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Sony WH-1000XM5 Wireless ANC Headphones $348 (Was $399) If you want to look professional but still let your freq flag fly, the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones offer a clean, contemporary design and the most customizable features of the wireless active noise cancellation headphones on the market today. Packed with sensors and paired to an app with layers on layers of toggles, the WH-1000XM5 has a consumer-friendly tuning with adjustable EQ—so you can crank all that bass in your face—it can change settings automatically based on your location and much, much more....

But while the bacteria have been getting most of the attention, 2015 has also been a respectable year for viruses. Granted, not all the news has been good. Viruses are, after all, parasitic organisms requiring a host to survive and thrive. When that host happens to be human, the result can be illness, morbidity, and possible death. But as a result of some very intriguing studies, the role of viruses in our lives is much more valuable to us than simply cell invaders and killers....

A recent review of those interventions, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows just how poorly they fare. After going through the existing data on 24 nutritional supplements and dietary changes, researchers found that only a handful have any effect at all. Omega-3 fatty acids seemed to minorly reduce risk of heart attack and coronary heart disease, while decreased salt intake mitigated the risk of death from cardiovascular disease in people with hypertension....

While these discounts can’t be used simultaneously, it’s nice to know that you have options on how to save some money. We can stand by all of the items that are discounted during this sale, but the $25 discount on Anker’s 171 140W (watt) Charger stands out. Anker 171 140W Charger $74.99 (Was $99.99) [Use Promo Code: WS24DI01QL] The power adapter is about as large as the one that comes with Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s powerful enough to charge all of your gadgets—from a smartphone to a laptop—at its highest possible speed....

Yesterday, the company took the wraps off the latest version of its vehicle. The newest iteration of the adorable electric four-wheeler will be able to hold nearly 500 pounds of groceries, Nuro says, with heating and cooling systems to keep food toasty or chilly, depending on what it’s carrying in what compartment. Like other self-driving vehicles, it uses onboard sensors like lidar, cameras, and radar to perceive the world around it....

As an extreme case, consider a drone recently shared on Twitter. The quadcopter looks like it was assembled on a dare. With a body made of six sticks, the drone is little more than rotors, wires, and a control unit wrapped around an ultra minimalist frame. A caption on it reads, in Arabic, “Yemeni makes aircraft from stalks of qat.” For at least a few seconds, the drone flies, soaring overhead....

In its January directive, the Chinese government described the social credit system as “an important component part of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system”. In particular, it “uses encouragement to keep trust and constraints against breaking trust as incentive mechanisms, and its objective is raising the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society.” The ACLU was not subtle in its warning about the coercive power of such a system....

China’s Yutu 2 Rover, which was crossing a crater on the far side of the moon, spied a mysterious, cube-like structure in November as it scanned the skyline. The unidentified structure seemed to be located around 260 feet away from where the Rover traversed, which was making its way across the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon. Our Space, associated with the Chinese National Space Administration which controls Yutu 2, first noted the object in a post on December 3rd; the story dubbed the object “mystery hut....

Keeping in mind that the video image could be pure theater and bear little or no resemblance to the actual bomber, the craft appears to be a large flying wing, optimized for stealth. A bent in the leading edge of the wing suggests that the bomber, tentatively identified as the “H-20”, may utilize a cranked wing design, in which the outer edges of the wings have less sweep than the blended fuselage, similar to the X-47B UAS....

Microorganisms are the earliest known life forms on Earth. They play a critical role in ecological processes like the decomposition of organic matter, nutrient recycling, soil aggregation, and even the control of pathogens. Their abundance and diversity help maintain a stable and healthy global ecosystem. However, if microbial diversity were to change, the ability of other organisms to respond to climate change may be affected, too. A study published in Nature Microbiology this month reported that long-term global warming reduces microbial biodiversity in grassland soil....

As of this reporting, there is no official diagnosis or explanation of what triggered Hamlin’s cardiac arrest. Hamlin’s condition has been called an “unprecedented situation” and something people haven’t “ever seen before” in the professional football community. It has not only shaken the National Football League (NFL) but has shone a light on having medical resources available to make sure contact sports are as safe as possible. While there’s always a risk of injury during contact sports, medical research on football has often focused on head trauma such as concussions....

The Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory spent a month running through the equivalent of 13.7 billion years of dark matter interaction to produce a simulated galaxy. As the more than a billion digital bits and pieces coalesced, scientists could see much more going on within the galaxy’s halo than other simulations have produced. In previous tests, the region of our solar system always came out relatively barren....

Many people are turning to CBD products if they want to enjoy additional benefits of cannabis without experiencing an altered state of mind from the THC. CBD is currently being studied for a variety of health benefits and has already been proven to have some very promising results, especially when it comes to the treatment of medical conditions such as epilepsy. Given that CBD is still relatively new in terms of being introduced into the mainstream market, many people are still trying to uncover its potential uses in medicine in addition to its benefits when it comes to wellness....

Their proof-of-concept results suggest that some masks may be superior to others. In the limited study, fleece gaiters, folded bandanas, and knitted masks all offered little protection from spreading airborne droplets that could contain the novel virus while simple, multi-layer cloth masks could be more effective. These results align with previous suggestions by the CDC and others. However, the results were limited and based on a very small sample size....

As people in Tulunan shared photos and videos of the destruction, I felt helpless. The anxiety of not knowing what to do or what would come next flooded my mind. Little did I know, my worries were just beginning. “The vast majority of earthquakes are caused by the sudden release of stresses built up by movements of tectonic plates,” says Morgan Page, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey....

Unlike typical combs, this one contains a high-voltage electrical current that runs through its teeth. The tips of the teeth act as electrodes and deliver short bursts of energy to the surrounding air, so that when the current is running through the teeth, the electrodes break apart nearby air molecules and turn them from a gas to plasma. The electricity makes the molecules high-energy, which is enough to kill hardy lice, but it doesn’t raise the temperature, which makes it safe for human use....

As a staff writer at The New Yorker, Kolbert’s reporting focused for many years on global warming, work that culminated in 2006’s “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.” In her latest book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” she takes on an even bigger story: mass die-offs of life on Earth. Geologists and geochemists have identified several “extinction events” in pre-history: losses of biodiversity so cataclysmic that they’re called the Big Five....

“In developing regions, [sanitation] infrastructure does not exist so toilets are not emptied safely and human waste comes into contact with people,” Duke University engineering professor Jeffrey Glass told PopSci via email. Americans, by and large, rely on a functionally invisible sewage system and off-site wastewater treatment plant managed by a municipal sanitation department to safely process their poop. Elsewhere, the detrius flows a little more freely. “Thus pathogens make their way into the drinking water and water used for everyday household chores like cleaning....

If it clamps down too hard on something delicate, it could destroy it. But if it doesn’t grab onto the object hard enough, it could drop it. Stanford engineers hope to solve this problem with a new robotic hand designed with finger pads that can grip like a gecko. A study detailing their prototype, farmHand, was published this week in Science Robotics. The project was born out of Stanford engineering professor Mark Cutkosky’s Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Lab, which has been focused on creating bio-inspired robots for about 30 years....