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“In making a film, I start with an emotion, a feeling, a sense of a subject or a situation,” Kubrick is quoted in the exhibit, his first U.S. retrospective. “The theme and technique come as a result of the material passing, as it were, through myself and coming out of the projection lens.” What a lens it was: Kubrick gave life to his haunting scenes and uncanny visions by constantly seeking out new tools that would explode earlier limits of what could be projected onscreen....

Click to launch the photo gallery_ Whether you rent or own the place where you live, odds are you’ll either be tempted or driven by necessity to make some repairs and alterations. To do it well and efficiently, you will need tools. And while better tools might not turn you into the next Bob Vila, they should make your average home-improvement project infinitely less daunting. Here are nine tools for neophytes and super-skilled DIYers alike....

Near the town of Ridgecrest, California, on July 4 and 5, a pair of magnitude 6.4 and 7.1 earthquakes broke the state’s near 20-year rumble-free streak. Those widely reported tremors, which were felt by millions of people, thankfully did relatively little damage and caused no casualties. They also happened to be the most well-monitored California earthquakes of their scale ever to take place, thanks to two decades of advances in monitoring technology....

For most serious anglers, it was their family and friends who showed them the basics of the sport. But not everyone was lucky enough to have been mentored to a lifetime of outdoor fun pursuing and catching fish. The good news is, learning to fish isn’t difficult. And it offers never-ending challenges in the outdoors. Even old hands at the game can learn about new types of tackle, baits, and lures....

A hash-marked bone found in the Semliki Valley in the Democratic Republic of the Congo might be the earliest human attempt to count the days. Ten thousand years later, in what’s now Scotland, humans dug moon-shaped pits to track the lunar cycle. Humans cut days into smaller units by tracking the sun with shadow-casting obelisks and rods. Nearly 2,000 years later, Egyptians refined that method into the earliest known sundial....

When a man with no medical degree and a diagnosis of fatal leukemia builds a cancer-curing machine in his garage, you might think it merely the desperate attempt of a dying man to escape his fate. And you’d be right. The weird thing is, it just might work. John Kanzius was diagnosed with leukemia in the spring of 2002. But it wasn’t until the following year, during a bout of chemo-induced insomnia, that he got the idea for his machine....

Working from home has many challenges, but there’s one that people everywhere, regardless of their setup, keep facing over and over again: slow, spotty WiFi. If sprucing up your home network has not stopped your connection from snailing, or solved the dead zones plaguing your workday, it’s time to break out the big guns. In this context, that means running some Ethernet lines and plugging them into a mesh Wi-Fi system....

Prevention of infections in the ICU is a daunting task. From an environmental perspective, cleaning, disinfection, and sterilization procedures are in place to minimize the risk. Hand hygiene also plays a major role in keeping patients safe. These interventions are solely focused on preventing the introduction of pathogens to the patient. Yet, every single person already has an extensive population of microbes in the form of microbial flora. Hundreds of species are present in and on the body; some of these are opportunistic in nature....

But it’s much more challenging when you do the same mission carrying not just pounds of gear but are jumping in tandem—attached to another person who is not a trained paratrooper. That configuration makes it almost impossible to look down and gauge how far away from the ground you are, so that you cannot only warn your passenger in good time to lift their legs up horizontally but also correctly time your landing maneuver....

But in a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, researchers from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australia National University have put forth a mathematical theory that they think explains how ball lighting occurs and why it tends to occur where it does. In it, the researchers propose that ball lightning isn’t the result of microwave radiation, antimatter, or slowly burning particles of silicon leftover form lightning strikes (all of which have been theorized as the source of the phenomenon), but of leftover ions that accumulating and interacting with electric fields, often across some kind of dividing plane like a pane of glass (explaining why eyewitness accounts have sometimes described these glowing orbs as passing through glass....

While it’s certainly not time to claim victory of any sort for airline travel over the COVID-19 virus, metrics released last week does at least offer a bit of encouraging news to people who depend on air carriers. Transportation Safety Administration data is a good place to begin since that agency keeps a close eye on the number of passengers who pass through its security screening checkpoints at airports that offer airline service....

The findings are consistent with previous research on pregnancy and childbirth in the aftermath of big storms, including one analysis that found hurricane exposure during pregnancy increased the chances a newborn would need to be on ventilation. Other natural disasters, like earthquakes and ice storms, have also been linked to complications like early delivery. “Other people had done some work following hurricanes and other natural disasters which had suggested that there might be some increased risk of maternal and neonatal complications,” says study author Kjersti Aagaard, vice chair of research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Baylor College of Medicine....

This automotive variation on the “butterfly effect” has been carefully studied ever since, and a research group is now approaching the finish line on a potential solution devoid of any sort of half-baked “self-driving” system. As Associated Press recounts, a recent experiment has shown instances of phantom traffic jams can be reduced by linking cars’ into a single communication network via utilizing newer vehicles’ adaptive cruise control systems. An increasing number of cars often come equipped with a sensor array that automatically can slow or speed up cruise control depending on how close you are to the vehicle ahead of you in traffic....

The Deep Sea Nautilus is a 745-foot-long megaship capable of carrying 39,000 tons of ore—plus a 200-person crew and deep-sea mining robots. Nautilus Minerals, which owns the ship, plans to start gold and copper mining in the Solwara I, a mile-deep site in the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea. Nautilus Minerals is a Canadian company with an ambitious deep-sea mining plan, centered around high-tech underwater robots that wouldn’t look totally out of place in Star Wars....

Now, scientists from the the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Royal BC Museum, and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have found new evidence for how these tank-like armored dinosaurs used these signature tail clubs. Their study was published today in the journal Biology Letters. A very complete and well-preserved fossil of Zuul crurivastator housed at the Royal Ontario Museum has spikes along its flanks that were broken and actually re-healed while the dinosaur was still living....

In Antarctica, these craters function as a rest stop for animals like seals who swim under the ice, giving them somewhere to come up for air. However, Campbell says researchers think there’s a lot more to them than that. He and others think the holes—because they’re warm and melt sea ice that holds carbon—also release a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That makes understanding their role important for climate science....

Bamboo fabric is the perfect example. On paper it seems like a low-impact textile: The plant grows rapidly, doesn’t need a lot of fertilizer or water when farmed, and may have carbon-sequestering powers (though this is still highly contested). But some sustainable brands, including Patagonia, have chosen to skip it entirely. That’s because of the hidden process that turns bamboo into a wearable product. A history of bamboozling customers After taking the commercial world by storm in the early 2000s, bamboo has been hotly contested as a sustainable material for more than a decade....

A global leading authority on endangered species conservation disagrees, however. After conducting a two-year assessment, last month the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) designated the monarch butterfly as endangered on the organization’s Red List of Threatened Species. “This is an assessment by an international scientific body that looked at all of the data and said monarchs are endangered,” says Karen Oberhauser, an expert on monarch butterfly biology and conservation and the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum....

But once Aspen began actually producing vaccines in summer 2021, the vast majority of these doses were not used to vaccinate South Africans. Instead, the doses were sent out to Europe— as South Africa was hit hard by the Delta variant. Aspen agreed, “or was forced to agree, that the South African government wouldn’t impose export restrictions,” says Fatima Hassan, founder of Health Justice Initiative, a research and advocacy group based in South Africa....

Nevertheless, he and his colleagues found a way to study it without actually going there. They recreated its environment in the lab, building little boxes filled with sediments overlain by sea water, keeping them in the dark. They duplicated sea water temperature and chemistry, as well as the composition of the sediment. By mimicking seabed conditions, “we don’t need to go to the bottom of the sea to do measurements, and we save some time and energy,” Sulpis said....