Technology
It’s 2015: Here’s your hoverboard
Now, the 31-year-old Duru and his company, Omni Hoverboards, are working on a secret, next-generation version of the device. Watch as he takes CBC’s Reg Sherren into the workshop where he is building it, and then to a Quebec lake where he puts the new prototype to the test for the first time.
Uh, Did Astronomers Just Discover Alien Megastructures Near a Distant Star?
Enter Jason Wright, the Penn State University astronomer suggesting the irregular reading might be a product of orbital megastructures, essentially massive alien satellites. Megastructures, Wright says, would be “very large” — and likely made of very thin materials to offset the constraints imposed by launching and controlling big objects. Wright suggestion was, in a sense, Occam’s Razor reasoning: Astronomical explanations couldn’t account for brightness dropping by a staggering 22 percent. To give a sense of just how extreme that number is, a planet the size of Jupiter would block about 1 percent of light — and planets don’t get much bigger than that.
The return of the TV Antenna
The number of homes in the U.S. that get network TV over the air and don’t have cable or satellite service has gone up about 17 percent in the last five years, according to the media research company Nielsen.
Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG tag
I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:
IMG
Required argument is SRC=”url”.
This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.
2015 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards
What constitutes a breakthrough? It’s more than just doing something no one else has done before. (If that were the case we’d have to honor anyone who has considered voting for Trump.) It’s doing something that no one else would think feasible. Like perfecting the robotic hand by building something that isn’t a hand at all. The people in the next twenty-one pages have propelled their industries—and our society—to new possibility. In ways that you may not immediately notice, they’ve improved your life. They’ve made Breakthroughs.
Reversible Concrete and Temporary Architecture
At the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Self-Assembly Lab at MIT and Gramazio Kohler Research showed off a process that might finally one-up concrete, using only a 3D printing extruder, rocks, string, and smart design.
The Personal Airplane Is Taking Off
While this may sound improbable, it isn’t completely outlandish, thanks to a newish class of diminutive, two-seat aircraft known as light-sport planes.