Posts

At London’s Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition, Portugal- and UK-based drone company Tekever announced September 14 that its AR5 drone can now carry and deploy self-inflating life rafts to assist in water rescue. The AR5 can operate in winds of up to 40 mph and with light rain. Roaring into action, the AR5’s twin engines launch it into the sky from a rough grassy runway. Above the water, its internal bay opens, and a sheet of safety-yellow plastic falls out....

Here are some of our favorite waterproof cameras, built for adventures both big and small. The Fujifilm FinePix XP130 comes equipped with an LCD monitor that adjusts to varying lighting conditions and won’t drain your battery in the process. It also takes HD 1080p video and is capable of recording at up to 320 frames per second. Don’t worry about being too gentle with this one: It’s waterproof, freezeproof, shockproof, and dustproof....

Thirty years ago, the noxious clouds of chlorofluorocarbons that had been gathering in Earth’s stratosphere for half a century would chew a seasonal hole in the protective ozone layer over Antarctica twice the diameter of Pluto. While the Antarctic feature was extreme, it underscored a disaster unfolding across Earth’s atmosphere. With less ozone in the stratosphere to shield flora and fauna from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, crops would suffer and skin cancer would soar....

The move has, unsurprisingly, raised questions among consumers (and it’s drawn at least one lawsuit). Here are eight of those questions, answered. How does it work? The AquAdvantage is an Atlantic salmon engineered with a growth hormone gene from a Chinook, a Pacific salmon, and a promoter from an ocean pout. The hormone produced by the Chinook gene is actually the same that would appear in an Atlantic salmon—the Chinook just happened to be on hand when scientists first made the fish back in the late eighties....

“For the first time, we were able to pinpoint specific structures and say, ‘Look, this is not an ancient volcano but an active one,’” says study co-author Laurent Montési, a professor of geology at the University of Maryland. These telltale structures are in the form of rocky, doughnut-like terrestrial features planetary scientists call coronae. In the study, scientists led by Anna Gülcher, a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, used high-resolution 3-D simulations to model how the coronae that dot Venus’ cloud-cloaked surface form and grow....

Far away, two black holes are colliding, and instruments here on Earth detected the gravitational waves that resulted. The discovery was a long time coming, and can tell us a lot about the nature of the universe. Do black holes exist? Yes, we know that now thanks to this discovery. Is the universe made of strings? Maybe we’ll be able to find out now. Amidst all the excitement, the website for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the project that detected the gravitational wave signal, went down temporarily....

Space.com reports simply that at a press conference scheduled for 12:00 noon EDT on Monday, March 17, “[A] team of scientists will unveil what they bill as a ‘major discovery’ in the field of astrophysics…at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.” Predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves are speculated to be “an echo of the big bang [sic] in which the universe came into existence 14bn year ago,” writes the Guardian, which caught an echo of the intense excitement that seems to be swirling among scientists with these and other quotes: This seems to be a fantastic moment in time to be a physicist....

Greta Thunberg’s decision to travel the exact same journey to the UN Climate Action Summit on state-of-the-art sailing boat Malizia II shows that there are principled alternatives. But is there a way for the rest of us to cross the Atlantic without taking to the skies? Thunberg’s 14-day voyage was significantly faster than the typical sail time of three to four weeks, but that’s still not for anyone in a rush....

Stats Time: 3 hoursCost: About $85Difficulty: Medium Tools + Materials Teddy Ruxpin (make sure the jaw and eye motors still work)ScrewdriverWirecuttersSoldering ironC.H.I.P. computerSparkFun Motor Driver, Dual TB6612FNG3.5 mm audio cable3.7-volt single-cell Li-po battery Instructions This article was originally published in the May/June 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Hack a Teddy Bear to Say Anything.”

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5 percent, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot. The sum of all the ordinary matter that cosmologists measured only added up to about half of the 5% what was supposed to be in the universe....

The agency’s website now reads: “While all masks and respirators provide some level of protection, properly fitted respirators provide the highest level of protection. Wearing a highly protective mask or respirator may be most important for certain higher risk situations, or by some people at increased risk for severe disease.” The page also notes: “Some masks and respirators offer higher levels of protection than others, and some may be harder to tolerate or wear consistently than others....

WWDC is a digital-only event again this year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it looks like the announcements could be both plentiful and impactful. Rumors have suggested that we may get larger, more powerful MacBook Pro computers based on Apple’s own silicon. We won’t know until Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple crew take to the highly produced, virtual stage. The WWDC keynote starts at 1 p....

Ultra-processed foods fall at the far end of the NOVA food classification system, which breaks what you eat down into four categories: unprocessed foods (edible parts of plants and animals); processed ingredients (like oils, flour, or sugar); processed foods (which involve cooking unprocessed foods with processed ingredients to make breads or canned vegetables); and ultra-processed foods (which don’t have any intact, unprocessed parts). These ultra-processed foods are mostly made from substances derived from other foods, preservatives, and additives—designed to create convenient and long-lasting products....

If you prefer to pump or express milk into a bottle and then transfer it to a storage bag if needed, these BPA-free bags are a quality choice. Each bag holds about 6 ounces and is designed to stand upright in your fridge or freezer. You can also lay them flat if you’d like to stack them. When you are ready to use one, cut off the top with a pair of scissors to access the inside of the bag, which has been pre-sealed to keep it sterile....

Mega-casting, as Volvo calls it, is a way for the automaker to simplify the car-building process. The end goal is to replace many small parts with one large metal casting, allowing for more efficient manufacturing as well as more flexibility in the design and production process. This means less welding, less assembly, and less room for error when assembling a vehicle. One example part that will be made using mega-casting is the floor structure of Volvo’s upcoming lineup of electric cars....

The ongoing exercise is Project Convergence 21, which began the first week of October and is scheduled to run through the middle of November. For the event, the Army is joined by components from the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, with elements taking place at both Arizona’s Yuma Proving Grounds and New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. In this case, when a tank needed a new part, soldiers in Project Convergence turned to 3D printing....

I am a pediatric surgeon, but I meet many of my patients when they’re still growing inside their mother’s womb. That’s because I specialize in fetal surgery—performing an operation on a baby before it’s born. Usually, we remove the baby from the uterus, operate, then put it back. But you can’t always do that. For example, spina bifida, a defect where bone and flesh don’t fully cover the spinal cord, requires intervention at around 22 to 25 weeks of gestation....

The sounds we hear in the world can vary depending on factors like what type of spaces the sound waves are bouncing off of, what material they’re hitting or passing through, and how far they need to travel. These characteristics can influence how sound scatters and decays. But researchers can reverse engineer this process as well. They can take a sound sample, and even use that to deduce what the environment is like (in some ways, it’s like how animals use echolocation to “see”)....

During the days-long meetings, questions of heart inflammation following the vaccine loomed large. And by most accounts, reporting on those discussions has led to concern among parents about side-effects. But just how dangerous this vaccine side effect is still isn’t completely clear, and according to some experts, it might not be a cause for concern at all. Currently, the FDA has paused its approval of Moderna’s vaccine for adolescents while it reviews data from Europe on the risk of inflammation in or around the heart following mRNA vaccination....