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Team: Illuminati Motor WorksCar: SevenClass: MainstreamDrivetrain: ElectricEnergy Storage: Lithium-ion batteriesPM Says: A spirited team running on a shoestring. The car’s mass makes a 200-mile range seem very unlikely.Odds to Win: 100 to 1"We decided that if you have the ability to do something, then you have the obligation to do it," explains Kevin Smith, the team’s founder. “And that’s why our motto is audere est facere—to dare is to do.” Latin motto notwithstanding, Smith and six friends built—in a shed behind Smith’s house near Springfield, Ill....

The joyride started just before sunset.On Friday, Horizon Air ground service agent Richard B. Russell got in one of the airline’s Bombardier Q400 aircraft and took off from Seattle’s SeaTac Airport. In audio recordings released over the internet, Russell can be heard chatting in an upbeat, enthusiastic tone with the air traffic controllers trying to talk him down. Onlooker John Waldron took video that shows the plane rolling inverted at low altitude, then pulling into a half-loop in a aerobatic high-g maneuver called a “split S....

Military reenactments aren’t limited to people who like to dress up like they were in the Civil War. They can also have much more modern—more fun—stuff as well. Like a WWII-era flametank. Just look at that sucker go. The flametank—a rare, modifiedM3 Stuart outfitted with a supplementary flame jet mounted in place of a standard machine gun—was just one of the pieces shown off atthe World War II weekend in Athol, Massachusetts earlier this year....

2020 McLaren 600LT / Base Price: $256,500 / Engine: Twin Turbo V8 / Horsepower: 592 / Weight (Dry): 2,749 lbs. / Zero-to-60: 2.9 sec. / Warranty: 3 year unlimited milageAmong the selling points for six-figure supercars cars like the McLaren 600LT: noise, brutal ride quality, and an absence of conveniences. (For one, there’s no glove box). Those deliberate deficiencies benefit performance and feedback for the driver, all of which amounts to feeling like you’re driving a real race car to Olive Garden....

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have built a fish robot that can swim in the open water alongside the very animals it is researching.Robotic fish have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. They are now “secret agents” that can infiltrate schools of fish in controlled scenarios. The new CSAIL robofish called “SoFi” appears to set a new standard in its ability to blend into open water....

Mars’ moons may be a chip off the old block—and the Red Planet could have had a lot more than two of them. So says a new study published today in Science Advances, which seemingly confirms one theory for the formation of the Martian moon Phobos and Deimos.These two objects are pretty strange as far as moons go. They superficially resemble captured asteroids, yet they’re in near-circular orbits around the equator of Mars, a scenario that would be far more likely if they’d formed with or around Mars....

An airline crew on a flight over Mumbai forgot to pressurize the airplane’s cabin, causing dozens of passengers to suffer nosebleeds, headaches, and unconsciousness. After an emergency landing, five passengers were taken to the hospital, although they suffered no permanent injuries.The flight in question was Jet Airways Flight 9W 697 from Mumbai to Jaipur. The flight took off at around 6 a.m. local time, and almost immediately passengers started experienced the symptoms of hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation....

Media Platforms Design TeamAre eBikes the scooters of the 21st century?You might think so based on the proliferation of bicycles in tony urban settings, and mainstream manufacturer’s attempts to meld pedal power with electric assistance.After a brief test ride, I likened Smart’s eBike to a turbo for your legs– and Polaris’s new Vector and Strive models bring more electric options to the table. Built around an 8-speed mountain bike with a 6061 aluminum frame, 26 inch Kenda wheels, a Suntour XCT front suspension and Tektro brakes, these eBikes incorporate a removable in-frame lithium-ion battery that can be charged in 4 to 6 hours, and propel the bike roughly 30 miles at speeds up to 20 mph with some pedal effort from the rider....

The Republic of Korea Army is forming a new combat unit that would use drones to attack North Korean targets. The unit would give South Korean officials more flexibility in responding to a crisis with North Korea, using drones that would relay information real time before attacking regime targets.According to a South Korean government official quoted by the Yonhap News Agency, the ROK Army unit would operate what the South Korean government calls “dronebots,” a combination of drone and robot....

The good news for SpaceX today: The company successfully delivered its payload, the Jason-3 satellite, into orbit. The bad news: It didn’t quite stick the landing of the rocket on a barge. Related StoryWhy the SpaceX Platform Rocket Landing Is So Damn HardSpaceX’s live stream of the event apparently cut out during this part, leaving the world waiting to hear what happened. The company is now reporting that the Falcon 9 first stage reached the target but landed too hard, apparently breaking one of the struts....

Media Platforms Design TeamDeveloper: Nintendo EAD Group No. 1 // Publisher: Nintendo // Release: May 30, 2014 // Systems: Wii U // Price: $60We all have wonderful memories of Mario Kart—zipping around the track collecting coins, dodging obstacles, suffering the agony of the blue turtle shell, and laughing as you throw curses at your cartoon opponents. That’s the magic the Nintendo team has always created. But with the new gaming systems from Sony and Microsoft pumping out pure adrenaline games like Titanfall and Battlefield 4, is Mario Kart 8 even relevant?...

U.S. Air Force aircraft could someday take off and land from airfields in the middle of nowhere—from runways grown with bacteria. Like the mythological monster that turned its victims into stone, Project Medusa is seeking to turn easily sourced materials into a flat, sturdy surface for aircraft. The result? A runway capable of even supporting large transport aircraft.As the service continues to shift towards the threat of big power warfare against potential adversaries such as Russia and China, there is an increasing realization that the service may have to project air power where large, permanent air bases are not available....

In a potentially monumental medical breakthrough, an unmanned drone from the University of Maryland delivered a live organ to surgeons for transplant for the first time ever. The organ, a donor kidney sent to doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center, was successfully transplanted into a a 44-year-old woman’s body.The entire trip was under three miles, a distance deemed short enough for all teams involved to feel confident that the drone could carry the kidney....

Ordinary clocks and watches are fine, but they just don’t quite do enough to reinforce that the fact that time is fleeting and the moments of our lives vanish as soon as they arrive. Which is why we love this little timekeeping robot.Maurice Bos built a little ‘bot that draws the time on a whiteboard every five minutes. It first erases the old time, of course. The interval is an arbitrary number that Bos decided, though writing the time every five minutes looks like it’d burn through markers pretty fast....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe U.S. State Department is now banking on the possibility that the rise of social media may offer a new means of monitoring for arms-control violations. Imagine an army of sensors made up of ordinary citizens willing, in theory, to keep their governments in check and prove they aren’t violating arms-control treaties. That’s the concept behind the State Department’s “,” a contest that will offer a cash prize of $10,000 to the best idea, or ideas, for using social media to spot arms-control violators....

The family of the Arizona woman who was killed by a self-driving Uber car has reached a settlement with the San Francisco-based company. The settlement will protect Uber from having the details of its self-driving tech exposed to the public and, of course, prevent a high-profile discussion and legal decision of who is at fault when self-driving cars kill humans. Elaine Herzberg, 49, was killed on March 18 around 10 PM when a self-driving car powered by Uber’s technology and with a safety driver struck her at 40 MPH....

The largest vehicles in the world won’t fit on any highway. They are the enormous bucket-chain and bucket-wheel excavators used in strip mining operations. These giant machines weigh thousands of tons and dwarf entire buildings.And they can move. Some of these enormous machines have crawlers that they can use to traverse the terrain, while others move on rails. They may not move very fast, but they can cover a great deal of ground....

Last season, Netflix’s Black Mirror, a show that’s more interested in the darker side of our technological world, tackled Star Trek with the episode USS Callister. The episode went on to win four Emmys—But it doesn’t seem like Black Mirroris done with nerd culture quite yet. In the trailer for season 5, it appears virtual reality—and more specifically—gaming culture could be the show’s next allegorical nightmare with a sequence that looks like a live-action version of Street Fighter (a series we very much love)....

IFTTT (If This Then That) and Flow are both incredibly useful apps that are also pretty hard to describe. Basically, they let you plug different apps and services together, from Facebook and Instagram to iOS and Google Drive. They’re free to use as well, for the most part, letting you configure all kinds of custom setups and connections.You can get an SMS warning in the morning if the weather’s bad and your commute might be delayed, or have your Instagram photos sent straight to Twitter, or log all of your Fitbit data in an ever-expanding spreadsheet....

The first-ever detection of an asteroid from beyond the solar system revealed a remarkable object. About 400 meters long and only 40 meters wide, ‘Oumuamua’s axis ratio of 10:1 makes it the most elongated asteroid ever discovered. The highest axis ratio we see for asteroids in the solar system is only about 3:1. The odd shape is perhaps a clue about when the asteroid was flung from its own star during the formation of that solar system, or perhaps it can tell us something about what happens to space rocks when they fly through interstellar space for millions of years....