“The proposed rules would help prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers and help adult smokers quit,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in the FDA’s April 28 statement. “Additionally, the proposed rules represent an important step to advance health equity by significantly reducing tobacco-related health disparities.” Menthol is used in cigarettes as a characterizing flavor (that is, readily detectable) with a subtle minty taste, and has a cooling effect that manufacturers say soothes the throat from irritating smoke....

The more than 1 million barrels equal four times the amount of oil released by the massive Exxon Valdez spill in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989 polluted over 1,000 miles (more than 2,000 kilometers) of shoreline. The spill was so severe that in 1990 Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which created procedures for responding to future spills and established the legal liabilities of responsible parties following oil spills, in response....

The heat inside a large fire causes air to rise, forming eddies that can spiral into a vortex called a fire whirl. A fire tornado is essentially a much larger whirl. Those rising eddies become strong updrafts, much like the updrafts that form during thunderstorms. In normal storms, the moisture flung into the air from these updrafts form cumulonimbus clouds—when it happens in a fire, they’re called pyrocumulonimbus clouds. But these updrafts alone don’t cause a tornado....

VALL-E The latest entrant, VALL-E is a new AI from Microsoft researchers that can generate a full model of someone’s voice from a three-second seed clip. It was trained on over 60,000 hours of English language speech from more than 7,000 speakers and works by turning the contents of the seed clip into discrete components through a process called tokenization, which breaks down texts into smaller units called tokens. The AI’s neural network then speculates what the other tokens required to make a full model would sound like, based off the few it has from the short clip....

The moon is unique in the solar system, says Maxwell Rudolph, a geophysicist at the University of California, Davis. A new study he led, published in Geophysical Research Letters, proposes an explanation for the “tiger stripes,” and the geyser that burst through them. As Enceladus heats and cools down in orbit, its icy crust buckles under pressure, allowing water to spill towards the surface. The cycles of heating and cooling are driven by the movement of the moon itself....

There are no tanks or firetrucks or massive surveillance initiatives among the items we’ve dubbed the best security innovations of 2018. That’s because safety happens by the inch, through a relentless effort to stop the simple vulnerabilities that can lead to major threats—on our doorsteps, overseas, and in our streets. Our honorees down malicious drones without risking collateral damage, help military vehicles transverse tough terrain, offer new ways for police to capture fleeing assailants, and prevent porch pirates from nabbing our packages....

For the uninitiated: jailbreaking allows iOS users to install apps and tweaks to your iPhone that Apple normally wouldn’t allow due to their limitations. Apps like f.lux (which makes the screen easier on your eyes at night) or NoSlowAnimations (which speeds up animations that normally slow down the flow of using one’s phone) suddenly became an option. And then there are apps like Activator, which provide so much Apple-unapproved functionality it could fill an entire post....

Known as the Great Barrier Reef Expedition of 1928, its crew spent a year exploring and documenting the Low Isles. Their precise recordings of each community’s location allowed modern day marine biologists to retrace the expedition’s steps. They visited the original seven locations in 2004, 2015, and once more in 2019 to measure the number of species, the cover and size of coral colonies, and temperature amongst other metrics. These were the same factors observed in 1928 and again in 1954 when one of the original voyage’s members revisited the reef....

In disease news The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine went to researchers who discovered treatments for tropical diseases. Researchers from the U.S. picked up a tropical disease during a research trip in Honduras, after getting bitten by sand flies. An Oregon teen was diagnosed with plague. Although plague is rare in the U.S., we’ve seen a jump in cases this year. These owls aren’t going to give you plague....

Stats: Height: 6 ft 5 in. Distance: 100m Time: 9.58 seconds Terminal Velocity: 12.2 m/s (27.3 mph) Average Force: 815.8 newtons Tailwind: 0.9 m/s (~2 mph) Using approximate race-day conditions (temperature, altitude, Bolt’s surface area) along with measurements from the race’s laser velocity guard device (which measured Bolt’s position and speed every 0.1 second), the researchers were able to calculate the immense amount of drag that Bolt overcame. Bolt used 81....

Walking your dog seems simple enough—it’s just you, your pup, and the great outdoors. But without the right equipment and approach, a much-anticipated W-A-L-K can be disappointing. Get some good gear Search for “walking a dog” online and you’ll find pages of photos with people holding leashes attached to a collar around a dog’s throat, which is exactly what the experts we spoke to advise against. “I’m not a big fan of anything around the neck that’s pulling,” says Anna Mynchenberg, a manager at Bark, the company behind BarkBox....

Despite this, humans aren’t readily giving up their burgers and steak dinners. Rather, overall meat consumption has increased by 1.25 percent in 2017 and is projected to be 15 percent higher in 2027 than it was in 2015. Educating people about the devastating impacts of meat consumption can raise awareness, but it rarely changes consumer behavior. What might shift public eating habits, however, is simply increasing the quantity of vegetarian options....

Of all the far-out visions for the future provided us by popular culture (indeed, by this very magazine above almost all else), perhaps none is so conspicuously absent today as the flying car. Other sci-fi fantasies – the invisibility cloak, laser weapons, universal translators, 3-D printers – exist to some degree, if only on a lab bench somewhere. But the flying car, once considered the next logical step in personal transit, simply never took flight....

Earlier this month, the US Federal Communications Committee (FCC) made its first attempts at tackling the issue by introducing a new proposal to drastically shorten the window operators have to remove decommissioned satellites from orbit. As it currently stands, dead satellites can remain in low-Earth orbit for as long as 25 years, which many experts argue is far too generous a timeframe given the rapidly expanding industry. The FCC’s new regulation would see that time reduced to just five years—but observers note that far more needs to be done to truly solve the burgeoning problem....

So far, the CDC has only received complete sex and age data on 373 of the 805 total cases. But according to those numbers, 72 percent of the events were reported in males, and 67 percent are in people aged 18 to 34. Only 17 percent of the cases were people over the age of 35, and more than two-thirds were under 21. For now, the only clear connection the CDC and Food and Drug Administration have uncovered is that all of the afflicted individuals had a history of e-cigarette or vape use....

What is Candida auris? Back in 2009, a 70-year-old Japanese woman’s ear infection puzzled doctors. It turned out to be the first in a series of hard-to-contain infections around the globe, and the beginning of an ongoing scientific and medical mystery. The fungus that infected the Japanese woman, Candida auris, kills more than 1 in 3 people who get an infection that spreads to their blood or organs. It hits people who have weakened immune systems, and is most often found in places like care homes and hospitals....

A recent study published in the journal Cell reveals that genes involved in limb development are influential in creating the shape of our fingerprints. Previously, researchers thought the genes active in skin formation were the most obvious connection to fingerprint patterns. “Fingerprints are an interesting feature of human biology that have been used for a number of practical purposes like individual identification and, more in the past, diagnosis of conditions,” says Denis Headon, a coauthor on the study and developmental biologist at the University of Edinburgh, who investigates the genetics of structure variations on skin in different species, like hair, feathers, and scales....

See, while Dr. Pimple Popper was off becoming famous, the real stars were working behind the scenes to try to figure out how to prevent acne in the first place. (Popping your pimples is, as any good dermatologist will tell you, not actually good for your skin anyway.) But unfortunately many of us are left to pop ’em anyway, because we know very little about these lil’ pustules in comparison to the millions upon millions of people who get them every year....

All of that is poised to change in the next decade as NASA and its partners ramp up new efforts to return, with an eye on staying permanently this time. With new ways of collecting data and new methods for analyzing it, some of our long-standing questions might soon have answers. Here are six of the biggest scientific mysteries about the moon still waiting to be cracked. The Origin of the moon “The fundamental question of how the moon formed, and how that relates to the Earth, is really the most important of the unknowns....

They call the method 4D printing, due to the addition of the fourth dimension of time. Although researchers have achieved 4D printing in the past, this team is unique in printing objects in one step using a single material. Watch the process of printing the flower-shaped objects: “We were inspired by plants,” Sydney Gladman, co-lead author of the study, told Popular Science. “Pinecones, when they are wet, they’re closed up, protecting the seed, but when they fall off the tree, they dry out and open up, exposing the seed… all we had to do was design an ink that could express this behavior....