A Lunar Time Capsule We left a secret message on the moon. Among the roughly 400,000 pounds of human-made lunar detritus is a tiny ceramic wafer on a leg of Apollo 12’s lander; this Moon Museum bears six artist doodles, including a particularly curious sketch of male genitalia by Andy Warhol. In 2021, a team from Carnegie Mellon University plans to send a more comprehensive collection to the surface on a private spacecraft....

If you’re an Android user navigating such an ordeal, Google’s Safety app can assist. In the moment, you can share your location, and use the power button to trigger a suite of automated actions bundled within its Emergency SOS mode. You can also prepare for any future emergencies by adding medical data that may be vital for first responders. Setting up this potentially lifesaving mode is simple and will let you focus on what’s important while knowing help is on the way....

This kind of software is called Firmware, and manufacturers like Apple install it right at the factory to provide your hardware with basic functionalities. But unlike iOS or macOS you won’t see this program on a screen and you won’t interact with it directly. Firmware doesn’t get frequent updates as apps and operating systems do, but they’re not unheard of. These new versions are important for the proper functioning of your gadgets, which is why you need to make sure you’re on top of them....

Heavy rains and flooding are nonetheless still occurring and expected to continue for several days along the U.S. East Coast, namely in parts of Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Two people have reportedly already been killed in the Carolinas due to flooding and falling trees, according to Weather.com. Other updated models all point to the hurricane sweeping past the coast as it weakens over the weekend: Earlier forecast models varied widely, but initially appeared to show the Category 4 (out of 5) storm heading from somewhere between Washington, D....

Maj. Jason Markzon, the pilot of our F-16 fighter jet, had just steered the plane through two tight, hard turns, part of an aviation procedure called the G-exercise. A moment later, Markzon—whose Air Force call sign is Flack—abruptly rolled the aircraft on its side, a maneuver known as a knife-edge pass that put the plane’s stubby wings perpendicular to the ground. He brought us back to horizontal, then pulled the plane hard to the right....

Global Hawk and U-2 programs have been rivals for years, with the old-timer flying higher, carrying more sensors, and offering defensive countermeasures, while the younger drone far surpasses it in endurance. Global Hawks can fly for 24 hours continuously, twice that of the mandated 12-hour limit for onboard U-2 pilots, and the Global Hawk can change pilots mid-course, as its remote controls allow crew changes throughout the flight time. Lockheed’s proposal to upgrade their U-2s into optionally manned planes would mitigate the plane’s greatest weakness, which is the human on board....

On January 3rd, Israel launched a ground invasion of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, partly in response to rocket fire that hit deeper into Israel than ever before. During the Israeli occupation of Gaza, Hamas rocket fire consisted primarily of homemade rockets only capable of hitting the southern-most Israelis cities. After taking over the Gaza Strip in 2006, Hamas acquired the new rockets with the expanded range. However, the increased range doesn’t imply advanced technology....

Revealed earlier this week, the robot, built by Iran’s Center of Advanced Systems and Technologies, uses Microsoft’s Kinect sensor to see and is built on open-source software. It can do this: The robot, while modest by the standards of what can be done today, is a great improvement over the previous Surena II robot, unveiled in 2010. Surena II had 12 degrees of movement in its feet and just eight in its hands, while the new version has a total of 31 degrees of freedom....

And it’s not only about the annoyed look on your friends’ and colleagues’ faces when you finally arrive. Experts say that people who are perpetually tardy have a harder time keeping jobs, tend to harm their relationships, and have higher stress levels, while research shows that unpunctual students struggle in school. “Punctuality is all about prioritization, [it’s] both a skill and a practice,” says Rashelle Isip, a productivity consultant based in New York City and author of The order expert’s guide to time management....

We’ve all experienced profound loss in our lives—a bad breakup, incurable diseases, tragedies that feel like the world is crumbling in on top of us. What might it mean for an entire country or society or civilization to walk together, hand in hand, through stages of grief and loss and depression and mourning, at the same time? What would it be like to anticipate not only our own death but The End, the apocalypse?...

To achieve this performance, Lamborghini is employing a 48-volt, 34-horsepower hybrid electric motor built into the car’s transmission to supplement the 6.5-liter V12’s 785 horsepower. To maximize the effect of the electric motor, it is powered by a supercapacitor rather than the usual lithium-ion battery pack. These cells don’t hold a charge as long as a typical battery, but they charge in quickly and in short bursts. It’s similar to the tech Samsung uses to quickly charge the battery in the S-Pen stylus that comes with its Galaxy Note 10 smartphone....

Visiting the island of Fogo in Cape Verde in 2014 was a rare chance to people who actually live in a crater of a volcano, side by side with lava. I wanted to see this with my own eyes, despite the difficulties I had reaching the island, including a six-hour ride in a cargo boat that left many fellow travellers seasick. While I was there, the Cha das Caldeiras community in the crater was being evacuated by authorities as the lava flow from an eruption engulfed their land and houses....

As The Guardian also notes, the multi-car wreck came just hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the $15,000 autopilot upgrade would become available to all eligible vehicle owners in North America. Prior to the expansion, FSD was only open to Tesla drivers with “high safety scores.” Although Full Self-Driving Mode has drawn consistent criticism and scrutiny since its debut, Musk has repeatedly attested to the software’s capabilities, going so far as to take interview questions from the driver’s seat of a Tesla engaged in the feature....

In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written. And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of “global warming” or “climate change” whatsoever....

Sea ice forms in the fall and thickens through the winter, creating a barrier between ocean and air. But as the Arctic warms, some climate scientists have suggested that the melting ice sends our weather into the extremes. The logic is that heat from the ocean could more easily travel into the atmosphere without ice to block its path. Warming Arctic air could create a high pressure cyclone that sends a stream of cool air south, ultimately changing global air circulation and altering weather patterns....

“Since the reversal of Roe, Facebook’s parent company Meta and other Big Tech companies have made lofty promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare,” says Caitlin Seeley George, the Campaigns and Managing Director for the online privacy advocacy group, Fight for the Future. “However, most of these commitments only go as far as protecting their own employees by offering abortion as an employee benefit for a small and privileged group....

But there’s a digital bright spot for aviation buffs: For the first time since 2006, Microsoft is releasing a new version of their famous Flight Simulator game, a franchise that dates back originally to 1982. And by all indications, the world, the aircraft, and the actual flying it simulates are not just gorgeous, they’re highly accurate and realistic, too. The simulated world includes thousands of airports and 2 trillion in-game objects, like trees....

Now, however, demos are easily accessible via download and Microsoft is trying to fill the void left by a lack of in-person gaming conferences with its own online demo festival. The pandemic has nixed popular shows like PAX, Gamescom, and E3 where countless titles get their first chance to show their stuff. Some companies, including Sony and Microsoft, have put on digital events to show off game trailers, but MS is taking the concept one step more....

Now a team of physicists suggests they’ve cracked the origin of these stripes: an unruly ocean burst into space and fell as snow that overloaded ice shelves enough to create the handful of rather uniform cracks, according to results published Monday in Nature Astronomy. The theory also has implications for how water escapes from the moon into orbit, where Cassini was able to taste it and determine that the liquid has most of the chemical ingredients needed to support life as we know it....