Hasta La Gadget!

The first people to step on to the surface of Mars won’t arrive aboard the chemical-fueled rockets that delivered Apollo 11 to the Moon—they simply don’t provide enough thrust to get to the Red Planet before exposing their crews to months of dangerous space radiation. Instead, NASA is turning to long-ignored nuclear-thermal rocket technology to deliver the first Martian explorers into history. More »

If there is one complaint we hear from Android users more than any other, it’s the speed at which software updates arrive. Or don’t arrive. It’s especially tough on tech enthusiasts who read about all the advantages of the new update, but can’t get it on their own devices for six months, if at all. Even brand new devices typically fail to launch with the latest version of Android. The Verizon Galaxy Nexus—a marquee Android flagship if there ever was one—only got its new Jelly Bean (Android 4.2) update today. More »

While 8-tracks and cassettes are as relevent to the digital world as wax cylinders, the vinyl LP is still being steadily produced and collected despite, or perhaps thanks to, their imprecise warm analog acoustics. Here’s how LPs get their unique sound. More »

Turns out, being blown out of an airlock and turning into a meat popsicle after succumbing to hypoxia isn’t so bad. At least, not when compared to the multitude of other deadly maladies that await you in the depths of space. Here are just a few ways that interplanetary exploration is conspiring to kill us all. More »

That self-winding perpetual-movement monstrosity strapped to your forearm is accurate across a hemisphere’s worth of time zones. But no matter how extravagantly handcrafted or precisely engineered your Rolex is, it’ll never be as accurate as a cheap digital gas station watch. Here’s why. More »