Fugu A dash of danger is part of the appeal of this lean and mild whitefish, which is served as slivers of sashimi in select Japanese restaurants. Tetrodotoxin, a paralysis-inducing chemical that disrupts the connections between neurons and muscle cells, collects in the liver and sex organs of this family of pufferfish. Japan’s health ministry requires fugu chefs to be certified in properly cleaning and removing the potentially deadly body parts....

Architect Ruurd Gietema lives in The Netherlands, a country perennially trying to hold back the sea. He says his homeland has paid a price for the high dikes and tall dunes it built to thwart rising waters and prevent flooding. “Protection was a high priority, but landscapes were erased,” Gietema says. This fact is not lost on today’s architects and urban planners, who are thinking about how to protect other cities from more intense rainfall and rising seas....

The Lord Howe Island stick insect represents one of 40 species brought to life in a new macrophotography exhibit, Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril, by photographer Levon Biss at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The large format photos not only reveal the insects’ diverse textures and minute hairs in vivid detail—they also shed light on these often overlooked creatures whose existence is threatened by human-induced climate change and other ongoing pressures....

This story was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated Framework’s machine looks like a typical high-end modular laptop. It’s 0.6 inches thick and weighs just over 2.8 pounds with a 13.5-inch screen. The spec sheet includes familiar parts like Intel’s 11-gen Core processors and Windows 10 Pro. When it comes to connectivity, however, things get more complex and unique. The ports on the side of the machine live inside swappable modules called expansion cards....

Joy O’Keefe, director of the Indiana State University Bat Center, says she understands the Halloween connection — bats are spooky because they’re out at night, go into damp, dark places and make no noise. “People fear what we don’t understand, and with bats nocturnal, and tending to be small, they’re cryptic,” she said. “Even us bat biologists don’t know a heck of a lot about them. It only takes a few wrong turns to perpetuate myths and fears about bats....

Shell The suit is a sandwich of materials. The middle layer is roughly 1/8-inch-thick ­puncture-​­resistant polypropylene, and a coating on both sides includes dozens of plastic ­polymers. Each of those has its own protective responsibility, like stopping sarin gas. Visor The face shield gives rescuers a 220-degree field of view, and it leaves enough room for a scuba-style respirator to fit underneath it—necessary since the garb is airtight. The window is a combination of heat-tolerant Teflon and durable PVC plastic....

This article was originally published in the Spring 2019 Transportation issue of Popular Science.

But when it comes to tasting, robots are laggards. Taste is a sense that may seem basic to any human, including young children licking food from the floor, but not to robots. Tasting technology doesn’t even come close to the multifaceted sensitivity of the human tongue. For robot-builders and food scientists alike, improving that technology is an active area of research. One idea: Relocating the tongue to an arm, which a robot can manipulate....

If you want to drink perfectly warm beverages even if you’ve long forgotten about them, you might want to consider getting something like the Ui 2-in-1 Self-Heating Mug and Wireless Charging Pad Set. It’s a self-heating mug system that maintains your coffee, tea, or any beverage at the ideal drinking temperature. For a limited time, you can snag it on sale at a special Cyber Monday price with the code CMSAVE20....

Near-field communication, or NFC, is, I think, suddenly usable for normal people, in one very specific product: TecTiles, from Samsung. If you want a full primer on NFC, read this, but in short, NFC is a communications protocol, sort of like Bluetooth but without the need for elaborate searching and pairing. It’s a tap-based connection: tap to connect to a speaker, tap to transfer data, tap to pay, tap to talk, tap to share....

If you want a one-and-done solution to your cybersecurity worries, the Deeper Connect Mini Decentralized VPN and Firewall Hardware is an excellent option. You only have to pay once, and you’re pretty much set for life. PopSci readers can grab it on sale for an extra 20 percent off with the code VPN20. This device prides itself on being the world’s first decentralized VPN and firewall. Having raised nearly $3 million on IndieGoGo, this hardware tool integrates a 7-layer enterprise-grade firewall to protect any device you connect to it....

46P/Wirtanen is one of 400 within the Jupiter comet “family,” so named because of its relatively short orbit time (46P’s is 5.4 years) and proximity to the path of everyone’s favorite gas giant. 46P will probably appear in the sky as a fuzzy, greenish ball of light instead of developing the classic tail we associate with comets. The comet glows as its ice melts when it passes near the sun and appears green when ultraviolet light hits gases carried in the rock....

“This year’s prize in chemistry rewards a revolution based on evolution,” said Göran K. Hansson, secretary general of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences when announcing the honorees. “They applied principles of Darwin in the test tubes and used this to develop new chemicals for the benefit of humankind.” The Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half the prize to Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology for her pioneering work in the directed evolution of enzymes....

The scientists results, published online in the journal Nature Physics, explain how a natural impurity in silicon transistors opens the door for quantum computer chips. In theory, quantum computing would work by storing information not as electrons fixed to a magnetic surface or traveling across a conductive transistor like current computers, but by manipulating the energy state of single electrons as they orbited an atom. The Purdue researchers showed that the arsenic impurities in silicon chips provide just the sort of free electron needed for quantum computing, and then demonstrated how they could manipulate the state of that electron by opening or closing the flow across the transistor....

Many of the risks stem from new, internet-dependent automated systems. Motherboard reports: The flaws were exposed by German whitehat security researchers SCADA Strangelove, who have previously looked at security flaws in green energy systems and smartgrids. Their presentation, entitled “The Great Train Cyber Robbery,” was given at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg on December 27th. It details the change from simple mechanical rail-switches (think levers thrown on tracks in old-timey movies) to more automated means....

But this is easier said than done, and if you do some research online, you’ll find the subject is often rife with misconceptions. If you’re looking to shed some pack weight before your next adventure, here’s how to do it right. There are plenty of tips ultralight hikers will offer, but some are downright ridiculous, Brown says. A popular example is the suggestion to cut your toothbrush in half to save a few grams....

This all started back in September when the EPA announced that they had discovered software that allowed Volkswagen cars to cheat emissions tests, running clean in the lab while in testing mode, and then switching back to a high-performance (and much dirtier) mode once on the road. The software affected 600,000 cars in the United States and the problems just seem to keep expanding. Cars in other countries are also affected....

Both missions were announced by NASA as the final selections for the 2019 Discovery competition, beating out two other candidates that proposed trips to the moons of Neptune and Jupiter. DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging Plus) will launch instruments into Venus’s atmosphere to measure its gaseous composition, which will clue scientists in to why and how the planet became the scorching hot world it is today....

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) has something called the One Health Committee, which promotes the closer integration of human and animal healthcare. The committee recommends a new global monitoring network involving vets who work with small companion animals–your pets, not livestock. It would work by creating a computer database that any vet could access, managed by some sort of international consortium. If you bring your pet to the vet and it’s diagnosed with, say, flu, then the vet could log in to this database and report it, and global health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and others would be notified....