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RF Exposure Lab in San Marcos, California found that the iPhone 11 Pro emits over twice the FCC’s legal safety limit for radiofrequency radiation from a cell phone.The testing builds on former investigative work by the Chicago Tribune, which also found that an iPhone 7—and other smartphones— exceeded federal radiation levels. It all points to how old the FCC’s testing standards are for radiofrequency radiation—as in, they’re way older than our smartphones are and should be updated....

Late last year, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced that he had used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to create the world’s first genetically edited babies. A physicist by training, He’s declaration—made on YouTube, as opposed to in an academic setting—was widely condemned by the world’s scientific community. Now under house arrest by the Chinese government, He’s fate remains uncertain.He’s work with two babies, known as Lulu and Nana, has faced widespread criticism on both moral and purely scientific reasonings....

People are freaking out because the government is looking for creepy underground manmade tunnels.The request is just part of a DARPA competition called the Subterranean Challenge to test robots underground.Submissions for underground manmade environments will be taken until 5 p.m. Friday. (You can submit here). It’s not every day that the government asks you if you know any good underground tunnels for conducting, uh, research. In fact, that sounds an awful lot like the plot of Us....

Jack Berggren buys chainsaws 10 at a time. “When you run them wide open with no load, they don’t last very long,” he says. His bulk shopping list also includes makeup, orange lights, and Arduinos, a cheap little computer that can orchestrate simple sequences of events. He once bought a few actual jail cells that were never installed. Your shopping list is long and eclectic when you own a haunt, the industry term of art for a place where people pay to get frightened senseless....

Car-Crushing Mechanical ClawOur top prizewinner spent years dreaming of the perfect way to crush cars by hand. In 2007 Christian Ristow, an artist and former animatronics designer for the movie industry, demonstrated his first working incarnation of the Hand of Man at a robotics festival in Amsterdam. Much of his time since then has been spent re-engineering and refining the design of the 27-foot-long hydraulically actuated appendage, exhibiting more and more capable crushers at a series of public venues­....

It’s been more than a month since the Kilauea volcano erupted on Hawaii’s Big Island, leading to evacuations, acid rain, and widespread devastation. Now, a new YouTube video taken by the U.S. Geological Survey on the morning of June 14 is revealing just how much the lava is changing Hawaii’s landscape.The video focuses on the Big Island’s coastline, where the encroaching lava spilling from Fissure 8 has turned the beach into a pile of molten rock and waste....

BERKELEY, Calif. – Seismic engineers apparently have solved one of the world’s great retrofit puzzles: how to keep UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium from crumbling into a pile of concrete rubble during a major earthquake.It took decades of research, experimentation and head-scratching, but a team of San Francisco engineers says it has found a way to save the beloved landmark in Strawberry Canyon, which straddles the state’s most dangerous earthquake fault.“I’ll sleep well at night, even if I have season tickets in Section KK,” said David Friedman, lead engineer on the long-awaited Memorial Stadium retrofit project....

Astronaut Terry Virts recently plopped an Alka-Seltzer (or the generic equivalent) into a floating sphere of water on the International Space Station. Because why not? The resulting footage of the tablet dissolving and creating a small air-filled bubble of water spinning around freely is a kind of mesmerizing display of fluid dynamics.View full post on YoutubeThe video itself doesn’t really serve any scientific purpose beyond looking real cool, but it does function as a test of RED’s Epic Dragon camera which shoots in resolutions up to 6K....

In 1942, Calvin Graham, a Texas native, enlisted in the U.S. Navy to fight in World War II. He was only 11 years old. Graham had run away from his abusive father and spent time on the street selling newspapers, but when the war began, he sensed an opportunity to get even further away, as is detailed in this video from Today I Found Out. View full post on YoutubeIn the 1940s, faking your identity was a whole lot easier than it is today....

The Air Force is retiring F-16 fighters as the F-35 fighter comes on-line.The F-16s are stored at “The Boneyard” in Arizona.About thirty F-16s a year are brought out of storage to become remote-controlled aircraft. The F-16 Fighting Falcon has had a distinguished history, and the U.S. Air Force is capping it off with a bang. Every year the service modifies F-16 fighters into F-16 drones, transforming them from hunters to the hunted....

The Job: Build a planter with pressure-treated lumber.Use This: Ground Contact RatedMedia Platforms Design TeamPressure-treated lumber is rated by the amount of chemical infused in it per cubic foot of wood. This is stated on the tag stapled to the lumber’s endgrain. Ground-contact rated lumber has .40 pounds of preservative per cubic foot. Above-ground rated lumber has .25 pounds. Use the .40 variety for posts and flower planters, for example.Not This: Above-Ground RatedMedia Platforms Design TeamThere’s nothing wrong with pressure-treated lumber with ....

The invasive spotted lanternfly has invaded Pennsylvania and threatens to spread into neighboring states.Easily identifiable by its gray, spotted wings and bright red underwings, the insect could threaten billions of dollars worth of crops in Pennsylvania, such as apples, grapes, and hops.Report sightings of the dreaded insects to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture by calling this number: 1-888-4BADFLY. (For real.) Then, squash that sucker without remorse.Desperate times call for desperate measures....

Media Platforms Design TeamNearly every kegerator owner encounters this problem at some point: excessive foaming when pouring a fresh beer.In a kegerator, carbon dioxide pushes the beer through vinyl tubing and out of the faucet. For a foam-free pour, the pressure of the beer needs to drop from its carbonated pressure (usually 10 to 12 pounds per square inch) to its serving pressure (2 to 3 PSI). Typically, the beer runs through long sections of vinyl tubing as it travels to the faucet, which allows the constriction of the tubing on the flowing beer to drop the pressure....

A rocket blasts off from the launchpad, carrying a couple dozen tons of cargo into space. In the span of a few minutes, the rocket accelerates to around 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting the Earth at nearly 300 miles above the surface.What is this rocket carrying? Perhaps a communications satellite, a NASA spacecraft, or some payload for the military? Actually, the rocket isn’t even carrying a spacecraft at all. Instead, its payload contains several tons of high-grade plastic and pre-fabricated components, material that will be fed to a 3D printer waiting in orbit....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Bob Spielman’s glider went off course, he found just the right spot to make his crash landing: He parachuted onto a parking garage belonging to Reno’s St. Mary’s Hospital.Spielman took off from the Minden-Tahoe airport, about 45 minutes south of Reno, seeing to use the unpowered glider to ride some unique wind patterns nearby. Instead, the glider veered off course, though he ultimately crashed in the right place....

You’d have to be crazy to build your own PC these days. Value and selection have never been greater–Dell and HP are selling computers for under $300 that are more than adequate for Internet surfing and home office use. Plus, constructing a computer from scratch can be a colossal headache. The PC-building hobbyist gets no customer support and no warranties in case things go wrong.But in the technology department at POPULAR MECHANICS, we are a little crazy....

View full post on Youtube The future of manufacturing rockets could look a lot like ISAAC, this robot with a 16-point swiveling head, and the newest addition to NASA’s Langley Center in Hampton, Virginia. ISAAC was designed with one thing in mind: composites. With its many attachments, ISAAC can quickly produce the kind of carbon fiber composites used in airplane bodies like the Boeing 787’s. That makes it an ideal tool for NASA engineers trying out prototypes, as composite materials allow them to bring down a spacecraft’s weight....

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) plans to test the ability of a small satellite known as a CubeSat to observe the changes in a star’s light. The Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics (ASTERIA), part of an early-career program at JPL known as Phaeton, will use precision photometry to measure the intensity of an object’s light, known as its flux. The small satellite will help NASA determine the viability of CubeSats as space telescopes for future observational missions....

Orion Span, a startup that launched yesterday, wants to offer luxury accommodations in space for 12-day trips at a going rate of $9.5 million.“We’re proud to announce Aurora Station – our first orbital community - will launch in late 2021 as the world’s first luxury space hotel. By early 2022, we will be hosting tourists, astronauts, space research, and manufacturing on board Aurora Station in LEO [low Earth orbit],” says CEO Frank Bunger in an introductory blog post....

Media Platforms Design TeamHow do bikes stay upright?First of all, most people don’t realize that bicycles can balance themselves. It’s a miracle that bicycles can balance at all, but then there’s this second miracle that they can balance by themselves. When you’re riding, you think you’re going in a straight line. But really you are falling to the right, steering to the right, falling to the left, steering to the left, and constantly making these corrections....