The dormant volcano, whose peak is the highest point in the state of Hawai’i at almost 14,000 feet above sea level, is a sacred site to indigenous Hawaiians. It’s also prime scientific real estate. Some hope it will soon be home to the world’s biggest telescope—the Thirty Meter Telescope or TMT—which could peer back more than 13 billion years in time to the universe’s beginnings. What’s happening? All this has culminated in a historic conflict as attempts to construct the TMT get underway....

If you’re heading to foreign country and need to brush up on the local language (or are just somebody who loves learning new languages), travel translators and translation apps can make life a whole lot easier. Below, we highlight three translators that are not only compact, easy to use, and relatively effective. Slip these handheld devices into your carry-on so that you can practice on the plane, and feel prepared to translate as soon as you step into the airport....

But for those birds, migrating north to reach your windowsill is often a treacherous trek. Reflective glass found everywhere from monstrous city skyscrapers to suburban bungalows prove hazardous for avian fly-bys—they’ll see sky or foliage mirrored on a surface and try to fly through it. Instead of continuing on their journeys, birds crash into the glass and fall to the ground. If they aren’t killed on impact, they’ll often be stunned or unable to fly, and make an easy meal for scavengers like raccoons or bobcats....

For some, just the word itself is enough to spark cravings for popcorn, gingersnaps, and fried chicken. But when we’re chowing down, crunch brings a sonic experience that we can’t get enough of. Food scientists suspect that we equate that signature bite with freshness (à la an apple plucked straight from the tree) or the caloric lifeblood that is fat—butter-laden cookies and crackers are snappy, after all. So as it happens are Cheetos....

This uniform coding system is still in use today, allowing consumers and waste recovery facilities to sort waste before recycling. The problem is, most people don’t understand what the symbols mean. A 2019 report from the Consumer Brands Association found that 68 percent of Americans mistakenly assume that any product with the RIC symbols is recyclable, while 24 percent said that they didn’t know the meaning of the symbols at all....

The World’s Columbian Exposition was, by all accounts but one, a roaring success. Between May and October, 1893, more than 27 million people wandered the “White City,” a gleaming neoclassical campus commemorating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. The nation’s preeminent architects crammed artificial lagoons, the original Ferris wheel, the first moving walkway, and life-size replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria onto 690 acres on the south side of Chicago....

Dnipro, the fourth largest city in the Ukraine, still currently holds one of the largest spacecraft production facilities in the world. The major manufacturing center has built everything from rocket engines to rendezvous docking systems for spacecraft. Throughout history, the industrial city helped firmly position Ukraine in the global space sector—and even became one of the most valuable assets the Soviet Union had in the Cold War, says Asif Siddiqi, a professor of history at Fordham University who has written extensively on the Soviet space program....

The intrusion of saltwater from the sea into rivers and groundwater is a serious issue, but the threat is not from a reversal of flow, and our far inland lakes and rivers are not expected to be directly affected by the salty water of our oceans. However, the sensitive areas around the edges of our continents, where fresh water meets salt water, are at risk, and greater efforts must be taken to protect them....

Samsung likes to add its own flourishes to Android, which means Galaxy phones boast quite a few unique features that you won’t find on other devices running the operating system—or on iPhones for that matter. We’ve collected seven cool tips and tricks featured on the latest models of Galaxy phones and Note devices—they should work on all of them, except where we state otherwise. 1. Create GIFs from YouTube videos Everyone loves a well-chosen GIF, and Samsung Galaxy phones let you create them straight from any on-screen YouTube video—no third-party add-ons required....

The party’s just getting started: A trio of astronomers recently spotted 20 more, this time around Saturn. The new haul tips the balance of power in the outer reaches of the solar system ever so slightly toward the ringed planet, which now commands a three-moon lead over its banded neighbor. While the celestial scoreboard doesn’t really matter (although for the record, it currently reads Jupiter: 79, Saturn: 82, Uranus: 27, Neptune: 14), the rather close race backs up recent thinking about how the massive worlds managed to bag so many moons....

Anker announced the PowerHouse 767, its most premium power station yet, at an event held in New York City earlier this month. Final pricing and launch details are still to come, but the company is offering early adopters a $400 discount if they submit their e-mail address to receive a preorder notification. The discount comes by way of a coupon code sent to your e-mail. While final pricing hasn’t been announced, the Anker PowerHouse 757 costs $1,399....

Fortunately, you don’t have to break the bank to score an iMac. This Cyber Week, you can get the entire set-up for an extra 20 percent off, so long as you key in the code CMSAVE20 at checkout. Get an Apple iMac 27″ Core i5 2.9GHz 16GB Silver (Refurbished) for just $686.39 (reg. $1,899) with this deal. Upgrade your workspace for far cheaper. This iMac packs everything a desktop computer should and more, sans the hassle and wires of a PC tower....

Additionally, Beipiaosaurus belongs to a recently discovered and poorly-understood group of dinosaurs called therizinosaurs. The specimen with the feathers is also the first Beipiaosaurus specimen found with a skull, which will provide important evidence about the relationship between therizinosaurs and other dinosaurs. “Feathered dinosaurs are known by the bucket now from northern China,” said Mark Norell, Chairman and Curator of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, “but this is the first intermediary between feathers of Tyrannosaurs like Dilong and the feathers of more birdlike dinosaurs....

“These cells are functioning hours after they should not be,” said Nenad Sestan, a professor of neuroscience and comparative medicine at Yale and lead author of the study, in a news briefing per CNN. “And what this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted. And their functionality restored in multiple vital organs. Even one hour after death.” Sestan and his colleagues received 100 pigs from a local breeder....

“Defendants’ growth is a product of choices they made to design and operate their platforms in ways that exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of their users into spending more and more time on their platforms,” argues the legal filing made by Keller Rohrback, LLP, adding that, “These techniques are both particularly effective and harmful to the youth audience defendants have intentionally cultivated, creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth....

Once the cab is hailed, customers will simply need to approach the car with their Lyft app open to remotely unlock the vehicle, at which time passengers can enter and be driven to their intended destinations via help from an in-car AV app. “The features are backed by extensive research and feedback from real riders to maximize their comfort and ease of use,” Lyft states in the announcement, adding that, “Motional and Lyft are making the new user features available to the public now in preparation for when the service plans to be fully driverless next year....

“We’re hoping new capabilities will develop that can one day take over for the space station,” Robyn Gatens, the deputy space station director for NASA, said at Friday’s announcement. “We won’t transition off station until we have something else to go to, so we don’t have a date certain.” While the move makes it possible for private companies to use the ISS as a hotel for rich thrill-seekers, NASA is adamant that it is not making a foray into space tourism....

Early Muslim scholars argued over whether the liquid leftover in a vessel after someone has drunk from it—called su’r in Arabic—was pure enough to be used for ritual ablutions. These days, we have hard science to settle that ancient debate. Sunny Jung of Virginia Tech, who studies fluid mechanics in biological systems, explains that, in general, animals take in water in one of two ways: They either lap it up, like a dog, or they use a suction mechanism....

They say that as more and more users are using the ubiquitous social media platform, these degrees of separation have been steadily shrinking. Their most recent calculation put the mean separation between any given person to another is 3.57 degrees. If that sounds hard to believe, think of it this way: If you have 100 friends, and each of your friends has 100 friends, that’s already 10,000 friends of friends....

Fireworks make scaredy-cats out of many canines. That’s because dogs, like humans, are hardwired to be afraid of sudden, loud noises. It is what keeps them safe. Some dogs, though, take that fear to the extreme with panting, howling, pacing, whining, hiding, trembling, and even self-injury or escape. And, unlike humans, they don’t know that the fanfare on the Fourth and New Year’s Eve is not a threat. Dogs hear the fireworks and process it as if their world is under siege....