South Dakota was hit particularly hard, experiencing one of its wettest years since 1915. Warmer temperatures that might otherwise have been suitable for planting gave way to heavy rains over the summer which ruined what had been planted. The record-breaking spring rains were followed, months later, by record-breaking rainfall in September that wiped out what was left of the corn and soy crops, and damaged crucial roads and infrastructure in rural communities....

If you are interested in learning the ins and outs of cybersecurity, then you are in luck. Right now you can get The Complete 2023 Cyber Security Developer & IT Skills Bundle for a hugely discounted rate. With 26 courses and over 408 hours of content, this cyber security developer and IT skills bundle will put you on the path to understanding everything you want to. All of the courses are offered by iCollege, an instructor with a 5/5 star rating....

Over time though, a problem emerged: Hardened white spots frequently developed all over Lemon Frost geckos’ skin. Sometimes, the spots even expanded into large growths, which researchers identified as tumors made up of iridophores, a type of cell found in insects, reptiles, fish, and amphibians that’s involved in skin color. About 80 percent of Lemon Frost geckos go on to develop iridophoroma tumors, says Longhua Guo, a geneticist at the University of California at Los Angeles....

Stats Time: 15 minutesCost: $1Difficulty: Easy Tools + Materials Inexpensive, disposable recordCardboardSharpened pencilX-Acto knifePliersRubber bandsHot-glue gunNeedleWooden skewerMasking tape Instructions This article was originally published in the March/April 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Listen to Records with Your Teeth.”

Medical experts are still trying to understand why long COVID grips some patients and not others. According to a study in the journal Cell, a patient may be more prone to long-term symptoms if they experience one or more of the following biological factors: high viral load during the initial infection, a flood of autoantibodies, reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus, and a history of Type 2 diabetes. These drivers aren’t immediately visible in patients from the outset, making it challenging to predict who eventually is at higher risk for long COVID....

Rumors promised new custom Apple silicon, a high-refresh-rate screen, a built-in SD card reader, and even the return of MagSafe. As we found out at the Oct. 18 “Unleashed” event, it was all true. The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro 2021 laptops look like a true return to form for the line if they can live up to the hype. Enter the Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max chips The heart of the new announcements centers around a pair of new Apple chips....

After three years of labor and $50,000, Montesano’s obsession has taken the form of a 12,000-pound, 23-foot-long steel vehicle, dubbed the Walking Beast. He first found a mathematical formula online that determined how all the parts could connect to make an eight-legged machine walk properly. But he still needed several months of experimentation to make the numbers work for a version whose moving parts alone weigh 6,000 pounds. Working at his Oregon steel-fabricating business, Montesano is now adding features, including an elevator to load passengers....

“SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds,” said Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for the SAM instrument, which stands for Sample Analysis at Mars. The instrument did see some carbon-containing material–it’s just not clear whether the carbon in it comes from Mars, or whether Curiosity toted it from Earth. What’s more, at least some of the detected material was most likely created in chemical reactions inside Curiosity’s belly, as the SAM instrument’s oven baked sand samples....

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 protections around them....

It snapped this composite picture at 7:45 a.m. Eastern Time using GOES-East, one of three geostationary satellites that rotate in tandem with the continental U.S. and constantly monitor its weather. The day side captures more or less the colors your eye would see from 20,000 miles up into space, while the night side combines real-time infrared imagery for clouds with a database of past flyovers from a different satellite for city lights....

This is by no means a record breaking haul for the Border Patrol: 85 pounds of grass worth about $42,500–peanuts in the larger drug war. But it is representative of the ever-shifting tactics used by smugglers to get their product to market on the U.S. side of the border. The recovered canisters of pot were believed to have been launched roughly 500 feet (agents also recovered a carbon dioxide tank, tipping them off to the pneumatic nature of this latest ballistic border-clearing method)....

Today, Microsoft announced the Surface Go 2, which raises the ceiling on its tiniest Surface device. The screen area itself is now bigger, checking in at 10.5 inches, up from 10 inches before. The extra display real estate comes from a shrunken bezel. The base model remains at $400 and comes with 64GB storage and 4GB RAM, as well as a somewhat paltry Pentium Gold 4425Y processor, which probably won’t create that much of a performance rift between the update and the previous model....

The Neat Bumblebee II’s design While many of Neat Microphones’ products prominently feature a signature yellow-and-black color scheme matching the brand’s insect theme, the Bumblebee II mic takes a stripped-down design approach. It sports a matte black metal chassis and grill that give off a rather plain, understated impression that might make it more well-suited for use in more professional settings than the 2015 original—a distinctive golden disc perched above an obsidian slab....

Fergus Noble and Colin Beighley, the guys behind Swift Navigation, have experience in drones, specifically with work on wind turbines attached to flying kites. Knowing the precise location of a kite as it flies in circles is important, because the kite will fly autonomously for months and needs to self-correct back to a designated course in case anything sends it off-track. Knowing precisely where it is within inches is much better than being off by several feet....

Before heading out to far-flung destinations in the solar system, spacecraft often slingshot around the Earth, so the planet’s gravity provides a boost to send them on their way. In several cases in the 1990s and early 2000s, scientists saw an unexplained change in spacecraft velocities after their closest Earth-shaves. They didn’t see it in action, in part because the satellites weren’t logged into the Deep Space Network when it happened and even when they were, there’s a 10-second delay between data acquisitions....

That’s why the New York City Council passed a new emissions cap on Thursday that will limit the amount of carbon dioxide per square foot that large building, old and new, can legally emit. Violators will be billed for excess discharge—a carbon tax applied vertically, instead of along the open road. The move is part of a larger goal to reduce the city’s emissions by 40 percent in the next decade and officially ushers in what Costa Constantinides, chair of the council’s Environmental Protection Committee, called “the year of the retrofit....

A team of Japanese astronomers recently discovered one of the hottest Jupiters to date, around a star known as HD 167768, as part of their long-running Okayama Planet Search Program that began in 2001. To make the situation even weirder, this planet is around an old, dying star—a place no one would have expected a planet to survive. Huanyu Teng, astronomer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and lead author of this discovery, considers this planet “a relatively lucky find” and “a rare case....

Last week, a report on NPR about a discovery “for the history books” fueled speculation that Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars instrument had seen something interesting. Curiosity’s principal investigator, John Grotzinger, was looking at incoming data during an interview with an NPR reporter, and he got excited–leading to a story by NPR’s Joe Palca about how scientists have to keep their results under wraps until they’re sure what they see....

Now, they’re becoming part of the next big holiday season: the Christmas shopping wars. Yesterday, the NYPD’s 26th Precinct (located in Harlem) sent out the above-pictured tweet, noting that the electric hoverboard is illegal “as per NYC Admin. Code 19-176.2” Let the Twitter riot commence. Many people pointed out that the code cited (which bans motorized scooters) actually seemed to allow hoverboards. Here is the full text of the code: The legal scholars of Twitter took issue with the fact that electric hoverboards don’t have handlebars, and seem to fall into the category of either “electric powered devices not capable of exceeding fifteen miles per hour” (most electric hoverboards on the market max out at 12 mph, but there are exceptions in development) or the “electric personal assistive mobility devices”....

According to Dieter Hochuli, a professor at the University of Sydney, the spider lures its prey with the highly visible white stripes of its web. The decorations, which significantly increase the rate at which it captures bees, wasps and houseflies, mimic the ultraviolet light reflected by flowers, tricking the pollinating insects into approaching the deadly trap. Instant Expert: Launch Your Quick and Easy Primer on Just About Everything at popsci....