A charcoal fire fed with air from the bottom is hot enough to melt the combination of those materials into glass but not hot enough to make it truly liquid, so bubbles tend to remain and make the glass cloudy. I mixed the finely ground ingredients together and heated them in a cast-iron pot, then poured the molten glass into a graphite mold and pressed it down with a graphite stamp....

Airports are one of the main ways measles enters the U.S. because the virus isn’t endemic to the country, which means it’s mostly visitors or returning vacationers who bring the disease back from foreign nations. So when researchers look at how likely a county is to have a measles outbreak, it doesn’t just matter how many unvaccinated people live there. Who’s traveling to that county—and from where—will also have an impact....

First presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing last month and subsequently highlighted by New Scientist on Tuesday, “Golfi” is the modest-sized creation from a research team at Germany’s Paderborn University capable of autonomously locating a ball on a green, traveling to it, and successfully sinking a putt around 60 percent of the time. To pull off its relatively accurate par, Golfi utilizes an overhead 3D camera to scan an indoor, two-square-meter artificial putting green to find its desired golf ball target....

Based in Oakland, California, and started by a team of former Google engineers, Cartken already deploys their automated, six-wheeled delivery vehicles delivering food and other small items across multiple college campuses. But as The Verge notes, Uber claims this will be the “first formal partnership with a global on-demand delivery app beyond” universities. Cartken’s line of small, fully electric, automated delivery vehicles are manufactured by auto supplier Magna, and can carry around 24 pounds of items in its cargo storage....

Any extraterrestrial critters in our solar system, given the lack of obvious greenery and movement out there, are likely to be simple microbes. Perhaps they burrow deep under the Martian soil to hide from damaging ultraviolet rays. Or perhaps some lie dormant in asteroids, waiting to land in a friendlier environment. A team of researchers at the University of Vienna has tried to guess how such microbes could survive on their own, and what marks they might leave behind, by studying one of Earth’s hardiest bugs....

I first heard about liquid nitrogen ice cream from my friend Tryggvi, an Icelandic chemist working in the Midwest (these things happen). He suggested we make it for dessert at a dinner party I was planning. Yes, he said, he had a recipe, something he’d seen in Chemical and Engineering News. Now, right off the bat you have to worry about a recipe found in Chemical and Engineering News, the principal trade publication for the sort of people who build oil refineries, shampoo factories, and large-scale plants for the fractional distillation of liquefied air (which is where liquid nitrogen comes from)....

“​​The soils are not getting any richer,” says Ranveer Chandra, who founded Microsoft’s agriculture research division in 2014. “The water levels are receding; then there’s climate change. How do you get the world to grow more nutritious food in a sustainable way? One of the most promising approaches is that of data-driven agriculture.” Agriculture is the fifth-greatest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, responsible for over 11 percent of annual emissions....

Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps toward language, they’re fully formed, made up of words, sentences, and grammar carried from one person to another by speech sounds, like any of the perhaps 6,000 languages spoken today. So if you believe, as we linguists do, that language is the foundational distinction between humans and other intelligent animals, how can we study its emergence in our ancestors?...

YouTube is the second-most popular website in the world (the first is Google) and according to Mozilla, an estimated 70 percent of the 1 billion hours viewed daily on the platform are as a result of algorithmic recommendations. Various reports have shown how the algorithm can polarize people and recommend misinformation and harmful content—something that Google claims it has worked hard to fix. In this study, Mozilla set out to test the effectiveness of the controls YouTube offers to users to manage the recommended videos they see....

On New Year’s Day, media outlets received emailed riddles leading them to the “chance for a big scoop.” After solving various emailed riddles, police found a digital memory card attached to the collar of a cat near Tokyo. The actual process of cat-finding is unclear, but we’d like to think it involved a massive cat-sorting on one of Japan’s cat islands. Wired reports that it contained information about the “Remote Control Virus,” information only its creator would know....

That’s why NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has spent the last year swooping closer and closer to the sun. In its first two passes it encountered new features that may help explain both the corona’s extreme heat and the origins of the solar wind, researchers announced on Wednesday in a series of four publications in Nature. As humanity’s first close encounter with a stellar environment continues, further observations will help researchers better understand how solar weather affects Earth, as well as how all stars age and die....

In other words, we want even the most artificial and advanced technology to feel like nature, even as the natural world is rapidly contracting. This aesthetic, which elicits Pinterest-friendly terms like “urban earthy” and “modern organic,” has been slowly spreading for years—a metastatic peacefulness rocking the design world. It draws on chalk white’s other domain, minimalism, which evolved from a 1950s sculptural style to the spartan “religion of tech billionaires” like Apple’s fastidious founder Steve Jobs....

The film, a British production directed by Gavin Hood (who also helmed Ender’s Game), focuses on a fictional counter-terror operation in Kenya. The operation is commanded by Helen Mirren’s Colonel Katherine Powell, who sets it up as a capture mission. Assisting her are American drone pilots (from the creatively named “Drone Ops Command” in Nevada), specifically the cautious Steve Watts, played by Breaking Bad alumni Aaron Paul. Alan Rickman is also there....

The automaker plans to deploy a fleet of Volt extended range electric cars to drive people autonomously within the campus. To use the service, employees would use a smartphone application, reserving the vehicle and then selecting a destination. Using autonomous technology under development, the vehicle would then pick up the employee, bring them to the destination, and then park the vehicle. “The program will serve as a rapid-development laboratory to provide data and lessons to accelerate the company’s technical capabilities in autonomous vehicles,” said the automaker yesterday, in a press release accompanying a Global Business Conference Call....

For the uninitiated, the Labo is a Nintendo Switch-exclusive title that lets you build your own toys out of cardboard and various other parts, including washers, rubber bands, stickers, and grommets. Each toy has its own unique minigame, whether it’s fishing, controlling a robot companion, or playing a miniature piano. The surprisingly complex suite of tools comes with the main Labo software and allows you to create your own custom inventions....

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” he said. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it....

To understand this issue, it helps to know about “pointers,” which are one of the fundamental bits of code that a CPU uses to run your computer. It’s the bit that points to where another variable is stored in memory, and they allow it to perform operations without having to work with the full variable. You can think of them like the index of a book. If you want to check if, say, “coffee” is mentioned, it’s much quicker to scan the index than to scan the whole book....

Charming. The prank captures several looks of disgust, though it’s hard to be sure how many are about the pizza rat robot itself and how many are reactions to the strange camera crew following a robotic rodent into crowds. Watch the full video below: Digg