Now, it appears, ISIS has created a driverless car with the exact opposite objective: remotely controlled, a driverless car bomb could be just as deadly as a suicidal one, and without the high cost of a fighter in the driver seat, too. As reported by Sky News, ISIS has posted an instructional video on how to turn a car into a remote-controlled weapon. It includes remote steering: A machine to hit the pedals: And a foil-wrapped laser-eyed mannequin in the front seat to fool infrared cameras....

New laptop graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD Both Nvidia and AMD announced new graphics cards for gaming laptops that will bump up the next wave portable gaming PCs. Nvidia announced laptop versions of its RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti graphics cards. AMD went a step further, announcing multiple runs of notebook GPUs: The 6600S and 6700S are for thinner, lighter gaming laptops. The 6300M and 6500M are less powerful cards to allow for better performance in mid-range laptop configurations....

In fact, in James Dyson’s new memoir, Invention: A Life, he notes that at one point, around 2012 to 2014, his company—famous for its battery-powered vacuum cleaners, as well as other gadgets—was “consuming something like 6 percent of the global supply of lithium-ion batteries.” That’s just one fascinating detail in a volume that recounts Dyson’s trailblazing career: In his early days, he sold a boat called the Sea Truck, then he invented a new kind of wheelbarrow called the Ballbarrow, and eventually created a vacuum cleaner design that employs cyclones—rapidly spinning air—to separate out the dirt, instead of relying on a bag to do that job....

That’s why having a wide selection of feline enrichment toys is important for both you and your cat. Not only does having a wide selection of cat toys keep your cat from finding trouble, but it also gives them a variety of ways to stay active and stimulated throughout the day. One great choice for an interactive toy is the Smart & Interactive Self-Rotating Ball Cat Teaser and right now it’s on sale for $28....

What Triby Does Well Using an accompanied app, the Triby unit lets users send and receive drawings and calls between the speaker and an app on iPhone or iPad (an Android version is in the works). That’s handy if a person without their phone in the kitchen wants to talk with someone in the other room. Where Triby Could Be Improved Speaking of phones, a smartphone app allows you to talk between Triby and cell phone, but calls can’t be made to actual phone numbers....

A bunch of physics PhD students made “Decay,” which is set and filmed at the LHC in Switzerland. It is neither authorized nor endorsed by CERN, obviously, but that didn’t stop them from filming the huge ATLAS detector and CERN meeting rooms, and talking about the recently discovered Higgs boson. As you can glean from the trailer, something bad happens to the LHC’s particle beam. Cautious scientists warn that experiments should shut down, but the hunt for the Higgs is “the highest priority,” says the evil fake CERN director....

“Until the introduction of ketamine, there was no drug that could rapidly improve depressive symptoms,” says lead author Peter Nagele, a trauma anesthesiologist at the University of Chicago. Ketamine, which, like nitrous oxide, has been around for a long time, is considered a “promising” new treatment option, but it can have serious side effects, Nagele says, such as increases in blood pressure, hallucination, and addiction. Like ketamine, nitrous oxide blocks a neural receptor called the NMDA receptor, which indicated to researchers that it might have a similar antidepressant effect....

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a fridge-sized instrument that will be installed in place of Hubble’s original corrective optics set, will help astronomers learn more about the large-scale structure of the universe. Scientists hope it will help explain how stars and galaxies evolved; how the building blocks of life, like carbon and iron, came to be; how matter is distributed in the universe; and, well, what the matter is. Spacewalking astronauts will also install a new, improved camera, which will continue snapping cosmic postcards for another five years....

Siemens has built a system which does just that and has field tested it successfully, scoring a success rate of 99.9 percent. The advantages over the traditional bar code tag are obvious—the most important being the RFID tag can be read at any angle. Barcode tags are regularly crumbled or bent and easily become unreadable as they pass through the sorting system. That’s the biggest reason luggage is lost. The RFID system is non-contact and so does not rely on correct bag positioning....

You can also use Memojis outside of the iOS environment and in other apps like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This means you can spread the love to all your friends in a very personal, accurate way. Memoji basics To make a Memoji, open iMessage, tap on the Memoji Stickers icon (it’s the little monkey), and then the plus icon. This will open the creator, and you’ll find you have quite a number of options to customize your avatar:...

If you want to upgrade your typing experience with one of these gadgets, there are two ways to go about it: You can always buy one or, if you’re up for the challenge, put one together yourself. Choosing one approach or the other may not make a huge difference in the price tag of your new peripheral. But there’s only one way that gives you the satisfaction of having made a keyboard that’s specifically made for you and by you....

A paper published yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims that male bottlenose dolphins form the largest known multi-level alliance network outside humans. Humans form alliances for varying strategic reasons (economic, social, political, etc.) and dolphins appear to form similar complicated strategic relationships with each other. The international team of scientists say that these cooperative relationships between groups increase male access to a contested resource: female mates....

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19, national parks superintendents closed Yellowstone and Grand Teton. All Illinois state lands were closed. In Oregon, state parks, national parks, and the Columbia River Gorge are closed. Meanwhile in New York State, the epicenter of the outbreak, public lands remain mostly open. So who is in charge of deciding what public lands stay accessible and which ones close? And, how are they making their decisions?...

The Elfstedentocht used to be held, on average, once every four years, not quite as dependable an event as Leap Year, but fairly close. This fall, however, researchers from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency reported that fans and competitors can expect favorable conditions for the race to occur only once every 18 years due to climate change. In further bad news scientists added that “continuing global warming will lead to further diminishing chances of holding an Elfstedentocht....

The new names come from all over the world, and each star system has its own theme. The star formerly known as 55 Cancri, for example, is now known as Copernicus, and its planets are named after Galileo, Jules Janssen, and a variety of other astronomers. That system’s new names pretty conventional, but hey, they’re better than 55 Cancri b, c, d, e, and f. Others, such as the planet newly named Dagon, have a more interesting backstory....

We have a prescriptive document from that era, just into the second decade of the Cold War, imagining exactly what future wars will looks like. This snapshot is “Soldier of the Futurarmy,” an essay published in the November 1956 issue of ARMY, a magazine from the Association of the United States Army. Its author was Robert B. Rigg, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army who was sent as an observer to watch Soviet forces in World War II and as an advisor to the Nationalist army in China in 1947....

This stretch of road has few landmarks beyond a Best Buy distribution center, so to direct attendees here, conference organizers gave them the coordinates on Google Earth. People seem unbothered by the apparent contradiction. They owe the rapid spread of their belief that Earth is flat to the technologies of the so-called globular world. Some speak of YouTube, a Google property, with something close to reverence. A man named Robert Foertsch approaches me....

“Those butterflies are toxic butterflies,” says Elias, an expert in biodiversity at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Instead of the colorful hairs that make up typical wings, these see-through gliders are full of alkaloids, which lend them an astringent taste. Knowing the acrid meal that awaits them, predators, whether other insects, birds, or even monkeys, are unlikely to take a bite. Elias captured this particular image on a trip to South America’s western coast, where she and several other scientists studied the butterflies in their natural habitat....

Above, you can see some of the reptilian residents of Shallotte River Swamp Park all tucked in for a wintery nap. The North Carolina park saw similar behavior last year, when temperatures dipped below freezing and General Manager George Howard noticed what he thought were the offshoots of cypress tree roots jutting out of the ice. In fact, the swamp’s alligators had poked their snouts up above the water just as the surface froze over, which allowed them to access an oxygen supply while the cold water eased their bodies into a deep snooze....

A few Americans sought out additional doses of the vaccine as well, including ones produced by different manufacturers. And outside the U.S., a handful of countries are moving ahead with second or third doses by different COVID-19 vaccine developers. Now, the FDA has announced that in addition to authorizing booster shots of both the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines (boosters for Pfizer’s vaccine were authorized last month), the regulatory agency says its now okay to mix and max what booster you get....