Plastitar—or a combination of microplastics and tar balls—is a pollution conglomerate discovered two years ago by researchers based across the Canary Islands. In recently published research, they described how they found the icky substance on half of the rocks investigated on Tenerife’s Playa Grande as well as areas of El Hierro and Lanzarote in the Atlantic island chain. The formations, which look like big squishy black balls littered with colorful plastic sprinkles, result when oil spills washing up on shore....

At a cluster of buildings about a half-hour south of the city, a guard slides open a high steel gate for our white SUV, with Alhaz Rashid Khokhar at the wheel. A project manager for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Khokhar has, for the past several months, been working toward the opening here of a 200-megawatt expansion of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park. The dark panels stretch across the desert for more than 2 miles, a distance so far beyond the vanishing point that standing at one corner is like ­looking through a double mirror....

Jenner’s original creation, which he developed in 1796, was far from perfect—side effect rates were high, and rather than an injection, it involved transferring infected skin from one person to the next—but immediately, it drove death rates down. In the 1760s, smallpox accounted for more than 10 percent of all deaths in London. By the 1820s, just two decades after Jenner’s vaccine became widely available, it accounted for less than four....

The new book recapitulates a lot of the valuable material from the original, but strips out a great deal of background and theory, and makes a noble attempt to address the home cook. You can make every recipe in this book without owning a high-pressure homogenizer or a spray dryer, for instance! In practice, many of the recipes still fly over the heads of casual cooks, but not nearly as far over as the first batch did....

What We Knew Before Two Future Scenarios Ter Steege goes even further to suggest that most tropical tree species on earth may be eligible for official Threatened classification by the IUCN, considering that Africa and Asia have lost about 55 percent and 35 percent of their tropical forests respectively. And while it’s important to assess all species of flora and fauna, plant species can get overlooked. “Mammals and birds create more attention, but there are many more plant species, and our data on them is much less” says ter Steege....

Round We Go The Pebble Time Round is the Timex Weekender of smartwatches. The Moto 360 is attractive, but far too thick. The Apple Watch is elegant, but looks like you’re wearing a computer on your wrist. The Pebble Time Round, on the other hand, does the best job of blending in with the rest of what you’re wearing. Few will notice you’re wearing a smartwatch at all until they catch you reading the latest notification from its screen....

We’ve tried to regulate which chemicals get into the environment, but they’re clearly still causing harm. And according to a paper published Thursday in Science, the reason could be fundamental flaws in the testing process. “We’re seeing a decline in biodiversity, which we can’t directly link to pesticides,” says Christopher John Topping, an ecotoxicologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who lead the study. “But pesticides are heavily regulated, so as part of that we have to be sure that we’re asking the right questions, when we’re using public money to regulate these pesticides....

The small spacecraft from the European Space Agency became the first to land softly on a comet back in November 2014, but scientists have hardly heard from it ever since. A few things went wrong during the landing and Philae was unable to anchor to the surface of the comet. After a few impressive bounces, the lander came to rest in a dark part of the comet, possibly toppled over....

Welcome to Magic Pen. This fascinating little game displays a delightful plethora of physics principles in action. The object of Magic Pen — as in some similar games, like Crayon Physics Deluxe — is to roll a ball into a goal. The catch is that you can’t touch the ball directly: you can only interact with it by drawing shapes with the mouse. These shapes then interact with the ball, obeying basic principles of physics....

The amendment comes from Illinois Congressman Rodney Davis, and is a proposed amendment to the proposed “Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization Act of 2016,” which would reauthorize the FAA. Before we can understand how Davis’ bill works, we need to look at how the law without it defines drones. First, the word “drone” never appears. Instead, we get the sterile “small unmanned aircraft,” which more specifically are “unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds, including everything that is on board the aircraft....

To determine the absolute best materials configuration, the team relied on machine learning and the promising field of quantum computing for a solution. Although in its relatively early phases of development, quantum computing offers immense potential due to its ability to far surpass traditional computing methods. Currently, even the most advanced of classical supercomputers rely on a binary state—representing information as 1’s and 0’s—to do all their calculations, meaning that there are limits to what they can and can’t achieve....

What you have then is a never-before-seen state of matter, a state of quantum weirdness called a quantum spin liquid. Now, by carefully manipulating atoms, researchers have managed to create this state in the laboratory. The researchers published their work in the journal Science on December 2. Scientists had discussed theories about spin liquids for years. “But we really got very interested in this when these theorists, here at Harvard, finally found a way to actually generate the quantum spin liquids,” says Giulia Semeghini, a physicist and postdoc at Harvard University, who coordinated the research project and was one of the paper authors....

It’s filled with stuff other people have given me that I do not want. Regifting gets a bad rap (pun intended). It’s mocked on television and sneered at in magazines. It’s still taboo to pass a perfectly good item on to someone else simply because it was given to you first. But without regifting, those unwanted gifts will be thrown away or tucked into the back of a closet. When I was a child, my parents pulled out nearly forgotten sweaters and toys for us to wear and play with whenever the relatives who had given them to us turned up to visit....

Today, the FCC voted unanimously in favor of an effort it claims will help stem the tide of robocalls, which sounds like an effort we can all support. But, there are still some huge holes in the safeguards meant to protect your mobile device from the scourge of the auto-generated spam call. Here are some of the issues that remain. What does today’s vote actually do? The unanimous vote gives wireless carriers the ability to automatically block calls without notifying the subscriber that it happened....

Last year, Cassie pulled off another achievement when it power-walked a 5K in just over 53 minutes, displaying the team’s advancements in reliability and durability within mobile robotics. “This may be the first bipedal robot to learn to run, but it won’t be the last,” OSU robotics professor Jonathan Hurst said in a press statement. “I think progress is going to accelerate from here.” Check out a video of the record-breaking in action below: Using a computing technique known as parallelization in which a program simultaneously runs multiple calculations and simulations, Cassie fit the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of machine learning into a single week....

For many new parents, the Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play sleeper is essential for soothing babies into snooze mode. But it’s not safe for sleeping, as evidenced by the stringent warnings issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past week. These new developments have left many parents in a panic. Below, with the help of pediatricians and sleep experts, we’ve picked out products—swaddles, white noise machines, swings, bassinets and the like—that can safely help send your baby off to dreamland....

The 8,265 pounds of supplies includes a host of equipment and material for upcoming microgravity experiments, alongside the first satellites ever launched by both Uganda and Zimbabwe. Most notably, a 3D printer that first arrived aboard the ISS in 2019 is making its return to the station after heading back down to Earth for upgrades courtesy of its developers at Redwire Space. “We brought [the printer] back to our lab in Indiana … to add a few new capabilities, such as the ability to finely control the temperature of each printhead, and now we’re excited to see it launch,” Rich Boling, vice president of corporate advancement for in-space manufacturing and operations at Redwire, said during an October 25 press conference livestream....

Armadillo will provide the vehicles—vertical takeoff and launch craft based on a concept like the one you see here—and RRL will provide financing. The plan is to start flights in 2010. Granger Whitelaw, the Rocket Racing League’s CEO, is apparently betting that in a couple years there will still be plenty of people eager to spend $100,000 on a trip to the edge of space. Will he win that bet?...

Sleuth for scandal Essential oils do not need to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, but the agency can take action if it determines there’s a safety risk. The FDA does, however, require approval for any essential oil product it considers a drug. This nuance means sellers may overclaim the health benefits of their products without having the data to back them up. The FDA can step in—in 2014, the agency slapped three companies with warnings for falsely advertising their oils as treatments for the Ebola virus—but there’s no guarantee they’ll catch every offending oil before it ends up in your home....

Samsung and Xiaomi’s chip is called the 1/1.33-inch ISOCELL Bright HMX sensor, which is—if you can believe it—even more complicated to decode than it seems at first glance. The 1/1.33-inch number reads simple enough, but it’s actually a reference back to a rather arcane sensor sizing standard that started in video cameras. In reality, it’s still smaller than the chip inside a camera like Sony’s RX100 VII advanced compact camera, but bigger than a typical smartphone sensor....