Laser-armed satellites, naturally, generate a lot of attention, and so the proposal of Quan Wen and his co-authors has made its way into several splashy headlines. But it’s more than hype. The concept addresses a real (and growing) problem: there’s something like 17,852 artificial objects orbiting earth (PDF), and an estimated 300,000-plus pieces of space debris larger than a marble. At the fast orbital velocities up in space, even large craft like the International Space Station have to maneuver out of the way of small objects to avoid catastrophic damage....

What is the Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro? The Jackery Explorer 2000 Pro is a 2,160-watt-hour (Wh) power station capable of producing 2,200W of AC power, with peaks up to 4,400W. That’s a lot of power. To translate that into real-world situations, it’s enough juice to keep an efficient car fridge running for 2-3 days, or power a full-sized house fridge for nearly a day. Jackery markets the Explorer 2000 Pro as a sort of power-all solution for camping, overlanding, or home use, and I’d say that it suits each of these well....

Like many manufacturers, Jaguar Land Rover wants to up its electric vehicle game, and they see the Formula E series as an old-school way to test new-school technologies. This idea isn’t new, of course. All the way back in the 1890s and early 1900s, electric car inventors and manufacturers like Andrew Riker and Camille Jenatzy built and raced electric cars to test their designs—and to rack up speed records. Jaguar’s goals are no different....

Just one of the mind-blowing facts from this book: “It’s estimated that every human contains 100 trillion microbes, most of which live in our guts. By comparison, the Milky Way contains between 100 million and 400 million stars.” Ed Yong makes it easy to understand the complexities of our bodies, perhaps muddling your definition of self in the process. The late astronomer Carl Sagan delivers a poetic and powerful follow up to his bestselling book on evolution, Cosmos....

And hey, that isn’t such a bad gift idea either. NutriBullets are great blenders if you can’t shell out for something like a Vitamix, but their Bluetooth-enabled model might well make you scratch your head. Bluetooth? In a blender? What for? We actually had a lot of fun playing with this little guy, which uses a smart scale to help you weigh out smoothies and sauces with perfectly tracked macros....

This week’s Musk-read Our favorite tech super hero (and maybe eventually super villain) Elon Musk was the big news in the tech world yet again this week. He off-handedly tweeted about having “verbal government approval” for an East Coast hyperloop that would make the trip from NYC to DC in less than half an hour. We did a little digging to find out what kind of approval actually goes into a product of that scale....

Listen the latest episode of the podcast! On this week’s episode, we talk about the new Oculus Quest VR headset that tracks you as you move around the room. We also discuss Gmail’s ambitions to write your emails for you, and discuss big tech acquisitions, including Sirius XM’s purchasing Pandora. You can listen in the player above, subscribe on iTunes, follow us on SoundCloud, or add us to your Stitcher....

So, once you’ve ruined every relationship in your life with cutesy racing antics, read on to catch up on the week’s biggest technology stories. And if you see us out there racing in Kart, you better keep those blue and red shells to yourself. Listen to the latest episode of the Techathlon podcast We cover some serious topics on our weekly tech-based game show, but not everything has to be so serious....

Here’s a look at what else you may have missed besides what we referred to as “Twinter” at PopSci. . Nintendo released a new portable-only Switch video game console The original $300 Nintendo Switch got its name from the fact that you could play it at home on your TV, or on-the-go using just the controller. The new $200 Switch Lite, however, doesn’t hook up to your TV, lacks some of the motion controlling capabilities of the full version, and has a slightly smaller screen on the controller....

Though he never went to college, Ovshinsky invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and helped develop solar energy panels, rewritable CDs, and flat-panel displays. The Economist once called him “the Edison of our age.” He was an early advocate of alternative energy and was one of the first to champion hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine. In April 1978, PopSci published a story about “Ovshinsky’s strange devices”: semiconductors made from glass that could overturn the rules of solid-state physics....

New features in Android 12 Google hasn’t totally blown up Android on a fundamental level. It has added some notable new features, especially when it comes to design and security. Here’s a top-level overview of some of the new stuff you can expect when Android 12 hits this fall. Android 12’s new design: Material U Just a quick glance at the huge new clock on the Android 12 lockscreen suggests things have changed from a design standpoint....

What is the drug? Its brand name is Truvada, otherwise known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The FDA approved it in 2012 as part of safe sex practices to prevent HIV. Truvada combines two different drugs called Emtriva and Viread that, together, block an enzyme that the virus uses to copy its own DNA. Without this enzyme, HIV can’t replicate inside the body, so the drug prevents the virus from spreading.Who is this patient?...

As also reported in earlier rundowns courtesy of New Scientist and Motherboard, past assessments once deemed the winds of Mars too weak to provide a reliable, major source of power production, especially when measured against alternatives like solar and nuclear energy. This stems from the planet’s relatively thin atmosphere—just 1 percent of the density of Earth’s—which generally results in low force winds capable of moving flecks of dust and rock, but not much else....

Yet one of its most interesting oddities is the dwarf planet, Haumea. Though it was discovered less than two decades ago, information about the dwarf planet is sparse as Earth-based telescopes have a hard time making precise measurements because of how distant it is. But the little we do know about Haumea suggests that it is an extremely strange and important entity. Shaped almost like a deflated football, the planet spins faster than anything else of its size, whirling on its axis in only four hours....

You’re looking at a binary star system, named R Aquarii, that consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf orbiting around a common center of mass. Binary star systems are actually really common in the universe—more than four-fifths of the stars in our sky are actually a cluster of stars orbiting together. R Aquarii is one of the closest such systems to Earth. Many binary systems consist of two stars peacefully dancing together....

FASTER Modern terminals move no more than 30 containers an hour. At Maasvlakte 2, automated equipment will blow past that rate and improve overall efficiency by up to 50 percent. People will control ship-to-shore cranes [A] remotely from an office. Then, automated ground vehicles [B] will grab a container or two and navigate by following transponders in the pavement. Rather than wait in line for a crane to unload its cargo, the vehicles will unload themselves with built-in hydraulic lifts....

There’s been a great deal of work among scientists to decipher structures and functions of the proteins, and to this end, Meta’s AI research team announced today that they have used a model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences. Unlike previous work in the space, such as DeepMind’s, Meta’s AI is based on a language learning model rather than a shape-and-sequence matching algorithm....

This isn’t a new concept and it’s certainly not unique to Google. When Apple released iOS 13 earlier this year, it only went back as far as the iPhone 6S. People with a 5S or a 6 had to settle for an updated version of iOS 12 with security patches, and devices from before that era wouldn’t update at all. They still work, sure, but they won’t have access to modern apps or support that’s pretty much compulsory if you want to stay secure....

Many millions of miles away, an international team of engineers has spent the spring and summer analyzing what stopped the digging instrument, nicknamed the “mole,” and improvising solutions to get it burrowing again. This week marks their second major attempt to save the digger, this time by using a robotic arm from the instrument’s mothership—NASA’s InSight Lander—to physically support the mole. While the lander’s other instruments are working as intended, the fate of the mission’s ability to track the flow of heat inside the Red Planet rests on whether the team’s engineering ingenuity can overcome the unknowns of the Martian underground....

After lowering instruments half a mile into two deep drilled-holes alongside the San Andreas fault in Parkfield, CA, and leaving them there for two one-month stints in 2005 and 2006, researchers from Rice University, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took measurements of the density of small cracks in the rock. Two distinct changes preceded and lasted through two separate earthquakes—one a magnitude 1, and one a magnitude 3—by two and ten and a half hours respectively....