“Bipedalism is a defining feature of the human lineage and is the first thing to separate our fossil ancestors from other apes. Understanding why it evolved is thus key to understanding what made us human,” says Rhianna Drummond-Clarke, the study’s lead author and a biological anthropology Ph.D. student at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. If something jeopardized a basic need—food, water, air, and shelter—the evolutionary pressure to survive would have forced our early ancestors to adapt, the authors explain....

We’ve picked out several superlative tech gadgets–the quietest keyboard, fastest wireless mouse, and highest-capacity memory card–along with some other 2013 toys and tools to get your new year started right.

Two giant hospital ships, each nearly 900 feet long, are now dockside in the US’s biggest cities: Los Angeles and New York. The USNS Mercy arrived in LA on March 27, and has already begun taking on patients. Its sibling ship, the Comfort, cruised into New York City on Monday—although its spot at the pier required dredging before it pulled in, according to the Navy. The goal: take some pressure off land-based hospitals crunched by the COVID-19 pandemic....

The Allende meteorite, as it came to be known, was the biggest object of its kind ever found. And, as the poster child for the oldest material in our solar system, it became perhaps the world’s most studied meteorite. Its specimens contained grains of dust that were among the first solids forged in the nebula that swirled around the sun more than 4.5 billion years ago. That dust would condense into pebbles, then rocks, then boulders the size of cities—the size of states....

It was meant to make reporting results from the caucus simpler, quicker, and more transparent, but it did the opposite in each of those cases. Shadow, the company responsible for the app, reportedly had roughly two months to build the crucial app after charging roughly $60,000. Those numbers throw up an immediate warning signal for those who make this kind of software for a living. “One of the problems with software in the past decade is that many clients don’t place enough importance on discovery and planning of an app,” says Saptarshi Halder, COO at the app development firm Unified Infotech....

The machine is bound later this summer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where it will tackle a variety of complicated scientific problems, such as climate change, how vaccines should be administered, and mapping regions of the human brain. Ultimately, however, the computer will be dedicated to analyzing and solving questions surrounding nuclear weapons and how best to maintain the safety of our existing arsenal. Via Guardian

But NASA, other spaceflight agencies, and private companies have set their sights on putting humans on Mars—and returning them to Earth safely. So engineers and scientists are working to figure out how to make enough propellant to make such a trip possible. Oxygen, an essential component of rocket propulsion, is hard to come by on the Red Planet. But results from a prototype machine on Mars suggest the element can be yanked out of the air—hinting at future productions to power rocket launches, but not yet nearly enough for humans to breathe Martian air directly....

But why do some waves break as hollow grinding tubes while others crumble more gently and forgivingly? Let’s examine a little wave dynamics in order to assess the situation. Ocean waves are created by wind blowing over the ocean surface, as the kinetic energy of the air is converted into potential and kinetic energy of the water. The biggest and most powerful waves are created in massive storms. As the swells generated by these storms travel over the open ocean, the originally chaotic “victory at sea”-type wave motion is gradually organized into cleaner lines....

To address this problem, Sonos tweaked its Trueplay calibration system to listen to its own sound output using its array of four built-in speakers, and automatically adjust its playback to fend off music-ruining distortion. Last week, at a preview event in NYC, a Sonos rep put the Move inside of a deep bookshelf—one of the worst possible spots for a speaker because of all the reverberations—and started playing. After a few seconds, the sound audibly changed once it realized that the echoes were killing its audio quality....

The Navy SEAL Teams were created in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, who as a commander of a small patrol torpedo boat in World War II had seen the outsized value of small units in big fights and understood, as one early SEAL put it, “that a well-trained David can kick Goliath in the balls.” SEAL stood for “Sea, Air, and Land” and represented all the capabilities of the new force....

The message went like this: “I know I shouldn’t call you, and I promise I won’t call you again. But you’ve got to help me. They’ve sucked all the bones out of my body. I’m here in this hotel room and my bones are gone. My mother and my father and James. They’ve done this to me. And I don’t want to die. Please don’t let them kill me. Don’t let them....

The LG booth is always a spectacle with this massive, curved display at its entrance. LG’s press conference officially kicked off CES this year and the company is betting big on its ThinQ AI platform. During the presentation, the company outlined plans for the next decade in which it hopes to capitalize on the ambient technology trend, in which people seamlessly interact with digital assistants that learn and about their habits and preferences....

“Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!,” President Trump wrote in a tweet posted Monday. Most of the $1.6 billion, which goes on top of the $21 billion already requested, would primarily go toward developing a human lunar lander, and the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, with smaller allocations going to developing related deep space technologies....

Much of the increase, the researchers suspect, is due to environmental factors, “principally lifestyle changes resulting from a combination of decreased time outdoors and increased near work activities.” In Asian countries with “high pressure educational systems,” they say, nearsightedness is even more prevalent, probably because children stay inside to study from a young age. Everyone’s increased screen time likely plays a role, too. Based on that information, the researchers expect that the number of people with myopia in 2050 will be double what it was in 2000; high myopia, a more severe form of the condition, will have quintupled in the same timeframe, possibly due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors....

Scientists discovered new drug-resistant bacteria in China that can withstand colistin—the last antibiotic that could fight dangerous resistant bacterial strains. For great reporting on the findings and their implications, check out this piece by Mary McKenna at National Geographic and this one by Helen Branswell at Stat. New biotechnologies that allow for gene editing and gene drives—a precise way to alter an organism’s DNA and a method to spread genes quickly through a population, respectively—are poised to make unprecedented changes to infectious disease control, agriculture, and more....

I don’t live in Florida, I probably won’t notice which birds don’t exist anymore, and I think diner coffee is just fine. Maybe you’re a coffee connoisseur in the Florida Keys, but for most people living in the United States, it’s hard to get too worked up over climate change—even if we know, intellectually, that it’s a huge problem. But there is one thing we all love to complain about: how freakin’ hot it is in the summer....

The Peak Design Sling comes in two sizes, 10L and 5L, and I’ve found it to be a great quick-access bag for a day of casual shooting when I don’t need to lug a laptop or portable hard drive. The sling has a low-profile design, an easy to access loading compartment, flex fold dividers, two stretchy organizational pockets on the inside, and an additional zippered pocket with color coded pockets for items like memory cards....

Luckily for some of them—specifically the flesh-eating varieties—we humans have warmed the climate enough that their habitats are expanding. Vibrio vulnificus, one of roughly a dozen species that cause vibriosis in humans, only lives in high-salinity surface waters above 13°C (that’s 55.4°F). In the U.S., that means it’s historically been confined to the southeastern coast. But a case report published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that our flesh-eating friends are already moving up the shoreline....

Some of these displays are so lavish that they actually become a hindrance, including the enormous tails of some peacocks and male birds-of-paradise (a group of birds found mostly in Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea). It turns out this strategy has been successfully getting birds laid for a very, very long time. This week, paleontologists reported the discovery of a fossilized bird approximately 120 million years old that boasts one of the earliest known examples of an elaborate display called a pintail....

How can anyone pilot a drone while driving? As envisioned, the car can switch into a self-driving mode, so the driver can instead enjoy the experience hands free. Press a button and the steering wheel slides away. The driver’s hands are now free to pilot a drone, fiddle with the screens, watch TV, or even read a book. Where a glove compartment would normally be, there’s an actual dang bookshelf built into the car, for the driver to use, while driving....