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Libraries have been early tech adopters for decades now, with public internet and digital lending a staple for many municipalities. These innovations, while useful, look past the library’s books. No more. Meet the Depulvera, seen here at the Boston Public Library.View full post on TwitterFrom a company called Oracle, the Depulvera can handle twelve books a minute, fed by a human librarian. The company calls it a “complete automatic book cleaning system realized to remove dust from books....

Smart speakers are the digital genie filling our homes and fulfilling our every demand, from blasting our shower playlists to reminding us of our to-do lists to translating phrases in French.Portable, affordable, and oh so powerful, the Onkyo VC-GX30 Smart Speaker boasts elite quality audio and functions like your dream assistant, and is a fraction of the price of other speakers. View full post on YoutubeEngineered with a non-resonant, computer-modeled wood enclosure, it also comes equipped with a custom amp and long-throw woofer to deliver deep bass, rich mid-range, and clear high-frequency sound....

More than two years after the disappearance of MH370, and a month after the three countries directing the investigation said they may be giving up, one of the leading scientists who told investigators where to look is saying that searchers may have been hunting in the wrong area all along. Australian government scientist Neil Gordon headed up the team whose mathematical analysis of satellite signals transmitted by the plane defined the boundaries of the 120,000-sq-km seabed search zone....

Arms control efforts may become a casualty as the Russian invasion of Georgia deepens mistrust between the United States and Russia. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) expires at the end of 2009, and the first talks on its renewal were scheduled to begin this month. However, Secretary Condoleezza Rice agreeing with a statement from NATO explaining that relations with Russia could no longer be “business as usual” has spurred a debate over START’s renewal....

Update: NASA has released stunning visuals of OSIRIS-REx’s approach to the asteroid Bennu. Take a look:Here’s a look at Bennu’s full rotation:NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Bennu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a man-made spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system....

The most common and persistent first-world-problem nowadays is that the batteries in our smart watches and pocket supercomputers and touchscreen tablets and tiny flying drones just die too fast. But it looks like a solution—or at least a big improvement—is coming. And soon. Ever since smartphones broke into the mainstream, there has been no shortage of stories about new and exciting battery technology. Flexible batteries. Capacitor-based batteries that charge in seconds....

Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $23 to $32Price Difference Relative to Similar Products: Equal to or less than competing products.Description: Welding is a great hobby and profession, but it’s also a great way to ruin work clothing. All it takes is a small spark from welding, cutting, and grinding to burn a hole in your favorite cotton work shirt. The answer is a lightweight welding jacket made from flame-retardant cotton. I particularly like Hobart’s....

Last Wednesday, Apple announced a trio of new iPhones, the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. In attendance were Popular Mechanics’ Editor in Chief Ryan D’Agostino and his son John, who was kind enough to file the following report.THURSDAY NIGHTThe email appeared on my phone. The background was all black, and there was a big gold circle. “Gather round,” it said in gold letters. I knew what it was, because I had seen some people post it online—but it wasn’t that exciting before, because it was like, “Oh, look, this is the invitation for the lucky people who are going....

In September, an experimental free shuttle service featuring electric, driverless busses launched in Lyon, France, the first of its kind in the world. The service is run by the French Agency for Environment and Energy and the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy and called Navly. It features a 1,350 meter (about .8 mile) route with five stops around the neighborhood Confluence in the French city, a previously industrial area that’s now being urbanized....

At least for now, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is pulling back on nuclear power. He hasn’t changed his mind on the science—he puts his blame on the Trump Administration’s bitter relationship with China.Gates invested in TerraPower in 2011 with the hope of helping to prove the company’s core concept: a so-called traveling-wave reactor (TWR) which would run on depleted uranium, as opposed to the enriched uranium commonly used in nuclear plants....

Media Platforms Design TeamCane toads, throughout their 75-year march across Australia, have exhibited great skill at acceleration—moving more than a mile per night during rainy season and invading up to 31 miles of new territory a year. Their range has expanded from a handful of sugar crops in 1935, where they were introduced to devour cane grubs, to more than 386,000 square miles of land. Even their evolution has accelerated. Cane toads at the “invasion front” have longer legs and larger bodies than established populations, and move more often, further and in straighter paths....

PM west coast editor Ben Stewart drives a brand-new Corvette Z06 from Los Angeles to New York this week, in search of America’s best driving roads.Downtown Santa Fe is so quiet, clean and peaceful we’re thinking of relocating PM’s West Coast office. Not that there’s anything wrong with Santa Monica, Calif., mind you, but Santa Fe is a really serene and beautiful place. We, of course, completely ruin that serenity by rumbling up the street in our Z06 at 7 am....

Just south of the Martian equator, in the Western Hemisphere of that world, a great crater thought to be some 3.8 billion years old stretches 96 miles across the arid surface of the planet. Curiosity, our most advanced robotic explorer on Mars, is currently roving around the Gale Crater, taking samples and analyzing the composition of crater material. The trusty bot previously revealed that Gale Crater was likely once an enormous lake that stretched for miles “with water that we would even have been able to drink,” said Jens Frydenvang, a rover-team scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen, in a press release....

“No lap is ever the definitive lap,” Randy Pobst tells me. He just broke the production car lap record at Road Atlanta behind the wheel of the new Porsche GT2 RS. Like any race driver, he thinks it could go faster. “Whenever you see a Nurburgring lap time, whoever set that time always knows there was somewhere that could’ve been a little bit better.” He would know. After all, Porsche had just fitted magnesium wheels to the GT2 RS, which cut 0....

Mark Zuckerberg has made stitching together the vast Facebook universe a priority. According to The New York Times, he wants his company to integrate chat services between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.In a statement to the Times, the company stated that it wants to “build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private.” The social media giant added: “We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks....

You’ve probably heard of mercury poisoning, a condition suffered by workers in mines and other industrial industries that slowly drives victims insane. Dimethyl mercury, or organic mercury poisoning, however, is a whole different ball game. Only a few people in history have been poisoned by this terrifying substance, and all of them died quickly and gruesomely. This episode of Chubbyemu tells the story of one of these cases, in which a professor who researched toxic metal exposure accidentally dropped a few milliliters of dimethyl mercury on her gloved hand one day in 1996....

Wylie Dufresne is the mad genius behind the famed New York restaurant wd-50, and the kind of chef who remind you why the guys in the kitchen wear white coats. Whether you take your eggs scrambled, in an omelet, or over-easy, he’ll outline the proper way to get it done.SCRAMBLED For years I scrambled eggs the traditional French way: low and slow. Stir, stir, stir. The result was loose, almost runny scrambled eggs with tiny curds (1)....

About 4.6 billion years ago, when our sun finally accumulated enough gas and pressure to ignite the nuclear fusion at its core and become a star, things were just coming together in the solar system. The remaining dust and debris swirling around the newborn sun hadn’t had the chance to coalesce into individual planets yet. Which planets formed first from this massive disk is still a matter of debate. What we do know is that roughly 100 million years after the sun’s first light, one planet was the hungriest, voraciously ingesting any material that happened to pass too close....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe sphygmograph traces an undulating line, which represents a record of blood pressure and pulse over time. (Photo Credit: SSPL/Getty Images)The first heartbeats were recorded in 1854, with the sound saved onto a primitive recording device. Now an artist and a historian are teaming up to bring them beating back to life.The sphygmograph was a precursor to the blood pressure cuff we know today. It was the first non-invasive way to measure (albeit imprecisely) the heartbeats of patients....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile Nascar has a reputation for being as simple as the steel tube-frame designs of its cars, the reality is that plenty of technology in America’s biggest racing series is positively state of the art. Another bit of sophistication debuts with Goodyear’s new tires this weekend in Sunday’s AdvoCare 500 race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.“Atlanta is one of our biggest challenges from a tire perspective,” says Stu Grant, Goodyear’s general manager of worldwide racing....