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Mouse trap cars are a common high school science experiment: power a mechanical car made of wood with a single mouse trap. In this video from Mark Rober, we get deep into the mechanics of what makes these cars go, and how to optimize their performance. View full post on YoutubeRober visits his friend, the world record holder for mouse trap car distance, to find out how he does it. The cars physics are all about mechanical advantage, the trade off between how long it takes to do something and how little force is required to do it....

It is warm in the WeWork on Manhattan’s 28th Street, in part because it is stuffed with people, and in part because it is also stuffed with boxes of pizza. Young men and women mill around with slices on paper plates, sloshing plastic cups of a delightful black IPA from the veteran-owned Backward Flag Brewing Company every time they slap a back or administer a fist bump. Everyone is friendlier than you’d expect at a networking event, and as diverse as a college admissions brochure....

They sent me drones. Integrate them into my daily life, they said. It was going to be a challenge. My daily life tends toward the mundane.“Can they fold laundry?” my wife asked. “Can they do dishes? Can they cook dinner? Can they drive carpool? Will they mow the lawn? Or vacuum? Or sweep out the garage?“My wife and I share these duties. Neither of us likes any of them, except the cooking, sometimes, which we weren’t about to turn over to a remote-control flying machine....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn their lab at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Jürgen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster are growing human brains—or something like them, at least. Using adult skin cells, they’ve cultivated hundreds of 4-mm white blobs of neurons that develop specialized regions, similar to the way a human brain would develop in utero. The brain-like structures (called cerebral organoids) are expected to open up new avenues for studying neurological disorders such as autism and schizophrenia....

Media Platforms Design TeamIs this the moment when Manhattan catches up to its hugely ambitious premise? The third episode of WGN America’s Manhattan Project drama injects some much-appreciated momentum to the series. And perhaps most importantly, the episode solidly defines the tentpole characters Charlie Isaacs and Frank Winter. Until this episode, they might have been simply arrogant and cantankerous, respectively, but by the end of the hour they’ve come into clear focus....

Just because no human has set foot on Mars yet doesn’t mean that we can’t indulge in a little speculation. After all, Mars is brimming with resources that future robotic systems could extract, allowing us to build a happy colony on the red planet.NASA’s recruitment posters for Martian settlers suggest that our future Mars colony will need explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers, technicians, engineers, and even some brave astronauts to mine for resources on Mars’ moon Phobos....

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced this week that its green lit a Mars Moon eXploration (MMX) project.The project will target Mars’ two moons Phobos and Deimos and is designed to return samples from Phobos. It is slated to launch in 2024 and will land on Phobos in 2025. A Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission to visit Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos (the 13th best moon) officially got the green light from the Japanese government....

The U.S. Army’s standard service weapon, the M4A1 carbine, has a defect that allows it to discharge a round without actually pulling the trigger. The flaw was caught on video earlier this year by a soldier at a shooting range, and testing by the Army has detected nearly a thousand weapons affected by the problem. In March, according to Stars and Stripes, a soldier recorded cellphone video of his M4A1 carbine discharging a round after the selector switch was moved....

The winter is a punishing time for everyone. Sometimes, even if you wear multiple layers and cocoon yourself inside the thickest, puffiest jacket you own, it’s still not enough to keep you warm. You could put on another jacket or slip into another pair of long underwear, or you could just get the Torch 2.0 Coat Heater to free yourself of bulky clothing while still getting the warmth you need. View full post on YoutubeTorch 2....

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic medals are made entirely from recycled electronics.Organizers gathered over 47,000 tons of tech waste to create them.Japanese citizens donated over five million cell phones for the effort. This year, the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is in charge of presenting the gold, silver, and bronze medals—and they’re all made from recycled electronics. The Committee says it decided to create sustainable medals in an effort to build “an innovative future for all....

Marc Verdiell’s teletype and Linux setup uses very old technology as a seamless I/O.Turning hardware into Linux hardware is a common pastime, but this is extreme.To connect the devices, Verdiell made an interface where both hardware and software are “translated.“YouTuber Marc Verdiell, a.k.a. CuriousMarc, has turned a 1930s teletype machine into a Linux terminal. To do that, he had to make circuitry and programming that translates five-bit Baudot code into eight-bit ASCII code....

YouTuber Captain Xavier is nothing if not dedicated with his Nerf builds. After over a year of planning and building, he turned his Air Warriors Punisher into a fully functioning minigun. The results, from the looks for it, will make for a vicious foe in any Nerf-related contest.View full post on Youtube The firing mechanism has a three-stage trigger. The first stage feeds balls from the backpack into the blaster. Pushing it to two-thirds fires up the flywheels and starts the minigun rotation....

Game of Thrones comes back to HBO this Sunday with its superfans in uncharted territory, as season 6 will forge ahead of the narrative currently laid out in the book series A Song of Ice and Fire. No more can your nerdy roommates lord over you the fact that they know what’s going to happen (basically).Because Westeros-lovers have so much time to kill as they wait impatiently for the show to return or George R....

Media Platforms Design Team"Snow at the Baksol Outpost," one of eight wallpapers to choose from with scenes of Korean landscapes. Smuggled out from behind the nigh-impenetrable North Korean internet border, an alleged copy of RedStar 3.0—the state sanctioned operating system for North Korean Internet users—has reached the West.A hacker known as Slipstream released the copy of the OS. It’s a Linux based system, and according to IT expert Will Scott, it’s believed to be used mostly by businesses....

(Photo: The Apatosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Brontosaurus was believed to be an Apatosaurus mistakenly classified as a new species.)The long-necked, long-tailed, 30-ton Brontosaurus is one of the most famous dinosaurs of all time. And if you ask most paleontologists, it’s also not real.Paleontologists have spent the last century insisting that the species and its name (Latin for “thunder lizard”) are invalid—that the first fossil was incorrectly or deceptively described, or that what was called Brontosaurus is really another similar dinosaur, the Apatosaurus....

Construction giant Caterpillar hopes to one day bring its autonomous mining technology to one of the universe’s most sought after mining locations: the moon. Technology used in autonomous and remotely operated mining equipment in use today could someday harvest precious elements from the Lunar surface.Mining the moon, Mars and other celestial bodies will be an incredibly difficult task; NASA is working on the technology to make it happen. Caterpillar, one of the largest construction companies in the world, is aiming for a spot on the lunar surface and plans to adapt their range of autonomous and remote-controlled mining equipment for use in space....

Popular Mechanics gaming correspondent Brittany Vincent is on the scene this week at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Check back all week to see her dispatches from the trade show, including the coolest upcoming games and big announcements from major developers. E3 2019 has been a spectacle, and it hasn’t even officially begun. Ahead of the official first-day festivities, I spent some time at Microsoft’s E3 Press Briefing, which was home to some of the company’s biggest announcements, including details on the company’s biggest console release yet: Project Scarlett....

Ever wondered what we’re losing as ice sheets around the world thin out, calve off, and melt into the sea? Polar bear habitat to be sure, and miles of coastline as sea levels rise. But we’re also losing a record of Earth’s deep geological and astronomical history. A study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals new evidence found in ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice sheet....

Genesee Brewery in Rochester is the oldest brewery in New York, and it’s also (unofficially) the brewery with the greatest amount of cheer. For the fifth year now, Genesee has created a Christmas tree out of empty beer kegs. This year is the biggest yet, with 12 layers of kegs building up to a tree that is more than 27 feet tall and made up of more than 530 kegs....

Last year, pretty much everyone said the “Scarecrow, The Reaping” house was the best house. Wait times often stretched as long as 75 minutes. On one evening, a bald man walked the line with his two teenage children, gawking at the immaculate details—the galvanized metal wind pump, the cornstalks, a squat Quonset hut, a dilapidated wooden barn—as they appeared out of the mist. Even the clicking noises of the insects had been noticeably augmented from the normal cacophony of an autumn Orlando evening....