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

[ad_1] Y oga’s original south asian practitioners realized what the regimen can do for the mind millennia ago. In ­modern life, studies prove that the practice boosts attention and focus, reduces stress, and helps curb anxiety. (It’s okay that ­weightlifters and linebackers use it to build strength and increase flexibility too.) No matter why you’re there, the mat can give you a short break from your smartphone and its continuous flow of push notifications. Use these four essentials to help it all fade away. 1. Mat The Jade Harmony pad uses a layer of natural rubber on top to soak up slippery perspiration and improve traction. At three-sixteenths of an inch thick, it’s the perfect Goldilocks depth—comfortably squishy without sacrificing stability. 2. Garment The Lululemon women’s In Movement Tights have an inner, nylon-based fabric layer that spreads out sweat for rapid evaporation. It pulls moisture away from the skin to a quick-drying oute...

[ad_1] Black text on a white background isn’t just boring, it’s blinding. When you’re using your phone or computer at night, the last thing you need is a bright screen torching your eyeballs. Turning the brightness to less than zero can help, but thankfully, companies have begun falling over themselves to add new ways to darken their apps. If that appeals to you, here’s how to “Dark Mode” all the things. Windows 10 Windows 10 has had a dark mode for a while, but for a long time it only affected the settings panel and the Microsoft Store. With the release of its October 2018 Update, Microsoft extended those grey backgrounds to the File Explorer as well, inching a bit closer to system-wide darkness. Couple that with a dark wallpaper and a black taskbar and you’ve got the beginnings of a desktop you might actually want to use at night. Just open the Settings app and head to Personalization > Colors and switch the theme to “Dark” to ...

[ad_1] In 2017, physicists beamed photons from Tibet to a satellite passing more than 300 miles overhead. These particles jumping through space evoked wide-eyed sci-fi fantasies back on Earth: Could Star Trek transporters be far behind? Sorry for the buzzkill, but this real-world trick, called quantum teleportation, probably won’t ever send your body from one place to another. It’s essentially a super-secure data transfer, which is tough to do with the jumble of code that makes a human. Photons and teensy bits of atoms are the most complex bodies we can send over long distances in a flash. Each particle of the same type—photon, neutron, ­electron—​is largely the same as every other member of its subatomic species. Configurations known as quantum states distinguish them. Two photons spinning clockwise, for example, are identical. You can’t make one zip elsewhere with no lag time (sorry, that’s magic), but you can create its duplicate in ano...

[ad_1] Picture a helicopter, and you’ll imagine a craft with two rotors: a big horizontal one that provides lift and thrust, and a smaller vertical rotor at the tail. It needs that back propeller, of course, to keep the entire vehicle from spinning around in circles in reaction to the large rotor up top. But last week, a very different helicopter lifted off the ground for the first time in Florida. Called the Defiant, the prototype has two big rotors positioned one directly above the other. They rotate in different directions, so the chopper doesn’t need that back vertical propeller to keep it from twirling. Instead, the rear propeller pushes the helicopter forward and boosts its speed. While the Defiant, which is made by both Boeing and Sikorsky, is just a demonstration-level prototype, a helicopter like this could someday carry out the kinds of missions for the Army that Black Hawks do today. How it works With a helicopter like the Defiant, “there’s no need for...

[ad_1] Recent reports suggest that stony coral tissue loss disease, which has ravaged Florida reefs over the last half-decade, has moved into the Caribbean. The disease can be found in the waters of Mexico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands and St. Maarten, Florida radio station 88.5 WMNF reported last Friday. The disease, which attacks some of the most iconic coral species, like brain coral, is a major cause for alarm for reef scientists. Here’s what you need to know. What is stony coral disease? “This disease is particularly worrisome because it’s widespread and it progresses rapidly,” says Porter. Among the reasons to worry is that the disease seems to be borne from coral to coral in the water, says Erin Muller, Program Manager and Science Director at the Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research and Restoration at the Mote Marine Laboratory. That means it spreads fast and can potentially spread far. The exact cause of...

[ad_1] You may have noticed that these weekly tech news wrap-up posts—which used to post on Mondays—have been on pause for a bit while we welcomed our new podcast, Techathlon. Now we’re back, however, so fire up a spreadsheet on your computer so it looks like you’re working, sit back, and kill some remaining work time with this handy recap of the week’s big tech stories. Apple wants your subscription money Tim Cook and company recently announced some new hardware without much fanfare, but the company threw a big party this week to announce its new service offerings it hopes you’ll pay for until you slide comfortably into your grave. The new offerings include Apple News+, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, and a credit card called the Apple Card. You can get a full-rundown of the announcements here. Check out the new episode of Techathlon! Remember that hilarious and informative podcast mentioned earlier? Well, there’s a new episode of it embedded above. Y...

[ad_1] Psst. Hey. We see you planning for April Fools’ Day. We know you’re looking to slip a whoopee cushion under the CEO’s butt before that big business meeting. Hilarious. Truly. But—and hear me out—maybe humiliating the person who can fire you is not the best way to spend the first day of April. In the office, there’s a fine line between funny and annoying. That’s why we’ve drawn up this list of simple, harmless pranks that cost next to nothing. Make 'wrong' candy Color can affect our perception of food in subtle ways. Your colleagues likely associate certain colors with certain flavors, so turn those assumptions on their head by making hard candy with an unexpected flavor that doesn’t match the color. Of course, since you’re going to be playing with food for most of these pranks, it’s important to be aware of any food allergies your friends or colleagues may have. These jokes can be fun, but not if you send someone d...

[ad_1] Lionfish hunting native fish off the East Coast, kudzu vines blanketing large areas of the South, cane toads poisoning Australian animals—these are some common examples of destructive invasive species. But the globe’s deadliest invasive is invisible to the naked eye—the chytrid fungus. That’s the conclusion of a new study, published Thursday in Science , which quantified the global death toll of the amphibian-killing fungus. “Everyone knew [chytridiomycosis] was terrible, but we didn’t know the exact numbers,” says lead author Ben Scheele, an applied ecologist with the Australian National University. “Our paper quantified the impact as well as pieced together the when and where.” The B. dendrobatidis pathogen species, the main cause of chytridiomycosis, originated in the Korean peninsula, according to a genome study from last year. Chytrid then appears to have spread through the international pet trade, starting in the early 2...

[ad_1] In December 2017, Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, giving NASA instructions to return humans to the moon using projects already underway as well as private sector partners. Not an easy task, sure, but doable with the proper amount of time, money, and willpower. NASA’s been pretty ambiguous about when it could achieve this goal, but it recently gave itself a target of 2028. But the Trump administration has always hinted to NASA in that it hoped to see this happen sooner, and on Tuesday, the White House made this explicit. At the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, and nearly 50 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Vice President Mike Pence said the 2028 deadline was “just not good enough.” The administration is now directing NASA to land astronauts on the south pole of the moon by 2024—four years earlier than anticipated, and “by any means necessary.” “It is the stated policy of this administration and the United S...

[ad_1] M osquitoes are unrelenting killers. In fact, they are among the most lethal animals in the world. When they carry dangerous viruses or other organisms, a bite can be unforgiving. They cause millions of deaths every year from such infectious diseases as malaria, dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, and at least a dozen more. But here's the really bad news: climate change is expected to make them even deadlier. As the planet heats up, these insects will survive winter and proliferate, causing an estimated billion or more new infections by the end of the century, according to new research. "Plain and simple, climate change is going to kill a lot of people," said biologist Colin J. Carlson, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgetown University's biology department, and co-author of the study, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases . "Mosquito-borne diseases are going to be a big way that happens, especially as they spread from the tropics to t...

[ad_1] Nearly everyone at one time or another has had to endure seeing a blockbuster movie from the POV of a milk mustache under the main character’s nose. The front row is where the tardy are relegated, where those who have yet to master the chicanery of pre-orders and reserved seating must be exiled. There is no question that they are the worst seats in any house. The existence of a worst, then, must suggest its opposite: The ideal seat. The perfect focal point that maximizes your visual and aural experience. Does it exist? For a standard movie theater with exit rows on the sides (as opposed to down the middle, as some older theaters have), the best spot is as close to dead center as you can get. “I’ve always felt the obvious best spot to sit in a movie theater is in the center of the room, center with the screen. This way your eyes are more centralized and not straining to catch things on the very left or right side of the image on screen,” says Joe Muto, head...

[ad_1] Go shopping for a smartphone today and one of the features you'll want to pay close attention to is the rear-facing camera, which may come with multiple lenses. Each camera has a lens for directing light and a sensor for capturing it, both of which affect the quality of the finished shot. In recent years, manufacturers have added more and more lenses to the back camera, spawning designations such as "dual-lens" and "triple-lens." The upper end of the spectrum is occupied by phones such as the Nokia 9 PureView, which has five, but is more really better? What exactly do these extra lenses do? Here, we'll answer that question and explain why different types of lenses might be useful—and when it might make sense to save some money by getting a phone with fewer lenses. Wide- or ultra wide-angle lenses Quite simply, these lenses fit more in the shot, whether it's a sweeping landscape or a row of friends' faces. They're the equivalent of taking a...

[ad_1] On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, when a Volvo SUV traveling at 39 miles per hour hit and killed her. ­Although she was one of thousands of U.S. pedestrians killed by vehicles every year, one distinctive—and highly modern—aspect set her death apart: Nobody was driving that Volvo. A computer was. A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about technology making life-and-death decisions. Twelve months later, a survey by AAA revealed that 71 percent of Americans were too scared to zip around in a totally autonomous ride—an eight percent increase from a ­similar poll taken before Herzberg’s death. Self-driving cars are already cruising our streets, their spinning lasers and other sensors scanning the world around them. Some are from big companies such as Waymo—part of Google’s parent conglomerate Alphab...

[ad_1] From the next room, through a thick granite wall, comes a chug-a-chug-a-chug-a , like an old steam train closing in. Rounding the corner, I see the source of the racket: a table, shaking. The long, metal slab jerks quickly back and forth. On it, in two neat rows, are a half-dozen rectangular prisms packed with sensors measuring pressure and motion. Each one holds a titanium-alloy bolt the size of a grown man’s forearm and weighing about 10 pounds. As the elaborate assemblage might hint, these bolts are special. Eventually, this remarkable hardware will go to space. The bolts, or ones like them, will hold together sections of the Orion spacecraft, a new vehicle that, sometime in the next decade, will carry humans out of low-Earth orbit for the first time since 1972—initially to the moon and later on trips to Mars. But ­before that, the fasteners must survive a mock version of their journey. Only worse. The shaking they’re enduring is merely the beginni...

[ad_1] Researchers have known for a long time that eumelanin—the pigment that colors human skin, hair, and eyes—can conduct electricity. But eumelanin in its natural form isn’t conductive enough to be very useful, and nobody could figure out how to give it a boost. This week, that changed. In a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Chemistry , an interdisciplinary team of Italian scientists describe a breakthrough process that dramatically enhances eumelanin’s conductivity. “This is the first [stepping] stone of a long process that now can start,” says study author Alessandro Pezzella, a University of Naples Federico II organic chemist. Humans and other organisms don’t react to eumelanin, which means it could be used to coat medical implants or other devices meant to go inside the human body. But Eumelanin in its natural form is too untidy on a molecular level to conduct electricity with much efficiency. Previous work failed to i...

[ad_1] The historic floods that hit the Great Plains last week are perhaps just the start of a very wet and destructive spring. That’s according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s spring weather outlook, which warns of the likelihood of moderate to major flooding in 25 of the Lower 48 states through May. The worst flood risk is clustered around the Central and Southern U.S., along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Some of the hardest-hit states include the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Here’s what to expect this spring and in years to come. Snow, rain and cold Wet and snowy conditions are boosting flood risks across the states. This winter was the wettest on record in the contiguous United States, according to NOAA data, which dates back to 1895. In fact, parts of the Eastern and Central U.S. have had an unusually wet past nine months or year, says Bryan Peake, service climatologist at the Midwestern Reg...