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Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamWhile it has yet to rival the hip-swishing jauntiness of human speed walking, last year’s MIT-beating, Euro-engineered robo-walking champ still rules the two-legged robot race. And now, thanks to infrared eyes and a gait-altering neural network, this competition crushing ‘bot has learned to conquer mountains, too. RunBot, developed at Germany’s University of Göttingen, uses its infrared “eye” sensors to “see” hills and, after a few falls, learns to adapt his movements to climb the slope, just as toddlers do....

BREAKTHROUGH WHO Yoshihiro Kawaoka University of Wisconsin–Madison FIELD VirologyACHIEVEMENT Flu pandemic prevention research.The virus sits in 2-milliliter vials inside a freezer kept at minus 80 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, in that deep of a deep freeze, the virus is preserved as if in amber, lying in wait. Under a microscope it looks something like a medieval battle weapon, a spherical object stabbed with dozens of little spikes, like the actual virus it was engineered to replicate: the 1918 strain of H1N1, otherwise known as the Spanish flu, a pandemic estimated to have killed more than 40 million people....

Driving games have been around for ages. Some are practically cartoons, others are painstakingly simulated to the point of obsession, but Need for Speed has repeatedly found a sweet spot in the center. With its latest installment of the two-decade-old franchise out today (and plainly titled Need for Speed), developer Ghost Games is trying to push the franchise’s boundaries in both directions at the same time. In the newest Need for Speed, you’ll find yourself doing more than just picking a random car from the garage, picking the color of the paint job, and hitting the streets....

Nintendo just announced its newest console, the Nintendo Switch, which will be coming out next year. Long-rumored and much-anticipated, the Switch isn’t quite a console and it isn’t quite a handheld. It’s the best of both worlds. Whether you play it on the go like a Game Boy or plug it into your TV like a Gamecube, the Switch will run the same games and make them look great on screens of either size....

We don’t have the technology to send you on a trip across the galaxy. Yet. But we can give you a reasonable approximation of what the view out your cramped window seat will look like.On YouTube, user daveachuk compiled the freely available imagery from the Spitzer Space Telescope into a nearly 8-minute-long sweeping view across the Milky Way. As he writes there, “This isn’t CGI, rather it’s just a bunch of image manipulation of gigabytes and gigapixels of data....

View full post on YoutubeX-Wings bobbing and weaving around other ships, with nimble TIE fighters in hot pursuit. Photon torpedoes exploding on the surface of an enemy ship. Those fantastic “pew pew pew” sound effects of laser weapons.All wrong.Yes, if you know basic physics and have stopped to think critically for a moment about the space battles seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, or many other franchises, you probably realized that it’s all way off from reality....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on YoutubePlenty of Nobel Prizes go for big discoveries, such as yesterday’s physics prize for the Higgs boson. But sometimes how people approach science is just as important as the discoveries they make, as shown by today’s announcement of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.Arieh Warshel, Martin Karplus, and Michael Levitt, three naturalized American scientists, created the essential tools for future chemists and biologists to make groundbreaking discoveries via computer simulations....

From venturing in the Colorado backcountry to building a surfboard on the coast of Maine, Huckberry has stepped up its Explorer’s Grant program for 2019. The online outdoor menswear and adventure gear retailer returns with the fourth year of its Explorer’s Grant, presented in partnership with Popular Mechanics. Huckberry will give a selected winner and a friend the opportunity to choose from one of four trips with a Huckberry ambassador, and to venture on the trip in style with $2,000 worth of gear....

It’s a shenanigan that would probably make the U.S. Marine Corps’ vehicle maintainers blow a gasket. In the video below, Indonesian marines race their American-made amphibious assault vehicles off a dock, sending them flying into the ocean. The vehicles are actually suspended in the air for a few brief moments before sending up a tremendous splash of water. View full post on YoutubeThe amphibious assault vehicles belong to Indonesia’s marines, or Korps Marinir....

Using objects from space to study Earth’s early history, two scientists have taken the first-ever measurements of water contained in samples from the surface of an asteroid. The cosmochemists at Arizona State University believe their findings suggest that asteroid impacts early in the planet’s history had major implications for its earliest life, possibly delivering as much as half of our planet’s ocean water.“We found the samples we examined were enriched in water compared to the average for inner solar system objects,” says Ziliang Jin in a press statement....

First, the term “craft” came for whiskey. And we bought so much that shortages hit and prices skyrocketed. So, on to mezcal. To the Italian bitters called amaro. To gin, which distillers can produce relatively quickly since no aging is required. And vodka, which is distilled to not really taste like anything at all.It seems every other liquor got that artisanal, small-batch, let’s-get-slightly-weird treatment known as craft distilling. Except, until recently, rum....

Technology, especially the stuff packed inside your smartphone, usually follows a linear progression. Each year brings better chips, better Bluetooth connectivity, better displays (goodbye LCD), or better battery life. But one technology in smartphones has been in a years-long tug-o-war with itself—wireless charging. Apple finally brought this wire-free charging tech to the iPhone with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, but the idea has been around for years and now with only two formats—Powermat and Qi—duking it out for wireless charging supremacy....

View full post on YoutubeFor years now, the hottest candidate to become the real, practical flying car that we’ve always wanted—and that Popular Mechanics has always hoped for—has been the Terrafugia Transition, a car/plane built by MIT alums with a proposed price tag of $279,000. This month, Terrafugia unveiled the concept for its successor, the TF-X.The TF-X would have twin propeller pods that point skyward during takeoff and landing, but stow during driving or the cruising period of a flight....

Get Better SleepHops can work as an herbal replacement for sleeping pills. If you find yourself having trouble getting to sleep, try washing your pillow cases with a few spoonfuls of a hoppy IPA mixed in with the water. The hoppy scent will help you drift off into dreamland better than counting sheep ever could.Clean Copper and Cast IronBeer can clean everything from battered coins to your favorite pot. Soak your copper item in beer for 5 to 10 minutes and then use a soft cloth to buff the surface and remove stains....

Science fiction has been around as a genre for more than 200 years. That’s such a long time that many of the greatest works have fallen into the public domain, providing a way to get free and easy access to many of these timeless works (and a few that time has forgotten.)Project Gutenberg seeks to make many of these works available. Here are a few available there, as well as a couple from Archive....

The flying car never dies. The dream might go away for a while, but you just know it’ll be back.The latest iteration comes courtesy of Uber. Last week, the ride-sharing company announced that by 2020 it will roll out a fleet of electric flying cars capable of taking off vertically and flying 100 miles in 40 minutes. Meanwhile, Kitty Hawk, a company funded by Google co-founder Larry Page, said it will start selling an electric hoverbike later this year....

A Chinese man was detained by police and slapped with hefty fines after he tossed loose change at an airplane that he was boarding for good luck.Lu Chao spent 10 days in holding and has to fork over the equivalent of $17,000 in court fees and reparations to Lucky Air.Don’t throw coins at planes. We asked an aerospace engineer to explain why.Last year, a Chinese man was hit with a hefty fine—the equivalent of around $17,000—after he threw coins at a plane engine....

A North Carolina congressman has written the Navy asking if recently revealed UFO sightings by Navy pilots could be foreign aircraft. Congressman Mark Meadows wrote Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer expressing concern that the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP, also known as UFOs) observed by pilots in 2004 and 2015 might be advanced aircraft fielded by a potentially hostile power, including Russia and China.In a two page letter to the Navy, Walker shared concerns that the UFOs could represent a breakthrough in aviation technology by an unknown power....

The world is warming, and nowhere is this more evident than in the melting Arctic. As once-impassable sea ice becomes less formidable, countries are upgrading gargantuan icebreakers to make way for entirely new arteries for commerce—and war.Shipping traffic along the Northern Sea Route shot up by 50 percent last year, to ten million tons. To take advantage, the Kremlin is building icebreakers like never before. Today Russia has 41 icebreakers with at least 8 more on the way....

The revs are at the limiter before you can blink, but this isn’t your typical drag race. This is Honda’s Mean Mower V2, and it’s the fastest lawnmower in the world.You may not have been aware, but the battle for the speediest landscaping machine has been ongoing, and fraught with controversy. Honda just set a Guinness World Record for quick acceleration on a lawn tractor—from zero to 100 mph in just 6....