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

[ad_1] Last year, Mark Zuckerberg had an Oprah moment at the Facebook developers’ conference—he gave everyone an Oculus Go, a standalone VR headset that starts at $199. Fast forward a year later, and a new virtual reality device is now up for presale. It’s the Oculus Quest, and the marquee feature that differentiates it from the Go is that it can track your movement by sensing where it is in the room. If you duck toward the floor while wearing it, for example, the same action occurs in the virtual world. We've known about this gadget for a while, and it finally ships in May. There’s plenty to say about Quest, but one of the coolest features is its ability to easily show you the room you're in. Strap on a virtual reality headset, and you’re normally completely isolated from the environment around you. Want to see the real world for a moment? You need to slip off the headset or peek under it. But the Quest offers something different: move your head through a virtual boundary, and

[ad_1] The gnarled and twisted trees in these tropical forests are cloaked in clouds and mist, much like the fairy tale forests drawn by British illustrator Arthur Rackham for the Brothers Grimm. But these are not the spectral woods traversed by Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. These are real. They attract curious visitors and sustain a rich diversity of life. Many are centuries old. Sadly, however, their most iconic feature — their foggy ethereal cloud cover — may vanish, another casualty of climate change. “These forests are a source of wonder,” says Eileen Helmer, a scientist with the International Institute of Tropical Forestry, a program run by the U.S. Forest Service, and author of a new study in the journal PLOS ONE that describes the expected changes. “What makes them unique will disappear because of human-caused changes to the climate, which would be an unimaginable tragedy.” The research predicts that within the next 25 years, the wet, misty atmosphere that engul

[ad_1] It has been a rough couple of years for Facebook. There have been privacy breeches and even Congressional hearings. But, the annual F8 developers conference kicks off today, so we’re about to hear what’s coming down the road for the company. We expect to hear about everything from software to hardware and security features. Here are the high-notes of what you need to know. “Today we’re going to talk about building a privacy-focused social platform.” Zuck is aware that Facebook doesn’t have a great track record for privacy. He says that there are wide-spread changes coming on all of the company's platforms. We'll go through them one at a time. Messenger Zuck is heavily focusing on private communication instead of the public "town square" content that we're used to posting on typcial social media feeds like Facebook and Instagram. For Messenger, the company wants to make it faster. Messenger will now exist as a desktop app on Mac and Windows. That means peopl

[ad_1] Lisa Pratt was nearly 2 miles below ground in a South African gold mine when the lights went off and the air stopped moving. Power had cut out, along with the reassuring roar of the ventilating fans that regulate the mine’s methane and carbon monoxide levels. Pratt, then an Indiana University ­geology professor, was hunting for evidence of life-forms capable of ­surviving in extreme dark, salinity, and temperature. As miners began to pour from a crease in the rock above her and run for the exit, it was clear that humans weren’t on that list. “It was not a good moment,” she recalls of that day in 2001. “I honestly thought that might be the end of the line.” Today, Pratt’s work in such environments has led her to a brightly lit office at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., as the agency’s planetary protection officer. In this sparse room with a laptop and a whiteboard, she still ponders a question she faced during her years of crawling, sliding, and rappelling into harsh places

[ad_1] The following is an excerpt from "Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World, a new book by M.R. O'Connor. In places that have long-­established traditions of navigation by environmental cues, GPS can represent yet another onslaught against cultural identity. I watched the filmmaker and Hōkūleʻa crew member Nāʻālehu Anthony hold up his smartphone in front of an audience and tell them, “The compass and the sextant and the GPS. This device can co-­opt 3,000 years of knowledge by pressing a button and looking for the pathway.” When the anthropologist Claudio Aporta began studying Inuit wayfinding in the Canadian Arctic, he wondered whether GPS was just another technology that communities in the Arctic would adapt to and thrive with, like snowmobiles or shotguns, or would it erode something intrinsic and crucial about Inuit culture itself? When he first went to Igloolik in the 1990s, some 40 hunters already owned GPS units. The device’s greatest be

[ad_1] Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, made global headlines last week when he threatened to “declare war” on Canada over some 2,500 tons of trash shipped to Manila in 2013 and 2014. The 103 shipping containers of imported garbage, which came courtesy of a private Canadian business, were labeled as mixed plastic recyclables. But they concealed an unsorted mix of electronic and household waste, including adult diapers. Authorities buried 26 containers in a nearby landfill, but the rest of the refuse still languishes in the harbor as the countries feud over who should take out the trash. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now saying that a 2016 legal ruling means Canada could, theoretically, reclaim the privately-owned garbage—which is what Duterte wants. In a statement last week, the Canadian government said that it is “strongly committed to collaborating with the government of the Philippines to resolve this issue,” but officials have yet to take action. “This incident in

[ad_1] Sometimes it seems as if life is passing us by. When we are children, time ambles by, with endless car journeys and summer holidays which seem to last forever. But as adults, time seems to speed up at a frightening rate, with Christmas and birthdays arriving more quickly every year. But perhaps it doesn’t need to feel this way. Our experience of time is flexible, speeding up in some situations and slowing down in others. There are even some altered states of consciousness (such as under the influence of psychedelic drugs, in traumatic situations, or when athletes are “in the zone”) in which time seems to slow down to an extraordinary degree. So maybe by understanding the psychological processes behind our different experiences of time, we might be able to slow things down a little. In my book Making Time , I suggest a number of basic “laws” of psychological time, as experienced by most people. One of these is that time seems to speed up as we get older. Another is that time seem

[ad_1] Last night, Game of Thrones gave us its biggest battle ever as the humans hoped to fend off a seemingly endless wave of walking dead soldiers. The episode clocked in at more than 90 minutes and all of it took place in the dead of night. As a result, the whole thing was dark—so dark in fact that many viewers took to social media to complain about it and attempted to crank the brightness on their TVs to see what was happening more clearly. Unfortunately, that approach typically only makes things worse. Here’s how to improve your TV’s picture for dark content and pretty much everything else you watch. Consider a pricier TV Not all TVs are created equal and if you have a fancy OLED TV, you probably had an easier time understanding what was happening than if you have a TV that uses traditional backlighting, LED or otherwise. OLED TVs essentially allow each pixel to turn off completely when they’re supposed to be totally dark. That allows them to render as total black. A TV with a typ

[ad_1] Steve Hill paces—patrols, really— in front of four projector screens in a classroom at Sandia National Laboratories, outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has close-cropped hair, a straight back, and a swaggering demeanor that together suggest he’s either former military or law enforcement. If you were unsure, your doubts dissolve when you hear him call dice “a tool to determine chance-based outcome.” The phrasing could be right out of a police report. So yeah, he used to be a cop. And now he’s a “high-risk security professional” at ­Sandia. On this May afternoon, Hill is standing in front of a room crowded with regulators, power-plant employees, research reactor runners, and other types who work with nuclear materials. They’ve come from all over the world to take the lab’s security training course. Through lectures, tech demos, case studies, and hands-on exercises, they learn how best to keep their radioactive stores out of the wrong hands by constructing the strongest possible

[ad_1] Spring is a great opportunity to make the changes that you meant to implement as part of your New Year’s resolution before you totally gave up in mid-January. On this week’s episode of the Techathlon podcast, we can help with some of those improvements, including improving your nutrition with solidified condiments and cleaning up your digital life by scraping the digital crud out of your phone. You can check out the latest episode in the player embedded above. You can also subscribe on iTunes, add us on Stitcher, follow on Anchor, or find us wherever quality podcasts live. You should also follow us on Twitter for trash talking purposes. Here’s a look at what you’ll get with this week’s spoiler-free episode. The Techathlon Decathlon As always, we break down the week’s biggest tech news stories into 10 questions that pit our contestants against one another in a cutthroat technology trivia battle. This week’s topics include self-driving cars, the upcoming 5G mobile networks, and ju

[ad_1] Fictional characters may not suffer when they die, but true fans certainly do. Avengers fans have fallen on some hard times recently. Grey’s Anatomy fanatics still aren’t over McDreamy—or McSteamy, for that matter. Even Game of Thrones loyalists, who watch perhaps the most brutal show ever to air on television, struggle with the loss of, well, approximately 200 characters and counting. The idea of mourning someone who doesn’t technically exist may seem anathema to more stoic consumers of film and television. But just because this particular type of grieving is “disenfranchised,” to use the parlance of grief counselors, doesn’t mean it’s illegitimate. “You know what the hardest grief is? The grief you’re going through right now,” says Alan Wolfelt, founder of the Center for Loss and Life Transition. While there’s very little peer-reviewed research on people’s responses to the deaths of fictional characters, Wolfelt and his fellow grief counselors agree it’s a real, perhaps eve

[ad_1] Our laptops and smartphones hold a lot of appeal. After all, they're how we check up on our friends, load up the latest game, or read through the knowledge collected on Wikipedia. There's so much potential for entertainment and distraction. But too much of a good thing can be detrimental to our health, no matter what our age, and it seems even hardware makers and app developers are wising up to it. With that in mind, we've got some tips, tools, and apps to help you limit how much time you spend staring at screens, whether it's the little one in your hand or the larger one on your desk. Android Google makes its own free screen time monitoring app called Digital Wellbeing, though it's only available on Pixel phones for now. A wider rollout may happen soon, but until then, if you're not using a Pixel, check out the third-party options we've listed in the final section below. Once Digital Wellbeing is installed, you can find the app as an entry on the Set

[ad_1] It’s almost impossible to read the news these days without seeing yet another article on the rising threat of Android malware. But at the same time, a new report from AV-Comparatives has been making the rounds for its finding that most Android antivirus apps are terrible scams. So what’s a security-conscious user to do? It’s easy for reports to get overblown, so we spoke to the folks at AV-Comparatives to get to the crux of the matter. They’re an independent organization that tests the effectiveness of security software on PCs and phones to find what actually works (and what should be avoided like the plague). Here’s what they had to say about the prevalence of Android malware, and what you can do about it. Android malware is real, but the risk is higher outside the U.S. The risk of malware on the Android operating system “depends on many different factors,” says Andreas Clementi, CEO of AV-Comparatives. “Official stores such as Google Play are mostly used in western countries,

[ad_1] Some bags have been around the world, and it shows. These well-worn cases—sourced from the PopSci network—bear the scuffs and dings of adventures logged since the luggage first left the store. Start your own globe-trotting with a brand-new one, and its lifetime warranty will help it last from a gap year all the way through an Alaskan retirement cruise. This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 Transportation issue of Popular Science. [ad_2] Written By Stan Horaczek

[ad_1] It’s been hard not to be preoccupied by Avengers: Endgame , which came out this week. Maybe you’ve been scrambling to get tickets, or worrying about whether you can sit through the 3-hour film without a pee break. (On that last point, we have some advice to share.) Regardless, if you feel like you’ve missed out on tech news lately because you’ve been daydreaming about hanging out with Bruce Banner, don’t worry. We’ve got the info you need. Listen to the latest episode of our tech podcast, the Techathlon! Speaking of superhero cinema, have you ever noticed that film villains always get the best lines? And that silver-tongued tech CEOs love to bend our ears, too? On this week’s episode of the podcast, we play a fun game of who-said-it: a bad guy in a movie, or a tech company executive? For example: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” Give the podcast a listen for the answer. Plus, as always, we begin with the Techathlon Decathlon, where we quiz ourselves on the we

[ad_1] The Hubble Space Telescope gave us a gift for its 29th birthday: This image of the Southern Crab Nebula. Located over 6,800 light-years from Earth, the hourglass-shaped formation of gas and dust—also known as Hen 2-104—was formed by two aging stars locked in a cosmic do-si-do in the constellation Centaurus. The two swirling objects make up a binary star system, and they’re at very different stages in their lives. One is a white dwarf: A small, burnt-out core of a star that’s one of the densest objects in the universe (a spoonful of its matter would weigh as much as a truck). The other is a red giant: a bloated, cooled-down star that’s stopped burning hydrogen and started burning helium, which is a sign that it’s well on its way to becoming a white dwarf. Because of its density, the white dwarf has an immense gravitational pull on the red giant, sucking matter off of its larger neighbor and twirling it into a high-energy ring of gas called an accretion disk. Eventually, all that