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Media Platforms Design TeamThe SolAbode built by Team Alberta, made up of students from four schools in Calgary, reflects the forested, mountainous and sometimes industrial environment of southern Alberta. The exposed wood post-and-beam construction features reclaimed barnwood and spruce timbers from a community forest in British Columbia; part of the facade and the core of the house is covered by rundlestone from Canmore, and another part of the facade is covered by rusted corten steel–a nod to Canada’s oil industry....

Media Platforms Design TeamKeaton Ellis should have gotten all the glory on Saturday when he shattered the speed record on solving a Rubik’s Cube, completing the puzzle in 5.09 seconds and beating the previous record of 5.25 seconds set earlier this year. He could’ve been in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest at solving a Rubik’s Cube that day at the World Cube Association tournament in Maryland. That is, until Lucas Etter, a 14-year-old from Kentucky, shaved off the record to under five seconds, solving the cube in 4....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Hurt Locker (2008)Media Platforms Design TeamWhen the U.S. military began its campaign against, and subsequent occupation of Iraq, no one thought we’d be there seven years later. Now, with an end in sight, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker paints a complex picture of the struggles our soldiers faced. The Hurt Locker was written by journalist Mark Boal, who was embedded with a U.S. explosive ordnance disposal unit in Iraq....

One thing about airplanes—especially ones that fly from aircraft carriers, where they’re battered by saltwater and tough deck landings—is that they need lots of spare parts that are not always on hand. Instead of flying in new parts, though, future Navy ships may be able to make new ones to order. Picutre an intelligent, laser-wielding robot that can analyze the damage and 3D-print the needed titanium alloy parts from an onboard supply of metallic dust....

The idea that we needed an outdoor butcher’s table formed from what felt like necessity.While living overseas in 2005, we bought our first family home, a century-old, single-family house in a former mill town in coastal Rhode Island. We were not due back in the states anytime soon, so tenants would occupy the place while we were away. But our longer plan, to be realized at some time unknown, was to treat the house as a base camp and homestead—a home in which we might raise our family near the sea, and from where we might also grow and catch a portion of our food from habitats we chose to call our own....

Media Platforms Design TeamEarth’s biggest telescope just snapped the best photo ever taken of planets forming around a baby star. The swirling disk of gas and dust looks like a colorful set of concentric rings surrounding a blazing dot hundreds of light-years away.The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a platoon of radio antennas arranged on a desolate Chilean plateau, is the only telescope capable of seeing a system like this in such detail....

Life on Earth is complex and varied, but every living organism on the planet builds its proteins from the same set of 20 amino acids. All proteins in a human body, for example, are made up of some combination of the 20 common amino acids. But how exactly did that happen? Chemists say they might finally have some answers.“How chemistry led to complex life is one of the most fascinating questions that mankind has pondered,” says Luke Leman, Ph....

Don’t Say The M Word Nissan calls it a “mid-model line full redesign of the Quest.” In reality, it’s an attempt to put new energy and appeal in a minivan that fell short of the promise of its unconventional body styling. The Quest’s swoopy body lines and unusual interior styling did not make a big impact with soccer moms, the biggest buyers of these do-everything vehicles. Here’s what Nissan decided to change on the 2007 model:• “Completely redesigned interior,” featuring a new instrument panel....

He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher, is claiming to have successfully used the genetic editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the DNA of two twin baby girls. A researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, He claims that he has given the girls an ability to resist possible future HIV infection.Declining to name the parents of the children or offer any independent verification of the work, there is still skepticism that He, who has degrees from Stanford and Rice, has actually done it....

Scientists have made a mathematical model to explain why spaghetti curls as it cooks.Dry pasta is pretty widely studied, maybe because it’s a nearly universal product.The researchers found that the changes between the saturated outside and dry interior largely explains the curling.Scientists, as they are wont to do, have analyzed the way spaghetti curls as it cooks. Researchers Nathaniel Goldberg and Oliver O’Reilly, of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, used their noodles—we’re so sorry—to put together a mathematical model that accounts for gravity, density, elasticity, and rigidity in cooking “rod-shaped” noodles like spaghetti....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis photo of a supposed FEMA concentration camp in Wyoming is actually a satellite image of a North Korean Forced Labor Camp. PM editor-in-chief James Meigs appeared on Glenn Beck’s FOX news program twice to debunk conspiracy theories regarding supposed “concentration camps” being built by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You can read transcripts from those here and here. But PM’s research went beyond what could fit in the short segments....

French jet maker Dassault just pulled back the curtain on its vision for a sixth-generation fighter jet. The Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, is Dassaut’s first clean sheet fighter design in four decades, following the 1980s-era Rafale. The aircraft, which is being designed in collaboration with European aircraft giant Airbus, will fly for the first time in 2026.The fighter jet mockup was unveiled earlier today at the Paris Air Show....

A 700-foot-long ship sits off the coast of Papua New Guinea. But this beast isn’t even the star of the show—it is the control platform for a trio of even more colossal robots that are about to undertake a daredevil mission to the bottom of the sea.Their target is the called the Solwara 1 seabed, a place that contains silver and copper deposits with more than ten times the concentration you’d find on land....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe New American Home, a show house featured at this week’s International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas, seems to represent two extremes of American building impulses—lots of environmental innovation in an oversize package. The building isn’t just for gawking. It’s one of 14 similar houses for sale with price tags from $1 million to $4.5 million that include many of today’s sustainable technologies in an 8721-sq-ft spread. There is a reclaimed teak foyer table, a salvaged elm office floor, and the chaise lounge’s velvet and the countertops are made from scraps dutifully gathered from the grounds of mills and quarries....

During the Cold War, the CIA gleamed much of its information about new Soviet weapon systems simply by showing up at parades. The Soviet Union regularly held parades through Moscow’s Red Square, displaying new equipment designed to showcase the power of the Soviet state. The Soviets were on to the CIA though, and in at least one famous instance fooled Western intelligence into believing the country had far more nuclear-capable bombers than it really did....

*Don’t get auction fever and agree to pay too much because you’re excited.*Be skeptical. (Duh.) Any deal too good to be true probably is.*Avoid out-of-town opportunities. There should be plenty of nice cars within a few hours’ drive. Getting stranded a couple of states away in a broken-down piece-of-something beater will overshadow any potential bargain you’ve brokered.*Know your vehicle. Look for a vehicle you know and are familiar with. If you’ve always driven domestic pickups, you may not know that German sports car’s peccadilloes, or where to look for the Bondo where they always rust through, or when the seller tells you that it’s only a four-speed, and the vehicle really is a five-speed....

A system of nonlinear equations is harder to solve than you think—and more of a puzzle than a math problem. Puzzles like this require you to look and find the one loose end you can pull to unravel the rest.This kid is awesome.Novelist Celeste Ng has shared a head-scratching system of equations that her 9-year-old son apparently made up over dinner:View full post on TwitterShe’s right—using simultaneous equations does get really complicated, and if you’d like to send me your work for the solution, I’d love to see it....

Aluminum and magnesium are among the “many” metals that melt at lower temperatures under extremely high pressure.The results came from a quantum computer simulation, but model real materials elsewhere in space.Extreme melting, like that of silicon, is a cutting-edge materials science with many potential applications.Scientists at Brown University have found that many metals, including widely used ones like aluminum, have lower melting points under extreme pressure, a behavior called reentrant melting....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamYour spouse has been complaining about the minivan being hard to steer. Time to pick up a bottle of power steering oil on the way home. After you add the fluid, though, you notice a puddle of something under the engine. Within a minute of idling, the puddle is bigger by almost exactly 1 pint of power steering fluid. An odd coincidence, indeed. Checking the pump–which is buried well under the engine–reveals a lot of wet, oily stuff in the vicinity....

You can see the logic behind the idea. The U.S. Department of Defense envisions a kind of portable nuclear reactor that could move with units and provide all the power needs for a remote military base, eliminating the need to transport lots of fuel and maintain long supply lines to keep a base fueled up. But a prominent nuclear organization just weighed in, arguing that such a plan is a colossal mistake....