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In a press conference Sunday night, Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, stated that his team was able to recover most of the pieces of SpaceShipTwo scattered over five miles of Mojave Desert needed to complete their investigation. These included the fuel tanks and the engine, which, Hart said, came down intact, with no signs of breach or burn-through.Hart was careful to say that he was describing facts, not the cause of the accident....

Media Platforms Design TeamLG continues its line of curved, flexible phones at CES 2015, starting with the reveal of the LG G Flex 2. It’ll run Android on a high-end Qualcomm chipset, but the highlight is a 5.50-inch OLED display with special glass and a banana-like profile. A “self-healing” back panel keeps it from picking up scratches.The phone is a successor to the G Flex, which could flex if you put up to 88 pounds of pressure on it....

When you hear the name “Thinkpad” what comes to mind? A black, boxy, business-grade laptop with a tiny red nub for a mouse? Naturally, but that’s not what the first thinkpad was in the slightest. As it turns out, the iconic computer line got its name from a much more literal notebook. The original Thinkpad—perhaps more accurately styled as “THINK pad”—was a small, paper notebook given to IBM employees long before the advent of the computer....

Another huge container ship is sliding, almost silently, past the balcony of my hotel. We overlook the southern terminus of the Panama Canal, where the excavated channel enters a small bay dotted with anchored yachts and fishing boats. It looks like any modest harbor—until a massive freighter piled high with containers blots out the sky.We spent much of the day at the Miraflores locks on the Pacific end of the canal....

While the United States has seen substantive growth in homes using photovoltaic (PV) solar energy over the last several years, this growth has been uneven. According to a new study from Tufts, fewer African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods are gaining the benefits of solar power, even when controlling for home ownership and income level. “Solar power is crucial to meeting the climate goals presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but we can and need to deploy solar more broadly so that it benefits all people, regardless of race and ethnicity,” says Deborah Sunter, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts and the study’s lead author, in a press statement....

Perhaps you’re getting tired of the classic holiday songs. Who could blame you? After all, there’s only so many times someone can listen to ‘Silent Night’ before you start wishing for one. What we need are some new holiday tunes, and artificial intelligence is here with the solution.Well, kind of. Research scientist Janelle Shane has a hobby of training neural networks to come up with weird lists, and recently had one take a crack at writing the lyrics to some Christmas carols....

An Iowa teen just doodled his way into Caltech and MIT.Senior Dezell Turner of Des Moines’ Central Academy created a little something special for his college applications. He used his skills on the Etch A Sketch to create a five-minute video outlining the history of calculus, which helped him gain admission to Caltech and MIT. It’s goofy, charming, and just might teach you something about math:View full post on YoutubeTurner tells local TV station KCCI that he’s been an Etch-a-Sketch enthusiast since middle school, and that “Etch A Sketch is just an extension of my mathematical mind because it taught me calculus before I knew what calculus was....

Video games have come a long way since their humble inception. Players are now able to immerse themselves in stunningly realistic 3D worlds that feature pristine graphics and advanced motion aspects, and the quality of these games only seems to grow as time goes on.But when it comes to gaming, it’s true that the classics never fade. The GameBud Portable Gaming Console comes preloaded with 400 of your favorite classic 8-bit games, and right now you can pick it up for over 50 percent off at just $35....

If there’s a device with a screen and a processor on it, you can be sure that someone has figured out a way to run Doom. But what about bringing Doom into your everyday life. A new invention from Rich Whitehouse does exactly that: It uses data from your Roomba to turn your own home into a custom Doom level that you can play.Roombas spend most of their lives roaming around your house or apartment, cleaning your carpets and floors, but a newer versions actually generate a map of your home....

In our offline lives, people tend to surround themselves with others who share their beliefs, thoughts and feelings. Sure, your family or coworkers may not share your exact ideology, but we tend to gravitate toward people who think like us. Online, ideologically insulating yourself is even easier—on social networks, you may very rarely bump into ideas and thoughts you disagree with.This political polarization could be partly Facebook’s doing. After all, its algorithms are fine-tuned to show us content we’re going to love....

Congratulations: You won the lottery! No, not the Bill-Gates-is-poor-compared-to-me super jackpot—just your regular multimillion-dollar kind of thing. Plenty of money to buy a dream car. So what are you going to drive? It’s a surprisingly complicated question. You’ve got some money to indulge, but you don’t want to blow the stack and become one of those people who sheepishly goes back to work two years after hitting the jackpot. (Plus, nobody wants to hear “I told you not to buy all those manatees” and “You know that submarines require expensive crews, right” all the time....

Under-Cabinet Task LightingIf you’re tired of standing in shadows while working at the kitchen counter, consider installing under-cabinet task lighting. These thin, narrow fixtures fit into the recessed space beneath the upper wall cabinets. The most popular under-cabinet fixture is the plug-in fluorescent type, which is affordable and easy to install. But for better, brighter light and more flexibility, I recommend a low-voltage halogen system. It consists of a metal track, plug-in transformer and individual light fixtures that can be installed anywhere along the length....

Most people are prepared for a small power outage. You’ve got the flashlight next to the bed, a couple of cans of soup in the pantry, and a few extra packs of AA batteries in the basement. But are you ready for a bigger blackout? Popular Mechanics contributor Doug Mahoney recently spent six days and five nights without power after an ice storm. It’s an experience that’s been alarmingly common this year Missouri and Kansas are still fighting widespread outages....

At least 27 people have died, more than 2,000 structures have burned, and 18 million acres of land have been torched by the brushfires sweeping across Australia.Untold numbers of threatened and endangered animals have perished in the inferno, while many more will struggle to survive in the aftermath.Efforts are underway to save one species—the bush-tailed rock-wallaby— by dumping buckets of carrots and sweet potatoes across their scorched habitat. Bushfires raging across Australia have left a trail of destruction....

The Claim: The Awesome Auger “takes the hard work out of yard work.” Just attach it to any electric drill and its ski-pole style, solid-steel, “spiral, laser-sharp edge” cuts a path for the crescent-shape disk to rotate and dig. It bores post holes, tills and cultivates a garden, and removes weeds. It cuts through thick roots, trees, shrubs and “powers out” rocks and stumps. It aerates compost piles, mixes paint and concrete, and spins weeds into the trash....

We’ve all got our own way of celebrating things. For Colin Furze, one of our favorite YouTube madmen, hitting four million followers on YouTube meant building a fire tornado.Of course, it takes a lot of work to celebrate with that kind of style. Furze has made not one, but two videos detailing the work put into the celebratory, twenty-foot tall device. After building out the base in the backyard, Furze decided against a motor for the project, due to his hypothesis that it would move so fast that it would smother the flames....

It’s every neurosurgeon’s dream: The secrets of the brain’s architecture unfold before your eyes like the pages of a novel, with every nook and cranny of gray matter waiting to be explored, every fold and wrinkle of tissue waiting to be probed. It’s possible, thanks to a new ultra-high-resolution digital model called BigBrain that’s 50 times more detailed than any before it, and is now publicly available and free to use....

What seemed like a smart engineering decision had disastrous results earlier this week, when a bus equipped with a natural gas-powered fuel tank on its roof collided with a low tunnel overpass. The bus was quickly engulfed in flames as a powerful blast swept through the city streets, blowing out its windows and strewing debris everywhere. The Drive spotted video of the incident, which reportedly occurred in Central Stockholm at the Klara Tunnel around 11:25 am on Sunday....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs this went live, the fate of the six-year-old who may or may not have been in an experimental helium balloon is unknown. (The balloon came down empty.) What is clear is that there are few options for help when you’re in a hot air balloon.The Colorado Army National Guard was preparing to launch two helicopters to help rescue the boy. The Colorado Guard prepared an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter to track the balloon and an UH-60 Black Hawk to attempt a link up with the balloon....

As the debate over what to do with the International Space Station heats up, with a new NASA report casting doubt over the plans to commercialize it by 2025, the ultimate outcome could be its intentional crash landing into the Earth. But even that contingency is lacking, according to NASA Inspector General.“At some future date NASA will need to decommission and deorbit the ISS either in response to an emergency or at the end of its useful life,” the report says....