Zeus did it.

Since unveiling the 911 Carrera in 1963, Porsche has built many dozens of variations, ranging from convertibles to racing editions to subtly tweaked versions distinguishable only to board members of the Porsche Club of America. Full-blown generational revamps have been rarer. When the seventh Porsche 911 arrives this month, 90 percent of the vehicle's components will be new or redesigned. The result is a car that corners more evenly and consumes less gas, yet is substantially quicker than its predecessors.

LIGHTER BODY

Designers cut 100 pounds by using a higher proportion of lightweight aluminum- steel composite in the body. As the car travels faster, an adaptive rear spoiler shifts position, applying as much as 200 pounds of downforce to the rear wheels and increasing stability.

MORE-EFFICIENT ENGINE

The standard 3.4-liter, 350-horsepower flat-six boxer engine is 16 percent more efficient than the outgoing engine yet more powerful by five horsepower. The pricier 911 S comes with a 400-horsepower, 3.8-liter flat-six and runs from 0 to 60 in as little as 3.9 seconds.

FUEL-SAVING TRICKS

Both new 911s come with a stop-start system that powers down the engine at stoplights and fires it back up once the driver touches the accelerator. When coasting, the car's "sailing" mode automatically idles the engine for further fuel savings.

SEVEN-SPEED STICK

After years of pushing "automated manual" transmissions, Porsche does stick-shift fans a favor by offering the new 911 with the first seven-speed manual transmission. A shift lock prevents drivers from selecting the highway-speed overdrive gear prematurely.

COMPUTER ASSISTANCE

A torque-vectoring system slows down the inside rear wheel to pivot the 911 more quickly around corners. Anti-roll assist (Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control) senses cornering forces and adjusts the suspension to keep the body flat through turns.

ENGINE: 3.4-liter flat-six (3.8-liter flat-six in 911 S)
TOP SPEED: 178 mph (187 mph for 911 S)
PRICE: From $83,050

Until now, there hasn't been an all-electric car fit for road-tripping. But Tesla's Model S, due out late in 2012, is made for extended drives. Its battery goes up to 300 miles on a charge. Its cabin is spacious enough for seven passengers. And it can get up to cruising speed fast-the Model S accelerates from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds.

BIGGER BATTERY

At 85 kilowatt-hours, the Model S boasts more than triple the battery capacity of the Nissan Leaf. Its thousands of lithium-ion cells use a new electrode chemistry from Panasonic, which could allow them to store more power than other comparably sized cells.

FAST CHARGE

Tesla plans to install proprietary 440-volt charging stations (first along the I-5 Corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco) built to match up with the Model S's circuitry. They will provide a full charge in an hour. Standard chargers will require a full night.

TEMPERATURE CONTROL

To protect the motor, circuitry and battery from heat, channels filled with liquid coolant run through the components. Pumps cycle coolant through a front radiator and a pair of A/C condensers. This helps the motor deliver twice the power of its Roadster predecessor.

LIGHT BODY

To increase the sedan's range, the designers of the Model S kept its weight low with a body constructed from 97 percent aluminum. They added heavier structural steel only where necessary for safety: in central supports and front-end crash zones.

ROOMY CABIN

The Model S's batteries sit beneath the floor in a large flat pack that spreads the width of the car and about two thirds of its length. This arrangement leaves ample space in the trunk for cargo or two backward-facing jump seats. The main interior holds five adults.

Top Speed:130 mph
Range: 300 miles
Seats: Five adults, two children
Price: $77,400

If your car is a diesel, it will run. Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powered the space shuttle's main engines, could work, says Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But keeping hydrogen liquid requires maintaining it at a temperature below about -432°F. Storing it in a garage would be tricky, as would keeping it from freezing the engine.

RP-1 would work even better. A kerosene fuel developed in the 1950s as a more efficient alternative to alcohol-based rocket fuels, RP-1 powered the Soyuz and Falcon 9 spacecrafts. "It's a close relative of diesel fuel, so there is no real problem using it in diesel engines," Martinez-Sanchez says. "The only special thing about RP-1 is a lower volatility and a higher viscosity, so the engine might not run well on cold days," he says.

RP-1 probably isn't worth the trouble, though. Rocket fuel is less efficient than gas, and it wouldn't even make a car go any faster.

Recently I converted my old Ford pickup to diesel, and I needed to make a bracket to hold a throttle position sensor, which helps to control the new transmission. Often I wing this sort of thing, working from notebook drawings or cardboard models. But this time I decided to use 3-D CAD modeling, CNC manufacturing and 3-D printing to design and fabricate the part to the exact specifications I wanted.

STEP 1: DESIGN

Using Alibre Design Expert 3-D CAD software, I created an assembly, which lets you model previously designed parts as they will eventually fit together. In the assembly, I placed my throttle position sensor (TPS) over the fuel-injection pump to derive all the dimensions of my bracket from those two parts. I then modeled the bracket that will attach the TPS to the pump.

STEP 2: FABRICATION

I first 3-D-printed an inexpensive prototype to verify that my design would work. Then I looked to machine it. Parts better suited to conventional machining require a multi-axis CNC machine. For anything made from flat parts, a laser cutter is the best tool. Because my bracket would be made of sheet metal, I took the CAD model to a local shop that has a punch press, another type of CNC machine.

And, of course, video of the construction:

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FABRICATION SHOPS AROUND THE WEB

eMachineShop: For laser cutting, injection molding, and a variety of other machining processes.
Ponoko: For laser cutting of plastics, cardboard, wood and other materials.
Shapeways: For 3-D printing.

Biometric security is often focused on the more boring anatomical parts, like the pads of the fingers (ehhh) or the eyes (who cares). So little attention has been paid to the security possibilities of the butt. Well, not anymore: researchers at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo have come up with a car seat that measures the precise contours and pressures left by your posterior.

Apparently measuring buttprints, or rear-pressure (none of the terms I just used, or will use, have been approved or sanctioned by the researchers) is a pretty decent way to identify people. The seat is comprised of a system of 360 separate sensors, which measure pressure. Those sensors communicate with a laptop to put together a precise map of the seated person. The researchers say the seat can correctly identify people with 98% accuracy--not bad at all.

The team is hoping to work with Japanese car manufacturers to implement the system as an added security measure, possibly in as few as two or three years.

[TechCrunch]

Every now and then, someone takes a data set and does something absolutely illuminating. Here, the BBC has graphically mapped every road casualty on every road in Great Britain from 1999 to 2010. That's 2,396,750 crashes, with each individual point of light representing an individual crash resulting in a casualty (that's injury or death).

It's part of a larger interactive package BBC has up on its site right now in which reporters examine the island's highways and byways. Particularly cool: the time-lapse video that animates--via a heat map like the one above--where accidents occured over the course of a given week. As rush hours come and go, the map almost appears to be breathing. Check it out over at BBC.

[BBC via It's Nice That]

Cars with infrared sensors, cameras and collaborative connectivity will eventually go a long way toward avoiding collisions, but human drivers will still be a wild card. Now a new algorithm can predict whether they'll behave at intersections, and could someday prevent crashes and save lives.

Researchers at MIT developed an algorithm that analyzes several several parameters, including a vehicle's deceleration, its distance from a traffic light and when the light turns red. It can capture a vehicle's motion in 3-D in less than five milliseconds, according to MIT News. Using this data, it is able to determine which cars are driven by potential violators, those likely to run a red light, and which cars were obeying the law.

Led by Jonathan How, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, some MIT undergraduates and grad students tested the algorithm using traffic data at a busy intersection in Christianburg, Va. The state department of transportation had set up several instruments to monitor cars as part of a safety prediction project. The MIT team analyzed more than 15,000 vehicles in this data set, and found the algorithm was able to spot red-light scofflaws 85 percent of the time. That's about 15 to 20 percent better than existing algorithms, they say. It also generated fewer false positives than other safety-prediction technologies, which could be helpful if it's ever implemented for human use.

"If you're too pessimistic, you start reporting there's a problem when there really isn't, and then very rapidly, the human's going to push a button that turns this thing off," How tells MIT News.

They even tested it using robots, which used it to navigate a busy intersection. Watch a demo below.

The best part: The algorithm works so quickly that it can give drivers plenty of time to react. The team actually found a "sweet spot," lasting one to two seconds in advance of a potential collision, when the algorithm has the highest accuracy and when a driver could still have enough time to react to a fellow human who is about to do something dangerous. This could conceivably be integrated into future smart cars, perhaps combined with some kind of dashboard or windshield warning system, so that your car will tell you not to go - even if the light is green - when it senses another car is about to run the light.

The research will be published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

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[MIT News]

Amphibious vehicle designs always sounds great on paper, but in practical use they tend to sink more often than swim. It's not so much that they don't work, but that they tend to handle either land or water well, with the other being an afterthought (not to mention they solve a problem that most people simply don't have). But we'd be lying if we said the Iguana 29 didn't catch our eyes this afternoon.

Like the aforementioned amphibious craft, the Iguana 29 is suited more for the water. It's a 29-foot speed boat with a 35-knot top speed over water and seating capacity for up to ten. But closer to land it can deploy retractable caterpillar tracks that can carry it across dry ground at up to five miles per hour. That's not very fast, but that's not why the Iguana 29 is cool.

It's cool because, at least by all appearances (and you can see it make the water/land transition in the video below) its tank-style treads are actually decent at negotiating off-road terrain. In the kinds of environments where an amphibious vehicle actually makes sense--a beach during low tide, a sandbar in shallow water, etc.--the Iguana looks right at home. It lacks the complexity of something like a hovercraft (remember that brief period where we all thought we were going to own hovercraft?) and the bulky slowness of one of those duck boats you see driving around Boston or Key West or wherever tourists go on those amphibious tours.

In other words, it's less an "amphibious vehicle" and more a decent watercraft that can effectively handle dry land conditions when necessary--ostensibly a pretty good thing to have around if you're living in an area with wildly varying tidal conditions or doing a lot of island hopping or cross-bay traversing. And all you need is $290,000 to get on board.

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[Gizmag]