Lego’s latest offering, however, is a collaboration with the mighty Nintendo to create a Mario-themed set. Rather than cramming lots of different functions and play patterns into the toys, it takes a focused approach. Kids use Lego bricks to build custom courses for an adorable plastic Mario to traverse. There’s no app-based video game. The figures aren’t a controller. The app is simply a companion and it’s much better off for it....

“Home Free” is the open-world survival game where you’re a homeless dog, roaming the streets. You’ll search for food, avoid cruel humans, and evade meaner, territorial dogs as you try and make it from night to night. Cancienne wants you to feel many things, but most of all empathy. Here’s how he describes the game world on the Kickstarter page: And those things will be different every time you play....

If you’re not already a member, now is an amazing time to join the club. In addition to early access sales like this, Walmart+ membership also includes free delivery, free shipping with no order minimum, savings on routine purchases like prescriptions and gas, plus exclusive promotions, product releases, and events. Rather than hunting down sporadic deals, opt for a membership and save whether you’re pulling up to the pump or ordering online....

In 1944, the genius engineer, chemist and inventor Thomas Midgley Jr., a man whose discoveries had helped shape the modern world to a remarkable degree, died at home in bed at the age of 55. Dying at home in bed sounds quite peaceful, you’d think. Not in this case. Paralyzed below the waist due to a bout of polio some years earlier, Midgley disliked the indignity of being lifted in and out of bed, and had put his talent for innovation to good use, building himself an elaborate system of pulleys so he could do it himself....

So far, U.S. Geological Survey biologists have put Tasul and her brother Conrad on two diets. One was made up of meat from land animals and the other was composed of seafood. “We like to think of it as the surf and turf experiment,” Amy Cutting, an Oregon Zoo curator, told the USGS. The researchers’ measurements show the bears’ meals affect their fur and blood for far longer than previously thought....

The US contribution represents about 10 percent of the WHO’s funding, says Nicholas Grossman, a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Political Science. According to NBC News, last year the US spent just under $60 million helping to support the WHO, which is entirely funded by UN member nations. Pulling the funding will reduce the organization’s capacity, he says, but it won’t scupper it. However, the political move Trump made might have greater public health consequences, he says....

Since then, studies have tested many so-called treadmill illusions, including this one: Run on the machine for at least 10 minutes, step off, then have a friend blindfold you. Try to walk in place, and you’ll run forward instead. While you’re on the treadmill, your body is moving, but the world isn’t shifting past you like it does when you’re striding on solid ground. You end up with zero optic flow—the motion of the visual world as you move....

Fourteen hockey players, at an average age of 13 years old, were monitored during the 2006-2007 season (58 games and 51 practices). Standard hockey helmets were retrofitted with the Head Impact Telemetry System from Simbex allowing simultaneous tracking of the entire team. Inside each helmet six linear accelerometers, a wireless transmitter and a battery pack sent real time data on exactly how hard and where on the helmet each player was hit....

Thanks to the free and open-source software (FOSS) movement, there are alternatives that not only cost nothing but allow users to access the underlying code so they can make changes as needed. So if you don’t like how your particular copy of the software works, you are free to add or subtract code as you see fit, creating a new version, or “fork.” Programs such as Google Docs, which are free to use but do not have freely editable source code, are not included here....

But just because the oceans are mysterious doesn’t mean it lacks infrastructure: for one, the over 750,000 miles of telecommunications cables that let the internet cross continents. Scientists know this too. They’ve begun to play with that infrastructure for detecting earthquakes. Their latest step in doing so: using a trans-Atlantic cable to find earthquakes, as they did in a paper published in Science on May 20. The researchers, led by Giuseppe Marra at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, detected two earthquakes, one of which had originated half the world away....

“Good [Nile] levels promised stability [to] the ancient Egyptian society,” Hader says. “By contrast, the drought as a result of low Nile levels would be catastrophic and a reason for social unrest and sometimes, civil wars.” In May 2019, Hader and the team studied pollen grains taken after drilling the land next to where the Khufu branch of the Nile once stood. Two of the study sites were in the supposed Khufu basin....

For starters, this will expand Verizon’s data networks by utilizing Project Kuiper’s antennas and other signal transmitting technology. At the end of 2020, Project Kuiper unveiled a new antenna prototype that is “three times smaller and proportionately lighter” than average but delivers speeds of up to 400 Mbps. By significantly reducing the size of the antenna, developers said they could lower production costs, ultimately making them more affordable for the customers they hope to reach....

The team’s mission at Arquus was to develop an armored military vehicle that is fast, stealthy, and highly maneuverable. Plus, it has two engines (one electric, one diesel), is remotely-controllable, and is able to carry over two tons of equipment, including weapons. It’s even transportable and droppable from a low height, sans parachute, by plane. Scarabée, which is smaller and faster than an American Humvee, is a candidate to replace the French Army’s fleet of 730 light armored vehicles by 2025....

All the vultures they picked up were poisoned, with the two survivors rushed to veterinary care. According to the reserve’s manager, Meiring Prinsloo, local villagers who collectively own the reserve said the vultures were targeted for use in traditional medicine. It’s not just vultures. The wildlife trade for traditional medicine—called “belief use”—“has a bigger impact than the ivory trade, and the rhino trade, and the lion trade,” says Vivienne Williams, an ethnobotanist and ethnozoologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg....

The test took place on December 14. It was preceded by tests in the Pacific in May 2020, in which the Portland used the same laser weapon to destroy a target drone. Both demonstrations are part of the Navy figuring out how, exactly, its larger ships can protect themselves from smaller, cheaper threats. To better understand modern directed-energy weapons, it’s important to take a step back from the science-fiction idea of a laser weapon....

The video is a nanoscale view of the cytoskeleton, one of the outer parts of a cell that gives it shape. The red structures are actin filaments, fibers made of proteins that cause cells to move and contract; the green globs are clathrin-coated pits, structures that carry things that the cell needs, like hormones and signal receptors, from one vesicle in the cell to another. In the video, you can see the red actin fibers pulling the green clathrin-coated pits from the outside of the cytoskeleton towards the middle of the cell....

But even if the odds of global leaders shifting gears to focus on mitigating climate change are low, it’s not cause for climate doomerism. Every bit of warming we ward off helps. A new review in the journal Nature illustrates that even if we overshoot a global warming threshold, it won’t necessarily destabilize crucial Earth systems—including ice sheets, ocean currents, and tropical forests—right away. “If you change [the course of emissions] fast enough, you can avoid certain consequences that might be otherwise irreversible,” says Valerio Lucarini, a physicist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the study....

But once champagne was tamed by Dom Pérignon and other wine connoisseurs, it became all about the bubbles. The drink really took off during the Roaring Twenties, when the wealthy stealthily filled their coupe glasses from gilded bottles of Ayala and Perrier. Today, people are back to drinking from flutes, which better show off the dance of the carbon molecules. Of course, part of the joy of imbibing champagne lies in the uncorking itself....

This type of insight from Asner, 51, has helped arboreal managers plot and maintain the health of forests for nearly a decade. “Doing good conservation requires knowing what you’ve got, where it is, and how it’s doing,” Asner says. His lab, aboard a twin-prop Dornier 228, produces maps that reveal the structure of the canopy, indicate how much carbon trees trap, and even estimate hydration to see how forests cope with drought....

A year after health officials issued a record number of alerts for high ozone levels on Colorado’s Front Range, federal and state officials are trying to rein in the gas that can make outdoor activities a health risk. But new Colorado laws aimed at improving air quality along that urban corridor east of the Rocky Mountains aren’t expected to do much to directly reduce ozone, according to experts charged with bringing down the levels....