But the crew on Jet Airways flight 9W 697 managed to miss that step recently on their way from Mumbai to Jaipur. The result? A plane-ful of panicking passengers, many of whom awoke from naps to discover intense pain in their ears, bleeding from their ears and noses, and a heck of a lot of confusion. The airline itself hasn’t released much more than a vague statement, but Lalit Gupta, the deputy director general of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation told the Hindustan Times that “The 9W 697 Mumbai-Jaipur flight was turned back to Mumbai after take off as, during the climb, crew forgot to select switch to maintain cabin pressure....

If you want to get into a heated playground debate, tell someone you’re feeding your baby peanut butter. Parental advice is practically a blood sport—especially when it comes to an allergic reaction and potential anaphylaxis—and it’s not without reason. But the truth is that most parental units are probably not up to date on the latest and greatest ways to keep their kids allergy-free. Immunologists and allergists have faced an uproar in the last couple of years, because new evidence suggested that their advice on administering peanuts to children was entirely backwards....

Tomorrow, voters in 14 states will make their choice between the five Democratic presidential hopefuls: Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren. For environmentally-conscious citizens, choosing the right candidate is perhaps less than clear. All candidates firmly oppose the myriad environmental rollbacks of the Trump Administration, which have included repealing regulations for polluting power plants, opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling, and loosening key regulations protecting wildlife and water resources (here’s a guide to all 95 environmental rules affected)....

“It doesn’t matter who has keys if you don’t have any locks on the doors. It’s not far-fetched to say an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators in this room,” Zatko said during at one point during his nearly two-and-a-half hour testimony. During his interview, he also explained that Twitter’s estimated 4,000 engineers have consistent access to private user data such as phone numbers and IP addresses....

The second annual Electric Aircraft Symposium was held in late April at the most fitting location—a hotel conference room a stone’s throw from San Francisco airport, the gateway to Silicon Valley. (Advanced electronics will be as crucial to aviation as it is to Google or Intel.) The list of benefits starts with efficiency. Three hyper-technical presentations at the meeting (despite being packed with impenetrable terminology) made one point clear: electric motors are virtually magical....

While that vehicle and its futuristic lounge mode is just a concept for now, what’s real and set for its debut during calendar year 2024 is the brand’s first all-electric model, the Acura ZDX SUV. In case that name rings a bell, it’s because Acura built a gas-powered ZDX from 2010-2013 that wasn’t particularly popular. The ZDX will take design cues from the Precision EV concept, although Acura hasn’t revealed which cues will survive the production process....

Kaeli Swift, a corvid researcher and lecturer at the University of Washington, knows all about birds’ devious reputation. Of the behaviors she’s asked about most, her explanation usually boils down to, “they’re smart.” Corvids are famous for their intelligence. Ravens can use tools to get food (and even use other crafty birds as tools), and plan ahead like apes and small children. Crows have demonstrated the ability to recognize individual human faces and harass people who have harmed them....

But it got us wondering. The San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the most famous earthquake zone in the continental United States, is hit by dozens of small earthquakes every year–and only a century ago, pretty much the entire city of San Francisco was flattened by an earthquake. Yet we never worry about a San Francisco tsunami. Is that lack of foresight, or is something else going on entirely? Tsunamis–the word derives from the Japanese characters meaning “harbor” and “wave”–are not like regular waves....

This knowledge is hard-won, but he’s happy to share. From 6 to 9 a.m., he tells me, off-leash hours send squirrels straight to the treetops, the better to avoid meandering dogs. (“They know what time it is,” he says. Around 8:45 a.m., “they start perking up.”) Other species, like chipmunks and birds, are plentiful, he notes, but the raccoons were recently decimated by canine distemper virus. And while squirrels haven’t been observed eating the nuts of the park’s abundant gingko trees, O’Connor says humans certainly have, turning the fleshy white orbs into soup, or roasting them as a salty snack....

After the end of the Second World War, the US Army Air Force was getting into the business of developing its own ballistic missiles, ones inspired by but not strictly based off of recovered V-2 technology. In April of 1946, the service accepted a proposal from Convair to build a supersonic, ballistic, rocket-powered missile called Project MX-774. By December of 1954, the US Air Force was a separate service branch and MX-774, renamed Atlas, had developed as a stage-and-a-half missile: all the engines ignited at the moment of liftoff then the booster engines were jettisoned about two minutes into the flight....

And not in a good way. You can view the dance here, where a group of supporters break out the moves in the midst of an organizing meeting. The routine involves four sequences of clapping, arm pumping and waving, and making blender motions with your hands. It’s also led to a Guardian article asking whether it’s the “cringiest trend of the campaign season” and a number of similar stories asking why we simply can’t stand to look at the dance clips....

All over your body, you have special nerve pathways that transmit different types of information from your skin. For example, you don’t confuse softness with temperature because different nerves are responsible for each type of sensation. Many of these nerves connect at the spinal cord before being transmitted to the brain, where they are processed. But since we don’t feel a mechanical itch on our skin all the time, even when we have things like clothes pressing against it, there must be something gating the signal to the brain....

In July, chemical-manufacturing giant Bayer announced that home gardeners would no longer be able to buy products containing glyphosate, the active ingredient in the world’s most actively used weed-killer Roundup. It was the culmination of tens of thousands of lawsuits filed against Bayer and Roundup’s previous owner, Monsanto, for their alleged role in causing a form of cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So far, plaintiffs have been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements....

NASA’s moon twins, washing-machine sized spacecraft that arrived at the moon over New Year’s 2012, are going down later today. The spacecraft fired their engines over the weekend to alter their orbits and aim for an unnamed mountain-like structure near the moon’s north pole. They are scheduled to crash at 2:28 p.m. Pacific time, or 5:28 p.m. EST. You can watch live commentary on NASA TV or on JPL’s Ustream feed....

Earlier this week, Washington, DC-based physician D. Clay Ackerly described a worrying experience with a patient of his who tested positive for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 three months after catching the disease in Vox. After dealing with a mild cough and sore throat during his initial infection, the patient was now experiencing more severe symptoms, including a high fever, shortness of breath, and dangerously low oxygen levels. “Despite scientific hopes for either antibody-mediated or cellular immunity, the severity of my patient’s second bout with COVID-19 suggests that such responses may not be as robust as we hope,” Ackerly wrote, adding, “If my patient is not, in fact, an exception but instead proves the rule, then many people could catch COVID-19 more than once, and with unpredictable severity....

Inland flooding is an increasing concern as hurricanes grow more intense and drop record-breaking deluges of rain in their wake. The article below, originally published on September 20, explains why a hurricane’s most catastrophic flooding can occur days after the storm has passed. Days after Hurricane Florence tore through the Carolinas, torrential waters are still wreaking havoc on the region, far away from the coasts that bore the initial brunt of the storm’s wrath....

While certainly a spectacle, it isn’t the most aerodynamically-friendly car emblem in the world. In fact, concerns over the potential negative effect on fuel economy were one of the reasons that many automakers ditched hood ornaments—even if Rolls-Royce owners probably don’t have to worry about their fuel budget. And of course, with the forthcoming launch of an all-new Rolls-Royce electric luxury coupe called the Spectre, fuel efficiency is a non-issue....

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and more frequent, intense wildfires, air purifier sales have skyrocketed since 2020. Yet scientists have long recognized that indoor air poses health risks—the concentrations of some pollutants are usually 2 to 5 times higher indoors than outdoors, according to the EPA. This is particularly concerning given that, on average, Americans spend around 90% of their time inside. To tackle some of the harmful substances that may linger throughout your home, experts recommend using air purifiers with high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters....

“The problem with passwords is that they are easy to breach,” says Ram Pemmaraju, the CTO of security company StrikeForce Technologies. The tools for cracking them, such as malware, are easy to come by. New processors and open-source software can break an encrypted password in days, if not hours or minutes. Take a seven-character password with upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Five to 10 years ago, the average computer would have needed more than 1,000 years to guess it....

What’s a supermoon, anyways? The path of the moon as it circulates the Earth is not a perfect circle, so the moon isn’t always the same distance away from us. We call the furthest point the apogee and the closest point the perigee. “Supermoon” refers to the slightly enlarged appearance of the moon whenever it’s closer to the Earth than average. Supermoons can also be up to 30 percent brighter than typical full moons, according to NASA, which is why they seem so imposing....