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Media Platforms Design TeamOne of the preordained stars of CES is the Ultrabook, a Intel-branded category of extremely thin, very light laptops. They’re designed in the rough mold of the Apple MacBook Air: No optical drives, few connection ports, solid-state storage, low-power-consumption processors, and screen sizes ranging from 10 to about 15 inches. When closed, they’re closer in thickness to a tablet than to a traditional laptop.The last few months have seen Ultrabook announcements from the like of Asus (the MacBook Air-inspired Zenbook), Acer (the Aspire S3), and Toshiba (the pro-oriented, port-adorned Portége Z830)....

Some Chinese kite enthusiasts built what could be the world’s first aircraft carrier kite. The kite, made to resemble China’s first domestically produced aircraft carrier, is far smaller than an actual aircraft carrier, but still easily the size of a city bus. The kite flew at the 36th annual International Kite Festival in Weifang, Shandong province.The kite resembles China’s Type 002 aircraft carrier, which is currently at the port of Dalian receiving a new gray flight deck coating....

Years after a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, Tim Hemmes was able to move a prosthetic arm using just his thoughts, even using it to high-five his girlfriend. The high-five was the result of an incredible feat of neuroscience and engineering, one that earned the project a 2012 Breakthrough Award. Yet for Hemmes it wasn’t a complete victory. “I want to move my own arms, not just a robotic arm,” he told PM then....

Media Platforms Design TeamDoha, Qatar—For over a decade, VW’s been working on an automotive holy grail—the “1-liter” car. It’s a vehicle that can travel 100 kilometers (62 miles) using just 1 liter of fuel (0.26 gallons). This comes out to an astonishing 235 mpg. A prototype first saw the light of day in 2002—a 640-pound tandem two-seater powered with a spectacularly noisy 299-cc, 8.4-hp single-cylinder diesel that gave a top speed of 74....

A harmful red tide has forced Florida to declare a state of emergency throughout the Gulf of Mexico, in an area spreading 150 miles up and down the state. The red tide has killed more than five tons of fish and has become a dolphin-killing epidemic. Florida wildlife experts estimate around 200 sea turtles have been killed, too. For humans, red tide has made it dangerous to be even near the beach....

Military museums are not uncommon, but the middle eastern country of Jordan is building what just might be the weirdest of them all: an underwater military museum. Obsolete tanks, armored vehicles, and even a helicopter from Jordan’s military have been sunk in the Red Sea to promote scuba diving tourism.The “museum” is located off the coast of Aqaba in the Red Sea in an area popular with divers. It’s located in the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, a government effort to boost economic activity in the region and the overall Jordanian economy....

Yes, you can make your internet faster by getting a better connection, but that can be expensive, or sometimes even impossible. A new development from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Harvard could make every webpage you visit on your phone or computer load up 34 percent faster, and you don’t have to do a thing. Normally, stealthy speed-ups like this are thanks to new compression algorithms. Google’s recent “Brotli” algorithm, for instance, is doing important work to make webpages and other data smaller so that you can download it all faster....

Where did this idea come from?BRIT MARLING: It began with the premise: What if there were two? Then we said, [what] if there was a parallel universea duplicate Earth, and everybody here was also there. What if you could talk to yourself, meet yourself? And from that epic science fiction premise, the microstories became: For whom would it be the most important to encounter themselves? Did you research the scientific elements of the story?...

Hey you know what is a very good idea? Using a motorcycle throttle to control a 2-stroke, 37cc engine that powers the blades of a once normal kitchen blender. Fortunately, Instructables’ Mike Warren had that idea, built the device, and also left a series of detailed instructions so that you can follow in his overkill footsteps. The project includes several basic and predictable ingredients—chainsaw, blender, motorcycle handlebars—and seems pretty involved, but not exactly difficult....

A lone well in the Nevada desert represents a pioneering experiment in the history of geothermal energy–and a capital-fueled future for a field that until very recently remained overlooked. The well–named DP 27-15–is the first commercial application in the United States of a new technology known as enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, which experts say could one day produce 10 percent of the nation’s electricity.Unlike conventional geothermal power, which has been limited to areas with stores of hot groundwater, EGS power plants create their own geothermal reservoirs by pumping water to hot, dry rocks located tens of thousands of feet under the surface....

The Great Blue Hole, located off the coast of Belize, is one of the world’s true natural wonders. Now we’re finally learning more about what’s inside this mysterious phenomenon: A high-profile mission of exploration featuring billionaire Richard Branson recently took a submarine down to its depths, creating a high-resolution 3D map.View full post on YoutubeView full post on InstagramOn one level, everything you need to know about the Great Blue Hole is right there in the name....

Early Wednesday morning, a catastrophic fire engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-story block of public housing in the Kensington area of London. The flames spread rapidly through the 120 apartments and the entire building was destroyed in the blaze. Firefighters rescued many of the occupants, who had been advised to stay in their homes, but at the time of this writing 30 people are confirmed dead. That number is likely to rise as many of the people living on the upper floors have not yet been accounted for....

For me, making any basketball shot is an achievement. Asking me to pull off a shot from the three-point line is laughable. Not so for the folks at How Ridiculous, who just made a super-super-long-distance bucket from the top of a 660-foot waterfall. Behold the world’s highest basketball shot:View full post on YoutubeThe shot was made from the top of Maletsunyane Falls, located in the country of Lesotho. The team had to carry dozens of basketballs up the trails to the top of the falls multiple times a day, only to throw them to the bottom in what must have been hundreds of failed attempts....

Our planet is warming, and we’re to blame. Burning of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which insulates the atmosphere and traps heat. To try and combat this, countries and energy companies are investing in cleaner energy sources like wind and solar. But according to a pair of new studies, first reported by the Washington Post, the very problem these initiatives are trying to solve might be making wind power less effective....

In Popular Mechanics’ November cover story on the hydrogen economy, writer Jeff Wise walked readers through the various hurdles to making hydrogen power practical. At least one of those hurdles, it seems, has just been lowered a notch. Scientists have invented a material for solid-state storage that absorbs hydrogen at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and releases it at the flick of a switch. This circumvents the problems of storing liquid hydrogen, which must be chilled to near absolute zero, and solid-state storage using metal hydrides, which only work at extremely high temperatures....

Iran is flying antiques.It’s not the only one. After all, we’ve covered the travails of America’s rapidly aging Air Force, such as the fact that airmen could fly and maintain the same B-52s as their grandfathers. But at least the Pentagon has new tech and new planes in the pipeline.The Iranian military is in a stickier predicament. Political isolation, combined with an unwillingness by many countries to sell Iran new equipment, means its fleet fighters bought in the mid-1970s—from the United States, no less—must fly on for the foreseeable future, with homegrown know-how the main thing keeping them airworthy....

In case you don’t have enough nightmare fuel, try moving to the Brazilian town of Espírito Santo do Dourado. There, residents have reported that the sky is regularly filled with spiders, which rain down on unsuspecting people like some kind of demon weather.A video of the phenomenon was captured by 14-year-old João Pedro Martinelli Fonseca, who was visiting his grandparents in the town located in the southern state of Minas Gerais, just north of Rio de Janeiro....

The wait is finally over. Jim Bridenstine has been approved by the Senate to become NASA’s 13th Administrator, ending the longest period the agency has been without a permanent director in the agency’s history.View full post on TwitterBridenstine, formerly a Republican Representative from Oklahoma, has focused on space for much of his career. The former Navy Reserve pilot was once executive director of the Tulsa Air & Space Museum and during his time in Congress introduced the American Space Renaissance Act (ASRA), which, among other things, would give NASA Administrators a five-year fixed term (currently, the Administrator serves as long as the sitting President wants)....

• The Navy built super-fast ammo to use in futuristic railguns.• But the railguns aren’t on ships yet, so the Navy is adapting the ammo for traditional guns.• It could make destroyers much more lethal.The Navy is adapting a projectile originally developed for railguns to fit guns on existing destroyers and cruisers. The projectile, which tears through through the skies at Mach 3, opens up entirely new possibilities for standard Navy deck guns, including shooting down missiles....

Media Platforms Design TeamIf you’re a fan of the F1, McLaren’s eternally intriguing masterpiece of design and engineering, your anticipation (and concern over the integrity of) the so-called “new F1” is likely probably short of obsessive… and if ever there were big shoes to fill in the so-called hypercar realm, they most certainly belong to McLaren’s 20 year-old three-seater.When an expansively stretched silk lifted to reveal the F1’s spiritual successor earlier today at the 2012 Paris Motor Show, the crowds gathered at the McLaren booth had no shortage of curves, scoops, and carbon fiber contours to lay their eyes on....