Posts

Emulation is a fantastic little trick. With our smartphones and microcomputers that are multiple orders of magnitude faster than the video game consoles of old, we can effortless port the the classics of gaming onto virtual anything. But is it possible to do it backward? Can you play newer games on older hardware? Strangely enough, the answer is actually “yes.” This fantastic and complex project byhardware hacker Tom 7 brings the SNES classic Super Mario World for the SNES and plays it (with some obvious flaws) on an unmodified NES console....

However thrilled you may be to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi, there is no way your plans can live up to seeing the film in space. That’s what the astronauts aboard the ISS are planning to do, as Disney confirmed to space flight reporter Robin Seemangal earlier this week. View full post on TwitterNASA later confirmed. “[I] can confirm the crew will be able to watch it on orbit,” Dan Huot, NASA’s Public Affairs Officer, told Inverse....

A year from now, two stark white aerostats will hover over Washington, D.C., a pair of eyes in the sky to detect incoming threats. After eight years in development, two early user tests, and $2.7 billion, JLENS, the abbreviated title (thankfully) of the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, is ready for deployment.“We’re transitioning from a development program to an actual program where the users are coming in and operating the system,” JLENS program director Doug Burgess said during a press conference Wednesday morning....

You feel yourself rising out of your body…calm and distant, traveling through the darkness towards a light. You feel, for a moment, enlightened, fully awake. Later you come back to the rude reality of consciousness, life. People who undergo near-death experiences often report a similar narrative. And, it turns out, they’re not the only ones. According to a new study from the Imperial College London (ICL), users who take DMT, an intensive psychedelic drug, often seem to experience the same thing....

Media Platforms Design TeamSitting sideways in a kayak, I cast a plug into the inky-black dark of a south Louisiana salt marsh. It’s a half-hour to sunrise, but I’m already a mile out after following five other kayak anglers to a tiny island set deep in the wetlands. Now we’re catching spotted sea trout as fast as we can cast. All around me I hear lures plopping into the water and my fellow anglers whooping and hooting....

Media Platforms Design TeamA few years back, I had an opportunity to go to a Goodyear tire manufacturing facility and spend the day building tires, and it was very illuminating. To start: Natural and gum rubbers, oils, carbon black and other arcane additives they won’t discuss are added to a giant mixing machine. Rubber flows out of the bottom of the machine like giant sheets of crepe paper. On another machine the size of my backyard, steel wire is woven into sheets on a rubber ribbon and cut into chunks on a guillotine 10 feet long....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe newest material used to make artificial muscle can lift more than 100 times more than the meaty stuff you have stuck to your skeleton. It forms a sinewy band that’s flexible, dynamic, and can be reused millions of times. No, we’re not talking about carbon nanotubes, shape-memory metal, or some hyper-strong liquid alloy. This super-material is ordinary fishing line.A team of material scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have just discovered a new way to create powerful artificial muscles—synthetic sinew that forcefully expands and contracts on command—from low-cost, everyday fibers such as fishing line and high-tension sewing thread....

A new helmet under development by the U.S. Army promises to reduce the weight of a soldier’s protective head cover, bringing it down to World War II-levels. The new Advanced Combat Helmet Generation II will be easier on a soldier’s neck muscles than ever before while protecting the wearer from head injuries. The Advanced Combat Helmet Generation II (ACH II) promises up to a 24 percent weight savings over earlier helmets, including the current issue Advanced Combat Helmet (ACH)....

Rocket science, it turns out, is no different from the rest of society. People have divided themselves up into two tribes.When it comes to space launches, there are two basic options for rocket fuel, solid and liquid. Solid rocket fuel is just that: a thick mixture of fuel and oxidizer that is poured into a rocket booster, cooked to a pencil-eraser consistency, and set on fire during launch. The energy is directed through a nozzle, generating enough thrust to get a rocket aloft....

When you doodle, you’re probably drawing something like a square that magically turns into a 3D cube or your boss with devil horns. When Leonardo da Vinci was doodling, he was figuring out some of the fundamental laws of physics.In a new paper, Professor Ian M. Hutchings of the University of Cambridge argues that a sketch from da Vinci’s journals shows that the Renaissance-era polymath was already working out his own ideas about the concepts of friction years earlier than previously thought....

A new unmanned version of the M1 Abrams main battle tank recently underwent testing in Yakima, Washington. The Robotic Complex Breach Concept vehicle, designed to clear minefields and battlefield obstacles ahead of a ground assault, was developed to take humans out of the line of fire for the one of the most dangerous jobs in the military—obstacle breaching and combat engineering.In ground warfare, defending forces typically develop a so-called “countermobility plan” to boost their defenses....

The A-10 Warhog is a 25,000-pound monster with a 57-foot wingspan and two General Electric TF34-GE-100A turbofans to get it up into the sky. This model, built by the folks at FliteTest, isn’t quite the same magnitude of craft, but it’s still pretty impressive that they got it in the sky. A first prototype, this A-10 model is built out of foam board with two counter-rotating props to stand in for each of the two turbofan engines....

As we approach the release of Super Mario Maker, a new program that will let you make and share your own Mario levels (like those achingly hard ones that get passed around on YouTube a lot) here comes this video that reveals how the original designers lovingly laid out the levels of the original Super Mario Brothers: with graph paper.It makes perfect sense. In a game predicated on breaking a series of blocks to obtain treasure and coins, and where everything fits in roughly the same constrained proportions, of course they would view the layout in squares....

Staying in shape is hard, and even the most disciplined people need some helpful gadgets and subscriptions in order to stay motivated and on track and hit their goals. Here are five tools and services that will help you keep your New Year’s fitness resolutions.Resistance Door GymStackBUY NOWTraditional gyms are overrated. Expensive, crowded, and filled with people scrambling for the same equipment, gyms are slowly being replaced by equipment that can give you an equally beneficial workout in the comfort of your own home....

Bitcoin has been in the limelight for years, but in the last few months it has been rapidly increasing in value. A year ago, Bitcoin was worth less than a thousand dollars per coin, but climbed to over $5000 per coin by mid-October. Today the price for a single Bitcoin is hovering just below $12,000.But the price of Bitcoin isn’t the only thing skyrocketing. So is the cost of Bitcoin’s electricity bill....

CalTech researchers have built a new, cheap add-on that turns your smartphone into a 3D scanner, meaning soon your iPhone will help you 3D print any object you come across.The technology, just in its nascent stages, uses light detection and ranging (LIDAR) imaging to scan the surface of an object and record its height, width, and depth. LIDAR works a little like radar but with light, letting the photons bounce back to the imager to build a sense of the object....

Media Platforms Design TeamInnovator: Aydogan Ozcan, University of California, Los AngelesAydogan Ozcan hopes to make microscope lenses obsolete. “Microscopes are analog technology,” says the 31-year-old electrical engineer. Bulky and expensive, they rely on finely polished curved glass to refract and focus light. By hacking a cellphone’s software to perform the same function, Ozcan has brought an invention with Renaissance-era origins into the 21st century. Ozcan’s cellphone microscope focuses LED light on a slide positioned over the camera’s image sensor....

Owner: Josephine Botchway / Location: Dallas, Texas / Found On: Carmax / Purchase Price: $21,000 / Months Owned: 21The first time I saw one I was 19 years old. I knew it was the car I wanted, and I spent nearly a decade dreaming. It’s rare to see one, and every time I did, even as the years went by, I was always impressed.Owner Josephine BotchwayArturo OlmosIt’s really the design. It made me care about what it was....

Media Platforms Design TeamPM first became interested in 9/11 conspiracy theories in the fall of 2004, when a series of advertisements appeared in The New York Times promoting the book Painful Questions, by Eric Hufschmid. The advertisements included a number of claims regarding the physical evidence of the attacks. If true, these claims might have cast doubt on the generally accepted account of 9/11. PM editor-in-chief James B. Meigs asked the magazine’s senior staff to begin a preliminary investigation of these and other claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists in order to decide whether the topic would be appropriate for an article in Popular Mechanics....

The European Space Agency and McGill University are collaborating on a rocket-powered fuel efficiency study.Powdered metal burns more efficiently than other fires and makes power more efficiently than electric batteries.Zero-gravity research touches all sciences, from engineering to biology and brewing.European Space Agency (ESA) researchers are heading a project to study discrete fires in zero gravity. Special craft called sounding rockets, which are comparatively cost-effective to launch, give researchers a chance to study inside zero-gravity environments for a few minutes at a time....