Awe-inspiring science reporting, technology news, and DIY projects. Skunks to space robots, primates

[ad_1] A spring hike is a great way to take advantage of the newly-warm weather. But it also comes with hazards like lingering snow, unpredictable downpours, and winter-damaged roads and trails. To prepare, you need to bring basic essentials like extra clothing, snacks and water, and first aid supplies. In order to hit the trail with even more confidence, we also recommend that you carry technological help: Download some extra apps and pack a few trusty gadgets. We've selected 10 pieces of spring-hiking tech that will guide you through the great, still-slightly-damp outdoors. 1. AllTrails When you're deep in the woods, you can't exactly rely on Google Maps. Instead, download AllTrails (free for Android and iOS), an app with 50,000 maps of trails all over the world. Once you've chosen a route, AllTrails will plot your progress on a map, display upcoming terrain, and track statistics like steps, distance, and elevation. It will even save this information so you can see ho...

[ad_1] Blue moons, strawberry moons, supermoons. For some reason your news aggregation algorithm of choice thinks you really really really want to know all about these moons. “Catch This Weekend’s AMAZING SUPERMOON,” one headline (or, like, 500 of them) will announce. “The Supermoon Isn’t Actually A Big Deal And You’re All Ruining Astronomy,” another will grouse. On March 31—that’s Saturday, also known as tomorrow in some circles—we’ll have our second “blue moon” of the year. And while that’s not necessarily special in an oh-gosh-get-out-and-look-at-it kinda way, it’s certainly special: a blue moon is the nickname for when two full moons fall in the same calendar month, and we haven’t had two in one year since 1999. We won’t have it happen again until 2037. Astronomer David Chapman recently explained for EarthSky that this is merely a quirk of our calendar; once we stopped doing thing...

[ad_1] The New York International Auto Show isn't the biggest car event of the year, but it often gives us a first chance to see new versions of some prominent and popular models. Scroll through to see what cars you'll encounter on the road in the next year, then head over to our coverage of the Geneva show to see some more outlandish and concept vehicles. Hyundai Kona (pictured above) Electric cars don’t really need grills like gas-powered vehicles, but the blank face of the Hyundai Kona is still a little strange to see. However, it promises 250 miles on a single charge, which more than makes up for any aesthetic hangups. 2019 Nissan Altima One of the grabbiest aspects of the new Nissan Altima sedan is the 8-inch “infotainment” screen in the dash. It works with both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. Standard models include a suite of safety tech, including a driver alertness monitor that can tell when the pilot isn’t paying attention, or starts drifting off to sle...

[ad_1] Back in the fall of 2017, outlets started reporting that a defunct Chinese space station—Tiangong-1—was set to return to Earth in an uncontrolled crash at any time . The uncertainty of the event (no, scientists really couldn’t say where or when it would come down) coupled with the classic action movie premise (Stuff! Crashing! Out! Of! The! Sky!) meant this piece of space junk pretty much stayed on your Facebook newsfeed for weeks. At the time, Popular Science told you all that we could: it was too soon to make any real guesses about when Tiangong-1 would hit, and you shouldn’t freak out. Now the time has come for a real, actual update. Here’s everything we know—now that we actually know stuff. Tiangong-1 should come back home on Saturday or Sunday, and estimates are skewing to the later end of that range Tiangong-1 was once a space station, but now it’s basically just a bus-sized hunk of dead space junk. That means there’s no way ...

[ad_1] Technology Sustainable rum? I’ll drink to that! Don Q, Patrón, and Castello Banfi wine are just a few of the alcoholic beverage brands committed to sustainable production. [ad_2] Written By Eleanor Cummins

[ad_1] No other member of the animal kingdom can ace an algebra test or write an A+ essay. But that doesn’t mean other species aren’t highly intelligent. Several members of the animal kingdom have impress cognitive chops and cerebral skills. Chimpanzees Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. We share almost 99 percent of our DNA (the little bits of genetic code that make us who we are) with them. It turns out that they share some of our brain power as well. In a study published in 2007, researchers gave adult chimps, adolescent chimps, and college students the same cognitive test. The exam involved remembering where a list of numbers—from one to nine—were located on a touch screen monitor. Chimps and humans alike saw the numbers in their locations for less than a second. Then they were asked to remember where those numbers had been and show the researchers. The adult primates and humans performed about the same. But the adolescent chimps left them both in...

[ad_1] M odern weather forecasts rely on complex computer simulators. These simulators use all the physics equations that describe the atmosphere, including the movement of air, the sun’s warmth, and the formation of clouds and rain. Incremental improvements in forecasts over time mean that modern five-day weather forecasts are as skillful as three-day forecasts were 20 years ago. But you don’t need a supercomputer to predict how the weather above your head is likely to change over the next few hours—this has been known across cultures for millennia. By keeping an eye on the skies above you, and knowing a little about how clouds form, you can predict whether rain is on the way. And moreover, a little understanding of the physics behind cloud formation highlights the complexity of the atmosphere, and sheds some light on why predicting the weather beyond a few days is such a challenging problem. So here are six clouds to keep an eye out for, and how they can help you und...

[ad_1] Next time you drop, dunk, or otherwise damage your precious smartphone, don't panic. Follow this basic advice to quickly restore enough function for a short-term fix. In a pinch, one of these remedies should buy your phone enough time to reach the professionals who can perform more extensive surgery. We've also collected some alleged phone-repair tips to avoid, because they either don't work or could damage your device even further. Here's how to perform fast and easy phone first aid. Protect your phone preemptively Before we get into emergency phone fixes, here are some ways to stop damage from happening in the first place. One easy solution is buy a phone that resists damage well. Next time you go shopping for electronics, look through the descriptions of each device's features to find its IP rating. This number, called the International Protection Marking or Ingress Protection Marking, describes how well the device can withstand dust (the first digit) and ...

[ad_1] There’s a certain romance to wooden baseball bats that goes away the second you swing one. For those of us not trying to make it to the majors, using a wooden bat is mostly just a reminder that hitting a baseball is either painful or frustrating, depending on whether you’ve made contact with the ball or not. See, the trouble with wood is that it vibrates. If you hit a baseball anywhere but at the bat’s so-called sweet spot, you feel all those vibrations in your hands, and about 10 swings laters you’ll have a bruise. But man, hit it right on the sweet spot and it feels like you are a baseball god . Despite the old timey aesthetic to wooden bats and sweet spots, scientists actually didn’t know much of anything about the acoustics (yes, acoustics) of a bat until the 1980s and ‘90s. All batters knew was that when you made contact about two-thirds of the way down the bat, it felt good in your hands. But it’s not that simple. “When we say...

[ad_1] The early 2000s were a great time to study amphibians in Panama. At night, dozens of species sang out in chorus while researchers measured and photographed frog after frog, often hiking to remote sites hours from the nearest road. Jamie Voyles and Cori Richards-Zawacki were both graduate students at the time, just at the start of their scientific careers, and Panama’s amphibians offered a plethora of research possibilities. There were glass frogs with transparent skin, nocturnal frogs with bulging eyes, and arboreal frogs with huge, webbed feet. “The places where we were working had some of the most amazing amphibian diversity in the world. If you went out at night you’d see and hear dozens and dozens of different species every night, some of them amazingly beautiful,” Richards-Zawacki says. Within a few years, everything changed. The amphibian choir grew softer, more muted, and species that had once been plentiful started vanishing. “It wasn’t...

[ad_1] DJI already has a pair of devices compatible with the new PSDK. The first is a thermal camera called the Zenmuse XT2, which it developed as part of its ongoing partnership with Flir. The camera itself has two imaging devices. One is a typical 4K camera, and the other has a radiometric thermal imager, which gives it the ability to effectively see heat. The integration, however, goes beyond simply streaming two video feeds back to the user, and DJI has applied some of its consumer-style automated features. For example, you can use its QuickTrack mode to center the picture in a scene or switch to the thermal camera’s HeatTrack mode, which automatically follows the hottest object in its field of view. DJI touts it as a tool for firefighters who can get remote assistance from a pilot in real time, or someone monitoring conditions at a facility like a solar farm. The other launch partner is agriculture tech company Slantrange. Its new 3PX sensor monitors a cadre of agri-specific ...

[ad_1] Anyone watching Swedish scientist Anja Lund working out on an aerobic stepper recently might have thought it a strange way to get fit. She was stepping while holding a shoulder bag, its arm strap dripping with water. In this case, exercise was secondary to science. Lund wasn’t attempting to break a sweat — rather, she was trying to simulate a brisk walk in the rain. The idea was to test an experimental material’s response to moisture. That’s why she doused the arm strap in tap water, hoping that the special electricty-generating fabric she and her team developed not only would keep producing power when wet but would become even stronger. It succeeded on both counts. “The reason we focus on the functionality underwater is that most electronic textiles have a structure that means they would probably cease to function when wet,” she said. “For practical use, it’s important that this textile can withstand both foul weather a...

[ad_1] When computers try to imitate humans, they often get confused. But simulated brain cells in so-called neural networks can mimic our problem-solving skills. An AI will look at a dataset, figure out its governing rules, and use those instructions to make something new. We already employ these bots to recognize faces, drive cars, and caption images for the blind. But can a computer cook? I fed a neural network thousands of recipes and asked it to whip up something of its own. It spat out an...interesting dish. Amnesiac AI To keep processing fast, the network recalls only 65 characters at a time. It adds cocoa just before it would otherwise forget we’re making “chocolate.” Hopefully it forgets that black puddings usually feature blood. Word salad Title, category, ingredients, directions. It gets this format every time because of consistency across all the recipes we pulled from. But my AI hasn’t seen as many examples of how to use rare ingredients like sesame....

[ad_1] Before they were staples in your fridge or household supply cabinet, many ordinary products were used in extraordinary (and often totally absurd) medical contexts. The most popular example is Coca-Cola, which was first brewed on March 29, 1886 by Georgia-based pharmacist John Stith Pemberton. The sugary soda was originally marketed as a “nerve tonic.” Ads from the 19th century promote the drink, which contained a few milligrams of cocaine per glass, as a way to increase intelligence, relieve exhaustion, and cope with emotions like hysteria and melancholy. Pemberton himself became interested in brewing the drink as a way to manage his morphine addiction, from which many Civil War veterans suffered. But Coca-Cola is hardly the only soda, let alone the only popular American product, to have such a strange backstory. Here are six other mini-medical histories—and one dispatch from the future. Every other soda was “nerve tonic,” too Coca-Cola may be the mo...

[ad_1] We all have a favorite item of clothing we wish would last forever—the t-shirt from an incredible concert, that sweater grandma gave you, or the swimsuit you bought at a little boutique in France. But stains, tears, and worn spots can limit any garment’s lifespan—and laundering your clothes only speeds up the process. If you’re tired of shirts fading and workout clothes stretching into flimsy wrecks, tweak your laundry habits to give them longer lives. To do that, you need to know why clothes fade and break down in the first place. Know your fabrics Different garments wear out for different reasons. "There are two really different families of fibers,” says Lana Hogue, a garment manufacturer with 25 years of experience, who teaches classes at Garment Industry 411. “There are natural fibers, and there are synthetic fibers. And they all need different care." Natural fibers include cotton, linen, and wool, while synthetic fibers encompass nylon, po...

[ad_1] If ever there were a sport to completely nerd out about, it’s baseball. Geeks across America have been crunching data for years on what makes certain players or teams so great. But most people don’t care whether one team has a slightly elevated chance of winning the wild card this year because their DH’s slugging percentage is off the charts. They just want to see some home runs. We dug into the gritty details to figure out exactly how to hit one. You can even try it out for yourself. Use a composite bat Wooden bats make a beautiful cracking sound as they hit a ball, but if you’re going for a home run (and you’re not a major league player), you should pick a composite bat. In order to get the ball to go farther, you have to make it come off the bat faster, and a key way to do that is to make the bat-ball collision as energy-efficient as possible. A baseball already loses about half its energy deforming as it hits a wooden bat. If you watch in super s...

[ad_1] Back in 2000, a galaxy appeared as a smudge on a photographic plate. It was huge, the size of the Milky Way, but also incredibly faint, and hard to observe. Someone gave it a catalogue number and filed it away into obscurity. It was a member of a relatively new class called an ultra-diffuse galaxy. They're roughly the same size as our own, but with hundreds to thousands of times fewer stars, leaving them easily outshone by brighter objects in the sky. Years later, astronomers took a closer look using the Dragonfly array, a telescope made up of 48 telephoto lenses—perfect for viewing huge, faint objects like this. Astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues wanted to know more about how these star-sparse structures worked, but detailed observations of the (recently published in Nature ) were odd. The galaxy appears to have no dark matter—a new, puzzling piece of evidence for astrophysicists to ponder. What is dark matter, anyway? We have no idea what dark matter really...