Lifeboat Foundation

Car design firm Pininfarina has designed an inkless pen with a metal nib that will write without ever running out.

Icefin robot swam more than 1 kilometer to reach Thwaites Glacier’s grounding line.

Talks center around quickly erecting a SpaceX plant across the channel from what will be San Pedro’s new waterfront development opening in 2021.

It designed Meena to be able to talk about, well, anything you want.

Amid today’s technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that several decades have passed since a single innovation has dramatically raised the quality of life for millions of people. Summoning a car with one’s phone is nifty, but it pales in comparison with discovering penicillin or electrifying cities. Artificial intelligence is being heralded as the next big thing, but a cluster of scientists, technologists and investors are aiming higher. In the vernacular of Silicon Valley, where many of them are based, their goal is nothing less than disrupting death, and their story is at the center of “Immortality, Inc.” by science journalist Chip Walter.

The efforts of scientists and investors to defy the aging process—and extend the human life span—are still in their infancy.

The company is building a massive centrifuge to accelerate rockets and send them screaming into space.

There’s nothing quite like a maddening math problem, mind-bending optical illusion, or twisty logic puzzle to halt all productivity in the Popular Mechanics office. We’re curious people by nature, but we also collectively share a stubborn insistence that we’re right, dammit, and so we tend to throw work by the wayside whenever we come upon a problem with several seemingly possible solutions.

This triangle brain teaser isn’t new—shoutout to Popsugar for unearthing it a couple years ago—but based on some shady Internet magic, the tweet below reappeared in my feed today and kick-started a new debate on our staff-wide Slack channel, a place traditionally reserved for workshopping ideas, but instead mostly used for yelling about other stuff that we occasionally turn into content.

For 16 years, NASA’s trusty scope revealed a hidden infrared universe. Now it’s up to the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up where it left off.