Sure, Nerf’s newest ball-shooting guns can hurl projectiles out of the barrel at 70 MPH. That’s cool! But Nerf’s old-school dart-shooting pistols are awesome in their own right. In fact, they have one mechanical trick that is straight-up brilliant. If you’ve used any of Nerf’s newer multi-barrel pistols you might have already seen this at work. No matter how many barrels are loaded, these pistols will always fire a single dart....
As we move away from fossil fuels like coal and gas as sources of energy, one of the better ways to produce power is by harvesting light from the sun. Solar panels are rapidly becoming cheaper and more efficient, and new solar farms are being built all around the world.Most of our power is used in cities, but cities pose a unique problem for solar power. The buildings are too tall....
Media Platforms Design TeamMead may be the ancestor of all today’s booze. People gathered, ate, and probably fermented honey long before the agricultural developments that led to beer and wine.After all, honey fermentation is an amazingly simple process. In its simplest form, mead requires only honey, water, and yeast. “If you take the honey out of the hive before the bees finish drying it, it has enough moisture content to ferment on its own due to wild yeast,” says Houston meadmaker (or “mazer”) Josh McGregor....
Classic brick-and-mortar fireplaces aren’t exactly hot these days, according to Joe LaVecchia of New Jersey’s Abbey Hart Brick & Stone. “We used to sell a million firebricks a year in the 1970s,” he says. “Now it’s more like eighty or a hundred thousand.“It’s not that the hearth’s allure has been extinguished—it’s a cost issue. Between the prerequisite concrete foundation and a mason to do the job, a traditional fireplace can cost $10,000 to $15,000 to install....
An investigation into the mysterious downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine concluded that the plane was shot down by the Russian military. The investigation identified a Russian military convoy in the area when the airliner was shot down and even the individual surface-to-air missile launcher, in large part through analysis of photos found on social media.View full post on YoutubeIn a press conference streamed on YouTube, Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team concluded that MH17 was shot down by a Buk anti-air missile that was part of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, based in Kursk, Russia....
Mars’ moons, Phobos and Deimos, have little in common with our own moon. They are lumpy, misshapen, and some of the smallest moons in the solar system–14 miles wide and 8 miles wide, respectively. Our moon is many times their size, at 2,159 miles wide. The moons orbit Mars very closely. Phobos is a distances of 3,700 miles above Mars’ surface, and flies around the planet three times a day. NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has orbited the planet since 2002, recently captured stunning images of both moons in action....
Floating off the coast of Antarctica is an iceberg, but not any normal iceberg you’ve ever seen. This particular iceberg is completely flat at the top, with square sides and right angles. It looks like a giant sheet cake floating in the ocean. While your first instinct might be to assume this particular chunk of ice is human-made, in reality it’s completely natural.The cake-shaped iceberg was photographed on October 16 by NASA’s IceBridge program, which routinely flies planes over the poles to take photos and study how these remote locations are changing....
(Image: One of the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B unmanned spaceplanes that orbits for hundreds of days at a time on classified missions.)Speaking today at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, President Trump said that space is becoming a contested “warfighting domain.” He went on to suggest that the United States could need a new military branch to defend space, or a Space Force. “My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea,” Trump said at the California base....
Media Platforms Design TeamTomorrow, people around the world will be able to see Venus transit across the sun—and it’s the last time this will occur until 2117. But the astronomical happening is about more than just “I saw it” bragging rights. It’s also an unprecedented opportunity for astronomers itching to know if planets outside of the solar system could host life.Venus is a dead realm choked with carbon dioxide, lead-melting heat, and sulfuric acid rain....
Right now, there is physical way for a human to touch even a speck of Martian dirt. So if humanity can’t bring Mars to Earth, at least not yet, astrophysicists at the University of Central Florida have made their own simulated Martian soil. They’re selling it for $20 a kilogram (2.2 pounds) plus shipping.The team at UCF has developed a standardized approach to recreating the soil of the Red Planet, with a recipe based on chemical signatures collected by the Curiosity rover....
Cat 5eMedia Platforms Design TeamThis cable connects every device to your home network, allowing you to distribute movies, music and photos from PCs to HDTVs. align=“right” valign=“top” style=“font-size:10pt;padding:2px;background-color:#CCC”>HDMIMedia Platforms Design TeamThe current king of AV cables, HDMI carries an uncompressed 1080p video signal and up to eight channels of digital audio.USBMedia Platforms Design TeamThe standard wire for connecting PC peripherals is also used for game-console controllers. align=“right” valign=“top” style=“font-size:10pt;padding:2px;">ComponentMedia Platforms Design TeamThis three-plug analog technology can carry HD video up to 1080p, but cannot handle audio....
The Fukushima nuclear crisis that devastated Japan in 2011 left a footprint on the country that is still felt today. The pain lingers, and frustrations with government inaction have led to groups like Safecast, which has built the world’s largest radiation data set through the work of citizen scientists.View full post on VimeoIn the fallout of the Fukushima disaster, there was a global shortage of Geiger counters, devices used to measure radiation levels....
An Oregon energy startup has a modular nuclear power reactor 1/100th the size of a traditional reactor and is supposedly far safer.The reactors can be installed in multiples to scale up or down to a location’s power needs.Traditional U.S. nuclear plants are reaching end of life, and the technology is simply outdated.An energy startup in Oregon wants us to rethink our reluctance to embrace nuclear energy, Wired reports. NuScale Power studies new reactor technology from a lab on the Oregon State University campus—the same university where the 2019 climate crisis petition began....
Your old-fashioned dead tree science textbook probably featured diagrams of the Earth’s interior layers and one of those maps that displayed every kind of geographic landform. But our planet is not a static place. Now books are catching up to that fact.Media Platforms Design TeamEarth: A Primer is part textbook, part plaything. It’s the creation of Chaim Gingold, a designer behind the Creature Creator in Spore, who wanted to see what the future of interactive books might look like....
Media Platforms Design TeamLet’s say you find out-of-the-box premium SUVs a tad too understated, and prefer sport ‘utes that more closely resemble truck-eating decepticons than DOT-approved passenger vehicles. If big, mean, and merciless is how you roll, consider the Larte Design “Black Crystal” body kit designed for the 2014 Mercedes-Benz GL.The business end of this automotive stick incorporates German-made LED running lights from Nolden, exposed carbon fiber inserts, and enough air inlets to cool a Harrier jet engine....
The Collatz Conjecture is a deceptively simple math problem. It has only two rules. First, pick any number. If it’s even, divide it by two. If it’s odd, multiply it by three and add one. This will give you an even number. Divide that by two. The conjecture is that if you do this, every number you choose will eventually go down to one. But this simple hypothesis has so far been impossible for mathematicians to prove....
Rogue planets wander through space without orbiting a star, and now scientists have found two more of these free-floating worlds.For centuries, the very existence of rogue planets was hypothetical. Because they’re not close to a star that lights them up, they’re tremendously difficult to spot. Then a technique known as gravitational microlensing came around.Using gravitational microlensing, scientists find planets by noting when a rogue planet interrupts a star’s light from our point of view....
Media Platforms Design TeamLAS VEGAS — Volvo collaborated with independent tuner Heico (think AMG before they were acquired by Mercedes-Benz) to build two SEMA concepts that exploit the manufacturer’s latent wilder side. The Heico Sportiv S80 T6 High Performance Concept (HPC) wears a discreet, seven-layer “metal effect” paintjob that adds fluidity to the car’s lines, but under the hood is a 350-hp E85 bioethanol T6 engine coupled with all-wheel drive. A metallic carbon fiber-finished center stack sweeps from the instrument panel to the rear seats, continuing the metallic theme of the exterior finish....
Darren OrfOur beer started at a beer deli, mercifully miles away from boardrooms and PowerPoint presentations. Our beer was 115 years in the making and was born among beers—as all beers should be.We didn’t want to slap our logo on just any beer. We wanted innovation and satisfaction in a can, a liquid, barley-based version of Popular Mechanics. We knew we wanted to explore the frontiers of craft brewing, we also knew we needed help from the pros....
One afternoon late this spring a neighbor texted me a video of a thick maple that had come down during winter and crushed his aluminum rowboat. The boat was beyond saving. Its remaining value was roughly the sum of a pair of cracked oars and two salvaged cleats. The tree, on the other hand, had considerable worth. Our neighbor wondered: Would we like the wood? I consulted my sons. Windfall, we agreed....
