The trip in the solar-powered airplane will take 17 hours and 50 minutes. Traveling by car would take only 15 hours and 46 minutes. But the point behind this leg of the trip isn’t speed, but efficiency. This is the 11th leg in a round-the-world trip that started last year with the goal of promoting sustainable resource development. You can watch the flight as it happens in the live stream below, or follow updates on the Solar Impulse website....

But right now is an exciting time for flying machines that differ from the winged tubes you’re used to falling asleep in. Case in point? A new little “jet” from a German company called Lilium. It’s totally electric, has 36 little engines, and seats a total of five people. It flew for the first time earlier this month, although the company only announced that fact this week. The plane’s most distinctive feature is the way the engines are attached to flaps on its two wings....

Known as 2019-novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), the disease seems to have started in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, which is now on lockdown. Five cases have been confirmed in the United States so far, along with patients in 15 other countries besides China. Understanding a disease’s origin story is important, both because it helps epidemiologists track and prevent its spread and because a virus’s genetic makeup can inform the design of vaccines and treatments....

Because the equipment is crucial, doctors and parents have to make do, often forgoing some of that essential time. But a team of researchers at Northwestern University recently created small, sticker-like wireless biosensors that monitor necessary vital signs—all without large equipment and wiring. So far, they’ve tested the devices on a group of premature babies at the Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, who wore the new stickers alongside traditional wiring....

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, wrote a welcome post on the platform today, noting that Musk is “both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service, which is exactly what we need on Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term.” Musk is currently the 8th largest user on Twitter, with more than 80 million followers. In response to this post, Musk tweeted that he was looking forward to making “significant improvements to Twitter in the coming months....

Scientists may be excited, but talk of gravitational waves leaves most people scratching their heads. What are these cosmic vibrations, and why are they making waves in the scientific community? What are gravitational waves? Gravitational waves are disturbances in the fabric of spacetime. If you drag your hand through a still pool of water, you’ll notice that waves follow in its path, and spread outward through the pool. According to Albert Einstein, the same thing happens when heavy objects move through spacetime....

You can quickly and easily scan these square monochrome patterns on your phone, making them the perfect way to check into a venue or look at a restaurant’s menu, for example. Scanners can only read standard barcodes in one direction, top to bottom. But your phone can read QR codes in two directions: top to bottom, and left to right. This means these patterns can contain significantly more information—just about any type of data, and up to about 4,000 characters of text....

At 9:39 a.m., six minutes prior to impact, as N72EX was passing west of Van Nuys at 1,500 feet mean sea level (msl), the Van Nuy’s controller asked the pilot if he was in VFR conditions. The pilot replied, “VFR conditions, one thousand five hundred.” The VNY controller then advised him to contact Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control (SCT) for radar advisory services. At the time of the accident, the helicopter was technically still operating on a special VFR clearance the pilot had obtained earlier from Burbank, though portions of the route further west were reporting marginal VFR weather....

Probably not. But that hasn’t kept everyone from the ancient Greeks to modern psychologists and anthropologists from searching. While neuroscientists have identified a behavioral “attraction system” that seems to activate nerve cells in the midbrain to release the oh-so-pleasurable neurotransmitter dopamine when we’re into someone, they still don’t understand why only some potential mates spur activity. Over thousands of years, people have landed on only vague clues in pursuit of the keys to this ineffable magnetism....

Lagers are relatively new to the brewing scene. They first arose in Bavarian breweries in the late 15th or early 16th century, then eventually spread to the rest of Europe (most famously to Plzeň, the birthplace of pilsner) and eventually to the rest of the world. All of those beers you think of as “national” brands — Heineken, Tsing Tao, Sapporo, Kingfisher, Budweiser to name just a few — those are all lagers....

TikTok user Jewliah has shared multiple videos about her vabbing process and the successful results. With suitors buying her drinks, giving her gifts, compliments and attention, Jewliah claims the primping practice has changed her life. So how did vabbing start? Well, although the trend is recent, the first few mentions of it in pop culture were in Tom Robbins’ 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues; in the book, a lesbian cowgirl gives a step-by-step guide to vabbing....

Because of the coronavirus’ novelty to humans, there are many issues that we still haven’t pinned down—like how many different ways the virus can be transmitted and whether its spread will slow when warm weather arrives. How COVID-19 affects pregnancy is another area where there’s little that scientists know for certain. “At this time there are more questions than there are answers,” says Ashley Roman, director of the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine at NYU Langone Health....

Here’s what we know: On April 20, SpaceX conducted a routine launchpad test of its Crew Dragon vehicle—specifically, the same one that pulled off a successful uncrewed test flight in March into space which docked at the International Space Station. The company is currently preparing for an important test of the vehicle’s launch abort systems this summer. This trial would demonstrate the spacecraft’s ability to fire its newly designed SuperDraco engines (parts of which have been made through 3D printing) and pull onboard astronauts to a safe distance away from the Falcon 9 booster ....

Popular Science: Why is Pluto so important? Cathy Olkin: Pluto is the best known of the Kuiper Belt objects, the bodies that inhabit the outer solar system. Think of the Kuiper Belt as the deep freeze of the solar system, or the attic where you put all of the pieces left over from its youth. By looking at these more-primordial bodies, we can better understand the solar system’s architecture and formation....

Fact: An intentional detonation of some 6,000 pounds of gunpowder was showcased on PopSci‘s 1915 cover. By Rachel Feltman One of PopSci’s most popular vintage covers is for our November 1931 issue. It features a painting by Edgar F. Wittmack that appears to show a man watching a volcanic eruption in progress. He’s wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, and he’s tinkering with a contraption that looks like a xylophone....

In the cosmos, the physics involved in death and dying are a little more subjective than it is here on Earth. For instance, when the sun begins the process of sputtering out, the star will redden and swell up to more than a hundred times its current size. In its final throes, the star will devour the inner planets, leaving Earth to either burn up with it, or freeze over from the cold abyss without a star to keep it warm....

All this came from the chapter of our planet’s history that scientists today have titled the Neoproterozoic Era, which lasted from roughly 1 billion to 540 million years ago. The long stretches of time within its stony pages were a very distant prelude to our world today: a time when the first animals stirred to life, evolving from protists in ancient seas. Just as humans and their fellow animals do today, these ancient precursors would have needed oxygen to live....

My specialty is deep-sea biodiversity. I study invertebrates that live in hydrothermal vents near the ocean floor. These are unique habitats associated with hot springs, which tend to be found near volcanic activity. Many of the creatures that thrive there are not found anywhere else on Earth. Almost every time we discover another of these springs, we find new species. Accessing the habitat is quite challenging. With current technology, you need to be in a deep-diving submarine or use a nimble sea robot....

As the the San Francisco Chronicle reported, city Supervisor Aaron Peskin told his colleagues: “There could be an extraordinary circumstance where, in a virtually unimaginable emergency, they might want to deploy lethal force to render, in some horrific situation, somebody from being able to cause further harm,” offering a rationale for why police may want to use a robot to kill. Police robots are not new, though the acquisition of military-grade robots was bolstered by a program that offered local police departments surplus military goods....

The dangers posed by lead’s carcinogenic toxicity, whether it’s inhaled or absorbed into the bloodstream, have been well-known for decades. Lead is particularly harmful to children during their developmental years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began discussing a total ban on lead in automobile gasoline back in the mid-1980s and outlawed the heavy metal in all fuel sold in the United States nearly 25 years ago, with one exception: aviation gasoline, or avgas....