Posts

Media Platforms Design TeamSolid-state lighting has long been touted as the next generation of efficient bulbs, but technical challenges have so far limited product offerings to 40-watt equivalents—and consumers haven’t exactly rushed shelves to purchase bulbs to read by. Developing light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that generate full-spectrum color—white light—is particularly difficult. Another hurdle has been finding a way to efficiently manage LED temperature: If the bulb gets too hot, it fails. Now, the first LED bulbs to rival the 60-watt, screw-in incandescent are finally poised to hit the market....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe “Biopan” contains the Life Marker Chip (LMC) and opens up (as shown at right) to fully expose its contents to outer space once in orbit; it’s mounted on the outside of the Foton-M3 spaceship, which blasted off last week aboard the Soyuz rocket (pictured at left). (Photograph Courtesy of the European Space Agency)Of the 40 experiments launched into orbit from a base in Kazakhstan on Sept. 14, by far the most intriguing is a modified kind of pregnancy test designed to scout for extraterrestrial life....

The ARA San Juan, an Argentinian submarine that went missing one year ago has been found. The submarine was discovered in an undersea ravine more than 3,000 feet deep by the Seabed Constructor, a ship hired to locate the lost sub. The prevailing theory is the submarine was the victim of a fire that damaged its batteries, leading to an underwater explosion that eventually sank the sub.Image of the San Juan’s six torpedo tubes as discovered by the Ocean Infinity....

Based on a new report from the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, metamorphic manufacturing, also known as robotic blacksmithing, will represent the third wave of digital manufacturing. The process is still under production.That means robotic blacksmithing could take over computer numerical control (CNC) machining and even additive manufacturing as the next wave of digital production.Glenn Daehn, lead for the study and a professor at Ohio State University, says this process is less time-consuming and less expensive than other types of digital manufacturing....

Supersonic jets may be able to break the speed of sound, but they can’t seem to shake a sonic boom when they do it. But now, NASA, applying the “Aeronautics” in its name, is developing a plane that can quietly sneak past the sound barrier, inching supersonic passenger flights back into reality. At this point, most of the experiments are dealing with ways to reduce the noise level overall. That involves aeronautics testing of certain design shapes, as well as doing sonic testing to find roughly where the effects of supersonic flight bother human passengers....

Media Platforms Design TeamVideo games that employ virtual reality and motion sensors have been shown to recover function in their debilitated limbs. Now a study published in Neural Regeneration Research showed that even a simple game that millions of people have played on their iPhone or iPad can help stroke patients’ brains.help stroke victimsThe small study comprised of 18 healthy volunteers between 49 and 72 years old, plus five patients who had recently suffered a stroke....

Media Platforms Design TeamRoyal Dutch Shell passed another obstacle today on the way to drilling for oil in the Beaufort Sea, northeast of Barrow, Alaska, this summer. The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement approved the company’s oil spill response plan (OSRP), which outlines the procedures Shell would use if an accident took place during drilling. In February, the BSEE approved a similar Shell plan for drilling in the Chukchi Sea, off the northwestern tip of Alaska....

It’s the key material found in superglue and airplane wings. It once coated the Apollo 8 capsule for reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. And it currently insulates the electronics in your smartphone. Thermosets are the unsung heroes of materials science.Cured thermosets are heat-resistant polymers that are often more rigid than bone and virtually impossible to break down. In your car or in your computer, an indestructible component isn’t so bad. But on the manufacturing line, thermosets represent an engineer’s point of no return—once you coat something in thermoset, you cannot make changes without starting over from scratch....

A new composite that blends titanium and foam has the durability of magnesium with the weight of a sponge. It can withstand forces of 25,000 pounds per square inch, and has a higher temperature threshold than other lightweight materials thanks to the presence of metals. Oh, and it floats on water.The new material is syntactic, meaning that a series of air bubbles are inserted in production to make it even lighter without sacrificing structural integrity....

Hearing the phrase “smart knob” might make you feel like the internet of things has finally gone too far. But honestly, this sounds pretty cool. Called simply the Meld, it’s designed to let you adjust your stovetop to just the right temperature from beyond the kitchen by connecting to your smartphone. Meld is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.The knob includes a thermometer that clips to your pot along with the battery-powered Meld unit....

The U.S. Army is pouring a lot of time and effort into unmanned systems.Unmanned ground is more difficult than unmanned air. The research does not involve autonomous use of weapons, only mobility. The U.S. Army has developed a standard set of hardware and software that, once installed in a human-vehicle, allows the vehicle to be operated remotely or even in a semi-autonomous fashion. The Army’s goal is unmanned fighting vehicles that can operate along manned fighting vehicles, and convoys of unmanned vehicles that can travel routes autonomously or following the lead of a human driver....

U.S. paratroopers with the 82nd Airborne Division having started carrying a new item on their training jumps. According to the Fayetteville Observer, soldiers with the 1st Brigade Combat Team have been taking test jumps this month with the FIM-92 Stinger, a man-portable surface-to-air missile. Raytheon makes the 5-foot-long, 22-lb. Stinger, which has been in service with dozens of countries since 1981. Stingers showed up during the ’80s in the Falklands War and the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan....

Gallium is a metal with an extremely low melting point–about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. The shiny metal, which isn’t found by itself in nature, can be melted just by placing it in your hand. But gallium has even more interesting properties. In this video from LockPickingLawyer, we see how it reacts with aluminum, creating an alloy that destroys aluminum’s integrity. This is very useful if you want to, say, crush an aluminum lock with your bare hands....

At the Las Vegas international airport, there’s an terminal where planes take off and land all day. The parking lot for this terminal fills up with hundreds of cars, which leave by the end of the day. But no one knows who runs the Gold Coast Terminal, or who boards those planes. We do know what the airline is called–JANET–though we don’t know what it stands for. It’s suggested that the acronym means Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation, but it’s often referred to by secret aviation fans as Just Another Non-Existent Terminal....

Last week, Lockheed Martin proposed building a hybrid F-22 Raptor/F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for Japan. The jet, possibly to be known as F-3, would be the most advanced jet fighter in the world. Why Japan wants the best fighter it can possibly afford, and why such a high-tech nation was forced to go to an American company, is a story that traces back to World War II.At the end of the Second World War, Japan lay in ruins....

Try measuring the coastline of the United States, and it’s almost guaranteed you’ll find a different answer than anyone before you. Even official sources like the Congressional Research Institute, the CIA, and NOAA came up with wildly different answers (29,093 miles, 19,924 miles, and 95,471 miles, respectively). How could their measurements be so different? Meet the Coastline Paradox. As explained in this video from RealLifeLore, the Coastline Paradox has been vexing researchers and cartographers since its discovery by mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson in 1951....

Media Platforms Design TeamDriver-Monitoring SystemInstead of just watching for hazards on the road, Toyota’s latest precrash safety system is turning its attention to the most likely cause of an accident: you. This spring, Lexus models in Japan will be available with a camera mounted on the steering column that uses facial-recognition software to determine whether you’re watching the road. If not, and the front-mounted radar sees you’re getting too close to something, it will flash a light, then beep and tap the brakes if you persist in rubbernecking....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe past 30 years of video technology have democratized moviemaking—maybe too much. Anyone can now shoot high-definition video on a smartphone and instantly upload it to YouTube for the entire world to see. That type of uncut cinema vert style makes for good cat-playing-piano clips (if there is such a thing), but the videos that are truly important to you deserve more polish. The best way to get great results in the editing bay is to shoot quality footage in the first place, with a strong sense of the tale you want your video to tell....

Media Platforms Design Team(Photograph by Robert Mora/Getty Images) If there was ever a man who could ace the Popular Mechanics DIY quiz and perfect each of our “100 Skills Every Man Should Know,” it’d be MacGyver. And while television’s master of the clever homemade fix may not actually be a real man, actor Richard Dean Anderson still has plenty of his character in him to this day. At the launch event for Geek Squad’s Black Tie Protection service this week, we chatted with the man behind the Mac—about building his own house, giving ammunition to the MythBusters and why he absolutely hates instruction manuals....

Bread is life, but according to new research, it might be even more than that. A group of archeologists in northeastern Jordan have found the oldest bread in the world, and their findings show that this bread predates the invention of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. According to this discovery, the hunt for better bread ingredients may have triggered the agricultural revolution, which would make bread largely responsible for all of civilization as we know it....