Plenty of new power plants are constructed every year in the United States, adding gigawatts of power generation to grids across the country, but the past few months have illustrated a dramatic shift in the type of power plant being built. A new report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finds that of all new electricity generation built in the first two months of 2018, a full 98 percent is renewable....
The U.S. military is signing increasingly restrictive agreements with defense contractors.These agreements prevent troops from fixing their own equipment.This conundrum mirrors the “right to repair” debate, and ironically is the result of the military using civilian equipment.U.S. troops in the field are running up against increasingly restrictive licensing agreements signed by the Pentagon that limit their ability to service their own equipment. This presents a readiness and equipment confidence issue, which could make American forces less effective in wartime....
We’ve all been warned of the dangers of peer pressure: coaxing unsuspecting children into drinking, drugs, sex, and other questionable behaviors. Apparently, not only can human peers convince children to make bad decisions, social robots can too (though adult subjects remained immune), according to a new study by Bielefeld University researcher Anna-Lisa Vollmer published in the journal Science Robotics. To conduct the study, researchers created three groups of adult volunteers, all assigned the same task: to estimate the length of a target line based on three other lines....
Over the past several years, the Kepler Space Telescope has been staring at a section of the sky, waiting for the stars to get a little bit dimmer. A sudden drop of brightness could mean that a planet is passing in front, and Kepler has seen thousands of these brightness dips over the past decade, discovering a wealth of planets outside the solar system. Kepler has transformed what astronomers know about the number of exoplanets in the galaxy, but some worlds thought to be discovered may not be there after all....
Media Platforms Design TeamTell me a little of you guys’ backstory. How did you start building these crazy vehicles, and how’d you end up doing a show about them?Marc Parker: Shanon and I have always had a passion for building stuff and creating unique stuff. We never really liked the stuff that was available. So we started off as kids, with bicycles and go-karts. As we grew older, we got into motorcycles and cars....
For anyone who fears the abyss of death but also has a spare $10,000 lying around, there’s a wild-sounding new way to (maybe) cheat the grim reaper. Of course, the very procedure will kill you.Nectome, a Silicon Valley startup funded by Y Combinator, is similar to cryogenics companies in that it operates on a simple premise: If your body or brain could be preserved indefinitely, someday technology might come around that could bring you back to life....
Faced with a growing number of missile threats, the Pentagon is looking to the U.S. Army’s field artillery to shoot down those incoming threats. An innovative system called the Hyper Velocity Projectile would allow the Army’s heavy howitzers and the Navy’s deck guns to fire projectiles that can down incoming ballistic missiles.The U.S. military has a two-sided missile problem. America’s potential adversaries field large numbers of ballistic missiles, such as the Chinese DF-21, Russian Iskander-M, and the North Korean Nodong, all of which are a serious threat to both ground and sea-based U....
The Anequim Project Team, a group of students and professors from Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), recently brought their slick new plane to Rio de Janeiro to put it through its paces. When they were done with the high-speed flights out of the Santa Cruz Air Force Base this past weekend, they’d set five new world records. Not bad for a student project.Paulo Iscold, who created the project and is now one of the professors, spent the better part of a decade building his first race plane....
It’s hard to predict the exact effects of climate change over the course of a few decades. Even while broad trends appear, the litany complex interactions between the air, the water, polar ice, land masses, and so on, make exact predictions elusive. To deal with this problem, scientists develop models that simulate a few of these elements at one time and see which models are the most accurate.This variety of climate models is the reason long-term predictions tend to be all over the place, with some models predicting only a few degrees of warming while other models predict a lot more....
For the adventurous imbiber, meet Atomik vodka, a spirit made with radioactive ingredients from Chernobyl.Want to try the vodka? You’ll have to wait until production increases, as only one bottle currently exists.The team behind the vodka wants to use it to improve the economies of cities surrounding Chernobyl’s exclusion zone.Capitalizing on this year’s renewed interest in the worst nuclear accident in history, booze makers have introduced Atomik, the world’s first vodka made from distilled grains from Chernobyl’s exclusion zone....
Media Platforms Design TeamWatchmen: Director’s Cut Two-Disc Special Edition (2009)Media Platforms Design TeamAlan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic book, Watchmen, ushered in an era of dark and brooding antiheroes and earned a spot on Time’s “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels” list. Countless writers and directors have been attached to a Watchmen adaptation over the years, with Terry Gilliam famously proclaiming the material to be unfilmable. After his slavishly devoted adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, Zack Snyder was given the task of bringing the multi-layered comic to the big screen....
The Royal Air Force (RAF) has left Gatwick Airport in London over a week after a mysterious drone sighting canceled about 100 flights and disrupted holiday travel for an estimated 140,000 travelers, according to the BBC. The incident prompted international attention, and rabid speculation, as to who was controlling the rogue UAV. The military was called in, equipped with signal-jamming instruments meant to corral the aircraft if the chance presented itself....
On June 11th, Stephanie Creignou was attending a 5K race in Beloeil, Quebec, when a DJI Phantom 3 drone, weighing 2.7 pounds, dropped out of the sky and hit her on the top of her head. Creignou collapsed into her friend’s arms and had to be taken to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with whiplash. As of June 22nd, Creignou was still out of work and was forced to cancel a vacation she’d planned with her husband....
Media Platforms Design TeamToday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Apple debuted a whole host of features for OS X 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8. It was yet another session of the tech behemoth’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference and, at least this year, it seemed there was more news for developers to be enthusiastic over than regular Apple users. Yosemite and iOS 8 is available now as a beta for registered developers, while the rest of the public can snag the smartphone operating system when it’s released in the fall....
Russian engineers are finishing the design of a brand new space freighter that would replace the veteran Progress cargo ships supplying the International Space Station (ISS) with propellant, food, water and other goods, industry sources tell Popular Mechanics.The new vehicle will be about a ton heavier than its predecessor and will feature a radical new design. If it’s actually built, the next-generation cargo ship will allow Russia to reduce the number of annual cargo shipments to the ISS from four to three while still delivering all necessary provisions for three people to live more or less permanently aboard the ISS....
Media Platforms Design Team(Photo Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)Yes, the United States Senate just voted that climate change is real by a count of 98 to 1 majority. Technically. But don’t get too excited about the possibility of our legislators finally accepting reality. That vote was for an amendment to the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, one that acknowledged that climate change is “not a hoax.” That’s something that nearly all senators could agree on because it didn’t mention the causes of climate change....
The first North American native tribe to deposit seeds in the Svalbard “Doomsday Vault” is the Cherokee Nation.The remote Svalbard Vault in Norway acts as a nature preserve and military resource.Cherokee contributions include sacred varieties from before colonists arrived in America.The Cherokee Nation has become the first North American indigenous group to store seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, nestled in Norway’s far, far northern region. The Svalbard Vault is the most secure and remote doomsday vault in the world, and the Cherokee seeds will join a depository that dates back to 1984....
Your feet pound the treadmill. Your shirt soaks up the sweat. You can feel the heat—you’re working hard, burning those calories and you rack up the steps and the miles. But do you really know how many calories you’re burning?Gym cardio machines such as ellipticals, stair steppers, and stationary bikes offer a reassuring calorie count on their LED screens—a little numerical reminder that you’re really doing something. If you’re wearing a smartwatch or a Fitbit, though, it might tally a totally different calorie number for the exact same workout....
For a century, Hammond’s Candies has been hand-making its world-famous confections in Denver. Clearly, there’s something sweet in the water out there—so for the latest episode of the Popular Mechanics series “MADE HERE,” we visited the factory where old family recipes and a love of artisanal products continue to make Hammond’s a magical place.It all began when Carl T. Hammond, Sr. dropped out of high school and got a job as an apprentice at a candy factory....
View full post on YoutubeOur sun is a yellow dwarf star, but that’s just one of dozens of types of stars out there in the universe: There are red and orange dwarfs like many of the stars studied by Kepler, red supergiants like VY Canis Majoris (the largest known star), and ultradense neutron stars with diameters of less than 10 miles.What would our world look like if it orbiting some other kind of sun?...
