This week, however, Apple announced a spec update for the MacBook Pro that included the claim that it has fixed the troublesome keyboards, which have caused so much frustration with their propensity to die at the hands of a single errant crumb. Claims of a fixed keyboard were a big deal, and we’re hoping it really is ready to rock this time. But Apple wasn’t the only big news in the tech world this week....

Luckily, the rest of the tech world was up to its old shenanigans this week, introducing gadgets and creating news you can read about if you just keep scrolling. Listen to the latest edition of the Techathlon podcast If you’re looking for a bright spot in this week, look no further than our technology-oriented trivia podcast. On this week’s show, we recount some of NASA’s innovations that made their way into everyday life, and test your knowledge of Spotify’s mysterious algorithm that determines the popularity of songs and artists....

Question Two: Climate Change In true political fashion, the candidates have come miles to near-agreement, and now haggle over the remaining inches. Both candidates agree that global warming poses a serious threat and needs to be tackled immediately with carbon emission reduction. Both candidates want to institute a cap and trade system to make carbon reduction market friendly. But do they have the record to back it up? Most recently, Senator McCain and Senator Obama punted on the final version of HR 6, the 2007 Energy Bill....

The Inspirator is programmed to recognize 34 “facial landmarks,” according to the press release, especially those around your eyes and mouth. As you ponder images of surfers, equestrians, and kids swinging from tree branches, the app analyzes your facial movements at 15 frames per second. Was that a smirk? A frown? The creators of the app gathered data from 3.4 million faces in 75 countries to make sure they knew what happy or repulsed or most other emotions looked like for as many kinds of humans as they could....

Do you like to listen to music when you work? Pose this question at a party, and you’ll probably get some polarizing responses. Some will say they love it, claiming that it improves their performance; others will say they find it distracting and cannot work effectively with music playing in the background. As music enthusiasts and psychologists, we wanted to understand when it helps and when it hurts to listen to music while performing tasks....

While it’s still advisable to consult professionals should you wish to make a significant investment in stocks, you can make smart trading decisions on your own with the assistance of a stock screener. To the uninitiated, a stock screener is a tool that sifts through and filters thousands of stock listings and selects those that can accommodate your preferred investment strategy. A software like Tykr can help, and it even includes educational resources so you can be the best investor you can be....

Getting familiar with these programs can save you from having to download extra software, and they can help a lot by making your day-to-day computing life easier. To get to these apps, search for them from the taskbar, or click the Start menu button and then select All apps.

Precisely round pellets fly straighter, but casting each in its own 1/8-inch mold isn’t exactly mass production. In space, making them would be easy. In zero gravity, surface tension pulls any liquid into a sphere, the shape with the least surface area for a given volume. This is as true for molten metal as it is for drops of water floating inside the space shuttle. On Earth, the closest thing to zero gravity is freefall—falling objects experience weightlessness right up until they hit the ground....

Squamates have been left out of most CRISPR experiments because of their unique sexual reproduction process. CRISPR works via a cocktail of specialized DNA strands and some enzymes that chop up other pieces of DNA, and it’s usually injected directly into an egg after it has been fertilized. But female squamates store sperm internally for long periods of time, and form fragile shells around embryos once they’re fertilized, making it hard for researchers to figure out exactly when to inject their carefully calibrated gene-editing mixture....

No metaphor is perfect, but this one has an unusual problem: Thanks to just a few centuries of carbon emissions, the “fabric of time” is fast unraveling. Our history, and any certainty we may have felt about the future, is tangled up in it. In a new study in the journal Nature Communications, geologists working in the Canadian Arctic analyzed the carbon-14 in 48 mosses and lichens collected from rocks on Baffin Island to determine how long they’d been buried in ice....

As first reported by the Associated Press this morning, accounts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as non-Meta owned platforms like Telegram and Twitter, had been linking to websites that mimicked reputable European news sources such as The Guardian and Der Spiegel. Those sites, in turn, included fake stories with headlines like “Video: False Staging in Bucha Revealed,” referring to the confirmed Russian massacre of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in April....

Jenga’s physical nature makes it different from classic coffee table games like chess, or Go, which are contests at which artificial intelligence already excels. As complex as those games are, Jenga poses its own unique challenges for a robot. Mechanical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working on a two-fingered bot that uses AI and sensors to figure out the physics of that game and play it....

Researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center are working on developing a hybrid plane that will function kind of like a hybrid car, relying on both fossil fuels and electricity to power itself through the sky. Scientists are working on all components of the hybrid system, developing new hybrid electric engines, but also working to improve small pieces, like insulation around the wiring in the aircraft. “These systems use electric motors and generators that work together with turbine engines to distribute power throughout the aircraft in order to reduce drag for a given amount of fuel burned,” Amy Jankovsky, a NASA engineer said....

One such mission, called Hermes, or the Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite, has recently passed a critical mission review, and NASA scientists will now transition into finalizing the mission’s design. “Hermes will be a critical part of the Artemis mission and NASA’s goals to create a permanent presence on the moon,” Jamie Favors, Hermes program executive at NASA, said in a press release on January 30. Built by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Hermes is one of two mini-weather stations that will monitor space weather with a focus on heliophysics, the study of the sun....

“It’s kind of sad for me,” said David Lehman, GRAIL’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, in a phone call with journalists. “I’m hoping tonight a gas station will pull up next to our spacecraft, refuel it, and we can continue another 6 months. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.” Ebb and Flow, which were named by schoolchildren and are about the size of washing machines, will receive commands Friday morning to fly from south to north on their final trajectory....

Barry Callebaut, creators of the coveted “ruby chocolate,” says they’re finally bringing the pink-hued sweet stateside. The announcement comes two years after the new class of cocoa went public, and one year after the pink KitKat first appeared in Japan. Though the company still needs FDA approval to call the rose-colored bars “chocolate,” American consumers have been eagerly awaiting the domestic debut of the first new chocolate color in over 80 years....

“We’re really putting our foot down on the accelerator and revving up our efforts to make sure we have this transition—not someday in the future, but on a specific date, a specific year—by the year 2035,” said Hochul in yesterday’s press conference. New York is the fourth most populous state in the United States and the second state to mandate zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035 after California. Last month, The California Air Resources Board voted to ban the sale of gas-powered cars beginning in 13 years....

But, you might argue, 25 cities hardly encompass the entire human race. How could such a global brand ignore so many? Never fear, thanks to the magic of Nike+ technology, runners not living in the pre-selected spots can join in. The wireless sensor inserted in your shoe synchs up seamlessly with your iPod or wristband to track your run for a future upload to the race website. Don’t have the Nike+ technology yet?...

This wasn’t the first time nursing home residents died from sweltering heat in the aftermath of a hurricane. After a generator at the Lafon Nursing Facility of the Holy Family stopped working from Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters, 22 residents perished in the deadly heat. Even if the generator was working, it wasn’t connected to the air conditioning, according to a court record. “[Both nursing homes] are places where there was really no morbidity and mortality from the storm itself,” says David Dosa, a geriatrician and associate professor at Brown University....

The current program calls for retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and sending the yet-to-be-built Ares I rocket and Orion capsule to the moon by 2020. But as Block reports elsewhere in the Sentinel, Ares is in serious trouble. It may not be powerful enough to boost Orion into orbit, and engineers are concerned that the rocket may crash into its support tower during liftoff. Some engineers are recommending that Ares be canceled, and Garver’s team has inquired about how much money could be saved by doing so....