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Media Platforms Design TeamWhere the Wild Things Are (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s amazing that a children’s picture book clocking in at a mere 338 words could still be the subject of such devotion and criticism almost 50 years after it was published, but that’s the enduring legacy, and some might say magic, of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are. Spike Jonze, the visionary music video director and co-creator of Jackass, may not have been the first choice to helm this $100 million live-action adaptation, but looking at the finished film he, along with screenwriter Dave Eggers, was the perfect choice to chronicle young Max’s journey....

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment With Flavors"With one exception I’ve never brewed the same recipe twice," says James Schirmer, an institutional research analyst at the University of La Verne. “I’ve brewed beers with various spices, chocolate, fruit, and anything that I think may lend itself well to a beer.“Schirmer says one of his most successful batches was a wheat beer brewed with hibiscus flowers. “I got the idea from my mother-in-law, who mentioned one of her favorite drinks is made with hibiscus flowers,” he says....

Blue Origin launched and landed a New Shepard rocket for the first time since October 2016 at their launch facility in West Texas. The launch, which took place Tuesday, December 12, was the first of a new rocket booster and the company’s Crew Capsule 2.0, which has been upgraded from a previous test capsule by adding large windows and some internal amenities. Ultimately Blue Origin plans to use the New Shepard rocket to launch paying customers on suborbital flights to space....

Can you send a container of nuclear fuel on an 14,500-mile trip through land and sea safely? Recently, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories teamed up with organizations in South Korea and Spain to find out.Right now, radioactive nuclear fuel doesn’t travel; most are stored next to the nuclear power plants where they’re generated. But one day, the government hopes to store all the nuclear waste from the U.S. in a central repository ( since few states want to host the country’s toxic nuclear waste underneath their land, the location hasn’t been determined yet)....

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, you might end up struggling to find the right gift. Making something yourself is always a good idea, and a wooden heart could be a handy decoration for someone’s desk or office. Of course, you don’t want to the gift to be too sappy, so it’s probably best to make the heart anatomically correct. Dustin Penner put up a new video guide to show you how....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs if there weren’t enough hype and heartbreak hovering over The Dark Knight, director Chris Nolan had one more headache facing him, right there in his garage, for his latest Batman film: how to top the Tumbler–a two-and-a-half ton, bulletproof Batmobile that leapt 60 ft. and did a sub-five zero to 60 in Batman Begins. His solution? Ditch the spoiler-and-fin sports car mod of Batmobile lore. Hell, ditch the sports car altogether....

An astonishing variety of animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic field—the list includes birds, salmon, frogs, sea turtles, honeybees, salamanders, lobsters, and rodents. You can add dolphins, too. According to new research by scientists in France, dolphins are apparently attracted to magnets, suggesting that they—along with some of their whale relatives—might have compasses in their heads.Previous studies of the migration routes of free-ranging cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins, and porpoises, suggested they may be sensitive to magnetism....

Remember that scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds where two of the U.S. soldiers kill German guards by punching them with pistols mounted to gloves? Well, believe it or not, the glove gun was a real weapon the U.S. military manufactured—albeit in very small numbers.Designed for the U.S. Navy and manufactured by the RF Sedgley company, the gun is a simple device that does just what it looks like. It’s a single-shot ....

Ultra-small bacteria are so little understood that they haven’t quite been given an official place on the tree of life yet. At just 0.009 cubic microns, they’re believed to be near the limit of how small life can get—150 of them could make themselves a comfortable home inside an E. Coli cell. And now we have a picture of one, thanks to a paper in Nature. Not surprisingly, these minute organisms are fragile and difficult to image....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face appears onscreen in Terminator Salvation, it’s precisely as it should be: wide, menacing and trapped in 1983. If the first three Terminator films were a flipbook portrait of an action star entering middle age, the fourth installment resets the iconic actor’s cinematic clock with a climactic fight scene that blends the latest digital effects with a prosthetic prop that’s been shelved for a quarter-century....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe long, hot summer of 2012 has created some of the in recorded history, leaving homeowners across much of the country with parched, brown lawns. The good news is that despite their delicate structure and appearance, grasses are surprisingly resilient. Most types of grass can survive extended periods of drought, and although they may look dead—visibly brown, dry and limp—they’re often only dormant, awaiting the next rainstorm. worst drought conditionsTo determine if a lawn is dormant or dead, inspect it down at the soil level....

Despite a crash that saw the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plummet, the fever is not dead. Look no further than the race for computing power, which is reaching new and bizarre heights.Cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin in particular requires an enormous amount of computing power to mine. That’s by design. As the difficulty of mining goes up, the cyber-prospectors of this new gold rush are employing all kinds of methods to corner as much horsepower as they can: Buying up graphics cards in bulk, co-opting high-tech government equipment, and most recently, illicitly employing the services of thousands of web browsers....

Robby cuts the wheel toward the apex of Turn 1, corrects a moment of understeer, and powers out to the edge of the track with tires howling. This is a 560-horsepower machine—an Audi RS7—on Sonoma Raceway, a fast road course scrawled across the hills of Napa wine country in northern California. We’re on our way to something like a two-minute lap time, which is seriously hauling butt. Robby really knows this car....

Media Platforms Design TeamOne year ago, James Cameron was diving to the depths of Mariana Trench, piloting his submersible to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. The filmmaker and adventurer broke the solo dive record as his Deepsea Challenger vehicle reached more than 35,000 feet below the ocean surface, surviving the crushing depths. Now, the vessel has a new home.Cameron, a PM Breakthrough Leadership Award Winner for his focus on new tech and exploration, said today that he would give the Deepsea Challenger to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, one of the top ocean research stations in the country, in June....

Mixed reality is coming to the battlefield. Microsoft has signed a $479 million contract with the U.S. Army for as many as 100,000 of its HoloLens headsets. According to a government description given to Bloomberg, which first reported the story, the mixed-reality glasses will be used to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy.” While the HoloLens has garnered positive reviews, the device has struggled to find a market....

Have you heard the big news? This is the blackest material ever made. Vantablack (above) was once the one to beat, basically just last year. In 2011, NASA had the title. Of course, it had beaten out Japanese nanotechnologists thought they’d created the blackest material ever made in 2009. There was 2008’s contender, which was also 2007’s. There have been lots of blackest materials ever created, incrementally blocking out most of the photons that hit them....

Scientists have long believed a quantum spin liquid state has existed. Operating at the atomic level, they finally found it.They’re unsure what they’ll be able to do it with it, exactly, but the way it creates magnetic fields within its electrons is wildly different than materials we see daily.Most notably, it appears to stay disordered on an atomic level even when near absolute zero. Stephen Wilson, a professor of materials at UC Santa Barbara’s College of Engineering, specializes in the “long before” area of material studies....

Range is the great limiting factor on today’s electric cars, as most can drive only 200 to 300 miles before needing to hit the charger again. But what if the car itself were made of battery?Related StoryWhy Carbon Fiber Is the Miracle Material New researcher has found that carbon fiber, increasingly used as a weight-saving structural material, can also be used as battery components. Specifically, carbon fibers can be used as electrodes, the materials in batteries that collect and store the battery’s charge....

At 11 years and two months, the Opportunity rover’s time isn’t going to win the Boston Marathon anytime soon. But now you can see the little robot’s entire Martian marathon in just eight minutes.Opportunity passed the 26.2-mile mark this spring—not bad for an explorer that was supposed to operate for only 90 days after its landing back in 2004. NASA JPL stitched together this time-lapse with images from the rover’s point of view on the left and a map of its route on the right....

Update 6:20 p.m. EST: SpaceX has scrubbed tonight’s launch of the classified Zuma payload. The launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday night, November 15, but that launch was also scrubbed at the last minute, making this the second delay for the Zuma mission. The company has decided to look at data related to a payload fairing test for another customer before pressing on with the Zuma launch. SpaceX has another launch window booked tomorrow at Kennedy Space Center from 8:00 p....