Popular Science is a magazine about the future and the science and technology that will get us there, but right now PopSci has a technology problem. Our editor in chief, Jacob Ward, lives and works in San Francisco. The rest of us work out of PopSci’s Park Avenue offices in New York City. But building magazines is nothing if not collaborative, and office culture is nothing if not interpersonal. So for Jake, collaborating with us across video chat is somewhat like watching a live concert streaming over the Internet; the sensory information coming across the fiber networks is real and true to real life, but not only is the experience not the same as actually being there, it’s not even remotely close....

Cantwell has been working on a fun, playable version of quantum chess since March 2014. His work eventually came to the attention of Caltech professor Spiros Michalakis, who helped Cantwell continue to develop the game until it was simple enough for an actor to master. Caltech ended up using quantum chess as the showpiece of “Anyone Can Quantum,” making it a form of publicity for the university’s Quantum Summit. Now, with some financial help, Cantwell wants to create a commercial version that anyone can play....

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But the bulk go to livestock, which are dosed up to ward off disease in crowded conditions or to speed up growth. And that means we’ve set up the perfect conditions for bacteria to learn to beat our defenses. Right now, about 35,000 people die from antibiotic resistant bacteria in the US annually, and the UN estimates that the annual toll could be millions by 2050 as we lose our ability to treat now-dormant diseases....

In a Thursday webinar, the authors outlined a series of recommendations for using the map to develop a global approach to biosecurity. “The aim of our project is to increase public knowledge about Biosafety Level 4 labs, and importantly, to strengthen national and international virus management policies,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, said on the call. That means everything from up-to-date education on how to deactivate a live virus, to better protocols for reporting accidents when they do occur....

Key to this operation are tiny protein bubbles that biologists call gas vesicles. Some bacteria and protists have the genetic ability to generate these structures on demand: If a microbe wishes to rise to the surface, it can generate a few gas vesicles, making its body more buoyant and pushing it upwards. If it wishes to sink, it can pop a few gas vesicles and do the opposite. Gas vesicles are old indeed: Some scientists think they evolved in Earth’s primordial seas as early as three billion years ago....

A compelling form and advanced functions come together in Bowers & Wilkins’ Zeppelin, a high-resolution single unit that looks minimalist but is packed with innovations. Featuring internal components sourced from models that cost in the hundreds to multi-thousands, this buoyant, Bluetooth and network-connected speaker is “pleasing and natural,” “muscular yet controlled,” according to our reviewer, making it not just one of our best smart speakers, but one of our favorite wireless-audio speakers period....

This particular kind of spam is garnering attention lately. “I have a feeling that it is on the upswing,” says Shuman Ghosemajumder, the CTO of cybersecurity company Shape Security who also worked as the “click fraud czar” at Google. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to both stop it as well as report it when you see it. It’s also worth remembering that while the location of the spam feels new, the behavior isn’t....

Now for the caveat: It’s important to focus on the word preliminary here. Nothing’s conclusive just yet. DNA-sensitive dye made cells in a sample glow green when placed under a microscope, but we’ve seen that sort of thing before: Last year, other Antarctic researchers thought they had found life, only to discover that it was actually bacteria from their own kerosene supplies. Dead cells can show up in the researchers’ test, too, so to make it official, they’ll have to work through more time-intensive tests, where the cells grow....

The Chinese National Space Administration’s Chang’e 5 lander touched down on the moon on Dec. 1, 2020. A little more than two weeks later, it brought back samples of lunar rock and regolith which it had drilled and scooped from the landing site in the Oceanus Procellarum region—a massive dark swath a few thousand kilometers wide, visible on the nearside of the moon. Within this lowland area, the landing site is one of the geologically younger regions of the moon, and the samples are the youngest ever to be returned to Earth for analysis....

The Supreme Court of the US finally handed down one of its largest climate change decisions to date. Today, the court voted 6-3 to limit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. In 2020, the US electric power industry emitted 1.71 billion short tons of carbon dioxide: 99 percent of that came from coal, natural gas, and petroleum fuels, despite them only making up 62 percent of the US electricity supply....

Moon Express signed the launch agreement with Rocket Lab in October, and the XPrize foundation just officially verified the contract. The Israeli team SpaceIL was the first to secure a verified launch contract in October. Their rover will be traveling to the moon with help from Spaceflight Industries on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The other 14 Google Lunar Xprize teams have until the end of 2016 to produce their own verified launch contracts....

Last year, a multidisciplinary team of scientists from two Danish institutions, Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen, began using pigs to study Alzheimer’s. But not just any pigs. The researchers created transgenic pigs—animals whose genomes contain genes from another species. In this case, human genes. The team introduced the human gene for the heritable form of Alzheimer’s into porcine fibroblasts, the skin cells most often used for cloning because they multiply quickly....

Many of us juggle more than one device during the day—phone, laptop, tablet, and sometimes even secondary phones and smartwatches. But you might have wondered if, and how, you can move text and images from one to the other. It can get really messy, really fast. Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies know this, too, which is why they’re making it easier to send data from one device to another—as long as they are connected to the same accounts....

It seems like barely a week goes by without some data hack or leak hitting the headlines. With so much of modern life now stored and managed online, it’s vital that you keep your most important accounts locked up and as well-protected as possible—which is what we’re here to help you with. A lot of security measures will be the same across all of your major online accounts, it’s just a question of knowing where to find them and how to switch them on....

What is it? Roam is the second portable speaker offering from Sonos. Move was its first foray into this space and it arrived at the end of 2019, just as the COVID-19 pandemic essentially stopped people from going anywhere at all for more than a year. The Move was extremely well-designed, but it costs $400 and weighs 6.6-pounds. It’s like carrying around a gallon of milk that can blast Wu-Tang songs....

The Sony PlayStation Classic is the latest in a small parade of officially licensed self-contained retro consoles. It rolls up 20 old-school PlayStation games—Tekken 3 and Rayman—with a pair of controllers, and a mini version of the original, iconic gray console that debuted in 1995. It even comes in a box that has the feel of an old console box. While I typically think packaging design is a somewhat overrated feature in the gadget world, I like the box the PlayStation Classic comes in....

“We infer that the Late Pleistocene ‘surgeon(s)’ who amputated this individual’s lower left leg must have possessed detailed knowledge of limb anatomy and muscular and vascular systems to prevent fatal blood loss and infection,” the authors wrote. “They must also have understood the necessity to remove the limb for survival. Finally, during surgery, the surrounding tissue including veins, vessels, and nerves were exposed and negotiated in such a way that allowed this individual to not only survive, but also continue living with altered mobility....

Jumpspeak Language App: 1-Yr Subscription (Spanish) Instead of making you type words you probably won’t use in real life, Jumpspeak teaches you a foreign language through speaking. With this deal, you get to engage in fun, interactive, AI-powered Spanish conversations and receive instant feedback, so you can speak accurately on day one. You also get to hear native Spanish speaker accents, making language learning more natural. A 1-year subscription usually costs $99, but you can get it on sale for $41....

You can place a separate Home 350 in every room and play different songs as you roam, or group multiple Denon speakers on sale—including the Denon Home 250 Wireless Speaker ($399, was $499), Denon Home Sound Bar 550 ($499, was $649), and/or Denon Home Subwoofer ($499, was $599)—to play the same song everywhere all at once, or to create a speaker cable-free home theater system. And, yes, you can even plug a turntable (with built-in preamp) into the Home 350’s AUX port, achieving a best-of-both-worlds of a sort....