Thinking about making the switch from gas guzzler to some more environmentally friendly auto technology? Check out one driver’s experience with a “green” fuel system: On a recent return trip from Massachusetts to my home in New Jersey, a distance of 160 miles, I burned a total of two cups of diesel fuel in my 2001 Volkswagen Jetta TDI. Since that would indicate fuel economy of more than 600 miles per gallon, something didn’t quite compute....
Here’s a Nintendo tribute that works surprisingly well. DoniGuitars, which specializes in using geek relics like a model Millennium Falcon as the body of a bass or guitar, built an axe around an original Nintendo Entertainment System console. Cleverly, it’s called NES Paul, a nod to the Gibson Les Paul guitar you’ve seen the likes of Slash from Guns ’n’ Roses play.“The guitar that helped Mario save the Princess,” can be yours for about $600....
It’s not every day scientists get the chance to walk on a volcanic island shortly after it erupts from the ocean. But that’s what research scientist Dan Slayback got to do during his visit to a small group of islands in the South Pacific. Slayback, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, joined a group of scientists and students with the Woods Hole Sea Education Association (SEA) to investigate first-hand a three-year-old landform he’d been observing via satellite off the coast of the island nation of Tonga....
The U.S. Navy’s next fighter will be designed exclusively for naval service and without cooperation that will result in variants for other services. The unnamed fighter, tentatively named F/A-XX, will replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet strike fighter on the decks of navy carriers sometime in the 2030s.Flightglobal, reporting from the Navy League Sea-Air-Space conference in National Harbor, Maryland, states the navy has decided it has different priorities than the U.S. Air Force....
Ants are remarkable creatures. They can cling together to form rafts or ant bridges. They even seem to know when they have the perfect ratio of ants-in-bridges to ants-gathering-food for maximum efficiency. When you bunch them together, ants display properties that are similar to both solids and liquids. And now we know that they were the world’s first farmers. Or, at least, they were farming long before humans were. A new study led by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Copenhagen found that a species of ants in South America known as attine were cultivating fungi 55 to 60 million years ago, just after the age of the dinosaurs....
Media Platforms Design TeamAs part of their battle to understand and protect against the destructive force of earthquakes, seismologists have gone to extraordinary lengths. They have bored holes deep into the earth’s crust, laid out arrays of sensors hundreds of miles across, and built supercomputers capable of running simulations at teraflop speeds. But the most exciting new effort in cutting-edge seismology involves a piece of instrumentation that’s a good deal less exotic....
An Israeli couple collided on a zipline while on their honeymoon in Honduras.They both were injured, and the husband ended up dying in the hospital.The wife was transported to the United States for surgery, and is in stable condition.A couple from Israel, who were visiting Honduras on their honeymoon, collided while ziplining. The accident left one injured and the other dead, the Washington Post reports. The wife was going down the zip line first, and was still halfway down the cable when her husband started on the line from behind, slamming into her....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe nerds and hopeful capitalists have descended on Austin for South by Southwest. And lest they forget their favorite apps while off in Startup Land, app makers are bombarding them with updates. Updated interfaces, updated capabilities, bug fixes, miscellaneous tweaking—new versions of apps run rampant in the App Store (and, yes, in the Google Play Store too) to remind the smartphone-addicted why their vice is so sweet.Though many apps update monthly or even weekly, timing is just as important as frequency....
Media Platforms Design TeamWhat Is It? Ford Transit Connect Family One Concept The Specs The work-oriented $21,475 Transit Connect will soon hit Ford stores boasting the ability to haul a 135 cu.-ft. of cargo and deliver 24 mpg thanks to it’s 2.0-liter four cylinder engine. But what about hauling families? This concept shows that Ford might be looking at ways to get them interested in this design too. The concept showcases future technologies that “help keep busy, active families in the right place, at the right time, with the right stuff,” according to Ford....
Fringe is back–and right away, the show is throwing us out-there science claims. Last night’s episode, “Inner Child,” introduced us to a young boy who, in addition to possibly being a mini-Observer, is an empath. He uses his ability to sense people’s emotions (and write upside down!) to help our favorite FBI agent and kooky crew of scientists track down a serial killer known as The Artist. The 10-year-old had been sealed underground for possibly 70 years (so he’s older than he appears)....
It’s a great idea, in theory. Your engine shuts off at red lights, stop signs, and busy Taco Bell drive-throughs—whenever a momentary pause provides an opportunity to save some fuel. In practice, stop/start systems are annoying, pointless, and sometimes dangerous. Your car is barely using any fuel at idle anyway, and when it fires back up it’s with a burp and a shudder, like someone startled grandpa during his nap. And that’s if you’re lucky enough that it actually restarts....
Media Platforms Design Team[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/OWclTQbDJ64?version=3&hl=en_US[/youtube]We love bio-mimicking bots. In recent years scientists have developed robotic versions of fish, snakes, and even cheetahs that not only look like their biological counterparts, but swim, slither, or run like them, too. Thw newest one is a tiny robot jellyfish that appeared this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Built by Caltech and Harvard bioengineers led by Kit Parker, it undulates through the water by expanding and contracting....
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been zipping through the Asteroid Belt for the better part of a decade. It discovered water on the giant asteroid Vesta and ice volcanoes on the surface of Ceres, the largest object in the belt. But now its time is coming to an end. Last year NASA said that Dawn was running out of fuel. According to a new announcement from the agency, the spacecraft probably will shut down sometime in the next month or so....
DRIVE GREEN SPECIAL /// ALL-NEW ALT-FUEL TESTS!* CITIZEN FUEL CELL: GM Hydrogen Car Hits 40+ MPG in Long-Term Test* MECHANIC’S DIARY: Water-Powered Mod Still Can’t Improve Economy* FIRST DRIVE: Nissan Cube EV-02 Could Hit 150-Mile Range by 10* TEST DRIVE: BMW 745d Brings 25 MPGs of Luxury Thrust to U.S.* EURO TEST: With Diesel, Does U.S. Want Jag XF's Fright Mask’ Look?Americans burned 142 billion gal. of gas last year. Sen....
OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research group focused on studying artificial intelligence to help humanity (and founded by Elon Musk), has released footage of a robotic hand that’s trained to solve a Rubik’s Cube.The robotic hand is actually 15 years old, but was trained using new neural networks that completed the puzzle in simulation.Jumping from simulation to the real world required a new kind of training called automatic domain randomization.First the robots came for our jobs, then they came for our puzzle games....
The Space Shuttle Atlantis launched successfully on Friday, and now its crew can get down to the real work: delivering a 35,000-pound solar array to the International Space Station. The Shuttle successfully docked with the ISS today after performing a 360-degree backflip in front of it for inspection. Despite a torn thermal blanket and some small loose pieces, NASA engineers are confident that the Shuttle will return to Earth safely in nine days—even if this minor damage warrants repair before reentry....
Google’s lunar moonshot contest may be dead, but that’s not stopping one company from trying to complete the goal anyway. Google’s contest sought to award the first private company that could land a craft on the moon, and ended in 2018 without a winner. One of the participants, the Israeli aerospace company SpaceIL, announced on Monday that it’s still working on that goal and will attempt a landing in April.SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby announced his company’s spacecraft schedule at a press conference on Monday....
The driver stands in the shadow of his ten-wheel dump truck, which sits empty on Boca Chica Beach, deep in South Texas. After working all day at the site, he finally has a moment to relax and snap a picture of the beautiful view over the Gulf of Mexico to send to his wife.In clumsy but functional Spanish, I ask about the load of dirt that used to be in his truck....
When astronomers first spotted the supernova PS1-10afx in 2010, they were stunned by its brilliant, red glow. An otherwise unremarkable star, 10afx detonated nine billion years ago. But because its glow is so bright, astronomers estimated that it once shone brighter than 100 billion suns. In 2013, Harvard scientists concluded that 10afx must be a new, remarkably bright class of supernova.Unless, of course, distant galaxies are playing tricks on our eyes....
Media Platforms Design TeamCocoon Grid-It with Pocket, $30It’s a rule of physics that, given enough time and movement, a string in an enclosed space will tie itself in knots. Cocoon’s Grid-It line battles cord entropy, keeping lots of cables, cords, and pretty much anything else that can fit in its rubberized elastic bands untangled, organized, and generally tidy—and on a board the size of a notebook. It’s certainly a step up from the jumbled electronics drawers we tend to cultivate in the PopMech office....
