Because radio signals don’t travel well through water, Trident is, like many unmanned submarines, a tethered vehicle. The robot will ship with a cord that’s 82 feet long, but given a longer cord the makers say the body can work at depths of over 300 feet. Trident has a top speed of about 4 mph and can run on battery power for 3 hours. The robot itself is almost 8 inches wide, 16 inches long, and 3 inches thick....

This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Atlantic Coast Pipeline could cross beneath the Appalachian Trail on its way from West Virginia to North Carolina. The decision is a major win for Dominion Energy, which is leading the project, though it has yet to secure all the needed permits. Dominion wasn’t waiting for the Supreme Court to get started, however. Despite being stuck in regulatory limbo, the company had forged ahead, working during the coronavirus pandemic, much to the dismay of landowners who live in the pipeline’s path....

A statement from CERN, the organization that runs and houses the 16-mile-long superconductor in Switzerland, explained that its team successfully completed a break-in run of the accelerator on Friday afternoon. The LHC will undergo several more months of tests and preparation before it can collect applicable data on ions, quarks, bosons, and other weird and wild varieties of particles again. The latest experiment consisted of “two beams of protons circulated in opposite directions … at their injection energy of 450 billion electronvolts,” according to CERN’s post....

The NASA-funded Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment––or AZURE––aims to help scientists better understand how the forces that create the northern lights change our planet’s atmosphere. Specifically, the aurora borealis’ technicolor light show is the result of powerful collisions in which highly energetic particles from the sun—often collectively referred to as solar wind—crash into gases in Earth’s atmosphere. These collisions produce bursts of light, the colors of which are unique to the identity of each gas: oxygen creates the typical yellow-green aurora, whereas nitrogen makes a blue or purplish one....

Last time Messenger passed by Mercury, according to NASA, it took pictures of about 20 percent of the still mysterious surface. That close encounter showed that volcanoes spilled out rock to create many of the planet’s flat plains, and that its magnetic field seems to be produced by a core of molten iron. On this mission, another 30 percent of the surface, including the side of the planet that scientists have not yet seen, will be mapped in 1,200 high-resolution color images....

Founded in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, GIFCT has since evolved into a nonprofit organization that works with member companies, governments, and civil society organizations to tackle terrorist and violent extremist content on the internet. One aspect of this is maintaining a shared hash database of extremist content so that if one company, say Facebook, flags something as terrorist-related, other companies, like YouTube, would be able to automatically take it down....

Last night, SpaceX stuck its landing, setting down the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket after it launched satellites into space. The move means that it may now be possible to re-use rockets that can transport cargo into orbit. But this particular rocket isn’t slated to return to flight. The Verge reports that Elon Musk doesn’t want this rocket to fly again because it’s the first they’ve brought back, and is therefore unique....

These shots are based on the same technology as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine: mRNA strands in the vaccine enter human cells, providing them with the code to make little bits of the same proteins that sit on the virus’s exterior. Those proteins then act like test dummies for our immune systems to recognize, so immune cells in the future can identify and neutralize the actual virus. The process works incredibly well against SARS-CoV-2, and there’s hope that it may work with HIV as well....

At $129 MSRP (typically less in the cart), the MSI Immerse GV60 costs close to or below many of our favorites, such as the Blue Microphones Yeti X or the Elgato Wave:3. Yet, for that price, it delivers just about everything you may need from a USB mic: high-resolution audio, mounting options, no-latency headphone monitoring, four pickup (polar) patterns, and convenient front-panel controls. Let’s take a closer look at what makes the GV60 a USB mic that works for any purpose—not just gaming, but also podcasting, meetings, video creation, music recording … whatever you need....

Before the flyby, we only had the weakest glimpses of MU69. The best was a six-pixel photo taken from over half a million kilometers away, showing us a peanut- or bowling ball-shaped figure about 21 miles in length. But, as succinctly summed up by the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, during a press conference held Wednesday, “that image is so 2018.” The New Horizons team at NASA is finally getting around to sifting through all of the incredible images and bits of data collected by the spacecraft’s seven science instruments during the flyby, and yesterday, NASA officially released the first close-up images of MU69, the best of which is nearly 20,000 pixels in size, taken from as close as 17,000 miles away....

Sure, we landed the NEAR-Shoemaker orbiter on an asteroid in 2001, but we didn’t even try to see if we could change its orbit. Come on, everyone, we can do better. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have announced plans to fill that gaping hole in our asteroid knowledge by smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid’s moon and watching what happens. The mission is called AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) and involves two different spacecraft....

Despite this horrifying detail, neti pots are usually safe—when you use them properly and treat the water you put in them. Here’s how to clear your nose without risking your health. Why do people use neti pots anyway? For those who suffer from allergies, colds, sinus infections, or even frequent stuffy noses, a neti pot can provide real relief. In addition to thinning out your snot, which makes it easier to remove from your nasal passages, these little watering cans help rinse out dust, pollen, and other irritants....

The first new 30-second spot posted by Twitter’s official company account notably features narration by Lupita Nyongo, who plays a new character called Maz Kanata, saying she’s “lived long enough to see the same eyes in different people” (for context, J.J. Abrams also revealed more about Kanata’s history and lifespan, which you can read about over at Entertainment Weekly). The shot then cuts quickly from new character Rey (Daisy Ridley) to an all-new shot of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) standing in a winterscape, suggesting there may be some familial connection between the two....

In a paper published in today in Nature Plants researchers described a new species of flower found in two pieces of amber excavated from a mine in the Dominican Republic. Amber, which is solidified tree resin, preserved the flowers for either 15 million-25 million or 30 million-45 million years. The wide discrepancy between the two numbers is because amber is extremely difficult to accurately date. The first age range was reached by dating tiny single-celled animals called foraminifera, whose shells ended up near the resin between 15 million and 25 million years ago....

The Wall Street Journal reports that game makers have already started receiving development kits. Even more interesting is that developers familiar with kit have noted the likeliness of “one mobile unit that could either be used in conjunction with the console or taken on the road for separate use,” claims WSJ. The use of the word “mobile” could hint at Nintendo’s increasing embrace of the smartphone scene with the help of DeNA....

The gaming world collectively leapt yesterday when Sony advertised a $60 pre-order for No Man’s Sky, which would actually be available later this week. But that post seems to have been made in error: Sony has since taken it down, and no comment has been made from either Sony or the studio about what happened. A pre-order of course doesn’t actually mean you’re getting the game any earlier, but the studio behind No Man’s Sky has been cryptic about actual release dates since the game’s creation, and it would be a big deal to have pre-orders planned 90 days out....

Once thought of as an extremely stable structure, DNA is actually under constant attack. It can undergo literally thousands of spontaneous and causal alterations in the course of a single day — more if you count the defects that can occur during normal cell division. To repair themselves, cells deploy an army of enzymes that break open DNA and snip out the damaged part. Then they bring in a repair crew consisting of other enzymes....

The Worst Jobs In Science There are great science careers, such as ice cream developer, and then there are jobs like bedbug rearer. Discover eight of the gnarliest jobs that researchers do—and learn why they endure unsanitary, unsightly, and sometimes unsafe conditions in the name of science. By Doug Cantor I Am Robot Boss A terrifying experiment on my employees from 3,000 miles away. By Jacob Ward The Meat Lab Can engineered beef, chicken and pork save the world?...

Over the past century, many astronomers claimed to have caught whiff of an elusive ninth body: Planet X. The latest to make this assertion is the same man who demoted Pluto. “We’ve found evidence of a giant planet in the outer solar system,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. “By ‘giant,’ I mean the size of Neptune, and by ‘outer solar system,’ I mean 10 to 20 times farther away than Pluto....