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Did most Stone Age people have all their fingers? According to the paintings they left behind, many of them did not. Plenty of cave paintings depict hands with missing fingers, and a trio of researchers believes they know why: those people had their fingers deliberately amputated. Right now it’s still a guess, but the researchers believe future evidence will help illuminate a strange and fascinating practice from our distant ancestors.Stone Age people are some of the most fascinating, from an anthropological perspective....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn my dreams of spaceflight, years after my final mission, I usually find myself in the middle of a spacewalk. I’m free-falling, weightless in a hard vacuum, only to discover I’ve left my helmet or gloves behind. How did that happen? Complications ensue.This week my nightmares took on a new and gut-wrenching immediacy, courtesy of the space thriller Gravity. I think the film scores on two major facets of spaceflight: it comes very close to replicating the stark, jaw-dropping beauty of Earth set amid the cosmos, and it illuminates how human existence there must constantly battle an alien, relentlessly hostile physical environment....

Currently, when Canada wants to launch rockets, they have to ship them all the way down to a spaceport in Virginia first. But by the end of the year, Canada should have a much simpler launch process when they build their own spaceport.Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian space transport company, has announced they will start building a spaceport in the town of Canso, on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. The company will begin construction sometime next year, and the spaceport is expected to be completed in 2022....

Cape Town is running out of water. It’s difficult to say exactly when the city will hit ‘Day Zero,’ the moment when the water runs out for good, but most experts predict it could happen as soon as next year. When that happens, thousands of people could lose access to clean water. Such a scenario would be disastrous to say the least.The looming disaster has prompted a series of increasingly desperate solutions to delay the problem....

Media Platforms Design TeamChevy uses a one-liter diesel engine to power this “rolling military helmet,” but that’s not the prime attraction in the Groove concept. The upright windshield and bulging fender flares contribute to an aggressive appearance that’s reminiscent of a retro hot rod. This mini-size vehicle was designed in Korea at a GM design center, and the overall theme is aimed to avoid the “weak, insecure” appearance of a tiny vehicle and offer a feeling of big-vehicle safety....

Masking tape is no doubt a useful and versatile item to keep around the house. You can use it to block off or “mask” areas when you’re painting, to put labels on boxes or your stapler, and you can even use it to hang up posters without damaging them or the wall. What more could you want?Well, how about masking tape that’s not only useful, but great to look at? Trying to appeal to computer nerds everywhere, a Japanese blog is selling masking tape that looks like a long roll of circuitry, and boy is it gorgeous....

Back in October, NASA engineers finally repaired the Curiosity rover’s drill, after it had been damaged for over a year. With the drill working, NASA has returned to sampling Mars rocks with it. Recently, however, the team ran into another obstacle: The rocks are too hard for the drill to penetrate.The Curiosity team picked out a rock for drilling a week ago, and called that rock Voyageurs. Over the weekend, the plan was to use Curiosity’s drill to dig into the rock and collect some samples that scientists could use to learn about the planet’s composition....

Electric cars are here and seemingly about to break into the mainstream, but what about electric boats? One company in Norway is working to build electric ferries that run entirely on battery power, and the country wants two-thirds of all ferries to be electric by 2030.Norwegian company Havyard Group ASA is meeting demand for more renewable transportation in the northern European countries. Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands in particular are demanding increased production of electric ferries, and Havyard hopes to fill those orders....

The Cold War gave rise to a host of exotic weapons never fired, but none were quite as strange–and potentially revolutionary—as Heckler & Koch’s G11. Affectionately referred to as “Kraut Space Magic” in reference to its over-engineered-yet-brilliant West German design, the G11 does look like it belongs in the hands of some space trooper rather than a typical infantryman. But the true “magic” of the G11 is much more than meets the eye, because inside that boxy frame was a gun unlike any ever made....

With photoshopped pictures and deepfakes running rampant on social media, there’s never been a better time to learn how to verify which images are real and which ones are bogus. Join Pop Mech Pro and get exclusive answers to your biggest tech questions.In most cases, all you need to do is conduct a quick reverse image search, which should only take a few seconds and a couple of keystrokes. Google has had reverse image search capability since 2011, but it’s not always easy to navigate—especially if you’re accessing the tool from your phone....

The Department of Energy has refused to enforce suggested light bulb efficiency standards.Incandescent bulbs are the hottest, shortest-lived, and least energy-efficient bulbs.U.S. households will likely continue to use energy-efficient bulbs anyway.President Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE) has decided not to enforce raised standards for traditional incandescent light bulbs. Light bulbs may not seem like the largest issue in the world, but they’re a canary in the coal mine of energy policy; switching to LED bulbs is an extremely simple, accessible, money-saving change that almost everyone can make easily....

If NASA wants to go back to the moon, it’ll need some money. Over a billion dollars of money, in fact. In a recent budget request to Congress, NASA laid out its vision for the future, along with what that vision will cost.Centered in the budget proposal are NASA’s aims for space exploration over the next decade. The agency has long had ambitions to return to the lunar surface, even beginning plans to build a space station in orbit of the moon to make it easier....

Now that real-time facial recognition is here and powerful, it was only a matter of time before we got “real-time facial reenactment.” As this video explains, the implications are fascinating, and perhaps a little scary.Six researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University have developed software that transfers one person’s on-camera facial expressions onto the face of another person. It’s photorealistic, accounts for movement and changes in lighting, and isn’t thrown off by differences in physique....

Media Platforms Design TeamWestlake Village, Calif.—Born from a desire to satiate appetites for a compact crossover, the Juke was conceived as a sportier alternative to the Nissan Rogue. The larger, family-friendly Rogue has exceeded sales expectations in the U.S. market, which begs the question: can the Juke carve a sizeable niche for itself stateside? To find out, we sampled one of the two pre-production examples in America well in advance of its October release....

Watching a meteor shower is a pretty spectacular, humbling experience that beautifully illustrates how small we are in the expanse of the universe. But catching a good meteor shower is hard. They only come a few times a year, and often at odd hours in the early morning.What if you could get a meteor shower right overhead, on demand whenever you want it? That’s the pitch from Japanese company Astro Live Experiences, which is placing satellites in orbit to produce artificial meteor showers....

Media Platforms Design TeamDrained for maintenance, the Miraflores Locks remain impressive after 93 years of operation. A recently approved expansion plan will double canal capacity by 2015.In late August, traffic jams at the Atlantic and Pacific entrances to the Panama Canal impeded a healthy chunk of the world’s maritime commerce. Each day, on average, more than 40 massive ships, many of them three times as long as a football field and piled high with cargo, rode at anchor in impromptu fleets that stretched across the horizon....

We’ve already rocked as hard as Popular Mechanics geeks can rock at the E3 conference last month, but when it comes right down to it, there’s only one sensible way to test the most exciting and innovative video game of the year this side of Halo 3. If Rock Band is air guitar meets Guitar Hero meets karaoke, with meters for vocal pitch, guitar notes and drum strokes digitally rigged up to the master tracks of classic rock, the game should already have one kind of expert on hand before its holiday release: the cover band....

There is a long history of militaries using bicycles in warfare—from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps that conducted long-distance tests in the 1890s to the Swiss Army’s Bicycle Regiment that continued infantry drills until 2001—but nothing was quite as daring as the folding bikes that were made specifically for British paratroopers in World War II. It’s hard to even imagine gripping the 23-and-a-half-pound contraption with wooden pedals and preparing to leap out of a plane into a war zone in the night....

The devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 inspired numerous innovations meant to prevent future disasters. That includes one man’s dream of a floating car.Hideo Tsurumaki, a former Toyota employee, witnessed people trying to escape the tidal onslaught in their cars only to be swept away in the destruction. He later founded Fomm Corp., which aims to build small, waterproof cars that can actually float. He sees them as not just potential ways to get around, but as safety investments....

The onX hunting app is a must-have for navigating the backcountry. The smartphone-based mapping system works in all 50 states, offers aerial topographical views, and tracks you whether or not you’re within the range of your cell network (thanks to your phone’s built-in GPS, which it overlays over saved maps). And crucially for hunters, onX’s layered maps let you know right away whether you’re on public or private land.This mountain of geographic data led the people at onX to a question: Just how accessible are our nation’s public lands?...