Posts

The Xbox Elite Controller is absurd. Great, but absurd. With a price tag of $150, the tricked out and customizable bad boy costs roughly three times as much as what you’d pay for a normal controller. A normal controller that, for all but the most hardcore and ultra-competitive gamer, will be functionally identical. After spending over two weeks with the Elite, I can tell you this: If there is even a tiny part of you that thinks that maybe Elite Controller might not be for you, it’s not....

Media Platforms Design TeamI keep flashlights stored all over the house because we lose power often in our neighborhood, and at least half of the outages occur at night. What’s the best way to store a flashlight so I can find it in the dark?Yep, a flashlight will do you absolutely no good unless you can find it in the dark. The photo above shows the simple setup I use at home....

Astronomers have been tracking interstellar flares, which they believe are coming from a binary black hole system in a faraway galaxy. They expect to spot another flare in April, and are training their instruments in that direction, Scientific American reports.Us Earthlings shouldn’t hold our breath for a display of celestial fireworks, though. The suspected merger likely won’t happen within the next 100,000 years.Strange things are happening in dark corners of the universe....

A new one-two punch takes the very greenhouse gas warming our planet and transforms it into a simple fuel.A team of materials scientists led by Shan Gao at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Hefei, China, have just developed a new material that transforms carbon dioxide gas into a simple, clean-burning fuel called formate. Using a process called electroreduction, their work requires nothing more than a modest amount of electric current....

The Claim: “Tired of getting nicks and cuts from blades that go dull after a few shaves?” With the Save A Blade razor sharpener, “there’s an easy way to save your money and save your skin.” The device extends blade life fortyfold, enabling up to 200 “perfect shaves” on a single blade. “Just slide the razor inside, press the button, and in seconds, your razor is like new again.” According to the product literature, a “precision Silicone [sic] Carbide sharpening member” rotates 60 times per second to hone the blade....

The first thing you need to know is that the pit stop isn’t a pit stop. Forget the tire change and the fuel top-off you’ve seen at Indy or Daytona. When a Formula E racecar enters the pits, the driver pulls into the garage, leaps out, and gets strapped into a second car with a fully charged battery, all over the course of about 45 seconds.It’s one way to beat range anxiety....

Celebrations in honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 are rolling in across the world. It’s a chance to recognize the achievements of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins—as well as many of the lesser known figures who helped make the moon landing possible. And Google is honoring one of them, Margaret Hamilton, with a massive portrait in the Mojave Desert using the light of the moon. Google’s tribute is massive. Taking place at one of the arrays at the Ivanpah Solar Facility, the company has reverse engineered 53,555 solar mirrors, each about the size of a car, to reflect the moon’s light, resulting in a 1....

Media Platforms Design TeamGoogle’s Orkut social network is going the way of Google Wave and Google Answers. As of today, Orkut will accept no new users, and on September 30, Google will officially shut it down. Until then, when Orkut won’t allow any logins, users have a few months to keep using their accounts, which they can export as zip files using Google Takeout. Google suggest that users also begin transitioning to Google+, of course, to which users can upload Orkut photo albums....

Media Platforms Design TeamCABOT, Vt. — This will be the last post on the Energy Family blog, so I’ll take a moment to thank everyone who has read and commented. Since this space was originally conceived as a forum to discuss my family’s adventures with off-grid living in northern Vermont, it seems fitting to close with a final update on our solar home.Our 2,200-sq.-ft. house here continues to hum away on 100-percent renewable power....

The Lion Air jet that crashed into the Java Sea a month ago, killing all 189 people onboard, was unfit to fly on more than one occasion in the days leading up to its final flight, according to Indonesian safety regulators. The revelation came in a newly released report that provides fresh details on the last few flights of the virtually new Boeing 787 MAX 8, and it raises more questions about the response of the crews and the airline to these problems....

To produce PM’s three-part Digital Family project, contributor Rebecca Day spent dozens of hours arranging to have the latest and most interesting home electronics shipped to Jamieson and Peggy Jones, who live with their two children in western Connecticut. The Joneses have spent literally hundreds of hours setting up and testing all those goodies and reporting back to Rebecca in near-daily e-mails. Here’s a sampling of the correspondence (mainly by Peggy) leading up to Part II, published in the September issue of POPULAR MECHANICS magazine....

Software is an ever-evolving process, something we’re reminded of every time we have to download a new update of an app. But an update is not an overhaul, and over time, updating features without working on the program’s core architecture can drag down the performance of some software, especially as the code underlying it all becomes older and older.Often, this means re-engineering the code to modernize it. It’s a hefty, tedious process....

Researchers at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are working on a new way to see around corners. Using standard RGB cameras, the CSAIL team says, “we use edge cameras to recover 1-D videos that reveal the number and trajectories of people moving” around a corner.An edge camera system, the team says in their paper, “consists of four components: the visible and hidden scenes, the occluding edge, and the ground, which reflects light from both scenes....

Mitsubishi is a titan of Japanese industry, a manufacturer of everything from space rockets to rice cookers. Mitsubishi is also one of Japan’s key defense contractors, building the Type 10 main battle tank and Soryu-class attack submarine. Its AAM-4B medium range air-to-air missile was the first with an advanced electronically scanned array radar, making it even more advanced than the American AMRAAM missile. Now Mitsubishi wants to get into self-driving cars, and it reckons that its military technology will give it a leg up on the competition....

Astronomers have used a brand new technique to get a direct look at a nearby exoplanet. The advancement could help us find brand new exoplanets in the future and learn much more about the ones we’ve already discovered.The exoplanet researchers observed is called HR 8799e, and it orbits a star about 130 light-years away. HR 8799e was first discovered in 2010 by a group of astronomers using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii....

Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.Soccket, the soccer ball that generates and stores electricity while it rolls around, has a powerful new backer. President Obama, noted more for his basketball fandom, kicked and headed a Soccket while on a trip to Tanzania this week, delighting onlookers with his presidential powers on the pitch.PopMech recognized Soccket with a Breakthrough Award back in 2010. The brainchild of four Harvard students, Soccket contains a magnetic slug that moves about inside an inductive coil while players kick it back and forth....

Media Platforms Design TeamA grandfather clock’s swinging pendulum marks time in seconds. A quartz watch’s oscillating crystal can segment time better: into thousandths of a second. Then there are super-powerful optical clocks, which can slice time into quadrillionths (one million times smaller than a billionth) of a second. But there’s a problem with the precision of these new optical clocks: They are actually more precise than the technology that exists to take advantage of them....

A new form of ransomware meant to target industrial control systems (ICS) has been detected by Dragos, a Hanover, Maryland-based cybersecurity firm. The threat, known both as Snake and Ekans, could affect manufacturing plants and utilities.This is different from past instances of industrial meddling because the attackers appear to be cybercriminals, rather than state-sponsored hacks.If you use electricity—or any utility for that matter—we have some bad news: a new type of ransomware that targets industrial control systems has been documented by a Hanover, Maryland-based cybersecurity firm called Dragos....

The horror story practically writes itself: hacked pacemakers and insulin pumps. Gaining control of medical devices through wireless connections would allow hackers to visualize vital signs or potentially even cause harm. But a team of engineers at Purdue have been working on a solution to this problem that involves the body itself. “We’re connecting more and more devices to the human body network, from smart watches and fitness trackers to head-mounted virtual reality displays,” says Shreyas Sen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in sensing and communication systems, in a press statement....

The first step to attempt to save net neutrality, via overturning the FCC’s recent deregulatory decision by way of the Congressional Review Act (CRA), passed the Senate this afternoon. The bill passed in a 52 to 47 vote, with Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining the Democratic caucus in favor. Now the matter will go to the House, where a simple majority will be required to send the bill to the White House for a signature or veto....