CABOT, Vt. – First, a warning: All you vegetarians might want to skip this post. I spent the better part of yesterday butchering a steer we raised on our small farm here in the Vermont hills. It was my first experience butchering such a large animal, but, fortunately, I had some help from a friend experienced in the ways of cutting meat. If you’re asking yourself what this all has to do with energy, you haven’t read Michael Pollan’s latest work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma....
It turns out that the Honey, I Shrunk The Kids franchise would have ended much more tragically in real life. In this new video from Kurzgesagt, we learn why animals need to stay the size they are. Animals bodies are fine-tuned to function at their average size. If you shrunk an elephant, it’d freeze to death, and if you made a giant mouse, it would explode. View full post on YoutubeOur bodies are made out of cells, and whether we’re an elephant shrew or a blue whale, those cells are about the same size....
Media Platforms Design TeamIn just a few months, Honda’s rare earth metal recycling program rapidly morphed from a lab curiosity to a corporate banality (in a good way—when experimental technologies become run-of-the-mill.). Now the Japanese automaker is taking the next step. Today, a little more than three months since Honda announced a plan to salvage those pricey materials from used nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the company says it will repurpose those rare earths in future hybrid vehicle motors....
If you were flying a spy plane over enemy territory and spotted the image above, what would you think it was? An strange satanic ritual? An alien crop circle? Some sort of bizarre tourist attraction? In 1962, a U.S. spy plane pilot was flying over Trece de la Coloma, a remote region on the eastern end of Cuba, when this strange image was photographed and sent to Pentagon experts in Washington....
So “waste from atomic weapon production” is pretty high on the list of things you don’t want to find in a public park, but that’s just the scenario St. Louis is living out right now. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is busy at work cleaning thorium-230, a radioactive decay product of uranium, out of parks, homes, and other properties around Coldwater Creek.As it turns out, the “low levels” of thorium-230 come straight from the Manhattan Project, the government program that eventually led to the United States dropping atomic weapons on Japan, the first (and only) wartime use of an atomic bomb....
For the past few years, researchers at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania have been running a computer simulation to study how people choose to prepare for potential natural disasters. The simulation, called Quake, is a multiplayer game. All participants start out with a hypothetical $20,000 in cash and a house, and as the game progresses, they must make decisions about how to use their money....
View full post on YoutubeUpdate Saturday 8:40 AM ET: Watch the entire thing via the NASA livestream above.Related Story10 Incredible Photos of the Blood MoonA “blink and you’ll miss it” total eclipse of the Moon is coming in the wee hours of Saturday morning. East coasters will only be treated to a partial eclipse at 6:16 a.m. ET which will last until the moon sets. But west coast residents can get the whole show by peeking outside at 4:58 a....
America’s best-known motorcycle brand is having trouble at home. Harley-Davidson’s U.S. sales are down to the lowest levels in years, and the company’s stock has fallen about 13 percent so far in 2018. The Milwaukee-based bike builder is shuttering a factory in Kansas City as forecasts for 2018 predict continued declines. International sales have fared better, but possible steel and aluminum tariffs threaten to rock the manufacturer overseas. The underlying problem that has plagued Harley for years is the slow demise of its core rider group—the bandana-clad riders rolling through curvy backwood highways, traveling in packs from bar to bar across America....
Moving manufacturing overseas may be easier. It may be cheaper. But that doesn’t mean everyone is doing it. These American companies work hard to keep their products made right here—and to prove that American manufacturing isn’t going extinct. It’s thriving.Gregg DelmanAlabamaHonda Odyssey: Lincoln, ALA Japanese company making the most popular minivans in America, in America, since 2001.AlaskaNomar Driving Mittens: Homer, AKNomar started out in an old school bus as a maker of brailer bags—huge sacks that pull salmon out of the water without the damage of traditional netting....
Media Platforms Design TeamBen Brandt of B2Builds has an amazing new Halloween project that doesn’t require any programming skills. Heck, you don’t even really have to plug it in. Marty the Mechanical Moving Pumpkin just requires a handcrank mechanism inside to dart his eyes and wag his tongue. Marty starts out like any other Jack O’Lantern. Just carve him up as you would any other pumpkin. This includes scraping out and roasting the seeds, maybe with a hint of salt and cayenne....
Uber has already changed public transportation as we know it. So now the company is branching out beyond conventional roads and taking its ride-share concept to a place where there aren’t any: the sea.Earlier this week, Uber announced the world’s first ride-share submarine in partnership with Tourism and Events Queensland. The mission? To allow riders to experience the Great Barrier Reef aboard a—wait for it—“scUber.“Related StoryClimate Change Has Weakened The Great Barrier ReefThe scUber submarine will have a pilot who takes two passengers per trip into the Pacific at the cost of $1,035 per person, which includes a roundtrip helicopter ride to the submarine launchpad and dock....
Media Platforms Design TeamTechnically, there’s nothing wrong with standard fire extinguishers. But they happen to be eyesores, and eyesores end up hidden, shoved in a closet or otherwise out of reach when a grease fire ignites. The new HomeHero Kitchen Fire Extinguisher ($30) from Home Depot could help save your house, but not because of any chemical breakthrough—the powder it sprays is similar to baking soda. It simply looks good enough to stay on a counter, in full view, ready to smother a fire before it becomes a blaze....
Last week, a Cessna 208 carrying 18 people—a pilots and a bunch of skydivers—crash landed near Lodi Airport in California in California. The plane, after suffering an engine failure far below jumpable altitudes, was attempting to return to the airport when it ultimately had to do its best to set down in a nearby vineyard. One skydiver’s helmet-mounted camera caught the entire rough landing on video and the result is intense....
For snarky defense wonks like me, a new Star Wars movie means one thing: new military hardware to lambast. George Lucas’ original sci-fi trilogy may have inspired a billion-dollar franchise, but it is a series that willfully abandons common military tactics, simple physics, and even common sense in the effort to create a cool new toy. To be fair: Star Wars tech is cool, and the original stop motion AT-ATs were a cinematic masterpiece....
When you upload something to the cloud, it’s easy to just imagine it floating off and existing in the aether. It’s almost like it transcends to another state of being. In reality, it is just being transferred from your hard drive to a different one that is very far away. This is just one of the many places that hard drive might live. A new (fairly stilted but 360-degree!) video from Google offers up a rare tour of one of these facilities, specifically the one at The Dalles, Oregon....
The new house at 310 W. Lake Ave. in Auburndale, Fla., has “custom-built” written all over it. It’s graced by a standing seam-metal roof, wraparound porch, French doors topped by transom windows, and corbels at the eaves. There’s nothing cookie-cutter about it. Want to know a secret? The bulk of the home was picked up off flatbed trailers and plunked into place in one day.Welcome to the world of modular home construction....
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is set to enter a round of testing to determine if the jet is indeed ready for action worldwide. The highly anticipated initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) tests will start in November 2018 and conclude in July 2019. A bad showing by the F-35 won’t cancel the program, but it would keep the jets expensive, and increasingly complicated, in the short term. The Pentagon-mandated IOT&E tests will put several F-35s through their paces to determine if the plane is mature enough for mass production....
The world’s fastest supercomputer for astrophysical calculations came online today. The room-sized parallel computer will model our universe—from star formation to the distribution of dark matter—with more precision than ever before.The mega-machine is officially called Cray XC50, but nicknamed ATERUI II. It links 40,200 cores to achieve a theoretical peak performance of 3.087 petaflops. This year, about 150 researchers will use ATERUI II.Astronomers rely on computational models of the stars, galaxies, and the universe to develop theories of astrophysics....
The U.S. Marine Corps is changing the size and makeup of the Marine infantry squad, making drone and counter-drone specialists a permanent part of the force structure, and bringing back tank and artillery units that had been deactivated to save money. It’s a series of moves meant to keep the force as agile and deadly as ever.Stars and Stripes reports that the changes are the result of two years of internal experimentation within USMC....
The boxy four-wheeled contraption is not particularly graceful. It does one job, night after night, intermission after intermission. Yet the Zamboni machine, that overgrown ice tractor that resurfaces a rink between figure skating routines or ice hockey periods, always elicits pure joy from onlookers.“It’s particularly mesmerizing to children,” Richard Zamboni, the son of the machine’s inventor andpresident of Frank J. Zamboni & Co, Inc, tells Popular Mechanics. “But the adults seem to enjoy watching the operators, likely putting themselves in the position of the driver and imagining if they could a better job....
