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Media Platforms Design TeamThe Toyota Corolla has been on the market for a staggering 47 years, meaning the compact is barely younger than automotive icons such as the Porsche 911 (50 years) and Ford Mustang (49 years). The long-lived but pedestrian Corolla may not have cachet of those sports cars, but it may be more successful. Toyota says it has sold close to 40 million of them. And even though the outgoing 10th-generation Corolla has been on American roads for nearly half a decade, Toyota sold more than 260,000 of them last year, beating the Ford Focus, Hyundai Elantra, and Chevrolet Cruze....

A Russian robot named Fedor is being launched to the International Space Station via rocket. The Soyuz rocket only sent up a robot because the space crew wanted to test a new emergency system.You can watch an archived video of Thursday morning’s livestream on YouTube.He’s just under six feet tall, weighs about 350 pounds, and eerily resembles the creature from the 1979 film Alien.The humanoid robot’s name is Fedor, which stands for “Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research....

Researchers from the University of Bath in the U.K. have created a nanomaterial that is both twisted and untwisted at once, expressing both chirality and non-chirality. Chirality, or handedness, is a naturally occurring property of asymmetry, meaning organisms that have this trait can’t be transformed into their mirror images.This advance in nanotechnology could be a game-changer in the world of pharmaceuticals.View full post on YoutubeA conch shell—with its twisting, spiraled insides—is impossible to transform into a mirror image of itself....

So you’ve hooked up a source of compressed air in your shop. It’s super useful for blasting away dust and stuff, but wouldn’t it also be great if you could control the temperature? If you had easy access to cold compressed air, for example, you could cool off your tools when they get too hot.What you need is a vortex tube. A vortex tube is a piece of metal that splits a stream of compressed air into two streams: one hot and one cold....

In 2015, Marble Distilling Co. won a $197,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for water conservation and energy efficiency.The distillery was built to 85 percent green code specifications.In 2017, the Sierra Club called Marble’s Gingercello one of “Six Spirits to Help Toast the Planet’s Health.“When we were planning Marble Distilling Co., my husband and I visited about 50 other distilleries. We were shocked by the amount of water and energy loss in this industry....

Getting a water-faring drone to zip across the surface of a lake isn’t an easy task—open water is a tricky, constantly moving surface. But University of Southampton professor Bharathram Ganapathisubramani has one idea on how to improve the speed of aquatic drones: give them bat-like wings. Ganapathisubramani’s research into Micro Air Vehicles uses the ground effect principle to get the craft to behave midway between an aircraft and a boat, enabling faster speeds by essentially using the surface of the water to skim across....

Get used to the sight of a referee making a box with his hands—you might be seeing a lot of it at World Cup 2018.The referee’s hand signal means he’s about to run over to a small screen to watch a replay of a controversial call. Video reply by the video assistant referee (VAR) has already appeared in major soccer leagues the world over, but it’s coming to the World Cup for the first time in Russia this June....

Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) School of Electrical Engineering have created AI that can turn a pixelated headshot of a person into a photorealistic rendering of the subject.Jonathan Fly, an AI expert, fed some emojis into the Face Super-Resolution (SR) AI, which he shared on his blog.They’re total nightmare fodder.A paper published on ArXiv, a repository of non peer-reviewed research, reveals that new tech created by a team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) School of Electrical Engineering has the ability to create pretty accurate photos of highly pixelated images....

High-grade aluminum has been the standard material of choice for airplane wings for years. A new study suggests that a newer material, a metal foam made out of steel and epoxy glue, could be even stronger and more effective.The material is still just in testing, but from bug build to erosion, it appears to offer an upgrade on what aluminum can provide.Airplane wings are made out of a specific type of aluminum, an alloy that offers a combination of lightness and strength comparable to steel that makes for easy flying....

Media Platforms Design TeamA year ago, iRobot’s Ava was penned in, ping-ponging around a roped-off corner of the company’s booth at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This year, the tablet-headed robot has been unleashed on the show floor. It’s actually outrunning me as I write this, weaving through the crowd as it navigates a loop around one portion of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s south hall. I keep cringing, waiting for the inevitable thump of its wide, triangular base against someone’s shoe or rollaway bag, or the sudden ding of its top-mounted iPad off an elbow....

There are stars too faint to see in the night sky just a few light years away, yet a chance cosmic event gave us a glimpse of a star that would have otherwise been completely invisible due to its immense distance from Earth—a whopping 9 billion light-years away.A paper today in Nature Astronomy reports the discovery of the star, called MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, or Icarus informally. Finding such a distant star is normally a tall order, but a larger object happened to pass in front of its home galaxy....

Among all the obstacles facing self driving cars—from inclement weather to shaky public acceptance—there’s another few of us anticipated: Bugs.Anyone who’s ever driven a stretch of road on a summer’s day (or night) has seen an insect come into view and…splat. The mess on the windshield is a minor annoyance, but when a bug obscures the LIDAR sensor on an autonomous vehicle, it’s a much more serious situation.Ford has been working on autonomous vehicles with Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence developer, Argo AI, since 2017....

Tiny robots that inch forward by absorbing humidity could one day be used to deliver drugs to humans. Researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea created these critters, which look more like moving office supplies than high-tech innovations, and are modeled after a natural process that occurs in plants called “hygroexpansion.“Plants can absorb water from the ground and air to change size and shape (for instance, pinecones close when it rains, and open when it’s dry)....

The 84-story Dubai residential building named, appropriately, The Marina Torch, burst into flames again last night. The Dubai Civil Defense said that the tower burned for at least two hours early on Friday morning, engulfing the exterior of 50 stories and 30 to 40 apartments. Onlookers’ videos show burning debris falling from the building.View full post on InstagramHundreds of residents were evacuated and forced to spend the night in temporary shelter....

Media Platforms Design TeamFord filed a patent earlier this month for a crazy new feature that would allow you to get around easily in congested urban areas. Instead of getting a tiny car or keeping your bike in the trunk all the time, they want you to pop off the back wheel, slap some handlebars and a seat on it, and take off on a self-balancing electric unicycle.Media Platforms Design TeamThe patent describes a car with “a self-propelled unicycle for selectively engaging the suspension system for use with the vehicle and selectively disengaging the suspension system for independent use....

Over the course of the 21st century, climate change will likely impact the color of about half the Earth’s oceans. Subtropical oceans will appear bluer, and those at the equator and poles will become more green in color as temperatures rise, according to a new study out of MIT published in the journal Nature Communications. The color of oceans depends on how sunlight interacts with whatever is in the water. It can be used, therefore, to gauge changes in marine life....

Black Friday is almost upon us, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until after Thanksgiving to land some of the best deals around. Here are ten great gift ideas for the home and kitchen that are available at Black Friday pricing right now.Craft Beer Homebrewing KitStack$45BUY NOWYou don’t need to own a professional-grade brewery to enjoy homemade beer made exactly to your specifications. This all-in-one kit lets you brew your very own Oktoberfest-style beer in the comfort of your own home, and comes with all the supplies you need to get started....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn a flourish of safety-related messaging, Honda has announced that the 2014 Odyssey will be the first minivan to earn a Top Safety Pick Plus (TSP+) rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). It’s a noteworthy-sounding award, but it’s important to know exactly what’s behind the testing and what constitutes a TSP+ rating.IIHS is an independent, nonprofit organization funded by auto insurers. It puts U.S.-market vehicles through a battery of tests to determine various levels of safety....

Unless you’ve got a lemon, most vehicles can continue to run well past 100,000 miles if they are well maintained. That means changing the oil at recommended intervals and making sure your transmission remains in good condition. Besides replacing an engine, transmission repairs are the most expensive fix for a car, and for older vehicles a transmission repair can cost nearly as much as the vehicle. Here are some tips for keeping your transmission in top shape....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamBy now, I’m sure everybody in the western world either has an Apple iPhone or is simply sick of hearing about it. But I’d like to use this week’s column to put together some final notes about the device on top of my review and move on—for now. And I’d also like to put forth my plea to Apple’s powers that be to allow for “equal opportunity syncing” to iTunes for the miraculous device, but we’ll get to that in a minute....