Here’s how it works: a laser beam goes forward in a straight line angled slightly downward. Light scatters from where it hits, and some of that light is reflected off of objects not seen, like one around a corner. A special camera watches the ground ahead for where the light bounces back, and then picks up signs of, say, a light bouncing off that person hidden around the corner. When the person moves, the place they reflect the laser changes, and suddenly the system can see someone lurking out of sight....

Listen to the latest episode of our podcast! On this week’s episode of the pod, we talk about all the new Surface products Microsoft rolled out, including a laptop and a surprise pair of headphones. We also discuss Wi-Fi’s branding makeover and whether our brains can handle any more devices, content, and social networks. You can listen in the player above, subscribe via iTunes, follow us on SoundCloud, add us to your Stitcher, and now even tune in via Spotify....

Bitcoin went on sale (or lost 40 percent of its value, depending on how you look at it) Earlier this year, Bitcoin—the cryptocurrency even your tech-averse relatives have heard of—hit a high of more than $19,000 per coin. The currency then cooled off and settled around $6,000 for a few months, before taking a serious beating last week—dipping below $4,000. According to various Bitcoin Reddit forums, this is both the best thing and the worst thing to ever happen to cryptocurrency and it will either bounce up to a million dollars per coin or completely go away....

Did PopSci’s recent article on cooking with liquid nitrogen pique your interest? Learn first-hand from H. Alexander Talbot and Aki Kamozawa how to flash-freeze foods and shatter them; turn any cream into ice cream; grind olives into powder; and other kitchen-tech wonders. The class is at Manhattan’s Astor Center, August 26 at 6:30 pm. Use the secret discount code POPSCI when ordering your ticket and get 10 percent off. Hope to see you there!...

This week’s episode breaks our usual format to dive deep into a recent package in our print magazine written by Eleanor Cummins—all about the mysterious, internet-driven phenomenon known as ASMR. Take a listen, and keep reading for a few select facts from the story. FACT: We’re just starting to understand ASMR Since it was first referenced in a 2007 forum post called “weird sensation feels good,” autonomous sensory meridian response has taken the internet by storm....

These apps aren’t hugely different from what iTunes used to be, but it might take you some time to get your bearings and discover all the functionalities that will allow you to make the most out of them. Lucky for you, that’s where we come in. Show the iTunes Store Apple Music does give you a lot for your $10-a-month subscription, but iTunes isn’t completely dead yet—it lives on in the form of the iTunes Store, where you can still buy digital music, TV shows, and movies to keep forever....

RSS is actually one of the oldest web technologies still around, and if you’re already a fan, you know how useful it can be. But if you’re unfamiliar with it, you may find RSS can open up a whole different way of keeping up with the flood of content hitting the web every day, whether you use Chrome for Android or any other RSS reader tool. How RSS works RSS is a notification feature that generates an update on a site’s RSS feed every time there’s a new publication....

“The toilet is an area that all kinds of people, from policy makers to industrial designers, have difficulty thinking about changing,” Gardiner told me. “Not enough designers have looked into ways of fixing the global sanitation crisis with product solutions, and are thinking about issues like user-friendliness and appearance, while taking into consideration that sanitation is all about infrastructure.” Gardiner took all these factors to heart while developing the toilet to satisfy her master’s thesis last year at London’s Royal College of Art....

Two recent studies by the Teratology Society suggest there may be a reason to worry. Exposure to marijuana during pregnancy looks a lot like alcohol exposure, the studies argue, and can even present with symptoms similar to Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Jennifer Thomas, a psychologist at San Diego State University, administered alcohol, cannabinoids (the active chemicals in marijuana like THC and CBD), or both to rats during their equivalent of a human’s third trimester of pregnancy....

But all that water might be worth another look. New findings published in Nature Geoscience on Monday suggest those pools might harbor more breathable oxygen than we ever imagined—enough for life to exist on or near the surface. “It’s a really great set of observations that kind of open up a new set of possible opportunities for life on Mars, in particular ones that were not possible on the early Earth,” says Lewis Ward, a geobiologist at Harvard University and a co-author of the new study....

“We have good news to report,” said Ken Hon, the scientist in charge of the US Geological Survey (USGS) at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, during a briefing, according to the Associated Press. “The eruption is still at an extremely low level at this point.” Hon added that the eruption is currently contained within the volcano’s cinder cone. The USGS also said that a small amount of light can still be seen at night through a vent within the cone, but the channels below that vent, “appear drained of lava....

The question, then, is what forces shaped H. erectus, and further down the line, its descendant Homo sapiens. One popular theory has it that a meat-heavy diet allowed H. erectus to invest in its brainpower. But a new report casts doubt on the basic evidence to support the idea. The theory that a meaty diet allowed human brains to develop is sometimes called the “meat made us human” hypothesis. “One of the leading ideas is that if you switch from a plant-based diet towards a diet that’s rich in protein and fat, like eating meat and bone marrow from carcasses, you have the energy you need to feed a larger brain,” says Andrew Barr, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, who studies the environment of early human evolution....

The device consists of a shoe clip and a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, each with a three-axis accelerometer, microcontroller, battery, and enough flash memory to store up to five days’ worth of data; the band also contains an infrared blood-oxygen and pulse sensor. When the wearer opens the Amiigo smartphone app, it prompts the bracelet to transmit its data. Algorithms process that data to determine what kind of exercises the wearer has done (barbell curls versus hammer curls, for example) and how much of each one....

A video, dubbed “Your Creative Sidekick,” shows the drone filming people mostly outdoors, in picturesque settings. It has tap-and-go navigation, where a user can point at a location on a map and the drone will fly to it. There are shot framing options, whereby users can use the screen on the controller to select an area for the drone to film. It has auto-tracking, wherein the user selects a person or vehicle to follow, and the drone focuses and flies along filming it....

When pure metals cool, they solidify into intricately interlocked crystals. You can’t see the crystals because they fit together perfectly to form what appears to be a uniform mass with a smooth, solid surface. But acid can reveal the structure inside. When you dip pure metals into strong acid (the muriatic acid available in hardware stores, for example), they dissolve slowly by releasing hydrogen gas (gold, being inert, doesn’t give off hydrogen; thus, no frothing)....

In order to design the first bot capable of constructing “diamond tools,” Minecraft‘s in-game items that on average takes humans about 20 minutes and 24,000 actions to craft, researchers utilized a technique known as imitation learning. As its name implies, imitation learning requires an AI to watch and improve upon thousands of human input examples to achieve its intended outcomes. Reinforcement learning, another popular and effective AI design method, instead centers on unfocused trial-and-error approach to its education....

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in today’s official announcement. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.” The team is chaired by David Spergel, founder of the Flatiron Institute for Computational Astrophysics and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and features SETI Institute affiliates, astrophysicists, oceanographers, science journalists, AI theorists, as well as former International Space Station commander and astronaut, Scott Kelly....

The new law declares astronomy as a state policy of Hawaii, which means that in addition to the scientific knowledge it brings, the state sees the field as an important contributor to jobs and the economy. It also establishes the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, an 11-member voting group that will now have majority authority over how the land is managed. According to the bill, the group’s responsibilities will also include building a new framework for the development of astronomy research on the islands, limiting commercial use and activities on Mauna Kea’s land, and requiring the “timely decommissioning” of certain telescopes....

Used primarily in hospital settings as an anesthetic, ketamine is a very powerful medication that also is used illegally by less than one percent of the US population. It can create intense highs, hallucinations, and distortions. Ketamine has been emerging as a potential treatment option for several years, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a nasal spray derived from ketamine called esketamine for people with treatment-resistant depression in 2019....

For starters: What kind of game is it? It’s not quite Destiny, nor is it Spore or Star Wars Galaxies. It’s bigger than all of those, and less defined. Hello Games‘ Sean Murray told Stephen Colbert during a recent appearance on The Late Show that, “We’re constantly surprised. We’ll find creatures and things like that that we never knew existed. We’ll find life places we didn’t expect it.” The release date has started a countdown to the largest scale game in all of history....