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Nobody will care more about the function and structure of your next house than you. That’s no knock on professional inspectors, but you’re the one living there. Your inspector—and he should be yours, not the agent’s—gives your next home a bill of health, but you can save yourself time, money, and frustration by knowing what pitfalls to look for before you put an offer in.(Find a certified inspector at homeinspector.org.)What to CheckScan the RoofWalk across the street and check the roof for missing, cracked, or curling shingles....

A legal agreement between the U.S. government and a gun rights organization is setting the stage for the latest skirmish in the wars over gun rights and gun control. The agreement allows the group Defense Distributed to host a collection of files online that can be downloaded and, with the help of a 3D printer, can print the necessary parts to build working firearms. Numerous states are now rushing to ban their residents from downloading the files....

flickr / jeffcoveyWith floodwaters continuing to plague the city of Houston after Hurricane Harvey, we’re updating these tips for how to deal with a flooded basement. This post was originally published on October 30, 2012, in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.Everybody’s in a hurry to get things back to normal after a disaster, but when it comes to electrical safety, it pays to step back and carefully evaluate things before moving ahead with any work....

First Assessment Report, 1990The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 to review the best research on climate change, evaluating both the risks and potential policy solutions. The First Assessment Report was released two years later.Surface temperature: The panel predicted in one scenario that, if 1990’s levels of emissions remained constant, the mean global temperature would increase by an average of about 0.3 degrees C per decade. This would be a more rapid increase than the globe had experienced during the past 10,000 years and would result in a rise of 3 degrees C by the end of the 21st century....

Media Platforms Design TeamIt’s one small step for man, another small step for amateur spaceflight. Only one team this past weekend came even close to winning the X-Prize Cup, also known as the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.Armadillo Aerospace, founded by “Doom” lead video-game programmer John Carmack, was the only team of nine to get its craft off the ground, and it narrowly missed a portion of the $1....

Media Platforms Design TeamCigarette Racing Team this week announced that it will be marketing high-end speedboats to military and law enforcement customers. A release from the company says that the their signature boat is “long-known for its commanding visual appeal and underlying sexuality” but neglects to mention its past as the preferred vehicle for drug smugglers who want to outrun law enforcement helicopters and ships. A cigarette boat is a slender, fiberglass vessel that is built for small crews and high speeds....

Eerie nuclear disaster site, Chernobyl, has become an unlikely spawning ground for wolves and other wildlife. According to a recent study in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (as reported by Livescience), some of the Chernobyl born gray wolves are venturing outside the exclusionary zone and into the world at large, perhaps, carrying specks of gene mutations with them.In 1986, a reactor explosion in the nuclear power plant resulted in one of the most devastating nuclear accidents the world had ever seen....

A new study published in the journal Nature reveals some mysterious complexities about our planet’s water cycle—in particular, how much ocean water gets trapped in the earth’s interior via plate tectonics. According to the study, about three times as much as we thought.The earth’s mantle consists of an interlocking puzzle of tectonic plates. When those plates collide and one slides beneath the other, water gets pulled into the subduction zone. Through a combination of heat and pressure, the water chemically transforms into “wet rocks,” a hydrous mineral that gets locked inside the plate and pulled deeper into the earth’s crust....

A new study out of Brown University suggests that Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, could sustain active plate tectonics. The churning uplifting and subduction of surface ice on Europa would suggest a high level of dynamic energy and could possibly carry nutrients down into a subsurface ocean that is thought to envelope the planetary body. The new findings were published yesterday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.The new research builds on previous studies that provide evidence of spreading regions on the surface of Europa similar to mid-ocean ridges on Earth, where new crust is formed from upwelling magma....

Ouch. Welcome to the Big Apple. In a span of two weeks, we had two vehicles of our long-term test fleet in for their 15,000 mile services. And in both cases we had the jobs done in Manhattan—paying New York prices. Surprise: service on our Toyota Highlander cost more than the service on our Infiniti M35. And the Highlander wasn’t washed, nor were we offered a capoccino while talking to the service writer....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhat looks like a flimsy strip of tape sticking out of a circuit board is actually a full-fledged HD camera. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which launched its first $25 single-board computer to the public in 2012, custom-designed the camera unit to work as seamlessly as possible with its single-board computer. The fixed focus lens and Omnivision 5657 sensor can capture 5 megapixel still images and up to 30 frames per second....

Media Platforms Design TeamData resellers should be thrown in jail. Or, at the very least, litigated out of existence. These are companies that track our every click online to build detailed profiles of our age, location, preferences, and proclivities, and they do it all without asking permission or offering payment. And since this industry has proved our personal data is worth money, it has also proved that these people are thieves....

Media Platforms Design TeamWe can now add two more names—Kepler-9b and Kepler-9c—to the list of extrasolar planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft. After analyzing seven months’ worth of observational data, researchers from the Kepler science team have confirmed that two Saturn-size planets, and a possible third, Earth-size planet orbit a sun-like star situated roughly 2200 light years away. The research is described in the journal Science. According to the report, authored by 41 astronomers, Kepler-9b orbits the parent star, named Kepler-9, every 19....

The Leeds Mummy, who was a priest and whose real name was Nesyamun, has spoken after 3,000 years of silence.Researchers used CT scans, 3D models, and an instrument called a Vocal Tract Organ to determine what the ancient orator might’ve sounded like so long ago. Sound is often a thing lost to ancient history. It’s not easy to recreate the songs of a pagan ritual or the clash of a titanic Bronze Age war, but with the help of computerized tomography (CT) , scientists are recreating the sounds buried deep in the past....

Ford has teamed up with McDonald’s to turn waste coffee chaff into biohybrid plastic car parts.Manufacturers have many kinds of sustainable trim materials, but a coffee plastic headlamp housing is the first “real” car part made with these materials.The coffee plastic is also lighter than traditional plastic and requires less energy to make.Ford and Ferrari were racing rivals once upon a time, but today, the Italians might appreciate emerging coffee technology....

Media Platforms Design TeamObama inspects a student-built robot from the FIRST Robotics 2009 competition. Yesterday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just steps from the White House, a 6-foot-tall rectangular robot whirred to life. Neon balls shot from a compressed-air tube past the President. “Uh oh,” President Obama said, taking a step back. “What are they aiming at right now?” The two Oakton High School students demonstrating the robot, which competed in the FIRST Robotics regional game in Virginia this year, explained to the President what the robot was built to do (shoot balls into another robot’s trailer to score points) and that they had just six weeks to build it from a kit of parts....

Physicists have long struggled with a perplexing conundrum: Why do tiny particles such as atoms, photons, and electrons behave in ways that bacteria, bees, and bowling balls do not? In a phenomenon called quantum superposition, for example, individual units (say, of light) exist in two states at once. They are both waves and particles, only settling on one or the other if you specifically test for it. This is not something that will happen to an object like your desk....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn late 2009, a writer, a producer, a director, and three scientists sat in a Los Angeles conference room. They were discussing Marvel’s —a film based on a comic book that was in turn inspired by the Norse god of thunder—about an arrogant warrior who, at the start of the film, violates a truce by attacking the Frost Giants. As the film team described their vision of the fight, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, knew the filmmakers had a problem....

LAS VEGAS — One thing I’ve learned this week has been the importance of having in Internet connection. For a conference on technology where everyone is emphasizing connectivity, this one has had connectivity problems of its own. At the Sands Conference Center on Sunday, there was no free wireless Internet and a distinct shortage of Ethernet connections in the press room. And I couldn’t even get a decent signal with my EVDO card....

Willie Swinney Buster’s Service Center, Hyde Park, Missouri Popular Mechanics: What’s the best piece of advice you have for someone who’s just bought a used car? Willie Swinney: They have to remember: A car is a wet thing. PM: Wet? WS: Think of it like that. Don’t let it get dry. I tell all my customers to check their fluids first. Oil, brakes, transmission. You have to stay wet. You don’t have to check fluids every day, but you might as well, especially in the first days when you get it....