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JollbotThough it doesn’t have grasshopper legs, the Jollbot can jump like one. The spherical Jollbot, the brainchild of Rhodri Armour from the University of Bath, can roll across rugged terrain and leap over small obstacles that block its path, thanks to its springy and light skeleton. The robot relies on motors winding up and tightening springs to release and launch itself off the ground–to a height of nearly 2 feet. The Jollbot’s maneuverability and durability could make it an interesting rover design for other planets, Armour says....

For more than 30 years, a lasagna-loving tabby has been washing up on the beaches of northwestern France.Novelty telephones in the shape of Garfield the cat, dating from the 1980s, regularly show up as detritus on the shores of Brittany. The orange phones are the bane of litter-decrying French environmentalists and a symbol of careless, throwaway cartoon strip capitalism. But nobody could explain where the Garfield gadgets kept coming from. Nobody but local farmer René Morvan, that is....

The Morandi Bridge in Genoa, Italy, collapsed on Tuesday leaving at least 22 dead. At approximately 11:30 AM local time, a span of the bridge nearly 150 feet high collapsed during a rainstorm during which it was reportedly struck by lightning according to one eyewitness. The debris, including 10 of the roughly 20 vehicles on the bridge at the time, fell onto the industrial zone and railway below. View full post on TwitterAt least four people have been pulled out of the wreckage alive, but local authorities expect death tolls to rise with Italian Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli calling the incident “an immense tragedy....

“The polar ice sheets are undergoing rapid changes. Everybody knows that. What we don’t know is why,” says professor Sivaprasad Gogineni, director of the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, or CReSIS. To find out, glaciologists usually travel to the most inhospitable corners of the world to gather data during small seasonal windows of opportunity. But now CReSIS engineers, based at the University of Kansas, are combining digital radar equipment with unmanned aircraft for the first time to give scientists a much-needed edge....

The McDonnell Douglas MD-88, the final variant of the MD-80 twin-engine single-aisle jet, is the oldest plane in service with any major U.S. airline. Introduced in 1988, pilots call the jet “Mad Dog.” It has “eyebrow windows” that were common when pilots navigated by the stars—but now they tend to let light glares hit pilots right in the eyes. The cockpit has been described as a “cage” with no room to stretch....

The Fender Stratocaster is ubiquitous in the rock guitar world for a reason. The Strat has been an American icon since the 1950s, and it’s the instrument of choice for countless rock n’ roll pioneers and innovators, creating a musical legacy that has defined generations. As music has evolved, Fender has tweaked its designs to keep up with the demand for modern features while taking care to not lose track of its roots....

Media Platforms Design Team NASA has been sending scientific instruments to the brink of space for decades—but this weekend, its balloon program just got an important boost. A 7 million cu-ft balloon reached its 42nd day of continuous flight over Antarctica on Sunday, breaking the record for longest super-pressurized balloon flight. (The balloon continues to fly—today is its 44th day—and is streaming live, here.) The agency isn’t stopping there: This summer, NASA will launch a balloon twice as big from Sweden....

Update 1/20 9:00 p.m. EST: Rocket Lab’s second launch of the Electron rocket successfully deployed the payload of three satellites in orbit. You can rewatch the launch in the video below.Original Post:Rocket Lab, a spaceflight company with assets in the United States and New Zealand, is gearing up for the second launch of its Electron rocket. The company will open a nine-day launch window starting Friday, January 19. Each day the launch window will open at 2:30 p....

The last thing you want from a piece of rebar is for it to snap in half. That is, unless you’re performing a tensile strength test in which case that’s the inevitable result. Here, we see a piece of rebar not only stretched to the limits of what it can stand, but stretched under the watchful eye of a camera that can shoot slow motion footage at speeds of nearly 150,000 frames per second....

Media Platforms Design TeamMedia Platforms Design TeamThe Burlington Bike Path winds along the city’s lakeshore, across old train tracks, across picturesque bridges, and down forested corridors. During a recent road trip to Vermont in PopMech’s 2014 Subaru Forester long-term test car, my girlfriend and I pedaled north out of town on a Saturday afternoon and out to the Colchester Bike Path. Here the trail turns to crushed gravel and the ride turns a bit bumpier, but it continues all the way to the Colchester Causeway, a finger of pathway bounded by beautiful Lake Champlain on both sides....

Off-road enthusiasts know American Expedition Vehicles (AEV), a company known for its rugged off-road and overland vehicle parts and accessories. Now AEV has finally partnered with Chevrolet for a unique new product, the 2019 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 Bison. The off-road truck is another shot across the bow of Ford and its Ranger Raptor, which is on sale in Asia and Europe remains unconfirmed for the U.S. market.The Bison adds ruggedness to the ZR2’s appearance and performance, which were beefy to begin with....

Leatherman LeapMedia Platforms Design TeamThe Leap is quintessentially Leatherman, and by that I mean it’s a tool that embodies superb industrial design and vision. Like all Leatherman multitools, it’s a marvel of compactness. The Leap’s fold-out plier head with wirecutter is accompanied by scissors, a saw, a straight blade and Phillips screwdriver heads, tweezers, and can and bottle openers.It’s the addition of an add-on knife blade that qualifies the Leap as the product of an ingenious design team....

The Warthog A-10 is a badass plane, about that there can be no doubt. And at the heart of that badass plane is the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon, a massive gun the plane itself is essentially built around. But after thousands and thousands of shots, the barrels of a GAU-8 Avenger rotary cannon wear out. When they do, Shane Barefoot can turn them into sweet one-of-a-kind knives. A knife-maker by hobby rather than trade, Barefoot has been dabbling in the art for close to two decades now, though he says the knives he isn’t ashamed to show off have all been made in the past ten or twelve years....

So you have a folding pocket knife that can open and close (at least, you should). Congratulations! Really, that’s probably all you need, but what if there was a knife that could contort itself in even more ways? Friends, there is, and it is a wonder to behold. Designed and made by Russian custom knife company Atroposknife started by knifemaker Konstantin Sazhin, this marvel is dubbed the ‘Fortel,’ and is made out of two cylinders, attached at the center by a knurled metal ring....

Researchers have used machine learning to tentatively confirm an old theory about Shakespeare and a collaborator named John Fletcher.Forensic textual analysis of Shakespeare is popular because of longtime questions and conspiracy theories about what he really wrote.The algorithm identified text differences and tics more granular than what human scholars have already noticed, expanding their evidence.The MIT Technology Review reports that a scientist claims he knows for sure where Shakespeare ends and his long-suspected collaborator begins....

Media Platforms Design TeamFor a modern Hollywood sci-fi flick, the make-or break moment often boils down to an onstage audition in San Diego. That’s where Comic-Con International, the yearly gathering of comic-book lovers, gaming enthusiasts and self-professed science-fiction nerds, takes place each July. It’s also where big movie studios are becoming a larger and larger presence, eager to gather highly influential genre fans’ advance reactions to upcoming films while there is still time for course corrections....

Media Platforms Design Team10. West Philly Hybrid EVXWest Philly Hybrid X (Philadelphia, Pa.) /// 130 mpg (both) /// $25,000 /// EVXTeam.orgCould a bunch of teenagers in an after-school class really build the first mainstream plug-in hybrid not coming out of Detroit? Don’t put it past Simon Hauger’s mechanical engineering students at West Philadelphia High School–they’ve already won the Tour de Sol with an up-converted electric Saturn and the biodiesel Attack convertible pictured above....

Kreg Klamp Table Steel Stand ComboMedia Platforms Design TeamThink of it as the workhorse of worktables. The ultra-adjustable Kreg Klamp Table Steel Stand Combo ($400) has a pair of pivoting clamps and sliding stop blocks that secure any workpiece for cutting, drilling, routing or sanding. In our lab tests, it made typically tricky maneuvers (such as installing pocket screws diagonally through two wood blocks) far easier to execute than a typical workbench....

Building a Safer CockpitMedia Platforms Design TeamEnhanced and synthetic vision systems (inset) blend GPS information with a topographical database to create a moving digital map of unseen terrain and hazards. (Photograph by Sam Chui)Media Platforms Design Team Wreckage of Northwest Flight 255 crash, August 1987. (Photograph by Melanie Stengel/Corbis)Northwest 255 had just taken off from Detroit on Aug. 16, 1987, when it began rocking side to side. The plane clipped a building and caught fire before sliding under a railroad embankment and two highway overpasses (right)....

In March 2018, a helicopter crashed in New York City’s East River, causing the death of five passengers onboard, and today, a similar drama played out amidst NYC’s skyline. A helicopter, operated by Zip Aviation which works with charter providers such as Blade, and Uber-like company for choppers, crashed into the Hudson River—thankfully with no fatalities.View full post on YoutubeThe pilot careened into the Hudson not long after taking off from the West 30th Street heliport at 2:25 p....