Previous research showed the hippocampus produces memories of frightening events. Using a technique called activity-dependent neural tagging, the researchers looked to see what happened with those memories when the part of the brain involved in extinction—forming new positive or neutral memories of the place where a traumatic event happened—was active or not active. They are the first to identify another group of neurons in the hippocampus called “extinction neurons” that are directly involved in keeping the scary memory at bay....

The project, called Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities is co-owned by NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, and Portland General Electric (PGE). Solar and wind energy naturally work well together because of their opposite power hours—wind tends to be strongest at night, and the sunniest hours are during the day. Still, a key part here is the battery storage, which provides a little bit of an extra cushion for the intermittency of solar and wind energy....

To make the most of this modern way of working, you can use your browser as an operating system within Windows or macOS. By that, we mean using web apps and having shortcuts to them set up inside your browser just as you would for the programs in your operating system. With a few tweaks inside your browser of choice and perhaps a third-party tool or extension to help, you’ll be using your browser more intuitively and productively than ever before....

Tuvalu, which has a population of nearly 12,000 people spread across nine small islands between Hawaii and Australia, is literally sinking as sea levels continue to rise from melting ice due to increased temperatures. The highest elevation across the archipelago is only 15 feet, and although studies show the islands may be adapting to the water levels, flooding and erosion are expected to accelerate. Already, parts of the Pacific Ocean have risen by just about a foot....

As hard as meteorologists work to forecast storms accurately (even flying planes straight into storms to collect data), predicting hurricanes and tropical storms remains an imprecise science. Particularly when it comes to figuring out how strong a storm is going to be when it hits land, we have a ways to go. But storm-tracking robots, both above and below the storm, can get us the observational data to change that....

“To be a Maya, you had to have cacao,” says Anabel Ford, director of the Mesoamerican Research Center at University of California, Santa Barbara. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, Ford and her team examined 54 vessels for residue of cacao biomarkers, seeking to close the gap on research about non-upper class Maya cacao consumption. Out of the dozens of vases, bowls, jars, and plates, 56 percent were found to have cacao seed residue....

Back in April, the Washington State Building Code Council (SBCC) voted to require the installation of heat pumps for new commercial and multi-family buildings. The council recently voted in favor of requiring it for new residential construction as well, both of which are expected to go into effect in July 2023. These updates to the state’s commercial and residential codes encourage building electrification, which is a major step in phasing out the use of fossil fuels for heating and cooling....

A project by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, argues that it doesn’t, really, if there’s another way for it to land safely. The system is aimed at ultralight and fragile solar-powered planes. To catch the drone, researchers put a suspended net on top of a car, drove it at 45mph, and waited for the drone to match speed and lock onto target: The drone’s camera scans a marker that looks a lot like a QR code, and then lowers itself gently into the waiting sky-cradle....

The test on Friday was a demonstration of Daimler’s Highway Pilot system, a network of radar and camera sensors that allow a truck to be semi-autonomous on the road, lessening, but not eliminating, stresses on the driver. It keeps a safe distance from other cars, either cruising on a highway or stuck in a traffic jam, and sends a wake-up-call to the driver if it senses that he or she might be drifting off to sleep....

During the winter, Canadian photographer Chris Ratzlaff ventures into the great outdoors to photograph soap bubbles as they freeze. Naturally, we had to talk to him about how to make our own frozen bubbles. In our original story, we provided DIY instructions and invited you to try the same project, then to share your photos and videos with us at manual@popsci.com. So, when temperatures plunged recently, a few readers braved the cold....

“It is a discovery of a novel astrophysical system whose existence was not certain,” says Katerina Chatziioannou, a member of the LIGO team at the Center for Computational Astrophysical of the Flatiron Institute in New York, and a soon-to-be professor at Caltech. “These systems have been theorized to form in various astrophysical environments, so proving that they exist and estimating how common they are will tell us about the environments in which they are formed....

When we look at calorie counts, we’re generally hoping to understand how much energy we’re putting into our bodies. But a nutrition label is never going to be able to tell you that, at least not accurately. There are too many factors at play, many of which are dependent on an individual’s physiology, and others of which we’re still figuring out. Consider this: Starting in 2020, almonds suddenly seemed to have around 30 percent fewer calories than they did the year before....

“I went home, Googled ‘sous vide,’ and found a bunch of forum postings,” Heimendinger says. “I figured out chefs were doing sous vide using repurposed lab equipment that was super expensive, and decided there’s no reason it should cost $1,200 to heat water. So I reverse-engineered the sous vide machine and published instructions for how to make a DIY machine.” In 2013, Heimendinger co-founded a sous vide machine company called Sansaire and launched a Kickstarter campaign for a home sous vide machine....

This was the experiment’s setup: Researchers had 30 men and 30 women strap on a pair of a virtual reality goggles. Then one by one, the subjects entered a simulator–a room researchers could manipulate with speakers to make an imagined situation more life-like. In the simulation, all of the subjects were sent to a city, and a woman’s voice announced that their mission was to find a diabetic child and deliver an insulin injection to him....

But our star, too, shall pass. And scientists are actually pretty certain about what will happen when it does. The sun powers itself by fusing, or combining, extremely hot hydrogen atoms inside its core. That creates helium and a lot of energy. But just as a music box will wind itself out, the hydrogen in the sun’s core will run dry. When that happens, in around 5 billion years, the sun will have to find a new power source....

Before the mile run each year in middle school, on the dreaded walk down from the classroom to the course, my classmates would argue over the best way to prevent a side stitch. More so than turning an ankle or coming in last, that repetitive stabbing pain is what the majority of us dreaded most. Our cures ranged across the map from taught techniques, like breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth and not eating for three hours prior, to my favorite: Punching yourself in the stomach at the slightest hint of pain (don’t try it, it doesn’t work)....

No one spays their cat because they’re worried it’ll have half-dog-half-cat babies with their un-neutered dog (or that it will produce the monster that was CatDog). And it’s not necessarily a size thing. My cat is roughly the same size as lots of toy-sized dogs, but she’s in no danger of being impregnated by a Chihuahua. It’s a species thing. Dogs and cats are distinct species, incapable of producing offspring together because of the many differences in their genome....

Funds can be put towards both upgrading existing infrastructure and building new paths of accessibility to “reconnect communities that were previously cut off from economic opportunities,” according to the DOT. The announcement lists some examples of projects that could qualify, including new bus lines, pedestrian bridges to cross highways, or new crosswalks and intersections. “Transportation can connect us to jobs, services, and loved ones, but we‘ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement....

Journalist’s Resource rounds up a whole bunch of these studies, which attempt to nail down such specifics as the motivation, the aesthetics, the specific classification, and the attitudes of the shooters in these events. “The ‘Pseudocommando’ Mass Murderer: Part I, The Psychology of Revenge and Obliteration,” for example, identifies a type of murderer “who kills in public during the daytime, plans his offense well in advance, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons....

“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. WhatsApp already offers end-to-end encryption on messages, which means only the sending and receiving parties can see the content being shared—anyone else who tries to intercept it wouldn’t be able to read the exchange....