This possible move mirrors what Google did in 2015 when it reorganized under holding company Alphabet to recognize the fact that it had expanded from being a search engine to a company with a variety of projects under its umbrella, The Verge noted. The Verge said that this rebrand (which could happen at the annual AR/VR-focused Facebook Connect conference on Oct. 28) could be related to the company’s ongoing efforts to build out the “metaverse,” defined by Facebook as a “set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you....

Since the 1800s, researchers have noticed that viruses could cause patients’ tumors to shrink or grow, but they weren’t sure why or how this happened. In recent years, scientists figured out that genetic tweaks to a virus could cause them to preferentially infect and kill cancerous cells without affecting the nearby healthy cells. And while malignant cancers often slip by the immune system, the virus’ presence ignites the immune response....

Those delivery vehicles, named the Zevo 600 after their approximate cubic-foot cargo capacity, come from a General Motors subsidiary called BrightDrop. Each van boasts a range of some 250 miles on a charge. One of them set a world record in April for the longest journey of an electric delivery vehicle on just one charge, when it clocked nearly 259 miles. (The road trip was so riveting that a reporter tagging along from the Verge seems to have, understandably, fallen asleep twice....

Like many, I was shocked back in 2014 when Harley-Davidson, perhaps the most tradition-steeped motorcycle manufacturer on the planet, unveiled a prototype electric motorcycle with intent to bring a whisper-quiet hog to market. It was a bold step for a brand with legions of devoted disciples baptized in gas, oil, and ink. But the 2020 Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric motorcycle is here, on schedule for an early fall 2019 delivery to 150 participating North American Harley-Davidson dealerships....

The treatment was thought to work because the lights and sounds, which pulse at 40 flashes per second, trigger the neurons in mouse brains to fire in patterns called gamma oscillations. People with Alzheimer’s disease have a decreased number of these neural fluctuations, which are tentatively associated with concentration and cognitive processes like perception. Why the oscillations may change Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice, though, is still under investigation. In a new study out this week that builds on that past work, the team found that the light pulses and gamma oscillations protect against neurodegeneration and change the expression of genes involved with inflammation and neuron health in the brains of mice....

RSV and the flu can form a hybrid virus that can escape our immune system’s best defenses and infect lung cells, according to a study published earlier this week in the journal Nature Microbiology. The study marks the first time that such a cooperation between viruses has been observed. The researchers believe that it could help explain why co-infections can lead to significantly worse illness in some patients, including the notoriously difficult to treat viral pneumonia....

Despite being unique, the Lightning also manages to be quite normal on the surface, which is an accomplishment on its own. Feeling like a typical pickup means it offers a seamless transition to electrification for drivers. It promises to be like a regular pickup with a whole lot of extra features. Popping the hood of the F-150 Lightning won’t reveal Ford’s 5.0-liter V8 engine. Instead, owners will find copious amounts of cargo space....

Scientists are not sure when this extinction crisis began—it could have started 10,000 years ago, or during the industrial revolution, or this century. But we are definitely seeing an extinction “spasm” right now, say the Berkeley scientists, especially among our clammy, froggy friends. This extinction is unlike the five that came before it, according to the paper’s authors from UC Berkeley, because it has nothing to do with any asteroid impact, or volcanic surge, or great sea cooling....

Despite their tragic ends at Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991, prolific volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft were not the first to film hot lava at close range. In April 1933, Popular Science published the dramatic account of scientific explorer, Arpad Kirner, who was lowered by asbestos rope 800 feet into the mouth of Stromboli off the coast of Sicily to film its rumbling, fuming vent-hole. With a 2,000-year eruption streak and nearly constant fountains of lava, Stromboli is one of Earth’s most active volcanoes....

Although it may seem like Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity caught the world by surprise at the turn of the 20th century, in fact, it was a long time coming. Relativity’s roots can be traced to Galileo’s writings in 1632. To prove Copernicus’s heliocentric system, physics had to show that although Earth swung through space and rotated on its axis, observers on Earth would have no direct way of knowing that they were the ones in motion relative to the cosmos....

The Japanese government never considered abandoning Fukushima as the Soviet Union did with Chernobyl. It made the unprecedented decision to clean up the contaminated areas—in the process, generating a projected 22 million cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste—and return some 80,000 nuclear refugees to their homes. This past September, the first of 11 towns in Fukushima’s mandatory evacuation zone reopened after extensive decontamination, but fewer than 2 percent of evacuees returned that month....

Why such a high-profile ribbon-cutting? Fusion power is a kind of nuclear power source, the same thing that happens on a much larger scale in the hearts of stars. Theoretically, if you could get light atoms to fuse into heavier atoms, the energy produced by the reaction (which happens at immense temperatures and pressures) would be a clean source of energy that could continue almost indefinitely, without the radiation byproducts of nuclear fission (the method currently employed at nuclear power plants)....

In a recent paper, DeepMind has taken on the third dimension, and built a program that can navigate a 3D, Doom-like maze. The algorithm isn’t reading the code of the game, it’s literally looking at what any human player would see, and making decisions and judgments about where to go. The algorithm was developed to explore a 3D maze-generator called Labyrinth, where the goal is to find rewards in a randomly generated maze....

“Transframer is state-of-the-art on a variety of video generation benchmarks, and… can generate coherent 30 second videos from a single image without any explicit geometric information,” the DeepMind research team explains. Basically, all Transframer needs is a one photo, which it then analyzes and identities the picture’s framing, i.e. clues like a table, a hallway, or a street. After predicting a subject’s surroundings using these “context images,” it then envisions (and subsequently shows) what that target would look like from various angles....

And now it seems Google has had other tricks up its sleeves to accomplish this goal, according to a new report by The Guardian. The search giant is reportedly testing multiple solar powered drones, and has been since last summer in a remote New Mexico airspace called the Spaceport Authority, according to the Guardian‘s sources. The space was originally meant to house Virgin Galactic aircraft. The technology allegedly used in the devices is not the cell service used by everyday people — at least, not yet....

The best part is, you can immerse yourself in this miniature Wunderland without drinking any sketchy potions. The model train set currently covers nearly 14,000 square feet with over 8 miles of miniature train tracks running through scenes in Europe and the United States. There’s even a tiny space shuttle at Cape Canaveral. Currently, there is an Italy-themed area under construction, with France, Great Britain, and Africa soon to follow....

Quite a few rocks and minerals contain water, but you would never know it from looking at them. Turquoise, for example, is made up of copper and aluminum phosphates. Remarkably, for every copper atom in turquoise, there are four water molecules. Heat it enough and this water can be driven out, discoloring the stone. The difference between water merely soaked into a material, such as cloth, and water that is chemically bound lies in how finely separated a material’s molecules are....

What do a hipster chandelier, an amateur telescope, and a living-room jet engine have in common? You can make each one with an ordinary pie tin! Click here to enter the gallery

You can try to convert those figures to something a little more familiar, such as the weight of a blue whale, by subtracting 5 from any of those exponents. But the numbers are unwaveringly huge no matter how you try to wrap your brain around them. Changing from kilograms to pounds doesn’t make much of an appreciable distance at these scales, either. When it comes to imagining such colossal masses, the human mind is completely out of its depth....

Popular Science: How does a Roomba create a map? Colin Angle: Because it’s a vacuum, its mission in life is to get everywhere it can get to. As it moves around your home, it uses optical sensors and software to document its journey. It says, “There’s nothing here, there’s something here,” etc. That’s how it builds a map, how it understands where your rooms are. You could build a platform on that and use your cellphone to track family members in the house—like find where your husband is and have your home perform intelligent tasks to suit his location....