AFWERX, a military technology accelerator by the Air Force and United States Special Operations Command, recently held a competition to find a better kind of high-speed vertical takeoff vehicle. This contest, announced in February 2021, seeks to find faster alternatives to the existing HH-60 Pave Hawk used by the Air Force. That helicopter is used for missions like recovering the wounded or rescuing pilots, but as a helicopter its speed is limited, topping out around 184 mph....

Reading or writing in the bath doesn’t have to mean awkwardly holding up your materials and hoping for the best. Instead, use the extendable handles of this bamboo tray to outfit your tub with a hands-free solution. A rust-resistant metal rack holds books and tablets at an angle suitable for reading, and two removable trays give you extra room for fancy soaps or snacks. You can even slip a glass of wine and your cell phone into dedicated slots to unwind with a movie....

Allergies to meat are rare, but one way they can happen is by getting bitten by a tick that happens to have a molecule in its saliva called alpha-gal. The substance—known scientifically as galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose—is a carbohydrate found in most mammalian cells except for humans, apes, and monkeys. The lone star tick, common in the southeastern areas of the country, is a frequent carrier of the alpha-gal molecule. Bites from these ticks send alpha-gal molecules into a person’s blood, and in some folks, causes a slow but potentially intense allergic reaction....

“Glenelg was conceptually a point that represented the three areas,” John Grotzinger, project scientist for MSL at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told reporters today. “As part of understanding how those interrelate, we consider ourselves now to be in the promised land.” Now the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument is analyzing a scooped sample of dirt from a site inside Glenelg called Rocknest. This is a major step for the rover, whose ability to X-ray sand is a crucial part of its two-year mission....

Lightweight, breathable, and soft, this baby carrier lets you take your infant baby around with you without the hassle of a stroller. You can carry your baby up to four different ways: facing inward with a narrow seat for newborns and smaller babies, facing in with a wider seat for bigger babies, facing out, and as a back-carry seat for older babies and toddlers. It also has a bib to protect your carrier and your clothing, and is machine-washable....

The Trick Typically solar panels soak up photons from the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity. The panels tend to be dark, because the darker a material, the more visible light it absorbs. The idea of transparent panels would usually get dismissed because they don’t, by definition, absorb any visible light—it just passes right through them. The Tech Ubiquitous Energy, a spinoff of MIT, has created a coating made of organic molecules that absorb the sun’s ultraviolet and infrared rays....

That’s the upshot of a new study from researchers at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, published on Tuesday in Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review. “A lot of the news coverage or popular discourse is ‘what has Facebook done,’ or ‘what has Twitter done.’ And those discussions tend to happen completely unrelated to each other,” says Zeve Sanderson, executive director at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and an author on the paper....

First, sanitize your masks Before you upcycle your masks, it’s important that you sanitize them properly to make sure they’re safe to wear—even if it’s not directly on your nose and mouth. If you’re using cloth masks, we have a thorough guide on how to clean them, but the easiest way is to simply throw them in the washing machine along with the rest of your laundry. Sanitizing disposable masks is trickier, as there’s no way to be 100 percent sure they’re germ-free....

To their surprise, they discovered that mucus secreted by these jellyfish is filled with tiny, wriggling cell masses that allow them to fire stinging substances from a distance. The researchers reported the newly identified structures, which they dubbed cassiosomes, on February 13 in the journal Communications Biology. “It was really one of the most shocking days in my history as a scientist,” says co-author Cheryl Ames, an associate professor of applied marine biology at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan....

Nothing tastes better than some freshly plucked basil over pasta or pizza. Grow your own with this smart garden. All you have to do is drop in the plant pots, fill up the water, and then plug it in. LED lights will make sure your herbs thrive, and if you’re not a basil fan, you can grow cilantro, lavender, wild strawberries, thyme, or even chili peppers. These sturdy planter bags are the perfect solution to growing a garden on a patio or indoor space, and can be used for several seasons....

Right now the option is only available on the web for Google Workspace users—that is people paying directly for the service, or members of an organization that does. But if you’re not currently a Workspace user, then there are third-party plug-ins you can add to Gmail that will provide you with a range of email templates you can modify to suit your own needs. Once you’ve found a layout you like, click Default styling to customize the template....

Researchers at ETH Zurich collaborated with the European Space Agency to build Camaliot, an app that uses a smartphone’s location data to improve live weather forecasting research. Launched on March 17, the crowdsourcing platform allows the public to participate in culling information and helps scientists create better ways to monitor the skies. Currently, the app is only available for Android devices. Camaliot essentially turns your phone into a receiver for weather monitoring data....

Self-driven cars have shown fairly promising results in limited road tests, but there are a lot of potential liabilities to consider before they hit Main Street. What happens if your autonomous car runs off the road, into another self-driven car, into a human-driven car, or into a pedestrian? Volvo’s promise is a bold step for two reasons. First, the company is expressing confidence in their own product in a way that hasn’t really been equalled....

Volvo is taking that idea and baking it right into their cars—in Europe, at least. In this case, some Volvos will be able to share alerts with each other about slippery roads. A vehicle detecting slippery conditions uploads that information to the cloud, and then it’s pushed to other vehicles in the area. And unlike Waze, where humans are actively keying in reports about police, for example, this alert process happens automatically....

Duke undergrad David Piech assembled a miniature processor and some servos and put it into a taxidermied sparrow. Then biologist Rindy Anderson and colleagues took it into a swamp sparrow breeding ground in Pennsylvania. The team rigged a speaker beneath a robo-bird perch, so the dummy sparrow would seem to be “singing” to alert other male birds of his presence. It also could move a wing, in a bird version of raising your fists....

The applications of course are vast, ranging from military uniforms resistant to chemical or biological agents to coatings for ocean vessels that reduce drag to surfaces that simply never, ever get wet. See this happening up close and in slow motion in the video above.

Unfortunately, the annual Hunter’s Moon will also peak this weekend, and the light from the bright full moon will outshine the dazzling glittery meteors a bit. Usually, skywatchers can see roughly 10 to 20 meteors per hour during the Draconids, but the night sky will likely be too bright to see many this year. The same rules apply to watch this meteor shower that applies to pretty much all space-watching fun: go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour....

The engineers filmed the entire assembly process of all 18 sections of ultra-lightweight beryllium in the 21-foot-wide mirror (6.5 meters), and now you can watch it too (above). The mirror was completed earlier this month on February 3, 2016 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, after a decade of research and development, according to NASA. When the telescope is finally in place in outer space, it will be the size of an Earth tennis court....

After years of research and advocacy, concussion awareness is at an all time high. Many parents, coaches, and players are worried that sticking with football might mean risking a damaged brain.Between 1.6 and 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur annually, and football is responsible for the lion’s share. Football players are also subject to hundreds of small, subconcussive injuries per season; hits to the head that shake up the brain, but don’t rise to the level of a full-blown concussion....

“The example that I often think about is the smell of coffee, which you identify as being a distinctive aroma,” says Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University. “It’s made of about 200 different molecules, and none of them individually evoke a strong perception of the smell of coffee. If you compare it to other sensory worlds that we live in, the chemical world is much larger and variable....