Media Platforms Design TeamYa know, every time I’m waiting in line at Starbucks to pay $3.50 for a cup of coffee—surrounded by branded mugs and other coffee paraphernalia while listening to the store’s soundtrack that has filtered, steamed and brewed the Starbucks vibe into song—I stare at the CD rack and think: “Why should I have to wait until I get home to rip that new Joan Baez tune onto my computer?...
The dream of driving 1,000 miles per hour is stuck in neutral.Bloodhound SSC, a British project to build a land-speed-record car, found itself in a position familiar to many big-dream engineering projects: constantly scrounging for enough funding to keep the effort alive. Last week we learned that Bloodhound had gone into “administration”—essentially the U.K.’s version of bankruptcy, and needed about $33 million to stay afloat. It did not find it, and now the project seems finished....
Counting steps in metabolic equivalent levels now comes without your usual price shock with Casio’s new G-Shock GBD800 trainer watch.Releasing this October for just $100, the new watch is part of the company’s Men’s Power Training Series, and these black/red and black/neon green wrist computers now come with Bluetooth connectivity to pair with a G-Shock app and increase your training know-how.Already known for its rugged looked and ability to handle extreme environments, the GBD800 was geared toward athletes and active lifestyles with a step tracker function that breaks down daily steps taken in five metabolic equivalent levels, displayed via a graph in the app and across the digital face of the watch....
Last year, Toshiba teased everyone with the announcement of an HD DVD player by the end of 2005, which never happened. The company also teased us personally with a sneak-peek at a digital camcorder that had an internal hard drive. PM proceeded to give the HD DVD player an Editor’s Choice Award at last year’s CES, while waiting anxiously for hard details on the hard-drive camcorder.Well, don’t we feel silly.This year, both products are actually coming out....
The Department of Defense’s research and development arm is teaming up with NASA to create a new generation of satellites whose job will be to maintain existing ones. The new satellites, called “service stations in orbit” by The Washington Post, could extend the lives of billion-dollar satellites and fix minor maintenance issues, problems that are currently not possible. Such “service stations” however could also interfere with the satellites of adversaries.Satellites are a multi-billion dollar industry, and it’s no exaggeration to say that everything from the military to ordinary civilians rely on them....
I hear the helicopter before I see it. A gentle whir at first, the noise grows to chain-saw strength as the orange-and-white-striped pod hurtles into view and settles into a hover over a paved landing pad just a couple of hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean. Standing in the tall grass at the edge of the clearing, I brace myself against the rotor wash. One foot back, knees bent, head down....
The Welrod is one of the best-remembered pieces of real-life James Bond gear manufactured by Special Operations Executive. SOE was a clandestine department set up in 1940 in the UK to assist resistance movements in occupied Europe, and they came up with some very interesting gadgets. SOE’s Station IX specialized in weapons R&D, and was located in the small town of Welwyn, just north of London.The devices created in Welwyn were all code-named using the name of the town for the first three letters....
When my friend and I left my California apartment, bound for the Sierras, we couldn’t wait to begin our RV adventure. But our expectations quickly soured when, time after time, we were met by signs that forbade overnight parking. Frustrated and fatigued, we surrendered to the RV park at an official campground. The first one we tried was full, but we squeezed into the second. Expansive wilderness? Not so much. It was a crowded, bustling place with RVs lined up in tight rows....
Media Platforms Design Team(Photot Credit: Diane Collins and Jordan Hollender/Getty Images)My first desktop external desktop hard drive and I have had a good run together. But now it’s six years old, it requires two adapters to plug into my computer, and it’s gotten noisy with age. So last weekend, I decided to bid the drive goodbye.First, I had to destroy it. Deleting all your data before you discard an old hard drive is the first step....
Media Platforms Design TeamToday, HP announced the 9.7-inch screen TouchPad (they also introduced two phones, the Pre3 and credit-card sized Veer), which will run on a tabletized version of Palm WebOS. There is no pricing yet on TouchPad, nor any specific release date except for “this summer.” The TouchPad’s specs are impressive (1.2 GHz, dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, front-facing camera, Beats audio), although, as we’re starting to see with the Motorola Xoom, nothing kills our desire for an impressive tablet like a depressingly high price....
The FAA has issued an emergency directive to anyone flying the Boeing 737 MAX, the type of plane that crashed in the Lion Air Flight JH 610 incident, related to the faulty sensors that reportedly fed bad information to the pilots. Meanwhile, investigators have reported that the plane received a replacement angle-of-attack sensor (a system that measures whether the plane’s nose is too high relative to the current of air) the day before the deadly crash....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe music phone is nothing new—mobile phones have been pinch-hitting for MP3 players for years. But unless you have an iPhone, songs have typically remained trapped in pocket purgatory, thanks to the combination of undersized headphone jacks and a limited number ways to pump the sound into speakers. Now the Motorola ROKR T505—a gadget that clips on to your car’s sun visor and wirelessly streams to its sound system—lets you listen to your phone-stashed tunes on the road....
The MQ-25A will be the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to be stationed on an aircraft carrier.The drone will refuel other carrier aircraft, dramatically increasing their range and ability to stay in the air.The MQ-25A will hit the fleet in 2024.The U.S. Navy’s MQ-25A Stingray drone flew for the first time last month, marking a major step toward integrating it into the carrier air wing of the future. The Stingray isn’t the first drone the Navy has flown, but it will be the first to regularly fly off a carrier flight deck....
Update, Sept. 22: Success! MAVEN has completed its 10-month journey to Mars by entering orbit of the Red Planet.NASA’s next Mars mission, and the first to study the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet, is on target to enter orbit of Mars on Sunday, NASA said in a press conference this afternoon. The primary mission of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, is to find out what happened to the water that flowed over the Martian surface billions of years ago and has now vanished....
Somewhere inside America’s sprawling space apparatus, a newly assembled team of NASA engineers has begun designing a spacecraft to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon. It would be humanity’s first visit since the glory days of the 1960s. The Lander Study Group, as it’s called inside NASA, put its very first ideas on paper within the past few weeks—that’s according to a NASA presentation seen by Popular Mechanics. What’s most exciting about this nascent work is that the new lunar lander won’t be a one-and-done like that of Apollo 11....
The first round of the legal boxing match between Apple and the FBI over whether or not the tech company could be compelled to help unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone ended before it started when the FBI found another way in and dropped its case. But that wasn’t the end of things, not by a long shot. The Department of Justice is about to make a second pass with a new order about a new iPhone....
“Hunter”, Russia’s first large combat drone, is on the verge of first flight. First spotted earlier this year, experts believe the drone is designed to act as an unmanned bomber, delivering precision-guided bombs at long ranges, and its stealthy design will allow it to penetrate air defense networks.Okhotnik, also known as “Hunter,” is an unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Russia’s Sukhoi aircraft design bureau. A flying wing without a fuselage and neither horizontal nor vertical stabilizers, it resembles the 31-year old American B-2 stealth bomber in profile....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe Event[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/j4vumb8J-x8&hl=en_US&fs=1[/youtube]Series premiere Monday, Sept. 20 at 9 pm on NBCTry to get producers of The Event, debuting on NBC this September, to tell you what the event actually is, and they go mum. “All we can tell you,” said executive producer Evan Katz at the Comic Con panel for the show, “is that this [panel] is not the event.” We’ve seen the pilot and what we can tell you is this: If you liked Lost, you’ll probably like The Event....
If you wanted to find the place with the most volcanoes, you might think to head to an island in the Pacific or along the east coast of Africa, but you’d actually need to take a trip to the South Pole. Scientists have found more than 90 volcanoes buried underneath the Antarctic ice, making that region the highest concentration of volcanoes in the world.Icy Antarctica might seem like the last place to find volcanoes, but in fact the region is very volcanically active....
Media Platforms Design TeamTo mark the Blu-ray release of Fast Five, PM has a sweepstakes going. To enter, you must “like” (or have previously “liked”) . People who like our page will be automatically entered to win either a Blu-ray combo pack or a Fast Five baseball cap from twenty randomly chosen entries. The sweepstakes ends in one week.the Popular Mechanics Facebook pageFast FiveThis fifth installment of the Fast and the Furious series features a high-tension race between four police-grade Dodge Chargers through the streets of Rio de Janiero....
