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Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk made a surprise announcement last week: He was thinking about making bricks.The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling project, creates tons of dirt that could be compressed into bricks.Musk says the bricks could be used to build public housing in Los Angeles, where it’s desperately needed. But architects say there are problems with that plan.Last week, amid sweeping talk of futuristic electric trains and $1 tunnel trips underneath Los Angeles, Elon Musk took a moment to talk about something a little more old-fashioned: bricks....

Stars are difficult to study. We can see them, which makes them an easier subject than black holes, but there’s no way we can ever look inside a star to find out what going on in the center. Of course, scientists aren’t the type of people to take no for an answer, so they’ve developed a creative way to peer inside the cores of stars anyway.The method is called asteroseismology, and it involves measuring seismic waves that bounce around inside the sun....

Hopefully you and your home made it through Hurricane Sandy in one piece, without much more inconvenience than losing power. But before you try to get back to your normal routine, now is the time to take a careful look at your house and catch subtle damage such as missing shingles or vents plugged by wind-blown debris.1. Start at the roof and work your way down. If the roof is steep and high, use binoculars to inspect it....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamIn the new sci-fi thriller Sunshine, the sun is dying, and it’s up to a team of scientists to save the day—literally. Dr. Brian Cox, a physicist with CERN—the world’s largest particle physics lab and home to one of the most extreme machines ever built—served as scientific advisor on the film. Recently, he sat down with Popular Mechanics to separate fact from fiction, and tell us just how tough it would be to reignite a fading star....

Media Platforms Design TeamAudi’s latest hot rod sedan boasts the usual stratospheric performance numbers we’ve come to expect from premium in-house tuners (560 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque, 0-60 mph in only 3.7 seconds), but one tiny technical feature reveals the lengths engineers will go to in order to extract that extra bit of oomph from an engine.The twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 in the Audi S7 produces a respectable 420 hp, and to squeeze the extra 140 hp from the mill for RS7 duty, the usual crankshaft/piston/connecting rod/main bearing upgrades were made, along with revised turbocharger hardware and geometry mods which increase boost from ....

The closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, and the planet that orbits it, Proxima b, are just 4.2 light-years away. The cool and faint red dwarf star is part of the Alpha Centauri system along with two larger stars. The planet Proxima b thrilled the astronomy community when it was discovered in August 2016, being not only the closest exoplanet to the solar system, but also terrestrial and the size of Earth....

Roof racks are a great way to add more storage to any vehicle, but finding the right one to fit your needs can be frustrating. Instead of settling for a rack that isn’t perfect, you can build your own. Steel…? When it comes to materials you have two options, steel or aluminum. You might see the occasional wood roof rack, but they are not a great long-term solution as they will weaken over time and are not as durable....

While taking a dip in a local stream after a hike near Hana on the Hawaiian island of Maui, Renee Lusano accidentally captured stunning drone footage of her friend being swept over a waterfall during a flash flood. Lusano and several friends had decided to head out to the location despite the fact that it had rained the past few days, including during their hike. Everything seemed okay when they sat down to take a load off, until a flash flood suddenly hit....

Cannibal ants that were first discovered in a bunker in 2013 now have a boardwalk to freedom.Scientists know wood ants in particular often consume their fellow ants’ corpses.Ants are suspiciously smart, using collective action to find resources like food.“Nuclear cannibal ants” sounds like a horror B-movie—one we’d totally see—but these real-life ants have beaten the odds after being stranded in a retired nuclear weapons bunker in Poland.Since 2013, Polish scientists have studied this unique ant population....

New research could help scientists build a stable rotating detonation engine after decades of theory.Current rocket research mostly focuses on making better, lighter internal combustion engine systems.Detonation is more powerful with less fuel, but combustion is more predictable and stable.A new rotating detonation engine could revolutionize rocket launches—if it can be made stable enough. That’s a big “if,” and one that researchers are hoping to explore using a new mathematical model of the physics at play in unpredictable rotating detonations....

“There will some day appear velocities far greater, of which light or electricity will probably be the mechanical agent.“Those words were written almost 150 years ago in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon—just another moment when science fiction predicts science fact. Although it didn’t have a name at the time, Verne unknowingly described solar sails, a mode of space propulsion that is now a reality.Solar sailing is only one of a few alternative propulsion options, but NASA and other international space agencies have been developing solar sails for years....

Media Platforms Design TeamJust over a year ago,the spacecraft Huygen’s made a 147-minute descent through the dusty atmosphere of Saturn’s mammoth moon Titan—it was the most distant touchdown ever by a human-made spacecraft. The landmark trip provided the first views of the surface of the mysterious moon, which is larger than the planet Mercury. When spliced together and sped up, the images sent back from Huygen’s descent form a four-minute movie of the landing....

Windows Phone is a distant memory for most people. Forever stuck in third place behind iOS and Android, Microsoft was never able to fire up app developers and consumers to mount an effective counterattack against its competitors.It died with a whimper.The Microsoft Surface Duo in action.But today Microsoft mounted a comeback of sorts, introducing the Microsoft Surface Duo, and there are a lot of things going on here. Microsoft’s hardware chief Panos Panay made sure to identify the new phone/tablet wunderkind as specifically a Surface device, inline with its years-long quest to combine all the tech in our lives with gadgets like the Surface Pro 2-in-1s, the Surface Laptop, and the newly-announced Surface Neo....

NASA’s plan to explore Europa has taken a major step forward, with its mission completing a major instrument review. Europa, a moon of Jupiter with a subterranean ocean believed to be 100 kilometers deep, is widely seen as the solar system’s best chance at life. There are few other moons that are believed to have water, such as Jupiter’s Ganymede and Callisto and Saturn’s Enceladus. But the brownish-orange streaks that dot Europa’s surface are thought to be salts, making that water, in fact, salt water....

The ground shook at the University of Nevada last week, registering at a magnitude that topped the Richter scale, but, thankfully, it wasn’t due to a devastating earthquake–it was a lab-made rehearsal. At the university’s test center, a team lead by professor Saiid Saiidi shook the ground for 10 seconds, trying to see whether a 100-ft-long model bridge built with the new earthquake-proof material (the nickel-titanium alloy) could stand the vibrations....

Residents fled when mysterious vapors spread over a square mile of Apex, N.C.>The fire that tore through a hazardous waste facility in Apex, N.C., was so dangerous that the fire department just let it burn. (Photograph by Chris Seward/Raleigh News and Observer/WPN)Media Platforms Design TeamOn the evening of Oct. 5, 2006, Jack Lewis was sprawled on a couch with his bulldog, watching the Tigers beat the Yankees in the playoffs. There’s not much else for the police chief of Apex, N....

North Korea today asserted its right to shoot down U.S. aircraft, even those outside of its airspace. The statement comes after repeated flights by American bombers near North Korean airspace in response to the country’s nuclear weapons and missile tests. North Korea has a history of shooting down American aircraft, but could it shoot down U.S. planes today?Speaking to reporters in New York, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho was quoted in the Washington Post saying, “The whole world should clearly remember it was the U....

Media Platforms Design TeamGHAZALIYA, Iraq, July 17 — I’m squeezed into the gunner hatch in the lead Bradley of a four-vehicle convoy heading north out of Camp Victory with Delta Company, 2-12 Cavalry. Our driver uses thermal-sight detection to seek out IEDs buried in the road as we head for Joint Security Station Thrasher, named after one of the first soldiers to die in this once wealthy Baghdad suburb turned Al Qaeda killing ground turned Army post....

To answer your question about an Ikea-inspired prefabricated home: No, you won’t need an Allen wrench.The production folks at Ideabox already had their share of the Allen wrench–filled assembly, however. The Oregon-based design–build firm is the company behind Aktiv (Swedish for “active”), the Ikea-stocked prefab home that hit the news last week and presumably gave hope to all those people who ever walked into an Ikea showroom and thought, I’ll take it....

A Taiwanese Navy patrol ship accidentally launched a Hsiung Feng III supersonic missile, killing a fisherman and injuring three of his crew. The Hsiung Feng III, which is capable of Mach 2 speeds, tore through the fishing boat but did not immediately destroy the vessel. The boat was forty nautical miles away from the missile, northwest of southern Taiwan’s Zuoying Navy Base and near Penghu Island in the Taiwan Strait. According to Navy Chief of Staff Vice Admiral Mei Chia-shu, the Navy was simulating an attack on Penghu, part of an archipelago of sixty-four islands where over 100,000 people live....