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Scientists have used electron microscopy to record atoms bonding for the first time.Electron microscopy blasts tiny items with even tinier electrons to “illuminate” them.Researchers used the electron beam to help their project along, by energizing the rhenium atoms they wanted to bond.Inverse reports that scientists have recorded video of atoms bonding and separating for the very first time. The research team used transmission electron microscopy in collaboration with the SALVE Project at the University of Ulm....

Heavy Chinese subsidies on electric cars are starting to show their benefits. A Chinese company, NIO, has released its first mass-produced model over the weekend, an SUV meant to challenge the Tesla Model X at half the price.A few months ago, China announced that it would eventually want to wean itself off selling new combustible engines. The country has begun working towards this goal through helping electric car companies, offering subsidies as significant as $15,000 per vehicle....

The tiny planet called uo3L91 is so new it doesn’t even have an official catalog name yet, let alone a fancy moniker picked from mythology. But it does offer something important for scientists: more evidence that a ninth planet is lurking in the far reaches of the solar system. This world uo3L91 has an orbit that seems to slingshot it out to some of the most distant reaches of our solar system before swooping back in....

Media Platforms Design TeamI heat with wood, and I always have problems with my chain saw during the coldest months, when I do most of my cutting. the saw gets cranky and doesnt cut well, and the nose sprocket gets loaded with frozen wood chips and doesnt turn. I bought a new saw a couple of years ago, and its just as bad as the old one. What do you suggest?...

Some of the most insidious and ancient threats to animals on Earth are parasites that hijack the bodies and brains of their hosts for their own nefarious ends. Now researchers are starting to gather clues about how this longstanding battle shaped some of the most basic functions of the animal brain. Psychologist Marco Del Giudice, of the University of New Mexico, recently published a comprehensive review of the research into the war between parasites and their hosts....

Russian defense company Kalashnikov is branching out from making guns and weaponry. Now, it’s making cars. During a recent military expo in Moscow, the company unveiled a fully electric car that a spokesperson said is designed to compete with Tesla.The car itself, called the CV-1, is designed to mimic the Soviet-era Izh 2125 “Kombi,” a station wagon released in 1972. Despite its retro appearance, the CV-1 packs a modern electric engine and a 90 kilowatt-hour battery....

The World Maker Faire will be held in New York later this month, and tinkerers from across the globe will descend on this city to exchange ideas and build a variety of awesome gizmos and gadgets. For engineering fanatics, this event is truly a sight to behold.But if you can’t make the trip to New York, fear not. This CAD & 3D Printing eBook Bundle will teach you how to build an endless number of awesome projects from the comfort of your own home, and right now the entire bundle is available for over 85 percent off at just $20....

Scientists have created a way to convert carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas, into formic acid.Formic acid, also found in bee and ant venom, can be used to sustainably power fuel-cell systems.The new type of catalytic reactor was tested and ran continuously for 100 hours.Scientists at Rice University have devised an environmentally friendly way to take carbon dioxide and turn it into liquid fuel. The device uses a catalytic reactor to transform the greenhouse gas into formic acid, an important chemical reagent that is also found in bee and ant venom....

Update, November 9: Lost in the fallout of Donald Trump’s victory last night was the fact that Maine narrowly approved the use of ranked choice voting—a way of counting the votes that, Slate argues, perhaps could have negated the third party spoiler effect and found Hillary Clinton to be the winner. This article from November 1 explains ranked choice and other alternative ways to count votes.One person, one vote, one candidate....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou can’t blame us for not being surprised at the Microsoft’s announcement of Kinect, their new gesture-controlled gaming system at this year’s E3 video game conference. After all, it’s been a long journey for the much-anticipated device, spanning one year, one name change () and (where we honored its inventors last year).you might remember it as “Project Natal"one appearance at PM’s Breakthrough AwardsBut there was something else in the air at Kinect’s E3 launch: nervousness....

Anyone who has attended a music festival or a construction site is familiar with the classic blue portable toilet. They’re also likely familiar with the mysterious blue liquid at the bottom of each. For everyone who has been put off by the whole unpleasant experience, an Oregon-based company has the answer: the Nature Commode, which replaces a chemical mixture with sawdust. The portable toilet industry has been trending towards greener products for years....

Robotic “sensor fish,” as they’re known, have been measuring and collecting data on actual fish for years. Developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), they’re now going to be sold across the world to dams that want to better understand their relationship with the ecosystem they inhabit.First built by the DoE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the sensor fish are 3.5 inches long. That’s around the size of a larger salmon smolt, the adolescent phase of a fish where they begin their first voyage from freshwater streams to the ocean....

The Russian government has confirmed it is still working on a new, nuclear-powered supercarrier, despite a drop in Russian defense spending and the ambitious nature of the project. The carrier would the first non-American “supercarrier” equal to U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. Analysts outside of the Kremlin, however, doubt that the new ship is anything more than a “pipe dream” and suspect it will never get built.The carrier project, known as Project 23000E Shtorm, has been under development for several years....

The results are in on the Russia’s Uran-9 combat drone and its baptism of fire, and it isn’t good. Uran-9, bristling with guns and missiles, may look impressive but it has trouble with the fundamentals not only of armored warfare but warfare by remote control. The remote controlled combat vehicle lost contact with ground control stations, suffered from an unreliable gun and suspension system, and could not target enemies while on the move....

On January 12, a cotton sprout poked out of the lattice of a planter on the far side of the moon. This comes nine days after the Chinese lander, the Chang’e 4, made history with the first soft landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, one of the largest known impact craters in the solar system. The lander’s rover, dubbed Jade Rabbit 2, started watering the seeds on January 3 to see whether the plant could survive in a low-gravity, high-radiation environment....

Consider a canoe: the aluminum frame blistering in the sun, its young passengers careful not to stand for fear of capsizing, sweating from the effort of paddling, dismayed when, after a swim, they find their vessel has floated 50 meters downstream. Then consider The Boy Mechanic Makes Toys canoe: shaded by a simple awning, stabilized by crafty pontoons, rooted by a shrewd anchor and power-boosted by a rudimentary motor. This new book takes play time—indoors and out, for young and old—from the hum-drum of store-bought amusements to the thrill of home-spun invention, all with the honest nostalgia of diagrams and explanations reproduced from original Popular Mechanics pages circa the early 1900s....

It is one of the most poetic, ingenious terms in all of robotics: the uncanny valley. Even without any explanation, it’s evocative. Dive deeper into the theory, and it gets better. In a 1970 paper in the journal Energy, roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed that a robot that’s too human-like can veer into unsettling territory, tripping the same psychological alarms associated with a dead or unhealthy human. “This,” writes Mori, “is the Uncanny Valley....

What can a 2,500-year-old fungus teach us about genetics? Plenty, according to Johann Bruhn, a forest health specialist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who has been collecting samples from a specimen spanning nearly 200 acres in a forest of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The motivation for the study goes back 35 years, when Bruhn first planted some red pines that began to die prematurely. A virulent species of parasitic honey mushroom, Armillaria gallica, appeared to be the culprit....

Two years ago, a team of scientists used an incredibly advanced telescope to observe two neutron stars in a distant galaxy colliding together in a super explosion. The force of that explosion reached all the way to our galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away. But according to new research, we didn’t actually have to look hundreds of millions of light-years away to find colliding neutron stars. That’s because one such collision happened right in our own backyard a long time ago....

After her husband passed away, an older woman brought a bunch of his old electronics to a recycling facility. She had no idea that she was throwing away $200,000 worth of computing history. NBC Bay Area reports that the unknown woman dropped off a vintage Apple I computer at CleanBayArea in Milpitas, California, and didn’t want to give her contact information or even a tax receipt. And the company didn’t know what it had until a few weeks later when they were going through her boxes....