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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a network of sensors across the world to monitor weather patterns, temperatures, ocean currents, and more. Part of this network is a collection of ocean buoys spread throughout the Atlantic and Pacific, and these buoys are reaching the end of their life.To replace them, NOAA is turning to a very different solution: autonomous sailboat drones, built by California startup Saildrone. These drones have just completed a test voyage across the Pacific Ocean, sailing for 8 months and collecting wind and temperature data....

Back in March, a Tesla Model X crashed into a highway barrier while reportedly operating on Autopilot, killing the driver of the vehicle. An independent review of the incident by the National Transportation Safety Board has reached a preliminary conclusion, and found that the Tesla’s Autopilot may have actually caused the crash.According to the report, the Tesla was following another car on the highway with the adaptive cruise control setting on....

Unlike technology, sometimes science fiction improves with age. Double Take is Popular Mechanics’ look back at sci-fi classics that have something prescient to say about today.Four years ago, when Alex Garland’s instant sci-fi classic Ex Machina debuted, it dropped into a different era—the time before Cambridge Analytica, before Russian election trolling, before the catastrophic Equifax leak and too many others like it. The world wasn’t naive, exactly. We’d spent decades knowing our personal data could be hacked, leaked, and abused by nefarious parties, of course....

In 2013, the European Space Agency launched the Gaia satellite with the ambitious goal of mapping every star in our galaxy. Recently, scientists have used the data collected by Gaia to try and find stars in our galaxy that were on their way out of it. Instead, they’ve discovered more than a dozen stars that appear to have originated in galaxies other than our own. Gaia is a unique satellite because it’s designed to not only watch other stars, but also measure the distances to all of them and determine which direction and how fast they’re moving....

Kids today. They just don’t know how good they’ve got it, with their YouTubes and their YikYaks and whatever the hell 4G is. Back in the good old days, us people roughly in their early 30s on up had to contend with slow Internet over a phone line in browsers ready to crash at any moment. But you can bring up those good, bad old days at OldWeb.Today, which lets you simulate what it was like to load a website at any point in time on any browser....

It’s a weird time for microbes, a sort of interspecies interregnum in which humans have realized that microbes hold way more power than we previously thought but haven’t yet wrested any of it back for ourselves. Over the past several years, studies have implicated the community of bacteria in the human gut in pretty much every terrifying malady that cannot currently be reliably prevented or cured (see: autism, cancer, neurodegenerative disease)....

Imagine how surreal it must be to be doing a little cleaning up, and come across a strange dusty ball of liquid metal in your home. Jeff Kaufman doesn’t have to imagine. It happened to him just this summer. In a post on his personal blog, Kaufman recalls his initial reaction to finding the poisonous metal just chilling out in his home. On July 1st I discovered a puddle of liquid mercury in our house....

The U.S. Department of Defense is considering using virtual reality technology to train military personnel who might someday come up against dirty bombs and other radioactive weapons. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which typically concerns itself with responding to weapons of mass destruction, wants to use VR as a training tool to teach soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen how to respond to “radiological threats,” from dirty bombs to nuclear weapons.The DTRA posted a solicitation to industry on the FedBizOpps web site....

View full post on TwitterTwo U.S. Navy destroyers that were crippled in separate collisions this summer arrived in Tokyo Bay this week. Amateur photographers took pictures of the two warships, out of the water and resting on heavy lift ships less than a half mile from one another. The startling sight is a stark reminder of the collisions the forward-deployed U.S. 7th Fleet endured this year.The USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald, both Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, arrived in Tokyo Bay en route to nearby Yokosuka, home of the U....

The Acting Secretary of the U.S. Navy believes the U.S. Navy can hit its goal of 355 ships.Reaching the goal will be difficult, and it probably won’t happen by the original target date of 2030.The Navy could eventually reach the magic 355 number, but there are a number of factors at play, any one of which could throw a spanner in the works.The Navy thinks the sea service can hit President Donald Trump’s target goal of 355 ships—but it won’t be easy....

Shooting stars streak through the night sky above Florida’s Space Coast as the Perseid meteor shower approaches its peak. Mars glows red in the predawn hours, hovering over the crowds of onlookers. But the people gathered here at Kennedy Space Center have not come to view these astronomical phenomena. They have come to witness one of the largest rockets in the world send a spacecraft to the sun.On the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the 30-story-tall Delta IV Heavy is already loaded with 460,000 gallons of fuel....

Media Platforms Design TeamAt yesterday’s Breakthrough Awards, PM gave a Mechanical Lifetime Achievement Award to the plucky Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. But we also wanted to explore the big open questions about the future of manned and unmanned spaceflight. So PM Senior News Editor Joe Pappalardo sat down with three major players in the aerospace industry: John Callas from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the Mars rover program; Steve Gorevan, chairman of Honeybee Robotics, which builds components for NASA; and Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who is now senior engineer at SpaceX....

Media Platforms Design TeamLee Richards lives with his wife in a 1957 brick rancher in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter homes in Charlottesville, Va., where he works as the city’s commissioner of revenue. In the past decade, he decided to become a more self-sufficient consumer of energy. He commutes to work on foot and by bus. He powers his home with 18 solar panels bolted to his roof and sells the excess electricity back to the grid....

Only a few hours after the world beheld the launch of Falcon Heavy, Elon Musk had already decided the monster rocket was too small. “I finished looking at the side boosters, and they’re pretty big—you know, 16 stories tall, 60-foot leg span," Musk said at a press conference following the launch. “But really we need to be way bigger than that.““Now that we’re almost done with Falcon… most of our engineering resources will go toward BFR....

A 12-year old girl from Massachusetts has developed a water-cleaning system that has attracted attention from major tech companies.Anna Du from Andover loves the water and regularly goes to the Boston Harbor. It was there that inspiration struck.“One day when I was at Boston Harbor, I noticed there was a lot of plastics on the sand, I tried picking some up, but there seemed to be so many more, and it just seemed impossible to clean it all up,” she tells local media....

Media Platforms Design TeamGood man. You don’t hear people say that much anymore. On the rare occasion when they do, it’s as if they are deliberately being old-fashioned. It seems we can’t speak from the heart the way we once did.Which brings me to Louis Peterson, a man for whom that was a particularly apt description. An industrial engineer, Navy man, and World War II veteran, he was also a self-taught carpenter, and a fine one at that....

Waterworld. Ishtar. Gigli. Cats. Hollywood history is littered with multi-million dollar flops like these, and countless others, that killed careers, sank studios, and drove (admittedly tiny) audiences away disgusted.On Wednesday, Warner Brothers, the studio that released bombs last year called The Kitchen and The Goldfinch that you’ve never heard of for a reason, announced a partnership with a Los Angeles-based company called Cinelytic that will ideally prevent such bombs from ever carrying the iconic WB logo....

Media Platforms Design TeamFrank Weber is the Global Electric Vehicle Development Executive for General Motors. Here he discusses the Chevy Volt and the future of transportation. This post was written for Gas 2.0 and reposted at the GM FastLane Blog. A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at EVS 24 in Norway about extended-range electric vehicles (E-REVs). Attendees and presenters were some of the brightest minds from around the world working to make electric vehicles an everyday reality, but frankly, I sensed many of those minds think electric vehicle development is better suited to small, entrepreneurial companies, some with little or no automotive experience....

Certain technologies become so integrated into our lives that we become dependent upon them almost to a fault. Cellphones and GPS have emboldened people to the point where someone can simply walk out the door to meet a friend with nothing more than a rough idea of where they’re going. Communication and navigation technology will figure it out for them en route.We’ve become so used to GPS navigation that we become frustrated at the point where it abandons us—the moment we walk indoors....

Media Platforms Design TeamBathed in hot pink and purple lighting, T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced during CES 2014 that T-Mobile will “force” the industry to change by paying for customers’ early termination fees (ETFs) who switch to the carrier. Fresh off of crashing AT&T’s Macklemore-fueled CES party, Legere laid out the plan stating that T-Mobile will pay up to $650 per line for up to five different lines, covering both single plans and family plans....