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Owner: David Zipf Location: Lexington, Kentucky Found on: Craigslist Purchase Price: $4,500Years Owned: FourMy father always had weird cars. my Grandad liked weird cars, my great-grandad liked weird cars. It’s in the genetic line. When the Vehicross came out in 1998, I was about ten years old and very impressionable. I used to drive it in the video game Test Drive: Offroad 3, and loved it. Years later, when I started looking to replace my college car, I remembered the Vehicross....

In our five-part Digital Family series, POPULAR MECHANICS asked Jamieson and Peggy Jones and their two children Nina and Ben to turn their home into a real-world, living laboratory, which we would outfit with some of the most innovative high-tech gear. Over the course of 11 months, we have technologically overhauled the Jones’s Connecticut home in three stages. Stage one was computer equipment. Stage two was home entertainment. For our December issue, POPULAR MECHANICS’s contributing editor Rebecca Day worked with the Joneses on home automation....

“I was a hobo,” Willy Howard told me. “So was my wife.” It was almost 30 years ago, and I was flat on my back in a hospital bed in Trenton, New Jersey, sharing my room with this elderly man. I called him Mr. Howard. To everybody else, he was Willy. I was in my early 30s, laid low by a bacterial infection and feeling like I’d been hit by a truck....

The people who built Stonehenge came from Wales. They took the massive rocks that were used to build the mysterious structure from west Wales on a journey with them. That’s what an international team of researchers have discovered through radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.There are still many unknowns regarding Stonehenge, a ring of stones in southwest England that has fascinated the world, including Buzz Aldrin, for centuries. Those unknowns include both how and why the ring was constructed, considering there is little to no evidence of construction and the society which built the ring evidently kept no written records....

The number of electric motorcycle companies has just grown by one. Tarform, based in New York City and Stockholm, Sweden, has announced its first model.The bike, available for pre-order, is powered by a battery with 90 miles of range. Prices start at $18,000 for the standard model, and a Collector’s Edition is also available. The design is a very 2018 type of technological convenience wrapped in vintage materials. The Tarform is electric and made with 3D-printed parts, but the leather seat and bronze ring around the instrument panel are clearly from the brain of a designer who likes old stuff (Taras Kravtchouk has worked for companies like Spotify, Google, and T-Mobile, and also designed mid-century furniture)....

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have shown that the information in DNA can be stored for thousands of years—and up to 2 million years if encased in ice. The Swiss researchers tested their idea by creating DNA strands that converted text from the Archimedes Palimpsest, a 10th century copy of an ancient text, into genetic code. They did so by using nucleotides as a binary system: adenine and cytosine encode for 0, while guanine and thymine become 1s....

Media Platforms Design TeamGPS AND LAPTOPA GPS unit feeds into Cox’s laptop, which uses GIS software to map the ranch’s 27,000 semi-arid acres and pinpoint the more than 100 pasture areas and water sources.LIVESTOCK TAGS AND COLLARSDemonstrating what’s in store for all U.S. livestock, Cox’s 300 head of cattle and 190 sheep are fitted with RFID ear tags for tracking. Select cows sport pricier GPS collars.BOOTS AND HATOstrich-leather Lucchese riding boots can last Cox a decade, while he wears out his everyday work boots in about nine months....

If you were worried that your electronic devices were too secure, you can rest easy knowing that a Hong Kong company is selling a simple USB stick that has the power to instantly destroy almost any hardware system. USBkill.com calls its creation “brutally efficient”.The method of attack is not a virus or other programmable means, but an electrical onslaught—charging and discharging the device’s capacitors via the USB power supply, “instantly and permanently disabl[ing] unprotected hardware”, say the device’s makers in a press release....

While it might not be practical, United Launch Alliance’s new custom rocket-building website is the perfect way to kill a couple of hours.ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and despite being around since 2006 they’re probably most well-known as the answer to a trivia question: who had the monopoly on military rocket launches before SpaceX? The competition forced ULA to restructure in 2014, with CEO Tony Bruno promising a more “agile” company....

Only nine countries are armed with nuclear weapons. Fundamentally different from other weapons, nukes have the ability to kill millions within hours and destroy human civilization. While the United States delegates the ability to use them to one person—the President—the majority of other countries do not, often involving multiple persons who must agree on the need to use them.The United States has 4,018 nuclear weapons ready to use at a moment’s notice....

A car is the best mobile computer ever invented. With plenty of space for data storage, wireless antennas, and multiple processors and LCD screens, driving a new car is like towing a data center with you to the beach or the in-laws’ place. The problem is that all of that connected bliss has been limited to speeds of about 1 MBps or so. While your new phone might get some 4G service as you motor along, most cars themselves can connect only via 3G....

A NASA satellite has spotted a big solar flare aimed directly at the Earth, and that material will likely hit us on Saturday. NOAA forecasts a solar storm starting Saturday morning and continuing into Sunday.Don’t worry, because this storm isn’t harmful. Although the Sun can—and occasionally does—produce damaging solar storms, most solar weather is harmless. The only real effect from the storm this weekend is likely to be a prominent aurora....

Phosphorus is a mineral that is crucial for fertilizers worldwide, increasing food supply. Several scientists warn that humanity might be using it too quickly. There’s debate about how close humanity is to “peak phosphorus,” at which point the world would start to face a global shortage. With great uncertainty about how there is across the globe, it’s hard to say for sure. But people will be using more of it in the future....

Prior-art searchers go through the USPTO\’s nearly ten million patents, looking for anything that can be used against an inventor.Richard BarnesTroy Norred was on his way home for Thanksgiving in 1998 when he had his flash of genius. It was the middle of the night, his wife was driving the family car, and his four children were asleep in the back. He’d just finished his shift at the hospital, where his workweek often exceeded a hundred hours....

You know the energy picture has changed when some of the world’s biggest companies are making news by joining forces on nuclear energy–a sector that’s been, well, radioactive in the United States for a generation. I was at General Electric’s Global Research center in Niskayuna, N.Y., yesterday when Hitachi and General Electric announced they’d be forming an alliance early in 2007 to build and service nuclear power plants around the world....

Media Platforms Design TeamCellular bills are confusing, to be sure, but when something is egregiously wrong, it stands out. That’s what happened when I got the first bill from Cingular for my BlackBerry service. In addition to the service charges and taxes and random excise surcharges and other assorted pork stuffed into my invoice, I found $72 assessed for 87 received SMS text messages, all billed by a Watertown, Mass., merchant named m-Qube, Inc....

Green icebergs are a part of Antarctica’s mythology. Since the 18th century, explorers have noted strange verdant outliers at the bottom of the world. The mystery of green ice has been with science for more than 200 years, but now a team the University of Washington believes they have solved the riddle.Ice usually appears white or blue because water absorbs the other colors of the visible spectrum. Scientists have had their pet theories about green ice, but the study from glaciologist Stephen Warren offers a new theory....

The iMessage system is how Apple devices send text messages between each other. The method blends your phone number with your Apple ID to upgrade your text game with certain perks. The bubbles are blue instead of Android green. You won’t be charged for a text message if you use iMessage. You can send messages not only from an iPhone but also an iPad, Mac laptop—anything signed in with your Apple ID....

September 2020: Popular Mechanics’ special report debunking 9/11 myths first appeared in our March 2005 issue, and was subsequently made into a book. Sen. John McCain, who passed away in 2018, penned the forward to the book edition, calling on Americans to come together and reject the baseless conspiracy theories about the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.You can also get the facts about the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, the planes, and the crash of United Flight 93....

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works recently divulged some information about the SR-72 program to build a successor to the iconic SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. The advanced aircraft development division of Lockheed Martin told Aviation Week that hypersonic technologies, including a combined cycle propulsion system that merges a supersonic jet engine with a rocket engine, have advanced to the point that work on the planned SR-72 can begin in earnest. On paper, the SR-72 will be a strike and reconnaissance aircraft capable of topping Mach 6....