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White Sands Missile Range was established in 1945, and was the site of the world’s first atomic bomb test.The range has seen at least 42,000 missile and rocket launches over the past 75 years.Today, both the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy are testing railgun and laser weaponry at White Sands.This week, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft made the first landing of an American capsule spacecraft at White Sands Missile Range. Located in New Mexico, White Sands is a huge proving ground where the U....

Forget the Raspberry Pi or the Intel Compute Stick. The real ultra-microcomputer is the Michigan Micro Mote (M^3), which measures 1 mm cubed. Ok, it might not be a full-fledged desktop computer. But it can do tiny analytics such as pressure readings, temperatures, and imaging. It could also be implanted for medical diagnosis or used in oil wells to sense deeper reserves of hard-to-get oil. David Blaauw said in a UMich article that this is enough for the mini-machine to satisfy the definition of a computer: “the ability to process that data—meaning process and store it, make decisions about what to do next—and ultimately, the ability to output the data....

As I peer over the short hood of the Jaguar I-Pace at the knee-high water ahead of me, I can’t help but question the sanity of the prescribed route for this test drive. Pushing a $70,000 electric SUV into a riverbed feels like a horrible, potentially catastrophic idea. But the map is clear.To prepare for the crossing, I use the Jaguar’s dashboard-controlled air suspension to raise the vehicle by two inches....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhile your old two-stroke leaf blower is an effective tool for leaf and debris cleanup, there are some downsides to using a gas-powered model. You have to buy pricey fuel, and there are the engine emissions to think about (some California cities have for that reason). The noise might annoy the neighbors or hurt your ears, and a traditional leaf blower can stir up lots of allergens and dust....

A traditional stethoscope.Media Platforms Design TeamStethoscopes are an important medical tool, but good ones are expensive. They’re so expensive that in some countries, like Palestine, it would cost a doctor a month’s salary just to buy one that’s good enough to use. But 3D printing could solve that problem, as The Register reports, and bring the cost of a stethoscope down to just about 30 cents. Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician working in the Gaza strip, has been hard at work helping to develop such a thing as part of the Gila project, an effort to provide alternatives to expensive medical equipment in the form of open-source 3D-printed versions....

Last week’s discovery that Apple is behind LIDAR and camera-equipped vans skulking the streets of San Francisco and Brooklyn has sent the internet into a tizzy. Is the company creating its own driverless car to take on Google? Or is it trying to come up with its own version of Google’s Street View functionality?The answer to the first question is no. Apple has never even showed interest in making autonomous cars, and more importantly, it makes absolutely no business sense for Apple to get into the car manufacturing business....

Unless you’re experiencing the deep, relaxing recline of first class, getting some decent sleep on a plane is challenging. Boeing realizes that, so it came up with a truly bizarre type of seat that lets passengers doze off while leaning forward.The aircraft manufacturer has filed a patent for an “upright sleep support system,” which includes a “face relief aperture” for maximum (dis?)comfort. Basically, a passenger takes a backpack-like cushion from underneath the seat and attaches it to a harness over the seat with adjustable straps, then face-plants into it....

The U.S. Air Force wants you or your aerospace company to come up with the next generation of jet engines—specifically, a lightweight and fuel-efficient turbo-shaft engine that uses 0.55 pounds of fuel per horsepower per hour while producing at least 2.0 horsepower per pound.That’s a lot of requirements to meet, but the payoff is $2 million if the Air Force chooses your design. As Chris Clarke at Planeopnik points out, the winner of the Air Force Prize also gets to keep the rights to their intellectual property....

Airports are constantly renaming their runways—and not because of changing styles or new regulations. The surprising reason is that the magnetic fields of the Earth will not stop shifting. This may seem like no big deal, but it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to continually replace airport signs and repaint runways. So why does this happen? As Wired explains, the magnetic North Pole can move by as much as 40 miles a year....

Johann-Dietrich Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency, is thinking big when it comes to the agency’s future. He wants to go beyond the ISS and see the agency eventually build a base on the moon. In a recent interview with the BBC, Woerner said, “We should look for a smaller spacecraft in low-Earth orbit for microgravity research, and I propose a Moon village on the far side of the Moon....

Media Platforms Design TeamCross-section of beam with plasma filament. (Photo Credit: IPC PAS)Unlike real-world guns with their metal bullets, laser weapons bloodlessly, quietly maim the bad guys in sci-fi franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. But could we ever really use laser bullets? And what would they really look like?Scientists in Poland set out to answer that question by firing short laser pulses into the air. Their new “light projectile” video shows the bullet moving in super-slow-mo, but it actually uses some tricks to recreate its ballistic path....

It’s not unusual to turn to nature for technological innovation, and researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University are looking to a flying mammal to improve our fleet of aircraft: the bat.The wing of a bat is much different from a bird’s. The wings are more flexible, agile, and responsive, curving the air around the creatures to achieve flight and making more rapid changes to their flight patterns....

Media Platforms Design TeamThirty years. That’s how far Audi’s previous V-8 engine dates back, albeit with numerous updates along the way. But in light of ever-tightening emissions and fuel-economy regulations, Audi decided an all-new design was needed. Thus was born the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8, sporting an all-aluminum design with double overhead cams, variable valve timing, direct injection, and two twin-scroll turbochargers nestled in the valley of the V. Output starts at 420 hp, equal to the old 4....

Finding ways to cut weight from your pack is an essential part of the pre-hike process. Lightening the load allows you to move faster in the backcountry and staves off fatigue as you carry your pack over longer distances. Still, it’s hard to know what to leave behind. So if you find that your pack tends to be heavier than you would like, here are some tips to shed the extra pounds....

Lots of bands get to take private jets. Not every band gets to take a private jet flown by its lead singer. Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden has a new set of wheels to ferry his band around the world. It’s a Boeing 747-400, and the band is loading in for a tour that will take them aces high across six continents. Dickinson is currently training to fly the brand new, bigger, better Ed Force One Of course, nothing Iron Maiden related is complete without their mascot Eddie, who is painted on in a few places so you don’t mistake this for a Delta plane....

A video of the Israeli Namer (“Tiger”) infantry fighting vehicle with a pair of important upgrades has popped up on YouTube. The upgrades consist of a new 30-millimeter unmanned turret with a pair retractable anti-tank missiles. The result is the the most heavily armed, and armored infantry carrier in the world. View full post on YoutubeIsrael developed the Namer in the 2000s as a heavy armored personnel carrier designed to carry twelve soldiers—including two crew members—into a battlefield thick with anti-armor weapons, particularly rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and anti-tank guided missiles....

Fiat is returning to America, and I’m glad. The merger of Fiat and Chrysler will elevate the Italian brand in this country and create some great cars. Fiat is known in Europe for small, fun, fuel-efficient vehicles—cars Chrysler just does not build. I own two classic Fiats, a 1937 Topolino coupe, with a tiny 569-cc 13.5-hp four-cylinder, and a 1959 Millecento sedan with an 1100-cc 43-hp engine. In America, that sedan would have been the equivalent of a Ford Fairlane or a low-end Galaxie in terms of its stature in the automotive landscape....

Media Platforms Design TeamAccording to leaked documents allegedly obtained by an industry website, the follow-up EV from beleagured eco-conscious carmaker Fisker will be delayed until mid-2014.Code-named N1/Nina before the vehicle was officially unveiled earlier this year, the Atlantic sedan has been five years in the making and was ballyhooed as a plug-in series hybrid that will boast a considerably lower pricepoint than the six-figure Karma.While we don’t question the curvy styling conveyed in the teaser photos (after all, the Karma ended up with remarkably similar styling to its concept car predecessor), the uncertainty here pertain to its ETA– namely, whether or not its original due-date of 2013 will indeed be postponed until 2014....

Nichelle Nichols has played a space explorer for 50 years as Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, but today, she’ll go up on a real NASA mission. She’ll just be a few dozen miles short of space, and a few light years short of the Enterprise’s typical mission. Nichols is flying up on NASA’s SOFIA observatory. The specially outfitted Boeing 747 carries the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy instrumentation, which makes observations in infrared of planetary atmospheres, distant supernova, comets, and other objects not always easy to see from the ground in the visible spectrum....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominated U.S. president Barack Obama for its Peace Prize, they said the committee “attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” They might be surprised to see some of the lesser-known details of his defense budget—which requests $7 billion, up $624 million from 2010, in funding for weapons research by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration....