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Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: Summer 2011Cost: $13,205 Competitors: Mazda2, Ford Fiesta, Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Nissan Versa, Kia FortePowertrains: 1.6-liter I4, 138 hp, 123 lb-ft., six-speed manual or automatic, front-wheel driveEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 30/40What’s New: With an larger and more powerful Accent, Hyundai defends its econocar turf against a growing list of rivals. It features compact-class interior space in a subcompact shell, powered by the strongest engine in the category thanks to gasoline direct injection (GDI)....

Media Platforms Design TeamOn-Sale Date: Fall 2011Price: $25,000–$35,000 (estimated)Competitors: Ford Fusion Hybrid, Ford Escape Hybrid, Honda CR-V, Volkswagen Jetta Sportwagon TDI, Mazda 5Powertrain: 1.8-liter I4 with electric hybrid, 134 total hp, CVT, front-wheel driveEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 44/42 (estimated)What’s New: This is the first member of the new Prius family unveiled at this year’s North American International Auto Show to hit the market. The Prius V (the “V” is for “versatility”) joins the standard third-generation Prius in the U....

Media Platforms Design TeamMechanical engineer Michael Goldfarb was just awarded a for his work on the Indego Exoskeleton—a wearable robotic suit that helps people with lower-limb paralysis to . In another project, Goldfarb is working on an advanced leg prosthetic for above-knee amputees, which is scheduled to be marketed beginning in 2015. 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awardstand and walk againIn a review article for the journal Science Translational Medicine this week, Goldfarb expounds on the recent advances that are shifting the paradigm for leg prosthetics—as well as what will come next....

Media Platforms Design Team"The form of an arch is quite stable for spanning distance. It’s not so good for building several hundred meters straight into the air," says John Oschendorf of MIT. In order to compensate for the limitations of their aesthetic choice, the architects of the Gateway Arch needed a good deal of reinforced concrete to make it stable at a height of 630 ft. This explains the very tiny cars that carried attendees of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference to the top of the steel structure on Friday evening....

Inspired by a trip to Disney, this Tiki bar is one of many hand-built structures in Steve Guizzo’s Aventureland themed backyard in British Columbia. Starting with plans for a garden shed and using only rusted and weathered materials, he created a theme park worthy design which has entertained his friends and family for several years. “It’s always evolving,” he says, and recently he has added a grill and plumbing to the bar....

Derailleurs are the transmission of your bike. When you shift, they guide the chain to the correct gears. Whether you’re fixing a particular problem with your chain or simply giving the system a tune-up now that spring is here, here’s how to do it. (Our expert: Savannah Quandt, bike mechanic at Scheels in Johnstown, Colorado.) 1. Start by putting your bike on a bike stand to get the rear wheel off the ground....

China is officially launching a giant radio telescope soon, known in English as FAST. FAST, which studies radio waves emanating from space, already discovered two pulsars in 2017, and has found over 100 possible pulsars since.Most recently, FAST has discovered a series of mysterious repeating radio signals known as FRBs. Scientists don’t know where they come from, but they suspect a black hole.The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), a project that the Chinese government first began planning in 2008, is now fully operational....

For nearly sixty years, U.S. Navy fighters have launched from aircraft carrier decks with steam-powered catapults. These catapults were created for carriers because they can safely accelerate large aircraft with big payloads. Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations soon became the norm for the U.S. Navy and a handful of its allies.Now China is looking to get in on the action. Growing evidence suggests that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy is mimicking the U....

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics yesterday, Chinese scientists from Huazhong University of Science and Technology detail the development of a new material that could be used to construct fighter jets capable of thwarting even the most advanced radar technology. Other materials that can absorb microwave radar signals in ultrahigh frequencies (UHF) are too thick to use in fighter jet construction. But lead researcher of the paper, Wenhua Xu, says the new material is almost ten times thinner than anything else available....

DARPA is taking a cue from cyperpunk novels in a project that seeks to improve network security by giving the backend of the Internet a graphic interface.The system could help prevent intrusions by showing if someone is where they shouldn’t be on a network, and displaying it in a way more comprehensible to an outsider rather than just an analyst looking for the digital footprint of hackers. The $125 million per year project is called Plan X....

The Department of Defense’s research and development wing, DARPA, is working on technology to read and write to the human brain. The focus isn’t on mind control but rather machine control, allowing the human brain to directly send instructions to machines. The goal of the process is to streamline thought control of machines to the point where humans could control them with a simple helmet or head-mounted device, making operating such systems easier....

Volcanologists are using powerful supercomputers to forecast volcanic eruptions.Fractures in rock along a volcano’s magma chamber can cause tiny movements along the volcano that indicate that an eruption is imminent. Scientists use GPS and satellites to measure this deformation and can input this data into models that track the probability of whether an eruption will occur.On July 19, 2008, volcanologists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory were stunned to see evidence of an eruption at Okmok Volcano in the remote Aleutian Islands....

Sure, it’s scary to watch the end of the 2019 reboot of Child’s Play. Aubrey Plaza is slowly lifted by the neck via forklift, her young son rushing to rescue her before she’s murdered by a doll that is part toy, part serial killer, and part . . . that dancing cheetah robot that Boston Dynamics would like us to believe is harmless. Imagine having to film it, though: In a horror movie, a stunt like this is not just a complement to the story, but the climax, affecting star ratings, scare factor, and canon-worthiness....

Media Platforms Design TeamFacebook is a near-ubiquitous tool for connecting to friends, old classmates, family, or that guy you met once at a conference, and knowing how to use Facebook is a step in staying in touch with geographically disparate connections. Social-networking sites tend to come and go, but over the years, while the likes of MySpace and Friendster have faded, Facebook has shown its staying power. Where it was once a service run out of a dorm room open only to Harvard students, the social network is now a publicly traded company with nearly a billion users....

Iran’s news agency IRNA has just run footage allegedly taken by an Iranian Revolutionary Guard drone during a flyby of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. In the footage, the drone’s camera zooms in on the carrier’s deck from a few angles before heading on its way. View full post on YoutubeIn Navy Times, a spokesperson for the U.S. Navy confirmed that an Iranian drone had flown past the Harry S....

It’s easy to forget that Pompeii, famed for its destruction from nearby Mount Vesuvius, was actually a vibrant city in ancient Rome. And being a city meant handling the same challenges that cities face in the modern world: In the days and weeks before the explosion, Pompeians used molten iron to fix their roads, finds a new study.The size of the Roman Empire allowed it certain technical advantages; after its conquest of Britain, for example, it had access to the region’s massive iron deposits....

Exoplanets offer a chance to teach scientists about how worlds are born. The recent explosion in exoplanet discovery has led to a wide array of planets, all showing different pathways to formation. Analysis of a new discovery known as Kepler-107c offers something never seen before: a planet comprised mostly of iron, what scientists estimate could be as much as 70 percent.Scientists from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the University of Bristol have been studying the exoplanetary system Kepler-107 through the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in La Palma, Spain, an ideal location for observatories due to its remote island nature and mountainous height....

New Navy photos obtained by the U.S. Naval Institute News show previously unseen damage to the hull and superstructure of the destroyer USS Fitzgerald. The guided missile destroyer collided with the container ship ACX Crystal on the morning of June 17th, 2017.The photos, released by the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan show the Fitzgerald in drydock with sailors inspecting the damage. A large hole in the hull, not seen when the ship was in the water, is shown patched with metal plating and large steel bars securing the plates....

Vitaly Yegorov, a public relations official for a Russian space startup by day and a popular space journalist by night, launched crowdfunding campaign last weed aimed at building a low-cost lunar orbiter. Last time we checked, the effort had already raised more than 1.1 million rubles (~$18,000), far exceeding its goal.This remarkable result was helped by the proclaimed goal of the nascent lunar project: to beam back high-resolution images of historic landers and even footprints left on the dusty lunar surface, and thus debunk once and for all the claim that NASA astronauts never landed on the Moon and that the famous scenes of men saluting the American flag were staged somewhere in Hollywood....

When New Horizons drifted past Pluto in July 2015, it gave us our first glimpse of the icy little world larger than a few pixels. The historic flyby revealed a particularly spectacular heart-shaped region on Pluto’s surface. Pluto’s heart is actually a big glacier named Sputnik Planitia, and it’s full of weird and wonderful features.Perhaps one of the most striking features is a collection of dunes on the glacier’s eastern edge....