The idea for Liam’s hand started out as Rich Van As’s nightmare accident. When Van As, an artisan carpenter, chopped off four of his fingers with a table saw, he vowed to get mechanical replacements. So Van As, in South Africa, researched for months. But only found the X-finger, which costs thousands of dollars. That’s when Van As stumbled on a YouTube video of a velociraptor-like claw made by Ivan Owen, a mechanical special effects artist in Bellingham, WA....

Lane-splitting is a benefit to riders all over the world, but in the United States, the privilege is currently reserved to riders in the Golden State. California-based Tesla seems to know a thing or two about motorcyclist’s unique advantage in the state, and by all appearances the company is working to ensure that riders filtering through traffic stay safe when its autopilot systems are active. But does it work? Can Tesla’s Autopilot detect a lane-sharing rider?...

While the Wide Field Camera 3 is just one of four active instruments the space telescope uses to make observations (and the other three are perfectly healthy right now) the camera has been a part of nearly half of all of Hubble’s scientific investigations in the past 10 years. It was installed during the last major servicing mission in 2009, so while it’s younger than other parts of the nearly 30-year-old Hubble, it’s not too surprising to see it running into problems....

Swirling around like giant pieces of cotton candy, this colorful cloudscape is about 1,000 light years away from Earth and surrounds the Herbig-Haro object HH 505. According to NASA, Herbig-Haro objects are the bright and luminous regions surrounding newborn stars. They form when either stellar winds or jets of gas are released from these infant stars, creating super fast shockwaves, or outflows, that collide with nearby gas and dust at high speeds....

The plastics had only been submerged in the ocean off Falmouth, England, for a week, but in that time a thin layer of biofilm, a slimy mix of mucus and microbes, had already developed on their surfaces. Michiel Vos, a microbiologist at the University of Exeter in England, had sunk five different types of plastic as a test. He and his colleagues wanted to know which of the myriad microbes living in the ocean would glom on to these introduced materials....

Hurricane Michael reached major hurricane status on Tuesday afternoon, and grew to a category 4 storm as it approached the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday. Widespread wind damage is likely where the eye makes landfall. For dozens of miles inland, and a life-threatening storm surge, flooding rains, and tornadoes are all possible as the storm makes its way into the southeast later this week. Governor Rick Scott tweeted on Wednesday morning that the time for safe evacuation had passed and that those along the coast should shelter in place immediately....

I loaded up Battlefront on my PC (~10GB download) and booted it up. Hoth was the only thing on my mind. You know what they say: If you can’t handle the Hoth, stay out of the kitchen. And as a relatively bad gamer, let me tell you—I should have stayed out. Hoth proved to be a brutal, unforgiving planet for the Rebels, and an altogether easy target for the Imperial fleet....

Scientists have reliable data on the Earth’s rotational speed, based on observations of the sun’s position in the sky during solar eclipses, going back some 2,500 years. Although the rotational rate hasn’t declined smoothly, over that period the average day has grown longer by between 15 millionths and 25 millionths of a second every year. Even at the faster rate, it will take 140 million years before the Earth’s rotation slows enough to necessitate a 25-hour day....

That’s because its gasoline range (EPA-rated at 78 miles) is more or less equivalent to its battery range (EPA-rated at 72 miles). How does BMW manage that? By restricting drivers’ ability to fill its tiny gas tank to a minimal 1.9 gallons. That restriction in turn frustrates eager i3 REx drivers who want to use their cars on trips without having to stop every hour or so to add $5 or less of gasoline on long road trips....

This new phone would supposedly have a 4-inch screen — the same size as the now two-generations old iPhone 5S — yet come with internal components similar to an iPhone 6 of last year. That would be a huge change for Apple, especially given that just four months ago, the company refreshed the iPhone lineup) by releasing the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. These new iPhones, coming in at 4....

Before the invention of antibiotics, most of our dealings with bacteria—at least, the dangerous ones—ended in death. At least partly because of that, we have viewed hand sanitizer, the powerful bacterial annihilator that it is, as something we should use liberally without fear of health consequences. Now, after more than a year of living with the threat of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the stuff has become a steady fixture of daily life....

It might not be the first part of your computer setup that you think about upgrading—a webcam generally just… works—but you might be missing out on the extra quality and flexibility that a new webcam brings. And not every computer has a webcam right out of the box anyway. If you’re running a desktop PC or Mac that doesn’t have one, you’ll need to make yourself aware of what you’re looking for and why you need it....

The study, published this week in the journal Psychological Science, took 4D ultrasound scans of 100 pregnant women ages 18 to 40, at weeks 32 and 36 of pregnancy to see how the fetuses responded after being exposed to flavors from foods eaten by their mothers. The moms were asked not to consume any food or flavored drinks one hour before their scans and also not eat or drink anything with carrot or kale the day of the scan as a control....

Between early morning and early afternoon 1.07 inches had fallen at Sydney’s Observatory Hill rain gauge. According to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, the records at the rain gauge on Observatory Hill date back to 1859. Sydney and the rest of New South Wales is seeing swollen rivers and moderate-to-major flooding due to the deluge that began on Thursday. More heavy rain is expected to continue across the city and other parts of southeastern Australia, peaking sometime on Saturday....

Traditionally, shoe-makers use foam and industrial molding to bring the pieces of the midsole together. “We use a lot of molds” in the footwear industry, says Katherine Petrecca, a general manager for studio innovation at New Balance. First, injection molding takes liquid foam and produces “a smooth bun of material that’s roughly the shape of the final part,” she explains. Then, that bun-like piece goes into a compression mold, which creates the final shoe component....

Harley has an electric scooter concept The LiveWire is Harley’s first ever electric motorcycle, but the company is also working on an electric scooter and some X-Games athletes got to ride it around last week. The design is stripped down and minimal, but it looks really fun for cruising. There’s not much real-world information out there at the moment, but it will certainly be a lot cheaper than the $30,000 LiveWire....

Listen to the latest episode of the Techathlon podcast! Before we dig into this week’s stories, be sure to give our tech gameshow podcast a listen in the player above, subscribe on iTunes, add us on Stitcher, follow on Anchor, or wherever else you find quality podcasts. You can also follow us on Twitter to talk smack or share pictures of your lunch. The Disney+ streaming service is going to be really cheap We’ve been talking about Disney’s upcoming streaming video subscription for a while, but now we know how much it costs....

Foldable phones are officially on their way We’ve heard rumors about folding phones for years, but last week Samsung turned down the lights (for some reason) at its developers conference and proved the existences of its new double-screen device. Folded in half, it works like a normal smartphone (with enormous bezels), but flap it open and you’ve got a 7.3-inch tablet screen—with no visible seam in the middle—to use for watching content or multitasking....

Facebook had a very bad year Most of us first heard about Cambridge Analytica in March of 2018, which is when Facebook’s biggest troubles began for the year. The political data firm had collected information on tens of millions of users by exploiting the old rules of the network’s app platform. Since then, Mark Zuckerberg starred in a very tedious Congressional testimony and several more substantial data privacy issues have popped up....

That is what Michaela Musilova spends her days investigating. As the director of the HI-SEAS facility, the product of a research program funded by NASA, she organizes missions that simulate, to the best possible degree, what life could look like on non-terrestrial surfaces. Musilova and her teams are looking at answering several questions that will arise once we embark: What food will we eat when we don’t have soil to grow it in?...