The Houston Astros’ use of cameras to steal signs and conceivably cheat to win the World Series has driven many recent conversations about the place and meaning of technology in sports. The Major League Baseball season is on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic, but this has only delayed the league addressing the controversy of using technology within the game. New MLB-sponsored technologies, specifically those used to call balls and strikes, will spawn an entirely new set of questions about tech in baseball....

Investing amid global economic uncertainty is undoubtedly daunting, so if you’re going to do it, you might as well get guidance from people who know the game. But don’t just seek advice from so-called experts. Outprfm, the Consumer Reports of financial analysts, is a platform that vets the accuracy and performance of financial analysts, so you can get trading advice from reputable sources for any stock. You can grab a lifetime subscription on sale for 20-percent off....

A savvy Reddit user with a sharp eye noticed that a Basel court found the company bankrupt on January 15. At the time, it was still valued at nearly $100 million (which is somewhat inexplicable, but also sort of makes sense when you consider how the company managed to linger on for most of the decade without having made any tangible success in getting to Mars). The non-profit arm of the company, the Mars One Foundation, is still alive but is listed in the UK as dormant, with under $25,000 left in accounts....

We can’t tell you if eight colorful dragons gently spinning in the breeze will lull your infant into peaceful dreams, but they will certainly add a touch of whimsy and imagination to your decor. This mobile is made felt and bamboo. This ocean-themed mobile from California-based company Lambs & Ivy is made of plastic and plush polyester and attaches to your child’s crib with a 27-inch arm. The design features a grey quadropus masquerading as an octopus and suspending cute whales and fish from its tentacles....

The news came courtesy of Mercedes-Benz Chief Technology Officer Markus Schäfer, who also reiterated the company’s goal to make battery-powered EVs more accessible to the public.The company aims to become carbon neutral by 2039. To accomplish the project, Mercedes-Benz is partnering with the battery storage provider MN8 Energy and solar power company ChargePoint as its North American partners for the new stations. And before you ask—don’t worry, you won’t need a swanky EV Benz to use the upcoming locations....

Where did they get this idea? Well, according to Fusion, it spawned from the website 8chan, a freewheeling, user-generated image and messaging board in the style of the better-known and controversial 4chan. The theory stemmed from some of its advocates tying together several observations: 1.) Marco Rubio did well in the Iowa caucuses, coming in a strong third and almost matching Trump’s second place finish, better than some expected. 2....

Though migraines were first documented in the 5th Century B.C.E, researchers still don’t fully understand their root physiological cause. Most treatments for migraine prevention include medications originally intended to treat other ailments–beta-blockers were intended to lower blood pressure, antidepressants to treat depression–but researchers happened to learn that they could sometimes prevent migraines (although how they do that is also somewhat unknown). In recent years though, researchers have drawn a connection between migraines and a neurotransmitter called the calcitonin gene related peptide (CGRP)....

Fact: Vampire epidemics are real By Rachel Feltman Back in September, there were a lot of headlines and tweets and TikToks about a new archeological finding in Poland. It was the 300-year-old grave of a seemingly wealthy woman in the village of Pien. She was wearing a silk cap and she was buried in a cemetery—signs that she was someone of status—but she was also shackled to the grave by her big toe....

Those remnants of the Apollo are about to see daylight—figuratively speaking—for the first time in 50 years. On Monday, during a speech about the White House’s proposed 2020 budget, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that the agency would release three samples of lunar rock to nine different U.S. research institutes, where they’ll undergo their first laboratory study and analysis. Those findings could give us a more robust picture of the lunar geology and how its evolved over billions of years, and perhaps even give us some insight into what we ought to be on the lookout for when we finally return to the moon in the next decade....

The launch came down to the wire after engineers discovered another liquid hydrogen leak in the mobile launcher about four hours before the planned go time. This prompted a “red team” to head to the blast danger zone to tighten the relevant valve, after which fueling resumed. The mission hit one more snag when the Range Flight Safety crew had to replace a faulty ethernet switch. The launch was put in a 10-minute countdown hold until a little after 1:30 am EST, when the green light finally came through....

Let’s say you have a heavy block and a rubber ball sitting at the top of a steep ramp, with you holding each one in place. What happens if you just let go (no pushing allowed)? We can predict that if you let go of the block, it’s probably not going to move down the hill as fast as the ball, if it moves at all. You know that round things roll, and things with edges generally don’t....

Alpha Centauri is actually a binary system, with Cen A and Cen B each pretty close in size to our own star. There’s a third star, Proxima Centauri, which is associated with this system. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory set their sights on the system because it’s likely to harbor planets, and because it would be very tricky to spot a planet there. They did it with a special spectrograph installed on the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and used the so-called wobble method, which measures tiny changes in a star’s radial velocity that are caused by planetary perturbations....

The flaw was spotted in a review of the keyboard on the app story. User T-chuk2965 gave the keyboard one star, and wrote, in part: T-chuk titled his review “OpSec”, which is military shorthand for “Operational Security.” The Pentagon defines Operational Security as “the process by which we protect unclassified information that can be used against us,” and broadcasting everything typed in a message to a third-party app seems to be a clear violation of that basic safety practice....

This story originally featured on The Conversation. $2.4 million. $1.5 million. $2.28 million. These are the amounts of money the health system where I work, teach, and get medical attention spent purchasing a PET scanner, a CT scanner, and a three-month supply of pembrolizumab, a drug that treats a variety of solid-organ cancers. To meet the clinical (read “market”) demands of patients, who are typically disinclined to wait for diagnosis or treatment, UVA Health already owns seven CT scanners (that I know of) and three PET scanners, which are used to detect small deposits of known cancer....

The NBA collaboration is based on the Together Mode Microsoft built into Teams software. It works similarly to other video chat services, which detect a person and make it look like they’re sitting in front of a different background. Rather than arranging everyone in a simple grid pattern, however, Microsoft super-imposes the participants into a single background. So, if you’re attending a lecture, everyone will appear in a single virtual lecture hall....

One order calls for the issue of “a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” Federally funded science agencies have been prohibited from using their funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” something critics say has stymied research into the causes of gun violence. “Public health research on gun violence is not advocacy,” the White House plan clarifies. Obama is additionally asking Congress to provide the CDC $10 million to conduct research into the relationship between video games, violence and media images....

But what if it didn’t? What if Borisov, as the interstellar visitor is known, represents the first example of a whole new way to make a comet? Marshall Eubanks, a physicist at the private company Space Initiatives, has been pondering whether the cosmic gunk surrounding dying stars could pull off similar acts of creation since his days at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1980s. If clouds expelled by sputtering stars do draw together into solid masses, interstellar space could be full of such dark, comet-like objects....

This idea has led some scientists to examine the universe’s metaphorical dials and knobs and wonder why complex systems like galaxies, planets, and life were able to form when that didn’t have to be the case, what’s called the “fine-tuning” of our universe. A new report published by the Foundational Questions Institute explains the major recent milestones in an ongoing debate whether the universe is fine-tuned and what that even means....

Researchers from Georgia Tech Research Institute decided to see whether people would accept the authority of a robot in an emergency situation. For the most part, people did, even when placed in an emergency situation, giving the team results that might as well have been dreamt up by writers of The Office. The team asked over 40 volunteers to individually follow a robot labeled “Emergency Guide Robot”. The researchers had the robot (which was controlled remotely by the scientists) lead them to a conference room, but in a few of the cases, the robot first led the test subjects into the wrong room first, where it travelled in circles....