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You can power a doorbell without a battery or external wiring. All you need is some clever engineering. YouTube channel Techmoan took apart a wireless doorbell to figure out what made it tick. The doorbell was a little unusual: There was no battery or wiring needed, yet it seemed to ring just fine. What Techmoan found on the inside was a piezoelectric device. Essentially, the doorbell has a teeny-tiny alternator. Pushing down on the button creates a mechanical force, and piezoelectricity uses this as a micro-power source to produce a low-power signal....

A few weeks after I gave my apartment a home-automation makeover, I found myself in a strictly 21st-century pickle: I was naked and shivering, stranded post-shower in my bathroom, trying to plot a route past a motion-activated camera to the freshly laundered towels I’d left by the bed. The camera was only meant to shoot pictures of trespassers, but the trigger that shuts off the system when I’m home is my smartphone—and I’d allowed the battery to run down....

There are certain groups of people whom you should always envy because they’re having more fun than you. This includes anyone riding a Sea-Doo, anyone who rented a beach cabana, and anyone driving a Jeep Wrangler with no doors. Living in the temperate South, I see doorless Wranglers all the time. You know what? Those people are never frowning. They’re never sullen. They’re laughing and smiling and basking in the pure exuberance of door-free driving....

If everything goes according to plan, Lake Turkana in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley will soon be home to the Ngaren Museum of Humankind. The Rift Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is also home to Turkana Boy, the most complete skeleton ever found of early man. Dr. Richard Leakey, a paleoanthropologist who discovered Turkana Boy, commissioned Ngaren in celebration of our ancestry. The museum’s edifice will be constructed to resemble the early stone tools used by ancient man and is set to be designed by Daniel Libeskind’s firm, Studio Libeskind, who previously redesigned the New York City World Trade Center and several other iconic buildings all over the world....

Media Platforms Design TeamNetflix users know the decision-making angst and endless scrolling that comes with trying to pick something to watch. Don’t worry, though—now there’s someone to decide for you.Netflix Roulette, a new Android app, is just what it sounds like: Click “spin,” and the algorithm chooses something at random for you to watch. You can narrow the pool by setting choosing genres and ratings parameters, or by entering a keyword, director’s name, or actor’s name....

Media Platforms Design TeamYesterday, the wireless firm LightSquared Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Included in the deal is a request that Philip Falcone, founder of the hedgefund Harbinger Capital Partners, step aside in his role of chief financial backer. LightSquared’s goal was to provide an alternative 4G LTE network to those of the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon; it would then lease chunks of the network to smaller cellphone companies....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt least 13 people are confirmed dead after an avalanche on Mount Everest. Another person sighted in the distance is likely dead, and at least four more people—all Sherpas—are missing.It’s a tragedy," says Alan Arnette, who summited Everest in 2011 on his fourth attempt and who chronicles each Everest season at AlanArnette.com. “There’s at least another 100 people trapped above the avalanche, so it could be days before we finally figure out how many people were killed and injured from this....

NASA on Friday successfully dropped a replica Orion spacecraft from an Air Force transport aircraft to a southwestern Arizona desert site to test the craft’s ability to cope with a partial parachute failure.The test used two of Orion’s three main parachutes to simulate the failure of the third and still sufficiently slowed the spacecraft for a landing.Previous attempts were thwarted by a failure of the C-17 plane’s cargo doors to open at the drop altitude of 35,000 feet (10,668 meters) on Wednesday and by high winds on Thursday....

Update: If at first you don’t succeed, set off the explosives again.Adamo Group demolition company took another crack at the Silverdome on Monday night, and this time the old stadium came crashing down in spectacular fashion.View full post on TwitterDec. 4: This weekend, engineers staged an implosion of the Pontiac Silverdome, the long-defunct former home of the NFL’s Detroit Lions. Well, nobody bothered to tell the Silverdome it was supposed to fall down....

Let’s get this out of the way: The Priority Embark isn’t cheap. For $3,999 you could get a respectable secondhand car. That’s actually not a crazy comparison, because for urban riders the Embark is intended to supplant or replace a car. This is a bike you could ride far, every day, an electrically augmented two-wheeled commuter—a real bicycle, but one with the ability to deliver you at work without being drenched in sweat....

Media Platforms Design TeamFrom pest-resistant corn to creepy glowing fish, genetically engineered organisms are creeping into our lives. But most of today’s GMOs vary marginally from the original animal or plant—there is an addition or deletion of a couple genes, which is like adding or scrubbing a line from Hamlet and calling it a new play. But a team of geneticists led by Jef Boeke at Johns Hopkins University is dreaming much, much bigger....

Owner: Christopher D. SmithLocation: Pinehurst, North CarolinaPurchased from: Leith Mercedes-Benz of Raleigh (summer 1989, new)Purchase price: $63,000Years owned: 29Mileage: 24,537 original milesChris’s 560SL competed in its first car show last spring, winning first place in the Hagerty Youth Judging, and the Mercedes-Benz Silver Star Award for Preservation.Travis DoveMy mother always wanted a Mercedes convertible. Back in the ’80s, we moved from Long Island to North Carolina, and she finally went to a dealer....

The U.S. Air Force confirmed today that a Minuteman III ICBM test flight had been terminated after the intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Air Force sent the self-destruct message to the missile at 4:42 Pacific time.View full post on TwitterThe Air Force conducts these readiness tests on occasion, launching a de-weaponized ICBM from the West Coast out to the sea. We don’t know details yet as to what went wrong in this case....

Media Platforms Design TeamBertolt Meyer and Richard Walker, two prominent roboticists and subjects of the upcoming documentaryThe Incredible Bionic Man, stand in front of a long panel table at New York Comic Con, eager to answer questions. Next to them is their Frankenstein creation. Its artificial blood circulates through its mechanical heart. It’s eyes survey the crowd. It walks, talks, and speaks—a bionic man made completely from prosthetic technology. “Suddenly, technology is at that point where we’re able to rebuild a lot of parts of the body,” Meyer says....

Quantum computing is a lot to wrap your mind around. To put things very simply (as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did recently, with surprising eloquence) regular computers are made up of bits—ones and zeros—which are fed into logic gates and come out the other side either transformed or the same, as another one or zero. Computers get faster as you make these gates smaller and fit more into one place....

When you think of projectors, I bet you think of some janky old thing hanging from the ceiling at some boring business meeting you almost fell asleep in. The DynaFlash is different. Spitting out images at 1,000 frames-per-second and mere three-millisecond lag, the DynaFlash is a projector that’s actually cool. The DynaFlash isn’t just a projector; it’s a projector with eyes that’s also attached to a computer. That means that it not only beams out light, but it can also look at the surface it’s projecting on, read in the angle of the surface, and then modify its projection to match a moving object in real time with a virtually imperceptible lag of only three thousandths of a second....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn Tuesday, Audi became the first car manufacturer to receive a California autonomous car driving permit (as of this writing, Mercedes-Benz and Google have also filed for and received permits). The permit was presented to Audi by Sen. Alex Padilla, who signed the state’s new autonomous vehicle laws that went into effect Tuesday; the law will allow for the legal testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads.According to Brad Stertz, Audi’s corporate communications manager, Audi has two cars registered on the permit, both capable of Level 3 autonomous driving, the official classification for a car that can handle many of the driving responsibilities but isn’t fully autonomous (Level 4....

They’re coming for you, ladybugs! Look, there comes one of them now!Some ladybugs face the very real threat of becoming real-life zombies, courtesy of a parasitic wasp named Dinocampus coccinellae. This flying bug is far from the only parasite that takes over its targets’ brains and turns them into zombies. But it uses a bioweapon not seen in other insects: a free virus.The wasp implants the virus and a wasp grub into the ladybug, where the virus hides among the young grub until it’s ready to gestate....

Philip FriedmanI have a pickup I absolutely love, and would like to prevent it from being stolen. Have any ideas to make it theft-proof? Car theft is a perennial problem that everybody worries about. In 1991, the peak of auto theft according to FBI crime statistics, a staggering 1.66 million vehicles were stolen in the U.S. Manu­facturers responded to this problem with factory alarm systems and ­sophisticated electronic validation between the car and the ignition key....

The U.S. Air Force dropped the the second largest conventional bomb in its arsenal, and the largest conventional bomb to be used in combat, on ISIS forces in Afghanistan today. Thirty feet long and weighing as much as a F-16 fighter, the GBU-43/B bomb—also known as Massive Ordnance Air Blast, MOAB, or “Mother Of All Bombs”—is designed to destroy enemy forces both in the open and in enclosed spaces.The bomb was reportedly used on an Islamic State tunnel complex in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province....