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Welcome to PM/AM, Popular Mechanics’ morning briefing on the top science and tech stories for today.Media Platforms Design TeamNASA/JPL-CaltechBeing an extrovert has a lot of advantages. Exploring Mars is not one of them. A NASA-funded study says that packing in a bunch of extroverts for a long-spanning (most likely one-way trip) exploration is a bad idea. “You’re talking about a very tiny vehicle, where people are in very isolated, very confined spaces,” said researcher Suzanne Bell, according to LiveScience....

PM: What possessed you to write this book?MC: I’ve been kicking it around for a while, and I just wanted to make one point: There’s knowledge work and there’s manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. And that this can be a life worth choosing–if you’re someone who likes to use your brain at work....

There’s been whispers and reports for years now about a connection between hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and earthquakes, especially after the 2011 quake on the east coast. Now a Bloomberg report says the fossil fuel industry paid big money to slow research that was looking into connections between fracking in Oklahoma and a series of earthquakes in that state.Bloomberg and other publications requested information on meetings between government officials and oil industry executives....

Media Platforms Design TeamCredit: Stan Honda/AFP/GettyImagesIn April, we captured a few snapshots as the space shuttle Enterprise flew around New York City strapped to the top of a 747. Since then, however, the prototype shuttle had been sitting underneath a tent at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (I actually saw the Enterprise out the cabin window on a recent flight out of JFK, thanks to a helpful reminder from the captain....

A new study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) argues that one of the mainstays of any drive should be altered. Guardrails could be risen from the current 31 to 36 inches and become much safer for that extra five inches.Coming out of UNL’s, Midwest Roadside Safety Facility (MRSF), which is funded by a consortium of midwestern states, the recommendations follow full-scale crash tests and extensive computer modeling. The paper reporting their findings has been published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention....

Media Platforms Design TeamCULVER CITY, Calif. — Sony is desperate, and the once-proud console giant showed it at today’s press conference, spending an alarming amount of time describing some new color schemes for the PlayStation Portable. The low-selling portable game system will soon be available in Ice Silver, as well as a Star Wars-themed white with Darth Vader’s face in one corner. A guy in a Chewbacca suit came out to help introduce that color scheme....

Researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia have been paying close to attention to the perfect turns bees appear to make during the flight. The better understanding scientists get of these turns, the more likely they’ll be able to recreate their flight patterns in drones and other forms of human flight.View full post on YoutubeIn order to get some quality footage of bees flying, researchers temporarily blocked access to their hive....

When you’re doing your taxes, you may engage in that obnoxious tradition of paying H&R Block or Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, a chunk of change for the privilege of filing your taxes digitally. It doesn’t have to work that way, but thanks to greed and the U.S. Congress, it’s probably going to stay that way. As ProPublica reports, a bipartisan bill coming out of the House Ways & Means Committee aims to ensure that filing your taxes remains a confusing and potentially expensive nightmare....

In 1917, visitors to New York City’s Central Park were greeted with a remarkable sight: a German submarine. And not just any submarine: this was the UC-5, a boat that had 30 ship sinkings to its name. Captured by the Allies, UC-5 was sent on a multinational tour designed to drum up support for the war.View full post on YoutubeMost people are familiar with the u-boats of World War II, but fewer realize Germany had tried an identical trick during World War I....

Legendary German director Werner Herzog is premiering his latest film at Sundance this month. Titled Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, the documentary dives into the realm of modern technology, artificial intelligence, and our relationships with the increasingly connected world of tomorrow. According to Deadline.com, Lo and Behold is “a deep dive into how virtually everything, from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and even how we conduct our personal relationships, has been transformed by the online world....

Scientists believe they now understand why wine trickles down the glass in its familiar tear shape.A team of scientists from UCLA created a theoretical model and tested the model by filling, swirling, monitoring (and hopefully drinking) a glass of port.They suspect a type of super-slow shockwave, called an undercompressive shockwave, may be the key to the drink’s signature movement.Swirl a glass of wine and watch the stuff slowly crawl up the walls of the glass....

Media Platforms Design TeamiOS 8 is officially launching September 17. While you’re gearing up of the big release, here’s a rundown of some of new features you can look forward to.Name That TuneWith iOS 8, Siri is getting a Shazam-like feature that allows her to identify a song. If you’re not sure what tune is, just ask Siri “What song is playing?” for a quick answer.Fewer Lost PhonesFind My iPhone is getting a small an upgrade with iOS 8....

In a remote part of Haiti, a raging river divides an entire village from its school. Many risk their lives every day to cross it. All the small village needs is a suspended footbridge to carry adults and children across the tumultuous water below.In steps Avery Bang, CEO and president of Bridges to Prosperity, an organization that builds footbridges across in developing countries, providing better access to health care, education, and employment opportunities....

Astronomers decide what we call a star, and what we call a planet. For awhile now, the official definition has had to do specifically with hydrogen: if a ball of gas fuses hydrogen, we call it a star. Burning hydrogen gives stars their brightness and long life spans, lasting up to millions of years. But there’s another class of object known as brown dwarfs. Instead of fusing hydrogen, they fuse something called deuterium, which is basically a hydrogen atom with an extra neutron....

Entire industries are built around making waste seem invisible, like it was never there in the first place. But a new study from Spain suggests this might be a missed opportunity — scientists have shown that a type of purple bacteria can convert waste into hydrogen gas for energy production. Purple bacteria are phototrophic, which means that they use photosynthesis like plants. The difference is that their source of metabolism is infrared light, as opposed to the visible light that green plants crave....

China is building a new ship and it’s huge. According to IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, a large ship is under construction in the Dalian shipyards in northern China. And nobody is really sure what it is. The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.Media Platforms Design TeamImagery taken by an Airbus commercial spy satellite has spotted an unfinished hull in the dry dock formerly used to outfit China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. The hull appears to be approximately 240 meters long and 35 meters wide, and Jane’s cautions that the final overall length will probably be at least 270 meters....

Four of the twelve boys trapped in the Tham Luang Caves in Thailand were successfully rescued today. Ten divers accompanied the boys throughout the journey, “[hugging] the boys beneath them while they were wearing masks,” the head of search operations, Narongsak Osottanakorn, told the New York Times. “Today, everything was very smooth. We have been practicing for the past three to four days, rain or shine.”The twelve boys were part of a soccer team called the Wild Boars, and became trapped with their soccer coach after a flood on June 23rd....

Media Platforms Design TeamIngleside, TX—Some hardware is so massive that it doesn’t need a flashy name. Such is the case with the Heavy Lifting Device. The 550-foot tall crane, the world’s largest on-shore lifter, is located in the La Quinta shipping channel in South Texas, and can be seen on the horizon from anywhere on the shore of Corpus Christi Bay. The crane’s 23 miles of 2.5-inch cable has raised 10,000 tons in a single heft, but is rated to handle 13,000-ton loads....

You need look no further than the enormous jagged teeth on a Tyrannosaurus rex to know its mouth was no place you wanted to end up. But the question for T. rex researchers is: Just how much crushing force could the jaws of this creature create?Scientists at Liverpool University in the U.K. released a study this week in Biology Letters that estimated the biting force of T. rex may have been able to deliver 12,8000 pounds of force—almost 20 times more powerful than previously thought....

Media Platforms Design TeamTo see text on my iPad mini, I often have to zoom in. That works fine on the Web, but I can’t get any of my magazines to change size. Am I stuck squinting?Yours is one of the main complaints voracious emagazine readers have about Apple’s baby tablet: Some magazines are simply too small to read. That’s because Apple decided to make the iPad mini and its bigger, non-Retina sibling have the same resolution (in part so programmers don’t need to redo their apps specifically for the smaller screen), so what you see on the 7-inch screen is just a miniaturized version of what you’d get on the 10-inch....