According to Walgreens, there are currently eight automation centers providing medications to roughly 1,800 stores, although the company aims to boost that number up to around 24 fulfillment locations by 2025. Each center is described as being around the size of a single city block—one of the largest reportedly fills 35,000 medications per day for 500 stores in Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. Eventually, Walgreens purportedly hopes to to fill between 40 and 50 percent of all medications at these robot-centric distribution sites....

The complete package, at least as promised, is a tool for better clearing rooms and approaching otherwise dangerous situations. A throwable robot can put a camera on people just out of reach, or whom it would be dangerous to observe up close. For soldiers clearing rooms in a building, or police attempting to do the same, being able to explore with a robot first can offer information and advantage without risking the lives of anyone in uniform....

Even without astronauts onboard, Alexa will still be testing its ability to assist people through virtual crew experiences conducted between Johnson Space Center and the Orion spacecraft in near real-time. Perhaps someday, for busy astronauts on their way to the moon, Alexa will be able to access telemetry data from Orion and answer questions like “How fast is Orion traveling?” or “What’s the temperature in the cabin?” Yet despite all the potential benefits of having Alexa on board, the team behind Callisto say it’s just as important to prepare for the system’s failure as for its success....

Developed during the 1980s and introduced in the mid-1990s to defeat a Soviet threat that no longer existed, only 21 B-2s were ever made. Stealthy and long-endurance, they made their combat debut over Kosovo in 1999, flying 30 hour missions from Missouri to their targets and back. Most of the fighting America’s military does these days is against non-state actors and insurgent forces without the means to get the kind of anti-air missiles B-2s are made to sneak past, so the bomber has a lot of down time....

It’s great, and you should watch it. One small quibble. Contrary to the video’s introduction, this was not shot in zero gravity. Gravity is everywhere, as today’s big announcement about gravity waves made clear. We can’t just get rid of it by flying in a plane. What we can do is make it so that we don’t feel the effects of gravity. That’s called zero-G, and while you’re in it, you feel weightless, as though there is zero gravity....

The 57-foot-long aircraft, which its makers call Alice, is just a prototype, although a pretty slick one at that. Someday, if a production version enters service with an airline like Cape Air, the goal will be for it to be able to carry nine passengers and their bags for flights lasting about an hour or two—think distances of about 170 to 230 miles. Up front in the commuter plane will be space for two pilots, although it will be certified to be flown by just one person....

Today, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) unveiled a video where they challenged staff scientist Nina Lanza of LANL’s Space and Remote Sensing group describe her upcoming trip to Antarctica to hunt for meteorites in just 60 seconds. The video is the first installment of a series called ‘Science in 60’ which will presumably feature other scientists from the lab attempting to explain their research in the same tight time crunch....

Broad access to testing is one of the most powerful tools to keep the COVID-19 pandemic under control until there’s an effective vaccine in use. Diagnostic testing, which is used in medical settings to determine whether someone is infected with the coronavirus, is costly, slow and overstretched in the US. But that’s not the only type of test that can be used. I study public health policy to combat infectious disease epidemics....

Start with our seven top-level categories—Cars, Gear & Gadgets, DIY, Military Aviation & Space, Entertainment & Gaming, The Environment, and SciTech. You can use the tabs to arrange posts within each category by date, popularity, rating, or most commented—all without reloading the page. Tags Below the category level, you’ll find thousands of organizational keywords, or tags, assigned to each article, photo gallery, image or video on the site. These help link similar content together, and also give you a handy way to find all the given articles about a particular topic....

There are other aspects of a modern urban streetscape as well, like operators of electric vehicles who want to find a place to charge. Experts hope that integrating more data-collection tech, in addition to traffic signals, can potentially help with issues like these. Chattanooga, Tennessee, is planning to create 86 new so-called smart intersections that are monitored by sensors such as lidar and cameras. The goal of making an intersection smart is “to be able to make sense of that intersection” based on the information provided by the sensors, says Mina Sartipi, the director of the Center for Urban Informatics and Progress at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga....

Among players and fans, Verlander’s “juicing” claim has gained momentum. There’s no question that there’s been a home run surge. Home runs per plate appearance is currently sitting at 3.5%, an all-time high. At this rate, players will hit more than 6,600 homers by season’s end, shattering the prior record, set in 2017, by more than 500 home runs. Though league officials denied, for years, that they were altering the balls to boost the home run rate, last year they admitted that the ball had changed, though they blamed suppliers....

The latest company to hop on board is Google. During the company’s virtual I/O developer’s conference last month, Google announced the inclusion of an all-new digital car key which will be built-in to its upcoming Android 12 smartphone operating system. As the name might imply, the new Android feature creates a digital copy of a car’s key that is stored directly on a cell phone. The digital key can then be used to lock, unlock, and start the vehicle it’s programmed for—just like a physical key fob....

Until a few months ago, you might have never run across the name “Zika.” The virus is named for the Zika forest in Uganda where scientists first identified it in 1947. Since then, scientists have figured out the basics for how the virus works. Zika spreads through mosquito bites, with symptoms like fever and joint pain that usually appear a few days later. Because of how it spreads and the nature of these symptoms, Zika is often compared to dengue fever, also called “breakbone fever....

What do you think? Discuss in the comments. Submit your science and technology questions to fyi@popsci.com.

As Popular Science reported recently, that lower estimate makes it even harder to understand the US’s outbreak—Delta is clearly still a dominant force, and is likely responsible for most deaths. Why such a dramatic swing? The CDC can’t actually see every COVID case, so it’s relying on a modeling concept called a nowcast. (Now + forecast.) That model predicts spread based on the characteristics of COVID variants and the general population, and tethers that prediction to real-world data....

First, some background. NASA currently has two working rovers on Mars—Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and Curiosity, which landed in 2012. Back in June of this year a massive dust storm forced the solar-powered Opportunity to shut down. Though the dust has settled and NASA is still anxiously listening, Opportunity remains silent. On the plus side, during most those three months, the car-sized Curiosity rover was doing just fine, relying on juice from nuclear batteries which were unfazed by the dust-darkened skies....

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.” Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades....

If superheroes kept cattle, they’d keep Belgian Blues. These behemoths have such bulging muscles you’d think they spent their lives in a gym designed especially for hooved creatures. But they don’t—they’re just born that way. And they’re not alone. Piedmontese cattle have the same musculature, as do a subset of whippet dogs that breeders have dubbed “bully whippets.” The normally lithe pups are born with an exceptional volume of muscle, complete with thick necks and tails....

As a clinician, she says, she wasn’t surprised to see responses citing concerns about accidentally hurting women and an inability to understand exactly how bad a woman’s symptoms are. These are both known issues that affect care. However, “I was surprised at the large proportion of people who responded about unwanted touching,” she says. Respondents expressed concern that touching a woman’s chest could be construed as assault or unwanted sexual touching....

The company behind the product, called the MeToo kit, say on its website that it designed the kit in order to allow survivors of sexual violence to collect evidence in the privacy of their own home. “It is universal and does not need any specialized training to be administered,” reads the website. Consumers can currently sign up for a waitlist, but the website says that the initial goals are to partner directly with and offer the product to businesses—and specifically, to universities....