Spending time outdoors is great for peace of mind, but can ask a lot of your gear—and especially your car. Every avid outdoorsman knows having the right toys—and maintaining them diligently—makes all the difference. Tucker, a born and bred Southerner, knows that fishing, camping and off-roading leaves his truck needing a little TLC. But just like a good pair of boots or your favorite watch, if you take care of it, it’ll take care of you too....
In the last hundred years, the world has become drastically more accessible. It’s difficult to imagine in the age of jet planes, but not long ago, getting from one side of the world to the other was a long and arduous process. Not to mention circling the world entirely. When Magellan’s crew became the first people to do so in 1521, the journey took three years, and most of the crew, including Magellan, died on the way....
So your internet has stopped working, leaving you without those news updates, social media pings, and streaming video shows you’ve grown accustomed to. Take a deep breath. Fortunately you must still have some way to tap into the information superhighway, but lets see about getting the onramp fixed. What to do right awayFirst step is a crucial troubleshooting question: Has the internet stopped working on all of your devices, or just one or two?...
Media Platforms Design TeamHalloween might be over but last night the zombies were out in force. To help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Walking Dead graphic novel series and of course the hit TV show upon which its based, Hyundai showed its new Walking Dead Limited Edition Tucson.The Tucson will only be offered in AWD and each will be painted Ash Black with red graphics. But on the inside, you’ll find a custom zombie survival kit and yes, decals to show your allegiance to your favorite zombie faction....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe University of Louisiana’s BeauSoleil House has been engineered to not only blend into and celebrate its home state’s environment but also to work with and, in some cases, defend against it. On the east end of the house a cistern collects rainwater for irrigation. A cypress rain screen is separated from the home’s structure by 1-in. furring strips, and a vapor barrier behind it eliminates moisture and allows air to circulate between the siding and the wall....
Airports need shuttles and snowplows, sure. But an airport in Moscow just bought a tank.Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport bought a gently used BREM-1 armored recovery vehicle, to be specific. The rugged vehicle was originally designed to haul damaged tanks off the battlefield. At Domodedovo, it will be used to tow planes in the event of emergency. View full post on YoutubeThe Soviety Army built the BREM-1 back in the 1970s and ’80s to tow the new (at the time) T-72 main battle tank....
The gene-editing technology CRISPR has the potential to change everything about medicine. With CRISPR, scientists and doctors can potentially edit a person’s genome on the fly, fixing all manner of genetic diseases with a simple, non-invasive procedure.At least, that’s the plan. In reality, CRISPR is pretty complicated, and any attempt to use it in human patients inevitably leads to some complex engineering. A recent paper from a group of Stanford researchers even found that most humans may even be immune to CRISPR altogether....
Media Platforms Design TeamA Pennsylvania gas well operated by Chesapeake Energy erupted late Tuesday, sending thousands of gallons of chemical-laced and highly saline water spilling from the drill site, heading over containment berms, racing toward a tributary of a popular trout-fishing stream and forcing seven families nearby to temporarily evacuate their homes. It’s the latest and possibly the most serious fracking accident in the controversial seven-year hunt to unleash natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, the biggest natural gas fracking target in the U....
Pluto just keeps getting weirder and weirder and weirder with every data release. Since its July flyby, the New Horizons craft has been slowly returning 16 GB of data to Earth. Much of the fascination has focused on Sputnik Planum, the left side of the heart-shaped region informally known as Tombaugh Regio. Sputnik Planum has some of the newest features on Pluto, showing signs of recent or even present geologic activity....
Media Platforms Design TeamPsyclone TouchCharge Kit /// $60The Promise: Wireless charging is a gadget-lover’s dream. And while various companies have been working on (and promising) such technologies for years, very few have actually come to market. This kit purports to charge game-console controllers wirelessly—lay the controller on the metallic pad and it receives an outlet’s worth of juice via a clamp-on battery adapter. The key: wire-free charging technology licensed from a company called WildCharge, which manufactures similar products for a small number of cellphones....
Although any future human trip to the Moon is still at least a decade away, behind the scenes, the next-generation lunar lander has already appeared on the drawing board—or more precisely, on a computer screen in Russia.The four-legged machine will be able to take at least two cosmonauts from a lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon. It is being developed for Russia’s own strategic goals in human space flight and, more importantly, for possible international cooperation, if the politics make it possible....
If you’re at all familiar with Japanese art, you’ve likely seen “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” one of the most famous pieces in Japanese history. The woodblock print depicts a giant wave crashing into a trio of boats off the coast of Kanagawa, but there’s been a lot of debate over the years as to what kind of wave exactly is depicted in the piece. The wave is commonly referred to as a tsunami but a new study seems to confirm it’s in fact a rogue wave, by re-creating it almost exactly in a lab....
View full post on Youtube The early days of the Internet were a weird time, and nowhere is this more apparent than in this fake 1995 ad for “The Facebook.” As you might remember from The Social Network (or real life, if you’re old enough), the behemoth was called TheFacebook.com when it launched. That’s real, but the rest of this ad is hilarious parody, imagining Facebook as a 1990s knock-off of AOL, with a combination web platform and old-school tech support....
Media Platforms Design TeamWire-Pulling Tips: To distribute pulling force on delicate Cat 5e, make a large loop of cable around the hook on the end of the fish tape (the steel tape used to pull cable). Wrap the cable over itself by at least one turn and cover the looped end with electrical tape.Q: I’m remodeling my kitchen and I want to get more counter space, more outlets, cable TV and–while I’m at it–a hard-wired Internet connection....
Like a flood of needles, an onslaught of carbon nanotubes seeps in through a plant’s leaves’ and beelines toward each cells’ chloroplasts—the hub where sunlight transforms into chemical energy. These nanotubes, thin straws of latticework atoms, pierce the energetic chloroplasts and imbed themselves like a thousand splinters. But rather than irritating or damaging the cell, the foreign particles are giving the plant a hardware upgrade.A team of MIT scientists announced yesterday in the science journal Nature Materials that by integrating these nanotubes into the leaves of several lab plants, they were able to markedly enhance each plant’s ability to perform photosynthesis....
Retro gaming often seeks to make new games using an old tech. A new Kickstarter, though, is trying to recreate a classic: solitaire for MS-DOS, shipped on a floppy disk.Zach Barth, the indie game creator behind the company Zachtronics originally developed this version of the game in conjunction with Shenzhen I/O, a puzzle game designed to teach the basics of coding. It’s growing popularity with Shenzhen players inspired Barth to first release the game as an app, and now, as a floppy disk....
In a recently published study in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists looked inside the head of ant overtaken by gruesome, mind-controlling parasites.The parasite, the lancet liver fluke, is a flatworm that jumps between different animal species to complete its life cycle. The parasite begins in egg form, attached to the dung of grazing animals like cattle or deer. Snails will eat the infected feces, and then dispel the worm larvae as little slime balls that ants then gobble up....
One Vietnamese fisherman just hauled in a particularly deadly catch. He returned to shore hauling what appears to be a Chinese torpedo, which he said he spotted floating in his country’s waters.It’s most likely that a Chinese sub launched the heavyweight torpedo in international waters and the weapon then drifted into neighboring Vietnam’s territory. The fisherman towed the torpedo to shore, where local government authorities took over and called in the Vietnamese Navy to inspect it....
Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupted yesterday, forcing the evacuations of thousands of people on the big island as entire neighborhoods were threatened by lava.Authorities have been warning residents of the possibility of an eruption for several days now, as the island has been experiencing hundreds of earthquakes over the past week. In particular, Hawaii suffered a magnitude 5.0 earthquake on Thursday morning that likely triggered the lava flows hours later.Those lava flows emerged in the neighborhoods of Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens, where around a thousand residents live....
Tracy Drain, NASA Deputy Chief Engineer, Juno MissionIn college, I had a co-op at NASA’s Langley Research Center developing components for flight simulators. They gave us the job of designing a support for the main control stick to rest on. We developed this complex torque box—an open box with a pole in the middle to resist force in any direction—but in the end, after some subtle guidance, we just made a flat plate....
