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Here’s what we know: About 130,000 years ago, near modern-day San Diego, something or someone killed a mastodon. Whatever it was bludgeoned the creature’s spine and jaw in a calculated fashion and harvested the bones for marrow and tool use. It sure looks like the kind of thing early humans would do.There’s a problem, though. At this time, humans had not left Africa—at least according to today’s dominant narrative of human migration....

As recently as a decade ago, 600-cc sportbikes (called supersports) were the hottest motorcycles in the world. Novices could graduate to them from entry-level 250-cc- and 300-cc-engine beginner bikes. They were less expensive and lighter than liter (1,000 cc) bikes, which hardly anyone has the riding skill to drive fast. A supersport could chew up corners and conquer the track, but was docile enough to ride home on the street. It was the everyman’s two-wheeled supercar....

POPULAR MECHANICS: We just watched the season premiere last night, and it’s a doozy. Who came up with finding out which hits the ground first; a bullet fired or a bullet dropped?ADAM SAVAGE: That’s been a story that I’ve had a particular penchant for for years. It’s a classic physics thought experiment. And at one point–I guess about two or three years ago–I had thought through a way of doing it in scale, and then as Jamie and I started talking it back and forth, we realized we could probably do it full-scale....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s the most expensive quarter of a second in sports. In the NFL draft combine on March 3, USC safety Taylor Mays seemed to have made history. The NFL Network reported that Mays ran a 4.24 in the 40-yard dash, which would have tied Chris Johnson’s all-time combine record time of 4.24 set in 2008. A few minutes later, Mays’ official time was announced: a fast, but hardly historic, 4....

A trickle of boron powder could turn nuclear fusion dreams into reality.Tokamak reactors are one of the major frontiers in fusion research, but they’re also volatile—and potentially dangerous.Inert boron powder would replace explosive boron-hydrogen gas.Researchers at Princeton University have found a way to make a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor safer using insulating boron powder. The new research appears in the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion and comes from Princeton’s U.S. Department of Energy-funded Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL)....

If electric vehicles are ever to get out of their novelty phase, three things must happen. First, an EV has to come along that has an operating range for a full day of driving. Second, it must be able to fit a family of five. Third, it can’t be priced exclusively for millionaires. The Tesla Model S solves two and a half of those problems. It promises between 160 and 300 miles of range on a single charge, depending on the battery configuration you buy....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you picked up a newspaper in the last week, you probably read that—after nine tortuous years of regulatory review—Cape Wind has been officially designated the first offshore wind farm in the United States. Not so fast. The distinction Cape Wind actually earned is the first wind farm to be by the U.S. Department of the Interior. That green light is required for every state but Texas, the current force to be reckoned with in installed U....

Drones already have a pretty impressive library of skills from the obvious ones like package delivery, to flying into your open windows or rescuing a stray AirPod. Engineers at Asahi Power Service hope to add “umbrella sidekick” to that list. Designed for use on golf courses and with an estimated launch date of 2019, the “Free Parasol” can hover its 11-pound heft for about 20 minutes on a full charge. If that short flight time sounds like a bit of a drawback, then buckle up because it gets worse....

When last we heard from the USS Zumwalt, the Navy had admitted that the brand-new stealth destroyer couldn’t fire because its custom ammo was too expensive. Now, the service may have settled on a replacement to get the vessel and its brethren back in business. The U.S. Navy says its Zumwalt-class destroyers, state-of-the-art ships designed to bombard targets on land, could be equipped with the Excalibur precision-guided artillery round originally developed for land forces....

Patch Hurty was five when he found the Ford badge on the side of the road near his house in Connecticut. He loves cars, so he was pumped about this find—car names were some of the first words he was learning to read, and now he had a badge of his own from a real car. ⠀ For more tech, science, and aerospace news, sign up for the daily Popular Mechanics newsletter!...

In 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan suffered a meltdown, releasing nuclear radiation into the surrounding area and into the ocean. While that disaster happened seven years ago and half a world away, the effects can be found even on our own shores. A new study finds that radioactive particles from the Fukushima disaster can be found in wines from California.Radiation in wine is nothing new. In fact, every bottle of wine made after 1952 contains some radioactive particles....

UPDATE: Early on Sunday, SpaceX successfully linked up with the International Space Station.UPDATE, Friday afternoon: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule won’t be linking up with the International Space Station on Saturday morning after all. But the company’s leaders say the spacecraft is under control and its mission to the ISS should eventually go on.SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell joined NASA’s William Gerstenmaier and ISS program manager Michael Suffredini for a press conference this afternoon to address the problems the Dragon capsule experienced after reaching orbit this morning, when its Draco thrusters failed to activate....

Graphene may not be the only game in town when it comes to two-dimensional supermaterials. Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have fabricated titanium trisulfide, which has something graphene doesn’t: the ability to turn off its conductivity.Chemistry professor Xiao Zeng created a computer simulation that proved it was possible, while colleague Alexander Sinitskii built the material itself. What they discovered is a material that, unlike graphene, can be used for logic devices....

View full post on YoutubeThe robot Olympics are almost here. Later this month, a batch of humanoid robots will descend upon Homestead Speedway in Florida for the next phase of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a competition to build rugged disaster response robots. These machines will be tasked with driving a human vehicle, climbing a ladder, and other tasks.PopMech will be down in Florida for the competition on December 20 and 21, but we’re getting an early look at some of the contenders....

Tomorrow morning, Mercury will embark on a transit across the Sun.The astronomical event happens roughly 13 times every 100 years. The last transit occurred on May 9, 2016, and the next transit will happen in 2032.Tomorrow morning beginning at 7:35 a.m. EST, Mercury will embark on a five and a half hour transit across the sun. Both professional and amateur astronomers will have their instruments fixed on our home star. The Swift Planet will pass closest to the sun at 11:20 a....

Since 2008, the Yeti Tundra has set the bar for what a great hard cooler is capable of. Promising days of ice retention thanks to thick, insulation-packed walls, the Tundra (and the wave of similar coolers from other companies that followed it) has come as close to cooler perfection as many people thought possible. But today, the Texas company announced its best performing cooler yet. The Yeti V Series is the first ever vacuum-insulated hard cooler....

The Chicago River is filled with pollution and trash that make the body of water unsafe for swimmers. Cleaning up all this garbage is a difficult task, which is why one startup turned to the internet for help.Chicago startup Urban Rivers has been focused on cleaning up the river for a while. Previously, it built a floating garden to clean the water and make the river more pleasant to look at....

One of the marvels of the modern world that we tend to take for granted is GPS. Thanks to the Global Positioning System and its network of precisely positioned satellites, anyone on the Earth’s surface can locate themselves to within a few feet. That’s a convenience that navigators even a hundred years ago would have killed for.Still, GPS is not perfect. Sometimes we lose GPS signal when traveling through tunnels, and sometimes the signal is not nearly as accurate as it should be....

Scramjets use experimental engines that are powered partially by air, and the Air Force Research Laboratory just tested on in excess of Mach 4.They’re been theoretical for a long time, but the Air Force broke its own record for thrust while trying to develop one.A team of engineers at the Air Force Research Laboratory and Air Force Test Center have set a record for the highest thrust produced by an air-breathing hypersonic engine in the military branch’s history....

Imagine a bank vault that handcuffed every John Dillinger who walked in through the door. Nothing like that quite exists, but this Russian strongbox, circa 1815, comes pretty close. The antique dealer Carlton Hobbs LLC has acquired a nineteenth-century steel safe with a complicated lock system, capable of firing two pistols at an unsuspecting intruder. On first inspection, the safe looks more like a metal treasure chest than a gun-wielding killer....