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Media Platforms Design TeamAbe Lincoln was the first wired president. PM editor-in-chief Jim Meigs voices that surprising insight during the History Channel’s epic, 12-part series, America: The Story of Us, which begins airing Sunday, April 25, at 9 pm EST. The one-hour shows, broadcast for six consecutive Sunday evenings, narrates U.S. history through the lens of innovation. Since Popular Mechanics has been covering American ingenuity for 108 years, the producers turned to the magazine for expert commentary....

Media Platforms Design TeamView full post on VimeoFinding it difficult to wrap your mind around the immensity of the universe? With thousands of known exoplanet candidates and billions and trillions of stars out there, things can get overwhelming. But a couple of new visualizations of space can help.The first, produced by Harvard astronomer Alex Parker shows 2299 of the planet candidates found by the Kepler telescope. In truth, those 2299 planets orbit around 1770 stars, but Parker didn’t want to overwhelm his audience with so much on screen....

A Soyuz craft will lift off from Baikonur Space Complex in Kazakhstan tomorrow, carrying with it two cosmonauts and an ESA astronaut for a short stay on the International Space Station. Sergei Volkov will serve as commander, with Aidyn Aimbetov and ESA’s Andreas Mogensen on his crew. The rocket will lift off at 12:37 AM ET on Wednesday morning. It’s an unusual mission for a few reasons. Rather than a few hours, the travel time between Earth and the station will be two days....

Today’s bombs are fairly straightforward, in that a 500-pound bomb pretty much explodes the same way, every time. But tomorrow’s bombs will unleash only as much hell as they have to. The Air Force wants conventional bombs to have a “dial a yield” mechanism, borrowed from nuclear weapons, that allows a bomb to explode with full force, something less than full force, or to not explode at all. Sometimes a small explosion is a better explosion, because it would allow the military to bomb targets in closer proximity to civilians without killing them....

The United States has been falling behind when it comes to the fastest computers. Since 2013, the fastest computer in the world has belonged to China, in 2016, China took the Number 2 spot as well, and last year the third fastest computer was built in Switzerland. But that might finally be about to change, as the world’s new fastest supercomputer is now online within the borders of the United States....

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are working on tiny robots that can build huge structures.NASA and Airbus are both interested in potentially using these robots in a new form of manufacturing.The robots view themselves as part of the structure, rather than as separate entities building a structure.It’s no simple task to build a spacecraft or an airplane. Usually, the pieces are built at separate facilities, shipped via massive cargo planes, and then put together at final assembly....

If cleanliness really is next to godliness, then a vacuum cleaner is a religious necessity. This noisy, awkwardly-shaped contraption performs the mundane task of sucking up grime with precision and efficiency. While vacuum cleaners today are a multi-billion dollar business a household necessity, you might be surprised to learn the machine’s basic design and performance hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years.“A vacuum cleaner from 1910 would clean the rug just as well as a modern vacuum cleaner from today,” says Tom Gasko, one of America’s foremost vacuum cleaner historians and the curator at the Vacuum Cleaner Museum at Tacony Manufacturing in St....

The U.S. Army has chosen a new rifle designed to allow infantry squads to hit targets at greater ranges. The Heckler and Koch G28 designated marksman rifle will give infantrymen a weapon guaranteed to penetrate enemy body armor at longer ranges than existing M4 carbines. The move is an acknowledgement that the Army could someday fight enemies equipped with advanced body armor, which is part of the Army’s reorientation to the world of conflicts between large powers....

U.S. Special Operations Forces operate a fleet of portable, rapidly deployable field workshops that can repair, manufacture, or even improve equipment in the field. The workshops, known as Mobile Technology Repair Complexes, are powered by renewable energy and stuffed with tools including lathes, welders, and 3D printers. MTRCs have proven their worth in the war against the Islamic State in Syria, quickly building ad hoc medical facilities from available materials.According to DefenseOne, U....

Update 2/7: The video of Elon Musk’s Roadster is no longer being streamed live, but you can watch the car’s epic journey in the video above. Original Post: Falcon Heavy successfully launched today, February 6, although the payload is still flying with the second stage of the rocket. The two side boosters jettisoned from the rocket and successfully landed on landing pads at Cape Canaveral about 1,000 feet apart. The center booster of the rocket, however, which attempted to land on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, crashed and exploded....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Kepler space telescope operated for just a few short years, from 2009 to 2013. But in those four years it discovered more than 3500 planetary candidates circling other stars and revealed that just about every star in the night sky has at least one planet. Just a few years ago, nobody knew whether planets were abundant or rare in our galaxy. Now, thanks to Kepler, we know they’re everywhere....

All around the country, from Virginia to Alaska and all points in between, new spaceports are popping up to support the burgeoning private space industry. Now, the federal government may be ready to throw some fuel on that fire.In April, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Federal Aviation Authorization bill that the Senate will begin debate within weeks. Tucked inside the FAA bill is an amendment (H. Amend. 565) that would “require a study on possible funding options for a potential federal grant program for spaceport activities....

Any ideas what you’ll be getting for the holidays? According to the FAA, about 1 million of you will be getting drones, whether that’s a high-end quadcopter or low-end $20 knockoffs from Walmart. Regardless, the FAA is very, very worried about what happens when 1 million new aircraft enter the airspace.As reported by Aviation Week, the FAA’s Rich Swayze put it this way while speaking at the Airlines for America (A4A) Commercial Aviation Industry Summit: “A lot of people who don’t have a pilot background are operating these things in the airspace....

Media Platforms Design Team Browse expert reviews and compare info on the MB SL Class at the Media Platforms Design Team Just about everybody in the supercar business builds one with a soft convertible top, and now Mercedes-Benz has joined that elite group with the soft-top roadster version of its long-nosed, hyperexotic SLR McLaren. For the company, it’s a way to keep the SLR product line fresh and simultaneously celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original 300 SL....

Romeo, Mich.—Few companies have ever come close to the legendary levels of success Ford has had with the Explorer. When the Dearborn company grafted two additional doors onto a thoroughly re-engineered Bronco II chassis in 1991, it not only created a more practical midsize SUV—but one that would soon become a bestseller in the category throughout the next two decades. In the year 2000 alone, Ford sold close to 450,000 of them....

On-Sale Date: NowPrice: $42,500 Competitors: BMW 335i xDrive, Audi A4 S Line, Lexus IS350 AWD, Infiniti G37x, Mercedes-Benz C350Powertrain: 3.0 liter I6, 325 hp, 354 lb-ft; six-speed auto; AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/highway): 18/26What’s New: To endow its halo sports sedan with more gotta-have-it oomph, Volvo enlisted Swedish aftermarket tuner Polestar to squeeze 8 percent more horsepower and 9 percent more torque from Volvo’s inline six-cylinder engine, yielding a finally tally of 325 hp and 354 lb-ft of twist....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: JulyBase Price: $43,185 – 45,185Competitors: BMW X3, Lexus RX350, Audi Q7, Infiniti JX35Powertrains: 3.5-liter V-66, 290 hp, 267 lb-ft; 6-speed automatic, FWD or AWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 20/28 (FWD), 18/27 (AWD)What’s New: The new MDX might appear to be a smoother, less muscular version of last year’s model. But behind those potent “Jewel Eye” headlamps, this is a radically improved crossover. Just how important is the new MDX to both Acura and parent company Honda?...

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: NowPrice: $27,495 Competitors: Fiat 500e, Ford Focus EV, Honda Fit EV, Mitsubishi MiEV, Nissan LeafPowertrains: AC permanent-magnet electric motor, 140 hp, 400 lb-ft; direct drive, FWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 128 mpge/109 mpge What’s New: The Spark EV is a pure electric version of Chevy’s snappy minicar. It shares architecture and dimensions with its internal combustion twin, but gets its propulsion from an electric motor driving the front wheels....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe world record for hottest recorded temperature changed hands last week—even though both of the contenders occurred more than 90 years ago. The previous record holder was Sept. 13, 1922, in El Azizia, Libya, with the temperature of 136.4 degrees F. But according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations (which also comes up with the annual list of hurricane names), El Azizia is the heat champion no longer....

A secret military spacecraft is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral this week, this time with an assist from private industry. If all goes well, the X-37B will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center on September 7th on a SpaceX Falcon rocket. The space plane, which is smaller than a city bus, will carry classified military cargo.The X-37B was conceived as a cost-effective alternative to the Space Shuttle. The spacecraft, which appears similar to the shuttle that inspired it, rides into space atop a space launch vehicle rocket and glides back down to Earth to land on a conventional runway....