Allow me a brief and flimsy anecdote: A couple days ago I’d turned off the pop-blocker on my browser to enable the function of some site or another and forgot to turn it back on afterward. After hitting a few more sites I was closing my browser window when I stumbled upon a pop-under ad. It kind of blew me away, like finding a T. Rex fossil in my backyard....

Since the discovery, EEEV has proven to be a rare but lethal enemy in humans as well as horses. Over the course of 40 years of surveillance from 1964 to 2004, 220 cases have been confirmed with anywhere from a 50-70% mortality rate. In comparison, its Western cousin only kills about 3-7%. The rate of infection is still thankfully low but there is evidence of a slow rise in cases....

While some measure of food will always be ruined due to environmental factors on its way into the market, much of the food wasted on tables in the UK and the U.S. is due to poor planning and over-purchasing on the part of consumers. The effects of all that waste reach far beyond a monetary loss on the consumer’s end; when the packaging, shipping, production, and waste management costs are factored in, the overall financial consequence skyrockets....

From its perch above Earth’s fuzzy atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope has spent three decades peering into the darkness, indiscriminately collecting whatever stray light beams found their way to its giant mirror. From local moons, to distant planets, exploding stars, and far off galaxies, the world’s first and best-known space telescope has snapped images of them all, producing a voluminous gallery topping 1.4 million observations. Now NASA is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Hubble’s launch with one more picture—and it’s a doozy....

It can print from a digital camera over a USB cable, or from a cellphone camera using Bluetooth. Send an image straight from either device, and in a minute or less the image will appear in a 2- by 3-inch hard copy with an adhesive backing for sticking in a scrapbook or on the fridge. As Polaroid promises, the photos are smudge-proof and waterproof (including, my roommate proved, lick-proof). PoGo worked wonderfully with my T-Mobile Samsung t639 phone....

Rats that had their uterus removed struggled more with working memory than rats that received other types of gynecological operations, found a study published this week in the journal Endocrinology. The scientists behind the research say this is an early step in parsing how the reproductive system—and decisions to alter that system—can influence cognition and health. Until recently, the medical community has primarily thought of the uterus as just a “baby house,” says Donna Korol, a biologist who studies the neural mechanisms of learning and memory at Syracuse University and who was not involved in the new study....

The study began, which began last month, “is developing and evaluating an autonomous personalized social robot tutor-companion that can engage preschool children in storytelling activities during a long-term interaction,” the grant abstract says. ” The project advances the fields of autonomous storytelling generation and analysis, as well as the interaction between autonomous social robots and preschool children to promote learning.” The research will likely continue through the summer of 2017....

The changes, experts say, are restrictive in terms of what electric vehicles and potential buyers will qualify. However, it’s not all bad news, either. Here’s a look at what to expect in the EV space if the IRA becomes law. The current landscape First, it makes sense to consider the way tax credits have worked in the clean vehicle space, pre-IRA, in the United States. Currently, in some cases, as much as $7,500 is available as a tax credit to people who want to buy an electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid....

Google previewed this feature in a blog post in July, and now it’s officially here in the latest Pixel phone. The company calls it Motion Sense, and it sprung out of a five-year-old initiative known as Project Soli. Radar is a great sensing strategy that a vast array of devices employ, from self-driving cars to airplanes to the radar gun a police officer holds. “Radar has a lot of very interesting properties that would be very useful for human-computer interaction,” Jaime Lien, a research engineer at Google, explained in a video....

A new paper encapsulates 32 years of data and satellite images over a 430,000-square-kilometer area of Ontario, Canada, looking at the waste of insects that munch on leaves, known as defoliators. Published today in the journal Nature Communications, the paper concludes that the gypsy moth caterpillar (Lymantria dispar) and tent caterpillar (Malacosoma americanum) indirectly contribute carbon emissions because their nitrogen-rich waste ends up in nearby bodies of water. “It’s a powerful study, building upon decades of that kind of work,” says Christopher Williams, a geography professor at Clark University who was not involved in this study....

They flip up a mast set in the vehicle’s bed, hook one side of the balloon to it, and clip the other to a carabiner near the cab. They stick a hose attached to a helium tank under the balloon’s skirt, and the gas inflates the material till it looks like a kid in a ghost costume, if that kid were the size of a Volkswagen Bus. Roa leads flight operations and McLaughlin heads payload systems for Urban Sky, a startup that makes reusable microballoons that float as much as 13 miles up to the stratosphere to gather information about what’s going on below....

Cholera results when the bacteria Vibrio cholerae infects the intestines. While most people can weather the relatively mild symptoms, others are hit harder by vomiting, diarrhea, and leg cramps. If these patients are left untreated, they can die within a day or even a few hours due to dehydration. The bacteria can be transmitted between people in food or water. “In an epidemic, the source of the contamination is usually the feces of an infected person that contaminates water and/or food,” according to the CDC web site....

We paleontologists have always loved bones, but that’s sometimes caused us to overlook another important resource: coprolites, the technical term for fossilized poop. I like to think I have an eye for ­ancient excrement, but it can be incredibly difficult to find. Sometimes, though, the poo finds you. This past year, I was in southwestern Wyoming searching for fossils in 50-​­million-​year-​old sediment. Snow, rain, and wind are constantly eroding the sandstone slopes....

Videos of gooey cheese pulls and photos of oozing over-easy eggs can make our tummies rumble. But these 2D dishes can’t satisfy our hunger, so how can pixels still make us salivate? It’s mostly because we “did not evolve in a world of pictures,” says Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano. You consciously might know that what you’re looking at isn’t food you can eat, but the brain pathways that evolved over millions of years—without programs such as The Great British Baking Show and Chopped to binge on—do not....

On October 7, the National Park Service released a new study evaluating Cold War sites for their potential to become National Historic Landmarks. While some Cold War sites are older than the 50 years typically required to be considered for registration or designation as a landmark, some are much younger than that, while still belonging entirely to the Cold War era. The exact duration of the Cold War is a matter of academic and scholarly dispute, but the National Park Service offers an expansive definition....

A group of researchers in the United Kingdom trained dogs to detect malaria in people infected with the disease but who had no fever or physical symptoms. They presented the results this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans. Malaria is a global problem. Despite $2.7 billion in funding to eradicate the disease, malaria still infected 216 million people and killed 445,000 worldwide in 2016, according to the World Health Organization....

Temnospondyls were a group of bulbous, four legged, amphibians that went extinct around 120 million years ago. They ranged from Eryops megacephalu to the aquatic Paracyclotosaurus davidi and have some similar shared features with modern salamanders, but not directly related to any living ones. In a new paper published this week in the journal Palaeontology, a team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia detail various methods of estimating the weight of these animals—not an easy feat....

Your keys can’t do anything for you when you spill lunch on your new white shirt. Your wallet and phone can’t protect you from surprise showers. When you leave your house, make sure you have everything you’ll need for the day. Make the journey to work less miserable with these things to carry, organize, and optimize your day. The original rugged twill briefcase by Filson is American-made, water- and wear-resistant, and comes with a storm flap closure to keep your belongings dry and safe....

THeMIS boasts a top speed of almost 22 mph. It is is 6.5 feet n length, and just under 3 feet in height. This lets it keep a much lower profile than human soldiers. It weighs 1,500 pounds, and can carry a 1,500-pound payload on top of that. The “hybrid” part of the name comes from THeMIS’s diesel-electric engine and battery. It can run on just electrical power, or it can use gas and battery for up to 8 hours straight....

The devices are made from a thin array of metallic wires that are oriented around a central sensor and map blood flow as well as pick up on the slight temperature increase that each pulse of blood brings. They are coated in a thin layer of silicone, so they are flexible and can stick to the skin like temporary tattoos. For now, the devices need to be attached to a computer using a thin cable, but could someday connect wirelessly via Bluetooth, as do other flexible electronics from the same lab....