At least that’s the quixotic idea behind Quixote, a technique developed by Mark Riedl, director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Building on previous research with Scheherazade, the Quixote technique shows robots stories which demonstrate normal or accepted behavior (helping others, being punctual, not wiping out the human race). The stories are crowdsourced from humans on the internet who chose the correct or socially accepted actions for a character, just like a “choose your own adventure” novel....

So, to recap: Musk wants his private spaceflight business to send 80,000 people to Mars every year. They’re not going to do that themselves, probably, but the company would certainly be leading the charge. How are they going to do that? Well, as Talking Points Memo writes, one of SpaceX’s big pushes is for reusable rockets. We’ve had something like that in the form of NASA’s classic space shuttles, but the refurbishing, Musk has said, is too much to truly make repeat space-travel cost-effective....

Although Sojourner, the first rover on Mars, trundled only a short way, it managed to nab more than 500 pics while studying the composition of alien rocks and soil. These twin hexagonal rovers don’t roll; they hop in their asteroid’s weak gravity. Leaps last around 15 minutes and cover about 50 horizontal feet. The nearly 2,000-​pound Curiosity hasn’t gotten too far. It was designed to vaporize rocks and snap X‑rays around the once-­watery Gale Crater—​​not to wander far afield....

Let’s start with the basics, like: How fast does the Earth spin now? That depends on where you are, because the planet moves fastest around its waistline. As Earth twirls around its axis, its circumference is widest at the equator. So a spot on the equator has to travel a lot farther in 24 hours to loop around to its starting position than, say, Chicago, which sits on a narrower cross-section of Earth....

But to do all of that, LHC needs electricity: enough to power a small city. It’s easy for someone outside CERN to wonder just why one physics facility needs all that power. Particle physicists know these demands are extreme, and many of them are trying to make the colliders of the future more efficient. “I think there is increased awareness in the community that accelerator facilities need to reduce energy consumption if at all possible,” says Thomas Roser, a physicist formerly at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York....

Table tennis is an interesting task for robots to learn because of two complementary properties: It requires both fast and precise movements in a structured game that occurs in a fixed and predictable environment. The learning algorithm the robot relies on to make decisions has to work hard to get good, but the confines of a table tennis table limit how much of the world it has to contend with....

Prior to 1968, jumpers used to attempt to clear the bar using a straddle technique in which they flung themselves sideways over the bar. To do this essentially the entire body has to be above the bar at the peak of the jump. In other words the center of gravity of a jumper has to pass above the bar. However, using the Fosbury flop your center of gravity actually passes underneath the bar!...

The company launched its first set of cars—now dubbed the Sweet Sixteen—in 1968. Since then the brand has grown to become a legitimate toy empire, boasting not only sales that are measured in billions of units but also lending its unique designs and aesthetic to video games, apparel lines, and even high-end collector items. “A good example of that is the Gucci car,” says Ted Wu, Hot Wheels’ VP of design....

The picture ranges from the dawn of man — which is shown with the aid of a revolutionary new projection technique — to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent beings in outer space. The existence of such life somewhere in the universe is the absolute conviction of Arthur C. Clarke, famous scientist and spinner of science- fiction tales, and producer-writer-director Stanley Kubrick, who co-authored the screenplay. By the end of the movie, you may be convinced yourself....

European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are opportunistic feeders very adaptable to different climates and geographies. Despite these advantages, their populations have declined in Denmark by 60 percent since 1976 due to changes in land use. However, you wouldn’t know that from the Wadden Sea murmurations, when up to a million of the smallish, glossy black birds perform for up to 45 minutes at a stretch. Although murmurations also occur in the spring, the displays are smaller and less impressive....

Even when it’s silent, your phone is constantly begging for your attention. Maybe you get the urge to see what’s happening on Facebook, even though you just checked 15 minutes ago. Or you feel a phantom vibration in your pocket that turns out to be nothing. Increasingly, our smartphones have become more like appendages we can’t live without. Here’s how to wean yourself off your pocket computer… at least a little bit....

With that in mind, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional society founded in 1975, has taken it upon itself to set out some guidelines for enjoying top-notch shows while making sure your body and brain get enough rest. We can show you how to implement them. If you have trouble obeying this type of limit, you might have to trick yourself. One way to do this is by downloading episodes onto your phone....

You do, however, need a way to listen to this audio, which is where—you guessed it—a pair of headphones come in. Connecting headphones to your smartwatch will only take a few minutes, too—just about any Bluetooth-enabled pair should do. You can also connect any pair of Bluetooth headphones to your Apple Watch from the smartwatch itself. First, check the instructions that came with your headphones (or run a quick web search) to find out how to put them in pairing mode....

That’s unfortunate, because home-cooked meals are often friendlier to both your diet and your pocketbook. “Foods cooked outside the home tend to have more saturated fat, more sodium, more added sugars, and less fiber, and it costs more,” says Jessica Lehmann, a registered dietician and lecturer at Arizona State University. Still, for anyone with an internalized complex about being a bad cook, it’s less about following a recipe than it is about finding the right headspace....

Then there’s the food. As staff scramble to serve plates of pastured lamb lasagna and birch-syrup-drizzled pistachio hummus, executive chef Doug Paine watches quietly, a calm island in a hectic sea, to ensure that each morsel of porchetta and dab of aioli meets his standard of “fresh and local.” Few diners realize, though, that when they lift a forkful of Paine’s salad, the peppery bite in the dressing comes from chopped sprigs of garlic mustard....

Alternatives for desktop computers and laptops One of the easiest ways to access another Windows or macOS computer remotely is by using Chrome Remote Desktop, which is a free add-on to the Google Chrome browser. First, you’ll need to set it up on the computer you want to access (maybe add this to your to-do list for when you’re at your parents’ house for Thanksgiving). As you begrudgingly prepare for the next time someone asks for your “techxpertise,” know there are certain apps and platforms that allow you to help from a distance by viewing, or even controlling, other devices over the internet....

Many folks see nothing wrong with tossing sandwich crusts to a squirrel or feeding ducks at the park. But human food can quickly cross the line between a one-time treat and a wildlife magnet, especially when it comes to hungry bears. Even if you don’t live in bear territory, you may still be at risk of attracting these predators with unsecured garbage. Bears have been known to wander through residential areas in search of an easy meal—and if one finds an accessible source of tasty scraps on your property, it’s likely to return for seconds....

What kind of light makes a space seem bigger? Contrasts between light and dark over a distance, no matter how short, increase perception of depth. This phenomenon is an optical illusion, one that’s well illustrated in this study, where the addition of a contrasting light source partway down one of two otherwise identical hallways caused participants to perceive objects in the unevenly lit space as being farther away. Of course, while you want some contrast between that person and the wall, you don’t want only the center of a room to be lit....

Apple’s built-in Messages app on iOS offers the ability to pin your most important chats at the top of the app, sticking them there for quick access no matter when the last message was sent. It’s an easy-to-use function that’s equally easy to overlook, and there are three ways to get the job done. You can also pin a conversation from the main list of chats by long-pressing on it and choosing Pin from the menu that appears....

And it can be hard to tell which one a basketball player has; many of them often fall into a “gray area” where playing the sport can either be safe or dangerous. Now researchers from Columbia University Medical Center have gathered data from more than 500 professional NBA players to clarify the difference between normal and dangerously enlarged hearts. Their study was published yesterday in JAMA Cardiology and reported by Stat News....