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Clusters of seismometers measure earthquakes in places like California, but Google hopes that this project will allow a multitude of Android phones to detect the earth-shaking events in areas of the world where there is a dearth of dedicated equipment. There’s no predicting these tremors, of course. But this detection system could someday push alerts to users in the area near a quake right after it’s started to let them know that ground-shaking is imminent and it would be a great time to, say, put the knife-juggling on pause....

For weeks, I’d been suffering from a pernicious case of viral bronchitis. With no clear remedy (viruses are unresponsive to antibiotics), I’d slowly come to accept my new reality. I needed naps to get through the day. A dry cough announced my presence before I’d even entered the room. My head felt like a dormant tree whose sap had stopped circulating, or a river stoppered up with ice. But somewhere between King Tut’s floral collar and a Mughal tiger claw necklace, my face turned on like a faucet....

“We are monitoring the situation closely and working with the New York State Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to respond to this emergent public health issue to protect the health and wellbeing of residents,” Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, the Rockland County Health Commissioner, said in a press release. The poliovirus is a highly contagious and deadly disease that has devastated humanity for centuries. No one knows when the first cases began....

The KeyMission 360 is compact like a GoPro, durable like a GoPro, and it also shoots 4K video like a GoPro. But what makes the KeyMission 360 truly unique is the the fact that it can take a beating while filming or photographing in all directions. At the time of the announcement earlier today at CES 2016, very little information was available about the camera’s technical specifications. Here’s the little information that we know: it’s waterproof to approximately 100 feet (30 meters), dust-proof, shock-proof and survives low temperatures without a hitch....

The documents delivered to the chairman of the committee, Congressman Lamar Smith do not appear to include the e-mails from NOAA scientists, which NOAA administrator Kathryn Sullivan refused to turn over, with the support of many members of the scientific community. NOAA spokesperson Ciaran Clayton sent Popular Science this statement:

Big things are coming. First of all, astronomers expect a cloud of gas roughly three times the mass of Earth to begin falling into a supermassive black hole in September. It’s not just going to be amazing (blasts of x-rays and radio waves!), it will be the first time such a thing happens within range of human instrumentation, which means we get to watch. This is also the first year we expect private spaceflight to begin delivering payloads into orbit at the regularly scheduled intervals with which we move big things around here on Earth....

The review is scheduled to last about three years. Previously, the federal coal program underwent reviews in the 1980s and 1970s, and similar to when those reviews took place, current coal mining leases won’t be affected. If you’re concerned about an energy shortage, the DOI estimates that those current land leases can sustain coal production levels for the next 20 years. In addition to reviewing the social and environmental costs, Secretary Jewell also announced a number of transparency reforms, such as a public database of the carbon cost of fossil fuels from public lands....

That means breed is not a good predictor of a pet’s personality. In fact, it explains just 9 percent of behavior, a study published in the journal Science on April 28 reports. A team of biologists and geneticists surveyed more than 18,000 dogs, about half of which were purebred, and sequenced the DNA of more than 2,000 pooches. The team found that while behavioral traits can be passed down through genes, those markers aren’t unique to individual breeds....

“Prescribing is different in adolescents and young adults, and the consequences might be different,” Bourgeois says. A pair of new studies, published this week in the journal Pediatrics, turned attention to opioid prescribing rates in the pediatric population. Specifically, they addressed two subsets of that group: adolescents and young adults between the ages of 13 and 22, and children with chronic illnesses and other special health care needs. Young adults are often lumped in with younger children or older adults in research, despite their specific health needs—and that’s been true for opioid research, even though that age group is at a higher risk for opioid misuse....

By 2019, no private cars will be allowed into the Oslo city center. They’re not quite tearing up the pavement to install a natural paradise; trams and buses will still be available to help Oslo residents get around, and a network of bicycle lanes will expand dramatically. But the change will be big, restricting the city’s estimated 350,000 cars to the suburbs and beyond. Cars powered by fossil fuel-guzzling combustion engines produce emissions that go straight from the tailpipe into the atmosphere....

Perhaps most concerning recently, is a study from the University of Texas that predicts rising temperatures will cause an additional 1.6 million to 2.2 million kidney stone cases by 2050. Unsurprising, considering that hotter days will cause us to sweat more, dehydrating the body, and in turn increasing the urine’s salt concentration and the likelihood of kidney stones forming. According to the research team, the study is one of the first of its kind to show how global warming can cause a direct medical consequence to humans....

Last year, more than 20 billion pairs of shoes were produced globally. Nearly 300 million of them end up in landfills across the United States annually. Shoes are made up of rubber, which many producers source from trees across Thailand, Indonesia, China, and West Africa. The industry relies on millions of workers to feed the demand, which translates to the production of more than 13 million metric tons of rubber in 2020....

This week, Panasonic announced the G100. It costs $750 and is clearly aimed at those looking to get into the talk-into-the-camera influencer genre of content creation. One bundle even comes with a hand-grip that doubles as a mini-tripod for shooting walk-and-talk videos of yourself. Inside, it has a 20.3-megapizel sensor typical for Panasonic cameras. It’s Micro Four Thirds in size, which means it’s smaller than the APS-C and full-frame models found in other mirrorless cameras, but it’s considerably larger than the small sensor inside of a smartphone....

Suffice to say, penguins are one diverse group of birds. And now a new study, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, is taking a crack at explaining how they came to be such an eclectic bunch. The study’s authors suggest that new island formation drove penguins to evolve and branch off into many of the football-shaped birds we know today. They think it went something like this: over the last 5 million years or so, new islands sprouted up like the Galapagos and Antipodes formations....

Lasers like this have an advantage when it comes to swatting pesky drones out of the sky: they will fry up and burn whatever they have hit. But the beam will go no further, causing no collateral damage. They are very precise, have a long range, and are extremely fast. Tanguy Mulliez, manager of the innovation and products department at CILAS, which specializes in lasers, tells Popular Science in a telephone interview: “It’s like the beam of a flashlight....

Obtaining the regolith itself was an arduous task, as Anna-Lisa and Paul Rob Ferl of the UF Space Plants Lab petitioned NASA three times over 11 years to be able to work with the soil. Regolith is in limited supply on Earth and is carefully stored in NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where it is kept in nitrogen to prevent oxidation and contamination. Scientists around the world are able to receive samples on loan, but NASA space biologist Sharmila Bhattacharya says that the substance is considered a very precious material....

The role has evolved since its religious beginning into a less formal but more sinister one in our day-to-day lives. Now psychologists know that playing devil’s advocate in a public meeting or Twitter thread can prove unnecessary and, in some cases, harmful. From the historical church to modern boardrooms, the devil’s advocate was intended to be a crusader against groupthink, a phenomenon that can hinder proper decision making, explains Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester....

Plutoids are a new class of bodies defined as those which maintain a near-spherical shape and have orbits which may intersect with others beyond the orbit of Neptune. That for now puts Pluto and Eris (a body beyond Pluto at nearly Pluto’s size) as the only objects in the category, but astronomers are certain that many more plutoids will be discovered as telescope technology improves. It does not include asteroids like Ceres, which were previously grouped with Pluto as dwarf planets, because they live within the solar system’s interior....

Sometime in the past 100 million years or so, some force appears to have been building up those mountains and smoothing out craters, but scientists aren’t entirely sure what. It could simply be ice melting and refreezing, sublimating and getting re-deposited. Or, the New Horizons team speculates, the changes could be driven from inside Pluto–perhaps the tiny planet was still geologically active in recent times. In a study presented yesterday at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists from Purdue University propose a way that the frozen world could have a moving interior....

Pandemic flu didn’t pop up on any politicians’ radar until 2004, when a major breakout of highly deadly H5N1 avian bird flu began killing birds and people in Asia. With the threat of a deadly pandemic arising for the first time in decades, President Bush asked Congress to appropriate money to help prepare for a possible outbreak. The result has been a flurry of bills like S 2968, the Emergency Flu Response Act of 2004, and S 2038 the Flu Protection Act of 2004....