In addition to making it easy to charge your phone (so long as you’re good with wearing a battery pack on the outside of your shoe), the company’s founder, Matt Stanton, hopes that it could also make a difference to the world; if people are making their own energy to power their phones, they might be more educated energy consumers. Then there’s the added benefit that using steps as a power source is better for the environment than burning fossil fuels....

So here’s how it works: — Bragging rights come complimentary of your hosts; all other prizes are determined (and delivered) within your own leagues. — When you join a league, your current Net Worth will be used as the starting point for % gain calculations. All new league members will start at 0% gain. Your standing in your league will be determined by % gain comparison. — Each leagues admin can optionally decide to reset all league member’s percent gain to 0%, whenever he or she chooses to do so....

But this is the wrong move. Medical experts say that under no circumstance should parents give adult doses or cut up adult medications to give to children. “Adult medicine has not been necessarily tested or approved for use in kids, so you’re putting your own child at risk for more complications,” says William Chu, pediatrician and medical director at Pediatrix Primary + Urgent Care of Texas. Not only is it ineffective but if administered incorrectly, it could be fatal....

There are four basic ways to stop a hostile drone. The first is destroying it with missiles or bullets. The second is simply catching them with nets, perhaps even nets carried by other drones (as in this South Korean example) . A third option is jamming the drones’ communication signals, and relying on its programming to send it straight to the ground. Finally, there are lasers. Laser weapons work by burning a hole through a drone, either disabling its computery guts or making it crash because there’s a hole in its wing and it can’t keep flying....

Think of a photo straight out of the camera as raw material. You can bring it into an editing app and finish it with touches like tweaking your exposure, dialing in your colors, and punching up the contrast to make it pop out of your followers’ Instagram feeds. Here’s a handful of apps that offer lots of options for turning your phone into a digital darkroom. Snapseed This full-featured app started off its life as a desktop photo editor, but made the jump to mobile when it hit the iPad in 2011....

The findings indicate that certain elements of communication may be widespread across the animal kingdom, says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist who studies animal vocal communication at the University of Cambridge who was not involved with the research. “These are very universal laws, it would seem,” he says. “What has led to the evolution of human language is a similar kind of process to what has led to the evolution of complex penguin communication, which is not language but is nonetheless very complex....

There are many competing theories to explain the workings of this fire-orb. New research published in The Planetary Science Journal and presented at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting narrows down what could be going on inside the volcanic world using computer simulations, suggesting that it hosts a scorching ocean of magma beneath its surface. Magma oceans are thought to have been a common feature of rocky planets and moons earlier in the solar system, but are almost nonexistent now as things have cooled down over time....

Q. Explain KERS to a five-year-old. OK, a really smart five-year-old. A. As a car slows, instead of wasting the energy used to slow the car—that from the heat radiated through the brakes—it is stored, and then re-used later to help accelerate the car. The energy can be stored in a battery, or in a flywheel. ** Q. What about your particular KERS system makes it best suited for F1 racing?...

A study of 108 wild koalas found distinctive patterns of pigmentation around the nostrils allowed observers on the ground to reliably recognize individual animals, even when they’re in the trees. But more importantly for the koala, the nose is an important connection between this iconic marsupial and the world it lives in, from sniffing out toxins to saying hello. And it starts right at birth. The tiny newborn koala, despite weighing only half a gram, already has the ability to smell and feel its way towards the milky scent of the pouch and its mother’s teats....

Apple products got a lot better at tracking your bodily functions Last week, Apple finally flipped the switch that allows Apple Watch 4 wearable devices to track a wearer’s heartbeat with an ECG test. We gave it a try and, luckily, everything looks normal so far. In addition to its ticker tracking, Apple also announced a new sleep monitor from Beddit, a company it purchased back in 2017. It costs $150 and slides under your mattress to literally watch you while you sleep in a way that’s more practical— but equally as creepy— as what Santa does....

Question Three: Energy Ah, energy. Juice. The ol’ Newton meter. Energy policy sits at the intersection of climate change, national security, the economy, pollution, scientific research and a host of other issues. For the candidates, their position on the US energy policy informs many of their other Science Debate answers, but do those answers match up with their record? The be all and end all of energy policy is the bill HR 6....

The nuclear engineering wizards at Los Alamos National Laboratory have an alternative: Uranium-powered nuclear fission reactors that convert heat into electricity. Scientists tested a new heat-pipe-based nuclear reactor in a test called DUFF, for Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions, in an experiment near Las Vegas recently. It’s the first demonstration of a space nuclear reactor system to produce electricity in the U.S. since 1965, according to LANL. It’s a very simple design, using heat from a uranium fission reaction and transferring it to a pair of Stirling engines....

Scientists designed the simulation as practice for lucid dreaming—a state in which the dreamer recognizes that they are actually asleep. They hypothesized that once the students found themselves inside a real dream, perhaps as bizarre and disjointed as the Spinoza Cafe, they’d remember they were sleeping—and open a door to a different, rare kind of consciousness. Lucid dreaming is more than just self awareness. People who lucid dream gain memories of what happened earlier in the dream, the ability to manipulate their environment, control their own actions, and marvel at how strange their dream worlds are....

In a world that’s pushing for net-zero carbon emissions, that sort of energy use won’t do. Luckily, researchers are working on fundamentally changing how computers work—which could lead to powerful, lower-energy devices. One way of doing that is to build a computer with magnets. Researchers at the University of Michigan, collaborating with chip-maker Intel, have created a new iron alloy that could be a major feature of magnet-based computers of tomorrow....

Although astronauts are typically sent to space with stores of necessary supplies, it’d be too costly to keep sending tanks of breathable air up to the station. Instead the oxygen that astronauts rely on for primary life support is created through a process called electrolysis, wherein electricity is used to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. On Earth, a similar process happens naturally through photosynthesis, when plants use hydrogen to make sugars for food and release oxygen into the atmosphere....

According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, the change in internal energy (U) of a system is equal to the amount of work (W) done on (or by) the gas plus or minus how much heat (Q) is added to or removed from the system. Mathematically: ΔU = Q + W And yes, the First Law is definitely a statement of the fundamental physical principal of conservation of energy. Anyway, what’s happening here is that, as a meteor encounters the thicker regions of the atmosphere at speeds in the neighborhood of 30,000 miles per hour, the fluid (air) in front of the meteor is compressed rapidly....

That’s important because here on Earth, much of the modern world quietly relies on partial vacuums. More than just a place for physicists to do fun experiments, the machine-based environments are critical for crafting many of the electronic components in cutting-edge phones and computers. But to actually measure a vacuum—and understand how good it will be at manufacturing—engineers rely on relatively basic tech left over from the days of old-school vacuum tubes....

Scientists have long thought that these islands were fueled by thermal plumes welling up from deep within the Earth’s mantle. However, when researchers compared the temperatures of volcanic hotspots and mid-ocean ridges around the world, they found that many of these so-called hotspots were actually rather cool. Conditions at these sites might not be warm enough for the plumes to travel up from the deep mantle, says Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles and coauthor of the findings....

And it will also be quicker than the current standard. “You can take LIDAR pictures at fine resolutions and build up a map in hours instead of taking years at comparable resolution with a single image,” says Donald Figer of RIT. Via RIT

All life needs energy to survive. The life on Earth’s surface mostly gets that energy from the sun, but microbes can survive without light if they get their energy elsewhere. “To have sufficient chemical energy for life, you need both reducing compounds and oxidizing compounds,” says Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He led the study while completing his Ph.D. at Brown University. Reduction is just a chemical process that gives a molecule more electrons, and oxidation is one that takes them away....