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About 77 organ transplants are performed each day in the U.S., and more than 101,000 people are on a wait list for body parts such as hearts, skin and veins, according to the Mayo Clinic. But even for those lucky 77, complications are worrisomely common. Forty percent of lungs, for example, are rejected within the first year of surgery. Pierre Delaere, a surgeon at the University Hospital Leuven in Belgium, hopes to improve the mediocre statistics by developing new methods of transplanting organs....

Vinyl has made a comeback, and from the looks of it, it’s here to stay. According to Nielsen, vinyl sales continue to soar year after year, and it now accounts for over 18 percent of all physical album sales. Not too shabby in the era of streaming.The only downside to spinning wax is they’re not the most convenient way to listen to tunes. It involves using a bulky turntable, which isn’t exactly portable....

Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today. Media Platforms Design Team (Photo credit: Leonardo Banchik/ Elsevier B.V.)New research in the Journal of Membrane Science suggests we may be able to power wastewater-treatment plants by mixing saltwater and freshwater. The MIT researchers modeled an up-and-coming method of generating power, called pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), to figure out the most efficient design. In a PRO system, a membrane separates two water supplies....

One of the major problems we’ll have to deal with over the next few decades is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. The more we use our antibiotics to kill bacteria, the faster those bacteria develop immunities and the harder they are to kill. We’re rapidly running out of usable antibiotics, and there are already some bacteria strains that are resistant to everything we could throw at them.Given that unchecked bacteria could potentially kill lots of people, many scientists are understandably looking for a new way to keep them in check....

Planning your next adventure is easier when you know it’ll be easy to haul all your gear. With the proper roof rack on your vehicle, you can bring your bike, kayak, extra equipment, and even a rooftop tent with you. Rack expert Andrew Pasquella from Front Runner Outfitters helped us compile the ten things you should look for when buying a rack for your vehicle. Front Runner Outfitters is a vehicle-based adventure gear company with Africa-proven, elephant-strength camp gear....

Elon Musk is old news—or rather, old tech. That’s the take by Vladimir Koshlakov, the head of Russia’s Keldysh Research Center and a man who want to build a nuclear-powered rocket (you heard that right).“Elon Musk is using the existing tech, developed a long time ago,” said Koshlakov, making his weird dig at the SpaceX found in an interview with state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta. “He is a businessman: he took a solution that was already there, and applied it successfully....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn 1988, Andrew Wight was leading an expedition of 14 people in exploring a large underwater cave in Australia’s Nullarbor Plains when a storm flooded the entrance and caused the cave to collapse, trapping them inside. “It took nearly two days to find a new way out of the cave,” Wight says. “It was one of those moments where you come very close to your own demise and afterward you start reflecting on what has happened....

Standing on the beach and watching the tide roll in is a reminder of Earth’s special relationship with our moon. But Saturn and its moon Enceladus have something more between them. They communicate back and forth, and scientists have overheard the conversation.“Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn.“Last year, the Cassini spacecraft captured an exchange of energy between the two heavenly bodies via sensors that could detect plasma waves. This discovery, made on September 2, 2017, was among the final findings of the Cassini probe that had spend two decades visiting Saturn and its moons....

Guns, drugs, murder, sting arrests—it’s all there in the story of the Silk Road. The new documentary Deep Web, out today on Vimeo and iTunes, doesn’t skimp on the good stuff. Picture hackers squatting in central London while sending out manifestos over stolen Wi-Fi, and corrupt cops stealing Bitcoins.The Silk Road was an online marketplace used primarily for illegal drugs—high-test cannabis, but also heroin, MDMA, and crystal methamphetamine. It started in the summer of 2011 because of two tools: Tor and Bitcoin....

The iPhone 6S’s new Force Touch screen is good for more than just cruising through apps and UI shortcuts. By measuring downward force, it’s also essentially a scale. While it takes a little bit of work to turn that into a scale you can use, it can be done. And then Apple will reject it from the App Store. The Gravity app, developed by Ryan McLeod and friends, is a clever little innovation....

The Earth is about 71 percent ocean. If you start at a port and head into the sea, you’ll likely travel hundreds or thousands of miles before seeing land again. But what course would allow you to travel the farthest distance in a straight line without ever hitting land?Back in 2012, a Reddit user by the name of kepleronlyknows posted an interesting map of the world, showing a line from Pakistan to Russia across the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans....

On August 15th 1977, a radio telescope located at Ohio State University detected something strange. The telescope was scanning the stars searching for possible signals from alien civilizations as part of the SETI project, and on that date it found something. The telescope recorded an incredibly strong signal appearing to come from somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius; the signal only lasted about a minute and was never detected again.The signal was so strong that astronomer Jerry Ehman, who first spotted it, circled it in red pen and wrote “Wow!...

The Russian Navy is installing new non-lethal weapons on several new frigates. The “visual optical interference” weapons are designed to disorient those looking at them, causing hallucinations, nausea, and dizziness. The weapons are also designed to interfere with aiming devices and some weapons. The technology dates back to work done before World War II and, although clever, is not considered all that reliable as a weapon. According to Moscow’s state media the Russian Navy has installed Ruselectronics 5P-42 Filin visual-optical interference stations on frigates of the Admiral Gorshkov class and the Project 22350–class frigates currently under construction....

Tom Brady appears to be an ageless wonder, throwing touchdowns for the New England Patriots at age 40 and promising to play pro ball until he’s 45. The multiple Super-Bowl-winning QB has long championed healthy eating and scheduled sleep, but his new book goes further—and it shows that Brady have not have as good a grasp on health science as he does on the Pats’ playbook.“There are not 72 minerals in sweat or in anything else that I know of....

Honoring the heroes of United Flight 93 takes a whole lot of stainless steel. But you also need some serious computational analysis—and a stiff breeze.At appropriately 93 feet tall, the Tower of Voices memorial in Somerset County, Penn., will be the world’s tallest wind chime tower when it opens this September (though only 8 chimes will be installed for the opening ceremony this Sunday.) This tribute to the 40 heroes of Flight 93 who died on September 11, 2001 was the work of L....

The U.S. Air Force officially designated the service’s new jet trainer the “T-7A Red Hawk.” The name celebrates the pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group of World War II. Manned by African American pilots in a segregated U.S. military, the 332nd flew fighter planes with a distinctive red painted tail for identification purposes. The jet is also named in honor of the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter, flown by the African American 99th Fighter Squadron....

One of America’s oldest colleges has unveiled a replica of the even older Tycho Brahe armillary sphere.Brahe fine-tuned existing designs for his armillary sphere, which helped astronomers plot orbits.This new armillary sphere is thought to be the only working one on Earth today.St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico has unveiled the only working Tycho Brahe armillary sphere on Earth. The complex device is used to target and measure distances in space, and although it was invented in the 16th century by landmark astronomer and polymath Tycho Brahe, none of his devices survived past shortly after they were made....

U.S. officials expressed confidence today that Iranian forces shot down a Ukranian airliner.The airliner mysteriously crashed just after takeoff hours after an Iranian missile strike on U.S. forces.Iranian forces may have panicked and accidentally shot the plane down. U.S. officials are reportedly “confident” that Iran shot down a civilian airliner on the same day it struck U.S. forces in Iraq. The Ukrainian International Airlines flight crashed moments after takeoff from the Iranian capital of Tehran, killing all 176 people on board....

Cast iron is known for its durability, but it’s been hard to nail down an exact process that makes it as strong as it can be. But new research published in Scripta Materiala could change the cast iron production process for the better. Caterpillar, the manufacturer of industrial vehicles, and the Aragonne National Lab collaborated on the research, intended to find a way to bring cast iron from an industrial art into a science....

The National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has released the most detailed video of the sun’s surface ever.The video shows the sun’s surface, which is made up of plasma cells that are each roughly the size of Texas. The 4-meter-wide telescope is still under construction.Take a second to imagine the surface of the sun. What does it look like? (Note: Please don’t ever look directly at it. This is just an exercise....