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Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamiSound BackUp Battery /// $50 /// Available NowThe Promise: You love how your new iPhone 3G zooms across the Web at EDGE-crushing speeds, but hate how the high-speed network drains its battery life. This backup battery claims to solve that problem: Pop it onto your iPhone’s (or any iPod’s) 30-pin connector and it adds “up to 30 hours of additional music, 6 hours of video, 3 hours of talk time....

NASA and its affiliated space contractors are set on sending humans to Mars, and while a crewed mission to the Red Planet is likely a few decades out at least, we are starting to get a sense of what the vehicles to make the long trip could look like. Lockheed Martin, one of six contractors NASA has approached to provide transportation to Mars, recently revealed a concept of a large spacecraft equipped with habitats and amenities to support human’s all the way to the fourth planet....

Milwaukee Tool just introduced a few big breakthroughs in their venerable M18 lineup of cordless tools. Playing catchup after Dewalt made a splash with their Flexvolt platform two years ago, Milwaukee’s added an 8 1/4-inch cordless jobsite table saw and a 16-inch chainsaw. But it’s the battery powering these new tools that might be the real difference maker.Meet the High-Output HD12.0 BatteryMilwaukee ToolThe Milwaukee HD9.0 battery released two years ago, provided enough power and runtime to handle the demands of the new 10-inch miter saw and outdoor power tools....

A loud boom was heard across much of northern Alabama on Tuesday, November 14 around 1:39 p.m. CST, according to ABC’s Birmingham affiliate 3340. The Birmingham National Weather Service originally hypothesized that the sound could have come from a supersonic aircraft or a meteor breaking the sound barrier, possibly from the Leonid meteor shower that peaks on November 17 and 18. View full post on TwitterHowever, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Bill Cooke, has since cast doubt on the theory that the boom could have been caused by a Leonid meteor....

Baseball has the crack of the bat. Football, the collisions of helmets and pads. But NASCAR—NASCAR has the rumble.The noise isn’t loud. Loud sits in your ears, pushes uncomfortably on your ear drums. The rumble goes beyond that. It burrows deep into your head, bounces around the mush between your sideburns until it’s impossible to tell if the cacophony of 100 percent American Ethanol engines is invading your mind or emanating from it....

As Earth zips along its orbit, it slides through the dusty trails of asteroids and comets. These are what we’ve come to know as meteor showers. There are nine main meteor showers that can be witnessed around the world throughout the year and are named after the constellations across which they streak. Meteoroids, which burn up in the atmosphere, can be as small as a dust grain or as large as a small asteroid....

As legendary screenwriter William Goldman once said about making a successful movie, “nobody knows nothing.” But a new AI bot is trying where humans have failed. The bot’s builders claims the program can determine a movie’s critical and financial success simply by reading a written description of the plot.“As the size of investment for movie production grows bigger, the need for predicting a movie’s success in early stages has increased,” say study authors You Jin Kim, Yun Gyung Cheong, and Jung Hoon Lee in their paper’s abstract....

Thanks to Stanford researchers, there might be a new recipe for hydrogen fuel: saltwater, electrodes and solar power. The researchers have developed a proof-of-concept for separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity. It’s far cheaper than the current methods, which rely on creating hydrogen fuel from purified water.Breaking up a substance like water to create hydrogen and oxygen is called electrolysis and is a scientific technique centuries old. It was first codified by British scientific legend Michael Faraday, whose two laws of electrolysis from 1834 still guide scientists today....

Humans have long sought ways to disguise themselves, and as technology advances, we have to be more and more creative to do so. The newest experiment in invisibility comes from University of California, Irvine where scientists were inspired by a natural phenomenon: the changing colors of squid skin. Squids are able to perform this thanks to pigment in their cells that can expand or contract to change their color. At Irvine, scientists found a way to replicate this action....

The first thing that Sony introduced was so weird that it seemed like a parody – it’s called the Rolly (pronounced “role-y”) and it’s a dancing, fist-sized egg-shaped MP3 player. Yes, you heard that right. Honestly, it looked kind of like a Saturday Night Live spoof to me, with this device as the John Travolta of MP3 players. Sony even displayed it with disco music and a lighted dance floor. It’s even white, like John Travolta’s polyester suit in Saturday Night Fever....

The U.S. Navy has approved the use of buoyancy gliders by all of its destroyers. These unmanned underwater vehicles use wave energy to propel themselves at sea. The Navy probably will use them to locate enemy submarines. Buoyancy gliders were originally developed by the scientific community to provide low-cost, autonomous drones capable of spending long periods of time at sea. The drones look like cruise missiles, with blunt noses, a vertical stabilizer tail fin, and two small winglets....

The Soviet Union was a juggernaut of a state given to grandiose statements of power, especially the military and industrial kind. It threw immense amounts of scientific and financial resources at projects aimed to prove the superiority of the socialist system over capitalism. Often, it failed. But state control over information and the press meant that the extent of many of its failures were hidden until after the collapse of the USSR in 1991....

The world’s largest flower belongs to the Rafflesia genus which is known for producing plants that smell like rotting meat.This particular bloom is believed to be Rafflesia tuan-mudae and was discovered in the Maninjau Forest Conservation in Indonesia.The bloom measured 3.5 feet across—1.6 inches more than its predecessor.Not every flower smells like roses. Take, Rafflesia tuan-mudae, for example, a flower more commonly known as the “stinking corpse lily” or “corpse flower....

Grass and gravel don’t mix. Or perhaps more accurately, the do mix but it’s more than likely you would prefer if they didn’t. So before you take the mower out, you have to deal with it somehow. A rake and some elbow grease might get the job done well enough, but not quite as satisfyingly as a power sweeper or power broom. Typically comprised of rubber flaps or brushes on a rotating cylinder, handheld power sweepers like this tend to be optional attachments you can pick up for a more versatile modular tool, which helps make them slightly less of a one trick pony....

Give people enough incentive, and they might take a risk on a home, Brion Grant says. His organization just released a study that sought to find out just how interested people might be in snatching up one of the rapidly growing number of foreclosed homes on the market, and found that two-thirds of Americans said they would consider buying a foreclosed home, even though only two percent had ever done so....

Researchers from the Étienne Jules Marey Institute of Movement Sciences have created an aerial robot that can change shape mid-flight, just like birds do. The Quad-Morphing robot can navigate tight spaces by reorienting its arms, which are equipped with helicopter-style propellers. These shape-shifting robots can navigate tighter, more complex spaces, and could become essential in search and rescue missions or exploration.Birds can quickly fold their wings during high-speed flights and reduce their span to get through smaller spaces....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn one of our very first issues, back in 1902, we told the story of an Illinois schoolboy named Mark Richards, who built an automobile for himself. By saving money from his after-school job blacking stoves, Richards cobbled together enough parts to assemble a runabout that rolled on four skinny tires and was powered by a single-cylinder engine. “I had no knowledge of the principles and practice of gasoline engine construction,” Richards said, “yet I not only managed to make it but to build the transmission mechanism, friction clutch, spark-timing mechanism, body running gear, etc....

Today, the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality protections 3 to 2. But before the vote, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn gave a long, doomed, but particularly impassioned defense of net neutrality, simultaneously explaining the virtues of the regulation and criticizing the commisson’s majority for turning away from its responsibility to protect a free and open internet. You can watch the speech in its entirety above, or read the full text of the statement below....

Engines: 6.2-liter gas V8, 420 hp and 460 lb-ft of torque / 3.0-liter diesel I6, 277 hp and 460 lb-ft of torque Max towing: 13,400 pounds (gas) / 9,300 pounds (diesel) / EPA Fuel Economy / (4x4): 16 mpg city, 20 mpg highway (gas)/ 23 mpg city, 29 mpg highway (diesel) / Price (upgrade over 5.3 V8): $2,495So, you want a new Silverado, and you’ve got an extra $2,495 to spend on upgrading from the 5....

Three scientists won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics today for their roles in the discovery of gravitational waves.Albert Einstein had predicted these ripples in space a century ago. But it took until 2015 for them to be discovered for the first time and 2016 for the find to be confirmed, which was a major breakthrough in physics. Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology are your winners....