But the Dragon 2 (a.k.a. the “Crew Dragon”) — the gumdrop-shaped capsule that will carry up to seven astronauts inside — will have to come back down to Earth sometime. After reentering the atmosphere, the capsule will deploy several parachutes and then splash down in the ocean, and NASA just posted a video of the parachute tests (above). The test didn’t include a real version of the Dragon 2, instead relying on a weight that presumably costs a lot less than a capsule mockup....

Captured by Sploid, this video shows a timelapse of the process, from disassembly to reconstruction, that happens every repair cycle. Most striking is the paint removal, which clocks in at about 1:13. Watch the full process below:

In a video released by the IHMC this week, ATLAS demonstrates a variety of “whole-body coordinated motions.” Specifically, a bunch of household cleaning tasks, like vacuuming the square of carpet, sweeping up the Nerf darts, and putting trash into a trashcan and then putting that trashcan on a table. The video shows them at 20 times their normal speed, which highlights just how awkward and inefficient the movements are. With every task It looks like a human in a giant clumsy suit struggling to complete basic tasks....

The footage comes from New Zealand. An aerial photography company was filming a promotional video when a soccer player decided instead to create a viral sensation. “Kid kicks ball at drone (Drone Crashes)” now joins the ranks of “Fireman blasts hose at drone” and “two minutes of animals attacking drones” in the annals of bad things happening to hapless quadcopters. Watch the whole seven-second video below:

Good news is, you don’t have to. With a little bit of streaming savviness, you can watch all the shows and movies you want without bleeding out your bank account each month. Unsubscribe, resubscribe Most streaming services let you subscribe by the month, which means if you’ve watched just about everything you want to watch on Netflix, you can take a break until the latest season of Stranger Things ends or the next season of Black Mirror appears on the platform....

Despite anti-vax movements being nearly as old as the first vaccine, there hasn’t been much research at all on how to convince parents to vaccinate. Public health officials have learned some lessons from their own efforts to increase vaccination rates, but that’s not the same thing as truly understanding what works and what doesn’t. “There’s a little bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect going on where knowing a little bit about it means we think we know a lot more than we do,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and vaccinologist at Emory University who regularly serves on advisory boards for vaccine-preventable diseases....

Teledyne FLIR is one of four companies working on such a device. Besides existing in a small, lightweight package, the gizmo will need to be able to differentiate between the normal chemicals a soldier might encounter and the nefarious ones. That mix of potential compounds in an environment is what Dave Cullen, the vice president of detection systems at Teledyne FLIR, refers to as a “chemical soup.” Some substances can be ignored, like a truck’s exhaust....

Monitoring your rainfall (as well as snow and hail) can help you decide when to plant your garden, how much to water, and when to prepare for basement flooding. This all-weather gauge features a calibrated inner measuring tube within an outer cylinder, which collects up to an inch of rain with accuracy to 1/100th of an inch. Decant additional amounts collected in the outer cylinder into the inner tube, and repeat as needed to complete your calculations....

“I’m the busiest program in the country, and I’ll only do 80 or so this year,” he says. This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement that Nadler and other experts in adolescent obesity hope will increase the number of kids who benefit from the procedure: The policy recommends that pediatricians take more steps to identify kids with severe obesity who meet the criteria for weight loss surgery, and help educate them and their families about the risks and benefits of the procedures....

You’re almost certainly reading this story on an electronic device that operates, at its most basic level, with bits built from silicon-based transistors. In the non-quantum world, what scientists call the “classical” world, each of those bits holds a single number: a zero or a one. Quantum devices use their own quantum bits, or “qubits” (pronounced like “Q-bits”), which play by the rules of quantum mechanics. That allows qubits to act in weird and wondrous ways....

In this post, we will explore both chemicals in detail to find out what they can do for your health and wellness. What is CBG and CBD? CBG and CBD are the two most prevalent chemical components of hemp. Both compounds belong to a group called cannabinoids, which give cannabis its medical and recreational properties. Cannabinoids also exist within our bodies naturally; they’re responsible for regulating things like mood, pain sensation, appetite, and memory....

Early 20th-century attempts to test the oft-misquoted quip (“beast” rather than “breast”) appeared to prove it quite wrong. In July 1921, Popular Science covered one such interlude at New York City’s Central Park Menagerie—now known as the Zoo. “The polar bear exhibited astonishment,” and a small tame wolf “ran wildly around, panic-stricken.” The elephant stood out, seeming oddly unfazed. The purpose of the demonstration, according to an account in The New York Times, was “to gauge more or less scientifically the effect of jungle music on animals....

Outbreaks wax and eventually wane, and they typically follow a similar pattern. The COVID-19 pandemic will likely be similar, although after two deadly years, it’s been difficult to chart a path forward. But public health leaders are still trying, in spite of the virus’s rapid evolution. On a panel at the World Economic Forum last month, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the president’s chief medical adviser, broke down COVID’s endgame into five phases: pandemic, deceleration, control, elimination, and eradication....

Portable solar panels are gaining popularity as folks look for a simple, sustainable way to juice up their devices while off the grid. Whether you’re a hardcore backpacker heading deep into the wilderness or a sunbather hoping to get some work done in your local park, there’s a personal solar panel out there suited to your needs. Portable solar panels are also a great way to familiarize yourself with renewable energy....

Bike riding isn’t just for outdoor fun, however. Cars and city streets are making room for more cyclists, and e-bikes could help reduce emissions and smog while offering benefits for riders. E-bikes are a less-sweaty way to get around compared to manual cycling since they have an electric motor that can give the bike a boost. That brutal hill on the way to work? Easy to get up with motorized wheels....

Many government agencies collect racial data. An easy example is the U.S. Census which has been gathering this information since 1790. And there’s a strong argument for gathering this demographic information, since doing so can reveal statistical disparities between racial groups. Despite this, other government entities that collect data on a national scale don’t require this information at all. “Our income tax forms, since they were first used in 1913, [did] not include a question on race and ethnicity, and they never have since,” says Jeremy Bearer-Friend, a George Washington University law professor who studies the tax system....

But not anymore. What once was just a stream of your friends’ photos slowly became a collection of autoplaying videos, and advertised content, followed by an endless feed of algorithmically curated nonsense. Now Instagram is even trying to shoehorn a TikTok clone into the mix. If you like Instagram’s new features, I’m not here to take them away from you. But if you, like me, find it all a bit exhausting, I come with a solution: the web version....

When he was a child, Donald Unger’s mother and aunts warned that he shouldn’t crack his knuckles, because he would develop arthritis. To prove them wrong, he set out on a half-century long experiment, cracking the knuckles on his left hand at least twice a day, while leaving the right knuckles (mostly) uncracked. After 50 years, Unger (then a doctor in Thousand Oaks, California) examined his hands—and found no evidence of arthritis in either one, and no other differences between them, either....

Although that does cut into the amount of O2 in the atmosphere, there’s no need to fill your basement with oxygen tanks. Nitrogen accounts for 78 percent of the gas in the atmosphere, but molecular oxygen, the O2 that we breathe, is the runner-up, at 20.94 percent. The remaining 1 percent and change falls into the “other” category, predominantly water vapor but also argon and hydrogen gas; CO2 accounts for just 0....

Technology has done a pretty good job of relieving Spot of his morning newsprint duties, and you can watch live video of swimming fish from around the internet without ever buying and filling a tank. So it’s fair to question whether that purring little ball of fluff on your lap really, truly, needs to be a living creature. If you make a list of everything you love about cats, you’ll probably find that you’ve left off feeding them, worrying about their health, or receiving a dead bird in your lap first thing in the morning....