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Media Platforms Design TeamThis week’s “Momentum Deferred” featured a peculiar memory-jogging concoction (main ingredient: worms) that Dr. Walter Bishop whips up to restore Agent Olivia Dunham’s lost memories of her other-world meeting with William Bell, the CEO of Massive Dynamic.Bishop claims that in an earlier experiment with cryptic ex-partner Dr. Bell, flat worms were able to transfer their memories to other worms through digestion. In drinking the worm milkshake, Dunham should, according to Bishop, begin to recall the blank details of her memory....

A low hum rises as 18 men and women straddle their machines. Engines snarl as tense hands grip the throttles. For a moment everything is still—the crowd, the racers, and the dust.Then the green flag waves and the bikes erupt in a fury. The collective engine thunderclap rattles my ribcage. Riders lean forward in defiance of inertia. In a heartbeat, they are gone, off like a pack of wild hyenas in a deluge of din and dust....

When the sound of my garage door opening went from a GRR-RRRR-wha-wha-ding-pop-pop-GRRRRRRR that woke not only my sleeping children but my neighbors, too, to a barely audible and sorta-comforting whirrrrrrrrrr, I knew the $198 Genie was a keeper. Its ¾-horsepower motor and quiet belt drive are a big improvement over my creaky, greasy, chain-driven model. Of course, almost any newer belt-drive opener would be. But the SilentMax Connect stands out in other ways....

Step 1. Find a straight piece of 1 x 6–inch white pine, 8 feet long, then use a circular saw to crosscut a 4-foot piece from it. Rip the piece to 4 inches wide on a table saw. Step 2. Square one end of the piece to 90 degrees on a miter saw. Starting from that end, crosscut the two sides (A) to 12 inches long. Cut the bottom (C) to 10 ½ inches....

Popular Mechanics has been explaining how your world works since 1902, and we continue to cover the best in new technology, automotive, DIY, science, the great outdoors, and more. With a subscription to Popular Mechanics, you’ll stay up to date on how the world is changing and get all kinds of practical advice about how to get more out of life. PopularMechanics.com, which reaches more than 8 million unique users per month, is your go-to online source for power tools reviews, aviation news, car technology, innovative science, and much, much more....

Media Platforms Design TeamA cow from a California dairy farm has been discovered to have mad cow disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced yesterday. The agency says that consumers have nothing to worry about; after the cow died it had been slated for use in nonedible products, so there was never any danger that infected meat would enter the food chain. Milk has not been shown to transmit the disease, and agency authorities say that this is an isolated case....

Half a world away from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, nestled near the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, a 34-year-old electrical engineer is wielding one of the planet’s most powerful computers to lend a virtual helping hand to American soldiers. Joshua Fairley’s detailed 3D modeling of warzone scenes, based at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Miss., has vastly improved the effectiveness of airborne sensors in scoping out deadly ground-based threats....

Construction crews preparing a site for a new hotel along the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia, unearthed a surprise last month: the bow of an 18th century ship. Archaeologists took it from there, and now a 50-foot-long section of the original frame, stern, and keel has been uncovered, amounting to about a third of the original hull. Archaeologists aren’t yet sure what the ship was used for, but preliminary guesses peg it as a military vessel or a large cargo ship....

A robot that debuted at a Russian robotics forum for teens on Tuesday wasn’t filled with the machinery and software typical of its humanoid brethren, but rather the flesh and blood of a man. Russian state news agency Russia-24 reported live from the event, praising the robot named “Boris” as a “high-tech” and “modern” innovation as it danced on stage and answered questions from an interviewer. But Boris was concealing his true identity....

Astrobotic, Inc. is sending an unmanned American lander to the moon in 2021.The Pittsburgh-based private company has chosen United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur as the rocket that will carry the lander to the moon. United Launch Alliance developed the Vulcan Centaur. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ private space company, is providing the BE-4 engines that power the first stage of the rocket.The Peregrine lunar lander, a private-public partnership between NASA and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, Inc....

When you see a face, what happens in your brain? How do your neurons process facial features to recognize a person you know? Thanks to a group of researchers at Caltech, we may finally have the answer.The researchers studied the brains of monkeys and managed to reconstruct the faces of people the monkeys had seen based solely on the measurements from a few neurons.Their results are almost eerily perfect:Doris TsaoThe researchers stumbled on their result almost by accident....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou’ve just bought a shiny new walk mower and you have visions of the best lawn on the block, with deep-green grass so crisp it looks like it belongs in a ballpark. But the mower is only part of that program.Safety BriefingThe smartest thing you can do when operating your mower is to put on a pair of safety glasses. We’ve been testing Honeywell’s Uvex line of glasses and we’re really impressed by their comfort, fit, and fog resistance....

Media Platforms Design TeamNot all cockpits are created equal. A contemporary Primary Flight Display screen from an airliner (above, left) lacks the terrain details and runway centerline extensions of the synthetic vision systems found in high-end business jets (above, right). Slowly changing federal regulations make it hard for carriers to keep up with emerging technologies—even those that would make flying safer and easier.As the Falcon 900 business jet emerges through a layer of clouds at 25,000 feet, pilot Sandy Wyatt points at a monitor....

As World War II approached its end during 1945, the Soviet Army began its advance on Berlin. The Nazis, with their depleted ranks, dwindling supplies, and shattered morale following the suicide of their leader, were not in great shape. Still, they had a few things in their favor, one of which was the Flakturm Tiergarten, known in English as the Zoo Flak Tower.After the British Air Force (RAF) had gone on its first bombing run against Berlin in 1940, dropping nearly 200 bombs in the process, Hitler began to reconsider how the Nazis would defend themselves against a competent air force....

Studying an animal’s nervous system is crucial to understanding how it functions in day-to-day life. The smaller the animal gets, the more challenging such a study can become. Using a so-called ultramicroscope, scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have developed a better way to make the nervous systems of fruit flies glow a fluorescent green, making them easy to document.“We focused on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster because it is of particular interest for research into the nervous system....

WASP-33b is an inhospitable, Jupiter sized world orbiting uncomfortably close to its parent star. But a recent discovery by researchers at the University of Cambridge shows it has a surprisingly Earth-like quality: a stratosphere. Like Earth’s stratosphere, the one on WASP-33b runs hot in its top layers and cooler in its bottom layers. This gives the planet a sort of heat shielding or “sunscreen” layer, as the researchers are calling it....

The Air Force finally replaced 8-inch floppy disks, used since the 1970s.The floppies were used to help broadcast emergency action messages issued to nuclear forces.As comically obsolete as the old system was, advocates said it was unhackable.The U.S. Air Force has finally replaced its ancient 8-inch floppy disk drives. The drives, cutting edge technology during the Gerald R. Ford presidential administration, were used to help send out emergency action messages to U....

A reported encounter between U.S. Navy aircraft and UFOs has been released to the general public. The video, taken onboard a F/A-18F Super Hornet strike fighter, shows a fast-moving object passing below the fighter, with an amazed aircrew watching the incident unfold. This follows the release of footage of a separate, still unexplained incident from 2004 which surfaced late last year. The video, uploaded by the UFO investigative group To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, was secured by a Freedom of Information Act request to the U....

Not content with merely a pair of googles? Maybe the next VR technology will be roller skates. A new Google patent, spotted by Ars Technica, shows that the Alphabet subsidiary is looking into how to increase VR range through special footwear. Google’s patent calls it “motorized footwear” which can be tracked and monitored in a physical environment. The “movement of the footwear,” the patent goes on, “may be translated into corresponding in a virtual environment....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe next time you order a cocktail on a United flight, your flight attendant might take your payment using an iPhone 6 Plus. The airline is purchasing 23,000 iPhones for flight attendants to use for in-flight retail transactions. The devices will also come loaded with safety and service information, and allow attendants to access their company email as well as United’s intranet.Eventually, the airline hopes to also replace printed safety manuals with electronic versions on the phones....