The San Francisco-based company has been developing the plane for the better part of a decade. It has a pusher-propeller in the back, a short set of canard-wings in the front, and can seat a family of five plus luggage. Oh, and it also goes a top speed of 300mph. With just a pilot, its makers claim it can fly 1,600 miles, but even with a full load of people and luggage its range should be around 500 miles....
Once I figured that out, I deleted the app and rearranged my sex life. Two months later, I had a thumping little heart on my first ultrasound. I was elated. I was furious. Data shows that most fertility apps can’t do what they were designed to do, and only four out of 53 platforms can accurately identify fertile windows. For people hoping for a child, faulty technology may be hindering a most desired pregnancy....
Venom has evolved independently countless times; such diverse organisms didn’t branch out from one venomous ancestor, so each species has evolved on its own. As a result, depending on the species, each venom contains a different chemical cocktail perfectly designed to attack the animal’s typical prey. The result is a huge number of chemicals not found anywhere else in nature, which can affect the blood, muscles or central nervous system....
Take your pick from these 12 options, and key in the code CMSAVE20 at checkout to get each of them for an extra 20 percent off. Quantum X Water Filtration Vacuum ZeroDark High Powered Portable Vacuum Cleaner Pet hair, dust, dirt, crumbs, and more are no match for this portable vacuum’s powerful 80W motor. It can eliminate both wet and dry messes, and it has different attachments for added versatility....
They come from InstantAction, an offshoot of GarageGames, which is a well-known maker of software tools for game developers. Now the company has created a Web browser plugin that lets programmers build full-featured 3-D games to run within the browser, a feat that’s never been accomplished before. No store-bought discs. No lengthy software downloads and installation routines. You surf, you click, you play. Instant gratification. While there’s no shortage of free games on the Web, they’re mostly based on Adobe Flash or other 2-D graphics technologies – great for puzzles and quick casual games, but not rich enough for serious competitive players....
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) was eight years in the making. Constructed at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and installed on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, it is a specially-designed sky surveying instrument that can do some very specific things better than any instrument in the world. It is not the world’s most powerful optical telescope, nor is it the world’s highest-resolution camera or the largest instrument of its kind....
Fetus in fetu, or FIF, sounds much less bizarre and implausible if you understand how embryos form. You can’t just wind back the clock and see tinier and tinier fetuses; at some point, we have to go from being a single cell to being a body-shaped blob of cells to being something actually identifiable as a proto-human. This process unfolds similarly for every one of us, but in twins, some of those steps get a little trickier....
Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ The key announcement from this week’s electronics onslaught comes in the form of the Note 10. You can take a more in-depth look at them here, but it’s worth noting that there are two different versions of the Note 10, which is a first for the line. Both employ the Snapdragon 855 processor, but the $949 Note 10 totes a 6.3-inch screen, while the $1,099 Note 10+ pushes all the way up to 6....
People with this mutation have hundreds of extra copies of a short RNA sequence—GGGGCC. Most people just have a few copies, says Aaron Gitler, a geneticist at Stanford University who is one of the authors of a new study out today in Nature Neuroscience. In those people, the sequence doesn’t do anything; it just sits there as part of the genome, located in a gene called C9orf72. But in people with hundreds of copies, the sequence comes alive and codes for a type of protein that damages neurons as it builds up....
The A5 belongs to the FAA’s new “light-sport aircraft” class, whose planes don’t have to go through the same lengthy certification process that discourages bold design in larger planes. That classification freed Icon to develop the folding wings and to install a modern engine that burns unleaded gasoline, whereas most private planes use decades-old, lead-spewing powerplants. You can fly the A5 with a simple sport-pilot certification, which requires half the training time of a standard license....
The vocation, known as infection prevention and control, is multidisciplinary in nature as the routes of infection in a healthcare facility are numerous. Infection preventionists need to focus on a variety of potential infectious disease sources. But the most important source of pathogens happens to be one of the hardest to control: humans. People are naturally shedding millions of microbes and many species pose a health risk, particularly to those with compromised immunities....
Now, Harry Potter fans might actually have a reason to rejoice, although the latest “invisibility cloak” in the news isn’t magic, nor does it actually make someone invisible. It’s called Quantum Stealth, and it comes from Canadian military camouflage company, Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp and its CEO, Guy Cramer. After nearly a decade of vaguely alluding to his advancements in invisibility but refusing to share anything other than computer-generated mock-photos, Cramer posted, back in August, an hour-long video demonstration to mark the official debut of his Quantum Stealth technology....
Fishman, a retired jeweler from New Jersey, has been flying planes and gliders for 30 years. In the mid-1990s, he put together a motorized glider kit, but it was noisy and undependable. It sat in storage until two years ago, when he replaced its gas engine with an 18-horsepower electric motor he and a colleague designed to minimize noise and vibration. He then raised the plane body eight inches off the ground to accommodate a 45-inch propeller, increasing the prop’s thrust by more than half....
The glues in my shop Everyone has glues that they prefer, and I’m no exception. Over the years I’ve learned about and incorporated many glues into my arsenal of adhesive solutions, and I’m excited to share them with you. Just please take into account that my knowledge of these glues and their functional properties is just that—functional. They are the conclusions of an experimental generalist. I am not a chemist, nor a physicist, nor a material scientist....
“They just have an astounding variety of diets,” says Michael Grundler, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He and his colleague Daniel Rabosky, of the University of Michigan, wanted to know how this group became so diverse and successful. When they analyzed both the diets and the evolutionary relationships amongst hundreds of present-day snakes, the pair found that the mass extinction that finished off the dinosaurs was a game-changer for the limbless reptiles....
As the name suggests, serotonin transporter removes serotonin from the brain. Serotonin itself is what regulates physical and emotional functions like eating, energy levels, and mood. During the winter, subjects had higher levels of serotonin transporter in the brain than they did during the summer. When tested, not just one but all investigated areas of the brain followed this same trend. All subjects were healthy human beings, so whether you are a marathoner or a couch potato, you can expect your serotonin to hibernate for the winter, at least to some degree....
JetBlue agreed to buy 25 million gallons of Air Company’s sustainable aviation fuel over five years, and Virgin Atlantic agreed to purchase up to 100 million gallons over 10 years. Boom Supersonic, a company trying to bring back supersonic passenger flight, plans to purchase up to 5 million gallons of this fuel on an annual basis through its Overture flight test program. According to a press release, the US Air Force, which awarded the company a contract, has already completed a “first-of-its-kind unmanned flight using Air Company’s 100% unblended CO2-derived jet fuel....
Since the aviation industry currently produces about 2% of global carbon emissions, there are serious reasons to develop a greener way to fuel planes. Rolls-Royce (the aerospace and defense contractor, not the similarly named car brand that is owned by BMW) is hoping that hydrogen might hold the answers it needs to keep selling its turbofans and other engines into the future. Most airplane engines run on jet fuel, which is based on kerosene....
Readers, please behold the “Commodordion,” a ridiculous, adorable musical contraption built using two C64 keyboards, custom software and wiring, as well as a bellows painstakingly constructed from taped-together floppy disks. First unveiled in late October by Linus Åkesson, a Swedish software engineer, YouTuber, and, as his video showcases, accomplished musician, the Commodordion looks predictably as difficult to play as the portmanteau is to pronounce. Åkesson, however, makes the whole thing look relatively simple, demonstrating his wonderful setup through an extremely impressive rendition of Scott Joplin‘s “Maple Town Rag” from 1899....
What are the AirPods Pro (2nd generation)? The $249 AirPods Pro (2nd generation) are the long-anticipated follow-up to what is essentially the default Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) earbud for iPhone users and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear they’re already everywhere. As I write this they haven’t been released yet, but there they seem to be across from me on the train, waiting in line with me for a bagel, jogging by in the street and lounging on benches in the park....
