Last week, NASA released the latest image of Tycho’s supernova remnant (also called “Tycho”). The photo, taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, looks a bit like an opalescent dandelion. “You look at this image, and it sort of looks like it’s cotton candy,” says Brian Williams, a NASA astronomer who helped take the latest photograph of the supernova remnant. Scientists use these cosmic fireworks to understand and test theories of supernovae....

This is a seal with an eel hanging out of its nose. This is a seal with an eel hanging out of its nose. Folks with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) spotted what looks like a lazy attempt at a narwhal disguise on a juvenile Hawaiian monk seal in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. A blog post explains that while NOAA only started seeing seals with morays in their muzzles a few years ago, they’ve now spotted such schnoz shenanigans on several separate occasions....

With yet another iPad Pro in our midst, you might as well be ready to drop thousands on the latest version. Apple is notorious for not offering discounts, but luckily, there’s another way to score their products without spending an arm and a leg — buying refurbished. Refurbished products are basically near-mint items that have been tested to ensure they’re in working order before being returned to the market. If you want to score an iPad Pro at a heavily marked-down price, this deal on the space gray 9....

“They don’t eat anymore. They have one thing on their mind, and that’s just sex,” Sopjes says. Before getting a drone three years ago, Sopjes and his colleagues counted the salmon by snorkeling in the river and standing on paddleboards, both of which greatly disturbed the fish and weren’t very accurate. The drone produced clear photographs of the salmon, but counting the fish in the images using pen and paper was tedious....

2. Follow brands and interests 3. Dig for fresh deals 6. Secure your orders 7. Apply coupons 11. Find the deals of the day 12. Pad out your wishlist 17. Review free stuff 18. Expand your household

The favorite, with its synonymous star icon, was introduced just after Twitter’s launch in 2006, before Tumblr introduced their hearts in 2008, or Facebook introduced the ‘like’ button in 2009. Twitter product manager, Akarshan Kumar, explained in a blog post that “we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.” Hence the change....

In 2018, Kristen Miller, a high school social studies teacher from Cleveland, had an uneventful pregnancy for the first two trimesters—“textbook perfect,” she said. But then at her 32-week prenatal visit, she was told she had excess amniotic fluid, a condition that can slightly increase the risk of complications. The following morning she went to work but noticed the fetus wasn’t moving much. Feeling something was wrong, she eventually went to the hospital....

With a flip of a switch, the completed tower is on, and the phone connects to the internet. The phone, which starts in professional video game streamer Captain Sparklez’ inventory, is a creation of Verizon, the telecommunications company. We don’t, in the demo below, get to see how it works, but we know it has a working web browser, rendering everything in simplified Minecraft blocks, and it can even make video calls to the outside world....

The voyagers are still on the cutting-edge of space exploration and remain the only probes to ever explore interstellar space or the the galactic ocean that our sun and its planets travel through. Part of what makes the sun and its planets so difficult to investigate is the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a protective bubble created by the sun’s magnetic field and an outward flow of charged particles from the sun called solar wind....

Flying away from the smoke is a TIE fighter, clearly more than capable of ruining our protagonists’ day. While the TIE fighter was repeatedly outmatched by X-Wings in battles earlier in the series, here it proves its worth as a cheap, dependable way to destroy a defenseless target. Watch the full clip, complete with audio, below:

A notable addition to this field comes from engineers at North Carolina State University, who came up with a manta ray-like robot that can do the butterfly stroke. A detailed description of their design is published this week in the journal Science Advances. “To date, swimming soft robots have not been able to swim faster than one body length per second, but marine animals—such as manta rays—are able to swim much faster, and much more efficiently,” Jie Yin, an associate professor at NC State University, and an author on the paper, said in a press release....

If you read “baby mat” and immediately cringed at the thought of ugly plastic, check this one out. It’s one of our favorites because there are a number of attractive reversible prints. Think of this like a new rug—it’s the size of a queen mattress. It just so happens to be waterproof, which is great for when your baby spits up on it. It’s extremely cushy, and it’s made from nontoxic materials, which we know is important to you....

What are you eating and/or growing for Thanksgiving? My work involves growing food in environments that we can control with a computer. Imagine a box in which we can create a climate by controlling things like carbon dioxide, oxygen, temperature, humidity, and light. We have sensors running in that box to monitor what’s going on inside, and the computers adjust the variables to the levels we want. I currently have seven of these little boxes in seven schools throughout Boston....

I’m not the first person to point this out (you can literally just Google the species name to read all about it, so the barrier to entry on this one is pretty low) but I may be the most offended. That is why I, Rachel Feltman, lover of sexually-confused blobs and protist enthusiast extraordinaire, have logged on to give this organism the introduction it deserves. What the heck is a slime mold?...

But it’s time to learn. WiFi 6 was announced in 2018 and hit the market in 2019, so we’re now hitting a critical mass of compatible routers and devices (including the iPhone 11, iPhone 12, iPhone 13, iPhone SE, as well as the iPad Pro, and MacBook Air/MacBook Pro). It’s no longer strictly the purview of early adopters, so it’s time for the rest of us to get with it....

Whether or not you’ve resolved to get into shape this January, Muscle Month is here to teach you a thing or two about stretching, contracting, lifting, tearing, gaining, and so much more. Unbeknownst to the bros who skip leg day, squats are an incredible exercise for many reasons. They help build your major leg muscles plus all the tiny stabilizing muscles that you need to do basic daily tasks like getting up from a chair....

I’ve been in the business since 2003, performing stunts both in movies and on television. I do all kinds—fire burns, in-car crashes, even high-speed chases—but the freakiest, most brutal feat I’ve ever pulled off was a blind car hit. That means I was running into the street, and the incoming car slammed into me from behind, at a speed of 30 miles per hour. There are so many things that can go wrong when performing a stunt like this....

The study collected diet and health information from more than 80,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79 as part of the Women’s Health Initiative, a longitudinal health study created in 1991 by the National Institutes of Health. The authors looked specifically for a connection between the consumption of diet sodas and other artificially sweetened beverages (like Snapple, Vitamin Water, or Crystal Light) and stroke, heart disease, and overall mortality....

“The appeal of the jetpack is that it’s something you can stow in a locker, pull out, and put on to go somewhere,” says John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “But the versions we’ve seen so far don’t make a lot of sense. They are just stunts.” Despite the array of fantastical, but perhaps impractical (and dangerous) jetpack designs, Hansman adds, “It’s an interesting time. There are a number of technologies coming online that could give you the capability of a jetpack....

Scroll over the colored boxes above to learn more about each tracker. This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of Popular Science, as part of Best Of What’s New 2015.