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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) just overturned a ban on manipulating viruses to make them more lethal, meaning researchers can now receive federal funding for more dangerous research. Any researcher that applies for this funding will have to get their research proposal analyzed by a panel of experts to make sure that the potential benefits outweigh the risks.“We see this as a rigorous policy,” said NIH director Francis Collins to The New York Times....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe new space thriller Gravity opens with an unbroken 12-minute shot of two astronauts installing a data-gathering device on the Hubble Space Telescope. Sandra Bullock, playing a flustered medical engineer on her maiden voyage, and George Clooney, as a veteran shuttle commander on his final mission, float in zero gravity while bantering, chasing a stray bolt, and marveling at the sight of Earth far below. Then things quickly go very, very wrong....

The stellarator fell out of favor in the late 1960s. The device, a magnetic-confinement fusion reactor named for the sun, was shoved to the side after Soviet scientists revealed their tokamak design to the world in 1968. The tokamak has been the preferred design for fusion reactors ever since, but the stellarator might be making a comeback. German scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) built a stellarator called the Wendelstein 7-X that was switched on for the first time in 2015....

(Published in the November 2001 issue)If a four-stroke bass boat is out of your price range, we recommend these bass boat alternatives.A four-stroke in a bass boat? Well, they’re cleaner, quieter and typically 50 percent more fuel efficient than comparable two-stroke outboards. But four-strokes are also larger and significantly heavier. For example, Honda’s superb 115-hp four-stroke weighs as much as Yamaha’s hot V MAX 250-hp two-stroke.The engineering challenge is to build a powerful four-stroke outboard that’s not too heavy to balance on the transom of a bass boat....

Q: Years ago, a mechanical engineer told me the best way to adjust your car’s a/c for maximum fuel economy is to turn the temperature dial up and leave the fan on high. Logic says that the fan takes a lot less energy to run than the compressor, and by turning the temp up, the compressor doesn’t have to work as hard. But I’m now thinking that when you turn the temp up, hot air from the engine gets mixed in with the cold air from the a/c....

Media Platforms Design TeamSenior editor Mike Allen (who used to teach organic chemistry in a previous career) gloves up to pump methanol into the processor.“Make your own diesel for 70 cents a gallon,” the Internet ad claimed. I was tired of paying for 30 gallons of regular diesel each week to fill my pickup, so I downloaded the instructions. It wasn’t long before I was sucking used fry oil out of tanks behind a restaurant, and mixing it with lye and methanol in a 5-gallon bottle before pouring it into an old water heater....

The search for life on Mars continues, but a new study suggests taking a different approach. While many previous efforts to find life on the Red Planet have focused on dried lake bed environments, where sediments were deposited by water billions of years ago, it’s possible that life never made it to these surface regions even if it did exist on Mars. A new study published December 18 in Nature Geoscience encourages researchers to instead search areas on Mars that could have supported hydrothermal activity in the ancient past....

Media Platforms Design TeamAs the release date for Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens nears, the TV trailers are coming fast and furious with glimpses of new material. This time, we get a better view of a new weapon wielded by stormtroopers. It looks a bit like a very long shock baton, but apparently is strong enough to stand up to a lightsaber—something very few other materials we’ve seen in the Star Wars universe be able to do....

Media Platforms Design TeamNinja Assassin (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamUnlike last week’s retro-actioner Ninja, Ninja Assassin is a hyper-kinetic, ultra-violent martial arts epic for the Xbox generation. Produced by the Wachowski Brothers, who were so impressed with Rain’s ninja sequences in their Speed Racer that they gave him his own film. Scripted by comic book writers Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, Ninja Assassin was directed by Wachowski collaborator James McTeigue. Raizo (Rain) is trained from childhood in the ninja arts by Lord Ozunu (the legendary Sho Kosugi), only to rebel against the clan when he feels betrayed....

Media Platforms Design TeamAmid a collective groan from driving enthusiasts everywhere, today Nissan announced that it plans to be first to put electronic steer-by-wire technology into production cars. Replacing the rack and pinion with a mix of wires and processors, the Japanese automaker’s new system will control the tires independently from the steering inputs.Nissan’s steer-by-wire system follows the same logic as the fly-by-wire systems found in aircraft (which have been controversial in their own right)....

Media Platforms Design TeamVirtual reality has always been a visual swindle. You strap on a VR headset that tracks your head movement, converting every tilt and twitch into a perspective shift in a digital environment. From the neck up, the illusion is complete. When done right, VR can hijack our brains, plugging into the complex interplay of ocular hardware (photoreceptors, nerves, etc.) and cognitive software (neural signals, for the most part) that have helped make humans such kingpins of the food chain....

The U-2 spy plane was famous for pushing pilot endurance to the limit. The slow, high-flying aircraft flew for up to nine hours at a time, with a single pilot guiding the plane, taking pictures of the ground below, and occasionally dodging surface-to-air missiles. Nine hours is a long time to be cooped up in a plane without a real bathroom—or to be stuck in a small space with the smell of your own fart....

The Nintendo Switch is designed to be a shapeshifter. It can be a mobile device, or a console that hooks up to your television, or even a way that you play with a cardboard box. So why not a Linux machine too? View full post on TwitterA video from the group failOverflow shows off a Linux browser working pretty seamlessly. There’s two-touch pinching for zooming in and out, brightness controls, an OpenGL demo running at 60 fps....

Common Russian battle tactics, currently on display in Ukraine and elsewhere, uses three rows of snipers in battle. Although the first two rows present a challenge for even the best marksmen, it’s the back row—which can be around 2,000 yards away from a target—where Russia places its most elite. Now a U.S. Army report says that this last row of warriors have become even more deadly, thanks to a new weapon—the T-5000 Tochnost rifle....

A new front clip that features styling changes in hood, fenders, grille and fascia leads the highlights in Dodge’s Magnum models for 2008. Unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show are the new versions of Dodge’s SRT8, R/T, SXT and SE models. Led by a blackout grille insert and new hood scoop, the appearance of SRT8’s new front end is described by Dodge as “more menacing than ever”. But the changes are not all just for show....

Why build a house out of something so boring as wood or brick and mortar when there are far more interesting—and environmentally-friendly—options around. Chinese architect Li Rongjun must have asked himself that question before building an office out of old beer bottles. Or maybe he was just wasted. A project that’s green in more ways than one, recent graduate Rongjun’s 312 square-foot beer office is made up of 8,500 empty bottles and has two nine-foot stories....

Air travel sucks, and holiday season air travel sucks even more. The airports are crowded, everybody is tired, and we all just want to go home. But no matter how bad your experience is, at least you weren’t on this cursed Delta flight earlier this week.View full post on IframeDelta Flight 284 started like almost every other flight these days, with a delay. Eventually the plane took off, but less than half an hour later, something in the plane made a banging noise....

The first completed plane in Boeing’s new MAX series rolled out of the hanger today amid cheers from thousands of employees in Renton, Washington. Factory construction of the Boeing MAX 8, dubbed the Spirit of Renton, was completed on November 30, the exact date specified in Boeing’s development schedule created four years ago. The new plane has spent the past week in the paint hanger getting a custom teal version of Boeing’s recognizable trappings....

Earlier this year, NASA retired its Opportunity rover, which had driven around the planet for 15 years. But now, a video game simulator can allow people on Earth to experience its historic run from the comfort of their PCs or VR headsets.Red Rover, as the simulator is titled, came out last year. The simulator “takes satellite and terrain data from NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) Mars orbiter and incorporates it into a driving simulator,” according to creator Alan Chan’s description on Steam....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn game two of the World Series, Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers, hit a long fly ball off the Giants’ Matt Cain. The ball hit the very top of the outfield wall at San Francisco’s AT&T Park and instead of bouncing over, for a homer, it landed in the glove of Giants outfielder Andres Torres, who held Kinsler to a double. Texas failed to score that inning, and the Giants beat the Rangers for the ninth straight time in the park by the bay....