In a 2017 episode of ABC’s medical drama, The Good Doctor, a patient’s thigh bone is so shattered following an accident that, instead of amputating the leg, the physicians in the show 3D-print a titanium femur and insert it into the man’s leg. Presto: The limb is saved. The episode is called “Not Fake”—a reference to the fact that the artificial bone is real. It’s just not biological. The plot resonated with me because I have a real artificial hip, a prosthesis made of titanium, ceramic, and polyethylene plastic....

For more traditional gardening gear, check out our list of the best gardening tools for keeping your yard lush without the waste. Have a small and portable chainsaw on hand to prune bushes, clear branches, or cull chunks of tree that might be growing too far into your property. This cordless, 20-volt Work electric chainsaw weighs a little more than 10 pounds. It’s got an ergonomic grip and an auto-tension and auto-oiling system....

Like Prime Day, finding the best stuff can feel like sifting through a needle in a haystack. That’s why we’re culled together the best stuff for you to pick up at the last possible second. Best TV deal – Sony Bravia XR A80J 55-inch OLED 4K UHD Google Smart TV – $999.99 ($700 off) We generally love OLED TVs, with their perfect blacks and incredibly deep colors, but they are expensive....

Today, uBiome announced a partnership with Apple: the launch of an app to analyze and profile your gut bacteria. Fill out a survey within the app that asks questions including your health history, eating habits, and sleeping patterns. Then, receive a kit in the mail, take a swab from your toilet paper, and send it to uBiome. The company will then analyze the bacteria on the swab and within a few weeks provide you a detailed analysis of this bacteria on the app and on their website....

Bad Idea: Give A Tattoo Daring inkers have discovered that an electric toothbrush can also drive the needle of a DIY tattoo machine. But it’s hard to control the needle’s depth, which increases the risk of serious infections and scars. “There’s nothing good about getting a toothbrush-machine tattoo, nothing whatsoever,” says professional tattoo artist Gerald Feliciano. “You can buy almost any rinky-dink machine that will work better than that.” This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title, “Use an Electric Toothbrush to…”

Perhaps Machii’s real skill, though, is using his reflexes and superb hand-eye coordination to cut speeding objects in half. To wit: Machii has halved a fried shrimp (80 mph), a BB bullet (200 mph), a tennis ball (400-plus mph), and now a baseball at roughly 100 mph. [via Kotaku]

It might have been an ordinary experiment if not for the extraordinary setting. But Bandla, the vice president of government affairs and research operations at Virgin Galactic, was floating dozens of miles above the surface of the Earth, pioneering a brand-new form of research. “We could be looking back at this in a year or two or ten and saying, ‘Geez, that was the first time somebody did an experiment in suborbital space?...

The exact shape of that bubble—which repels about 70 percent of harmful cosmic radiation—and how the inside mixes (or doesn’t mix) with the outside, are questions that have troubled researchers for decades. They’ve caught indirect glimpses of this edge of our cosmic backyard with radio waves and other observations, but their first direct contact with the mysterious boundary came when Voyager 1 sailed through it in 2012. Now Voyager 2, which joined its predecessor on the outside last November, has provided a second taste, in a second location....

The sheer amount of time we spend with our devices is a good reason to ask if all this information and distraction is actually good for us. Even Apple and Google now offer tools designed to help us take a break—to rest our eyes and minds, and to focus on something that isn’t a small, glowing, rectangular screen. Google just pushed out six different apps for cultivating a healthier relationship with your phone and other companies and manufacturers are following suit....

On Friday, Blue Origin’s used New Shepard rocket booster launched to a height of 333,582 feet and deployed an unmanned crew capsule that the company hopes will one day carry tourists into space. Then both the booster and the crew capsule touched down safely–the rocket with the help of its thrusters, and the crew capsule relying on parachutes. Watch it here: SpaceX has also successfully landed one of its rocket boosters, and although preliminary tests suggest it might be fit to fly again, the company would rather keep it as a souvenir....

Unofficially known as Ultima Thule, the rock—which may actually be two rocks moving together in tandem—sits in a distant region of cosmic cold-storage called the Kuiper Belt. Because of the temperature and lack of direct sunlight, the objects therein are much unchanged from their makeup in the earliest days of the solar system. Researchers hope that studying these distant bodies can help us better understand what building blocks were present when our Sun was brand new, and how and why these pieces came together to form planets....

Banks making the news like JP Morgan Chase, which bought out Washington Mutual in September, or Citigroup, which as of this week backed out of settlement talks with Wachovia and Wells Fargo, are prime targets for phishing. The report said that fraudsters may not necessarily be taking information to get credit using someone else’s identity, but could be going a step further and breaking into accounts that already exist. Spammers are apparently also creating fake Web sites and malicious software to get information....

This most recent discharge was the third of its kind. The first, in 1996, washed what little sediment there was downstream past the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead. The second, in 2004, redistributed too little sand. Definitive results on the success of this last experiment should be available within the year and will serve as a guidepost for the next flow, which is as yet unscheduled.

However, mounting evidence now reveals the death toll for Maria far surpasses initial estimates. New research puts the number close to 3,000, adjusted up from just a few dozen when the president made his now infamous remark. This is an estimate, but it is virtually certain that the number is in the thousands. The president has denied these numbers, but without offering any evidence to support his claims. The devastating truth is that most of the deaths in Puerto Rico were avoidable....

What are you eating and/or cooking for Thanksgiving? I’m not sure how much I’ll be partaking in Thanksgiving, since I just opened up a restaurant and it’d be nice to get a break. But one thing I was thinking that I haven’t seen a lot of is a Thanksgiving dinner with a Mediterranean-style table. I think it’d be a fun spin on Thanksgiving with more citrus, more spices, lots of little salads, and dips and spreads....

The explosion in question, procedurally named AT2018cow–and lovingly referred to as “the Cow”–flashed like a supernova in June of 2018. But it lasted much shorter than normal supernovae, and it emitted different colored light, making it what astronomers call a “fast blue optical transient.” Such events are fleeting and consequently easy to miss. Where a typical supernova develops for a month or two and fades over a few more months, these objects “go up in less than a week” and “disappear in less than a month,”says Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at MIT and lead of a new study on the Cow published in the journal Nature Astronomy this week....

So I was relieved to learn that Beck did not actually write the book. In her recent article “I got duped by Glenn Beck!” (Salon.com, November 19), Sarah Cypher–the editor for an early draft of the book–revealed that Agenda 21 was in fact ghost-written by one Harriet Parke. Beck, it turns out, simply purchased the right to claim he’d written the book. Possessing an even lower opinion now of Mr....

By using information most smartphones already have access to, like your typing behavior and activity patterns, Apple seems to be imagining a world where your phone could warn you that your mood’s been bleak. “I certainly don’t imagine that we can diagnose any mental health condition simply by using passive sensing technology,” says Dr. Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer of the American Psychological Association, “but I do think that we can create an opportunity for people to become aware of significant risk factors, and increase awareness about conditions people might not even realize they’re suffering from....

1. When is the 2020 winter solstice, exactly? Pretty much right now. The winter solstice always occurs when the sun is right smack dab on top of the Tropic of Capricorn, which is 5:02 a.m. eastern time on December 21. Depending on when exactly that special moment falls, the solstice can get split into two separate days for various time zones across the northern hemisphere. But this year, we’re all on the same page....

What happens to you and your vehicle when you’re driving through all that rain, snow, and ice—dry roads too, for that matter—depends largely on your tire. If it’s the General Tire AltiMAX 365 AW, the rubber is engineered to handle not just a season on the calendar, but all-weather—that’s what the “AW” stands for—365 days a year. But how can one tire be a top performer no matter the elements?...