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Media Platforms Design TeamPrice: $99-$149Late summer in New York City is neither the right time nor place to be testing Milwaukee’s heated hoodie, but it looked so awesome I couldn’t wait for fall.The heating element that weaves through the hoodie is made of a carbon fiber wire energized by an M12 lithium-ion battery pack. That’s the same pack that Milwaukee uses in its smaller cordless power tools, such as shears, cutters, and small drivers....

Consider for a moment your car’s role as your roving personal space. Inside it, you eat, you drink, you sneeze, you spill coffee, you kick muddy boots around the carpets—it’s sort of like you’re encapsulating yourself in a contaminated bubble of filth. (How comforting!) And while you likely treat your car’s interior to the occasional vacuum and wipe-down, it’s worth investing in a little extra TLC, especially in the spirit of spring cleaning....

Poly Bridge is simple. There’s a car (or two or three, plus maybe a bus or a monster truck) on one side of a virtual river. It’s your job to get everything to the other side, safe and sound. Build a bridge to do it. Just don’t blow your budget, or get anyone killed. In real life, that’s a big responsibility. Building an efficient, safe bridge is a job that requires expert knowledge, “careful” precision, years of planning, and millions of dollars to build even the most boring bridge....

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is setting the record straight over at Wired. Tomorrow, he says in a new op-ed there, the agency will officially introduce a proposal to make the Internet a public utility, which will give it stronger regulatory powers to protect net neutrality. It’s a (tentative) victory for advocates of an open Internet with no preferential treatment for any one site or fast lanes for those who can afford to pay more....

Seven hundred horsepower is the new 500 horsepower, and every performance car worth its carbon-fiber diffuser is packing either a supercharger or a turbo. Traction problems were once confined to the launch—once you were rolling, you could hammer down. The new reality is epitomized by the Dodge Hellcats and the BMW M5, cars that could lay rubber all the way down the quarter-mile if you please. With horsepower numbers heading ever higher (who’ll be first to 800?...

Internet access beamed down from space could drastically change the way we get online. Establishing quality high-speed satellite internet from low or medium earth orbit (LEO and MEO, respectively) would give whoever did it access to all 4 billion or so people who don’t have Internet access yet. With enough bandwidth, such a network could become instant competitors to telecoms like AT&T and Verizon without the monumental infrastructure costs of putting down fiber....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s wet and dreary here at the National Mall, a fitting day for the announcement of the winners of the 2009 Solar Decathlon, where students competed to design homes that could run most self-sufficiently on solar power, in rain or shine. The competition, run by the Department of Energy (and sponsored in part by Popular Mechanics), involved 20 college teams, pitted against one another in a showdown of architecture and engineering....

Since at least 2012, people have been using small RC drones to smuggle contraband, whether it’s bringing in kilos of heroin from Mexico into the United States or attempting to drop off bundles of drugs in prison rec yards. Below, six tales of drones making smuggling runs, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much.1. Baltimore, MarylandTwo men were busted outside of the Western Correctional Institution near Baltimore, Maryland, after police claim they attempted to use a drone smuggle drugs, tobacco and pornography into a prison....

Scientists studying a network of remote islands in the Hawaiian archipelago were aghast earlier this week upon discovering one of their subjects had disappeared entirely from the map, following a powerful storm that submerged the landmass in water. The 11-acre East Island was part of the French Frigate Shoals—the largest atoll in the northwestern Hawaiian islands—and fell victim to Hurricane Walaka, which battered the state with Category 3 gales earlier this month....

Media Platforms Design TeamRead enough scientific studies and you might become convinced that everybody should be playing a few hours of Halo or Call of Duty each week to gain a mental edge. Over the past decade, study after study has shown that fast-paced video games bequeath a shocking range of small but measurable cognitive and perceptual benefits to gamers.“We’ve seen improvements in tasks like efficiently tracking a large number of objects, accurately rotating an object in your mind, and perceiving slight changes on a display,” says Vikranth Bejjanki, a psychologist at Princeton University....

The most famous nuclear disaster site in the world is getting partially dismantled. Workers are taking down Chernobyl’s “sarcophagus,” once meant to keep the reactor’s radioactive materials locked inside, before it falls on its own accord.SSE Chernobyl NPP, the Ukrainian company that manages the former reactor, called the area, also known as the Shelter, “one of the most powerful symbols” of the catastrophe. The dismantling will begin after the New Shelter Containment (NSC) is in full working operation....

One day is all it took. The iPhone headphone jack is gone, and after a day in the dark world of iPhone dongles, I’m reluctant but ready to go wireless. Apple, you win.Killing JackWhen Apple revealed the iPhone 7 earlier this month, it set the world abuzz by confirming the rumors: Yes, it was killing the headphone jack, and now you’d need this extra piece of equipment to plug regular headphones into an iPhone....

Scientists have discovered how the four famed fissures on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, formed.The largest of the “tiger stripes” formed due to gravitational pressure exerted on the moon’s poles, according to a paper published December 9 in Nature Astronomy.The other three fissures formed soon after, as pressure on nearby ice built up. Since the Cassini first circled Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus, scientists have been captivated by its many mysteries. For instance, Enceladus has a thick icy shell, which caps a watery world below, and the moon spews jets of water vapor and organic compounds out into space....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhats your first reaction to these polling numbers?I am not really surprised. Most people dont have a very sophisticated grasp of what climate change is, which is completely understandable. But people do have a visceral connection to weather; they talk about it, understand it, and theyre very fond of extremes in weather (in a conversational way.) Whats it like to see these recent extreme events as a climate scientist?...

Media Platforms Design Team> Once it’s started on improved soil, grass needs very little care to look crisp, green, cool and inviting. Broadleaf Plantain: Weeds invade when the lawn itself isn’t healthy. Killing the weeds without healing the lawn means you’re only treating the symptoms.Face RealityThe first step is admitting your lawn has a problem. lots of them, actually: weeds, bare spots, thatch. People are talking. But are you ready to embrace the treatment?...

Media Platforms Design TeamNEW YORK — True, it was first introduced to the world at the Geneva Motor Show last month. But for the second year in a row, Maserati let PopularMechanics.com pull the cover back on its latest sport coupe before the actual North American unveil.The Gran Turismo S has an all-new V8 engine that develops 440 hp and torque of 361.4 lb- ft. It accelerates from 0 to 62 mph in just 4....

NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the martian landscape since 2012. In that time, it’s made dozens of important discoveries about the red planet. And today, the Mars rover hit an important landmark: 2,000 sols, or martian days, spent exploring and making discoveries.In that time, Curiosity has traveled almost 12 miles across the martian surface, from its landing zone in Aeolis Palus to its current location on Mount Sharp. Twelve miles might not sound like a lot, but if you were driving a multi-million dollar car with an 11 minute delay on every input, you’d drive slowly too....

Space junk is a growing problem, and with the private space industry racing to make tourism in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) it will only become more pressing. The European Space Agency estimated in 2017 that there were 19,894 pieces of space junk circling the Earth, coming to a combined weight of least 8,135 tonnes. An international research project from Japan and Australia offers a new potential solution: an ion beam shepherd (IBS), a still-hypothetical contactless approach originally designed for asteroid deflection....

In October, NASA unveiled two prototype spacesuits that astronauts will wear to the moon in 2024, and eventually, to Mars.The suits have several new features that allow astronauts extended mobility, have interchangeable parts that can be swapped out as the environment changes, and include enough sizes for a wide range of body types.NASA says it will begin testing the suits on the International Space Station in early 2023.In essence, a spacesuit is a small rocketship....

Bob Vila first appeared on TV in 1979, as host of This Old House. Over three decades he helped countless families renovate and rebuild, often while wearing plaid. It’s been nine years since his last new TV show aired, which made us wonder what he’s up to. We called him in Florida to check in.POPULAR MECHANICS: When you started out, you were the only one doing home projects on TV. Today there are entire networks devoted to the idea....