones will be checking on your insurance claim after a disaster. The FAA just approved use of drones in insurance investigations by insurance bigwigs AIG, following the approval of similar bots for State Farm.Insurance drones are marked for use in risky situations—particularly places where people need to recover after a disaster, where humans maybe shouldn’t tread. Think something like a storm, fire, earthquake, or other event where debris or other dangers may lurk after the fact....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe’ve all been there before. You’ve been toiling away on a project for hours, switching your tool back and forth whenever one hand aches too much. Eventually, you flip out and heave said tool through the nearest window while rabidly cursing and flailing your arms about. Just me? OK, nevermind. Either way, NASA and GM are here to help—sort of. The duo teamed up to design a robotic glove nicknamed the Robo-Glove—or K-Glove or Human Grasp Assistant device—to assist factory workers and astronauts by decreasing the amount of grip strength needed to operate a tool....

An isotope of gold has given scientists their first glimpse of longitudinal nuclear wobbling.The documented wobbling is similar to the way the Earth wobbles, caused by things like unequal axes.The nucleus is a prolate spheroid, like a rugby ball, and should lead to discovery of more wobbly isotopes.Scientists have identified a short-lived isotope of gold with a wobbly nucleus. The isotope is created by a nuclear reaction, and the research team believes the nucleus wobbles because of one extra nucleon....

If we’re not going to stop climate change by reducing emissions, then we’re going to have to engineer some outlandish way to save civilization—that’s the basic logic behind geoengineering, which researchers in certain circles have been talking up for the past ten-plus years. Now, somebody’s actually going to try it, at least as a small-scale test. One of these wild ideas is to fill the atmosphere with particles that block some sunlight from getting through....

Media Platforms Design TeamRaid71Let’s be clear: There’s no such thing as a truly air-powered car. But PSA Peugeot Citroën has a new take on how to use compressed air to store energy that a car can use for propulsion. Showcased in two concepts, a Citroën C3 and a Peugeot 208, the Hybrid Air system powertrain combines air, hydraulics, and gasoline. Peugeot claims its system improves fuel economy by 35 percent and is capable of 81 mpg in the New European Drive Cycle test....

The mobile game Pokémon Go stationed collectible creatures all over the world. Some of these creatures were to be found on Canadian military bases.Canadian military officials could not understand why civilians were suddenly showing up on their bases, staring at their phones.Shortly after the introduction of Pokémon Go, Canada’s armed forces noticed a peculiar trend. Canadian civilians claiming to be chasing pocket monsters were showing up inside the country’s military bases, memorials, museums, and even cemeteries....

Media Platforms Design Team When I bought my current house, a 50-year-old ranch in need of substantial TLC, one of my first jobs was to replace the aging hollow-core sliding closet doors in the master bedroom with nicer looking bifolds. When I moved on to setting up my home office, I decided to create a long desktop surface in the corner using the old closet doors. The doors were 30-in. wide—too big for my purposes....