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The U.S. Air Force wants to exploit development of air taxis to field a new vehicle.The Air Force’s taxi would ferry airmen and equipment short distances without the need of helicopters or larger vehicles.The vehicle fits in neatly with the service’s new strategy of dispersing fighters and other craft to regional airports, away from missile-attracting airbases.The U.S. Air Force is looking to purchase a fleet of air taxis to provide short-range transport for a variety of missions....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the Apple iMac G5 was introduced in late August 2004, it was hailed as a triumph of compact design. The entire computer, including the screen, drives and power supply, is contained within a sleek chassis with a 2-in. profile. Knowing that its powerful G5 processors ran hot, Apple integrated three fans.Within a few months, we began to suspect a problem as, one by one, POPULAR MECHANICS’s new iMac G5s started to overheat and then die....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor the third year running, the MythBusters—Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, Grant Imahara, Tory Bellici and Kari Byron—took the stage at Comic Con last Saturday. The 2000-strong crowd of fans—which included at least one Hyneman look-alike—went wild for the gang, which showed clips from the new season, airing this fall, and shared that they’ve just renewed their contracts for another 7 years. When we sat down with Hyneman, Savage and Imahara backstage, they had nothing but love for the Con, which, according to Savage, just keeps getting better....

Media Platforms Design Team With continued research into more energy-efficient compact fluorescents and light-emitting diodes, the halls of Berkeley and Vanderbilt are where you expect the latest breakthrough in lighting to occur today. Back in 1924, however, it was the military’s need to penetrate dark battle fields and unfriendly waters that drove advances in artificial lighting. Engineers with the Navy were developing “monster searchlights” to help defend their cruisers and destroyers, PM reported in the February issue....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe insourcing trend in U.S. manufacturing has been extending to skis and snowboards recently, and a small company called RAMP is one of the best examples. The company started out four years ago building its gear in Taiwan, but last summer it built a factory in Park City, Utah, and started making skis there. This year, RAMP is completing the process by bringing the snowboard operation in-house. What’s interesting about this is that RAMP is relying on the same kind of nimble, high-tech, low-cost processes as the upstart manufacturers making everything from DODOcase’s bamboo iPad accessories to 3D Robotics’ flying drones....

A new theory out of Brown University challenges common ideas about clay on Mars, which is ubiquitous on the Red Planet. Rather than forming through muddy interactions with lakes and rivers, like clay on Earth does, Martian clay might have formed near the beginning of the planet’s existence, when it cooled from a world with high volcanic activity and flowing magma to a stable rocky surface. As oceans of liquid magma cooled on the surface of Mars, water and other chemical compounds with low boiling points would have evaporated from the planet’s surface....

Harvard University’s robotic bees have come a long way since they were first designed in 2012. A year after the first RoboBees took flight and successfully landed, researchers programmed them to follow a pre-established route. Earlier this year, the robot bees were enabled to swim by applying a slick solution to their wings and slowing the frequency that they beat their wings. The next step is giving them the power to see....

• Microsoft’s newest console is the Xbox One X, coming November 2017 for $500• It is compatible with all existing Xbox One hardware and games, but will offer higher framerates and 4K resolution• All upcoming games are playable on the Xbox One X and the Xbox One• Original Xbox games are coming to the Xbox One via expanded backwards compatibilityAt last year’s E3, Microsoft announced the existence of a new high-performance Xbox, tentatively called “Project Scorpio....

The F-35C, the last variant of the Joint Strike Fighter to be declared combat ready, will join the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in 2021. The Navy’s first fifth generation fighter will eventually comprise half of the strike fighters based on aircraft carriers, providing a stealthier, longer-range, more capable platform for the 2030s and beyond.Some time in 2021, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson will slip out of its home port of Naval Base San Diego and head into the Pacific Ocean, carrying with it the first squadron of F-35C Joint Strike Fighters to go to sea....

Media Platforms Design Teamjonrawlinson/FlickrIf I had a bucket list, building an extreme treehouse (or even an entire tree neighborhood) would be on it. I loved being in trees when I was a kid. I love being in trees as an adult, too, though I think my chances of breaking bones when I fall are higher these days.Recently I found myself browsing treehouses.com, a website that primarily focuses on treehouses in Oregon....

After 18 years of drifting at sea, moving with the currents and battered by wind and water, the world’s largest iceberg is reaching its end. Iceberg B-15 first broke away from Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. It was about 17-miles long and 25 miles wide, with an area of 4,250 square miles, nearly as big as Connecticut. Since then, the iceberg has been fracturing into smaller pieces, most of which have melted away....

Central Poland—The wheels of an F-16 smoke and squeal as they meet the runway of the Polish airbase at Łask. The jet is moving fast and the runway is short; a parachute pops out of the back of the warplane, jerking it and its Polish pilot to a halt.As Russian aircraft continue to rattle nerves in Europe, this air base is increasingly busy. Sitting at the leading edge of the new face-off between Russia and the West, Polish fighter pilots here stand at the ready to respond to Russian incursions....

If you hit the brakes and feel your car wobble or shudder, it’s time to give your brakes a thorough inspection. It’s likely a classic case of warped rotors. Braking removes material not just from the pads, but from the discs as well. As rotors get thinner, they are more susceptible to warping because of the heat generated during braking. Although sometimes you can’t see any irregularity, that’s what is causing shudder when a caliper clamps down....

Media Platforms Design TeamApple didn’t reinvent the phone. But it came close with the iPhone, creating an entirely new breed of mobile device—and promptly selling 6 million of them. In other words, the first iPhone wasn’t the Sputnik of cellphones, but it may have been the Apollo 11. A year later, as Apple launches its second-generation iPhone, the competition must realize that time is running out. If someone doesn’t build a comparable touchscreen phone—right now—then the iPhone could become more than a historic success story....

The world’s first solar power train has gone on its inaugural run. It doesn’t go very far but the Australian Byron Bay Railroad will begin making regular solar-powered journeys in January 2018.Byron Bay, New South Wales, is located in eastern Australia and is known as a surfer and backpacker’s paradise with a population of around 5,000. The new train service covers 1.8 miles (3 km) between the city’s center and its North Beach district....

The solar system is huge. Neptune, technically the last planet in our solar system, is 2.8 billion miles away. But really wrapping your head around numbers that large is tough. What’s more, most representations of the solar system get the scale of the planets all wrong—when you’re talking about something 5.6 billion miles in diameter, even a massive planet like Jupiter (just 86,881.4 miles in diameter) is essentially a speck. View full post on VimeoFilmmakers Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh set out to try to capture just how big the solar system is....

Computer scientists from Italy’s Politecnico di Milano created a set of AI-generated game designs that are so good that AI programs analyzing it pegged it as manmade. The team opted to experiment with legendary first-person shooter, DOOM. First released in 1993, DOOM has been a hotbed for experimentation. While the AI-generated DOOM runs on a standard computer, previously, people have figured out how to run the game on toasters, billboard trucks, calculators, and even thermostats....

Today, at an event in Brooklyn, Apple trotted out a new, redesigned version of its iPad Pro, but the biggest stars of the show may have been its twin updates to the Mac computer line: the Retina Macbook Air and the new Mac Mini. Why so exciting? Because we’ve been waiting for them for years. At its 2012 World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple took the snazzy “Retina” displays it had recently introduced on the iPhone 4 and iPad and slapped them on a laptop to terrific effect....

As crowds began heading toward convention hall exits toward the end of the second day of CES, PopMech caught up with the Oculus Rift team. Since stunning the gaming world via Kickstarter in 2012 with his virtual reality headset, company founder Palmer Luckey and his team have been hard at work tweaking the device for better performance, and they unveiled a major upgrade this week. At E3 2013, Oculus announced the HD headset, giving the VR device a noticeable bump in resolution and reduced latency....

Popular Mechanics gaming correspondent Brittany Vincent is on the scene this week at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Check back all week to see her dispatches from the trade show, including the coolest upcoming games and big announcements from major developers.The first official day of E3 2019 was a cacophony of sights and sounds. While most of the year’s biggest announcements actually took place ahead of the show, the energy on the floor was positively electric....