“While our study corroborates reports of takedowns due to government requests, we also found many differences introduced by app developers,” notes co-author Renuka Kumar in a summary for The Conversation. “We found instances of apps with settings and disclosures that expose users to higher or lower security and privacy risks depending on the country in which they’re downloaded.” Kumar and colleagues poured over data from globally popular apps across the top 22 app categories in the Google Play Store, and found a staggering amount of geoblocking—aka online restrictions based on geographic location....

In the first step of the creative process, Karle and a team of experts scanned the bones of a female hand as the basis for a digital model. Then they gave the model pores and other microstructures that make it mimic bone. Karle 3-D-printed this scaffolding out of a biodegradable, nontoxic hydrogel. Finally, the team seeded the hydrogel with human stem cells and placed it in a bioreactor—a container to keep the project alive....

Ricardo Ramalho, lead author of the study and adjunct scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, had been doing research in Cape Verde when he began to notice giant boulders strewn about the island of Santiago where he was working. These boulders are enormous, truck-sized hunks of striated limestone and submarine basalts that form near or under water around the island’s coasts. Some were located as high as 650 feet above sea level and as far as 2,000 feet inland....

Previous studies have shown that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals encountered each other and even interbred; the new findings suggest that Neanderthals may also have imitated artifacts created by their Homo sapiens neighbors. “It’s important for us to go through these sites and…identify who actually was responsible for this innovative ‘modern’ technology,” says Shara Bailey, an anthropologist at New York University and coauthor of one of the papers. “We know they exchanged genes, but if they’re also sharing culture, were those interactions possibly friendly?...

Our group of international journalists gathers in the hangar to kick off the Arctic Frontiers conference—a meeting on industry and the environment in the Arctic. Tonight we’re taking a tour of the island of Tromsøya, on which much of the municipality of Tromsø sits. As a gentle snow starts falling, the boat pulls out, glides below a bridge, and passes by the glow of an Arctic cathedral. How These Ships Work These ships have long served to keep shipping transport routes open in the Arctic....

These events expose a stark reality: the American power grid is unprepared for climate change and the extreme weather that follows. Experts say power outages don’t have to be inevitable—though preventing them entirely may require re-imagining how the grid works. Today, the act of getting electricity to your house is fairly straightforward: a power plant generates electricity, that electricity is sent across long distances through high-voltage transmission lines to substations and transformers, which convert the high-voltage electricity to a lower voltage (usually 120 volts in the US), which is then carried by distribution lines to homes and businesses....

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that are produced when large masses accelerate, like when two black holes collide. The first gravitational wave was detected in 2015, and this new haul bumps up the total number of observed events to 90. Among the catalog of findings were 32 likely black hole mergers and at least two mergers between a black hole and a neutron star. The paper, which has not yet been peer reviewed, was published on ArXiv....

Brown dwarfs are often called “failed stars,” because they don’t have quite enough mass to ignite. But in recent decades researchers have wondered whether there’s more to being a brown dwarf than just having a little less heft than a star. By building up a sizable collection of bodies that challenge simplistic definitions, astronomers hope to get a better handle on all the weird permutations of matter the universe can throw at them....

The holographic screen is an updated version of BAE’s Q-Sight, a holographic display that’s been used by the military of the United Kingdom since 2007. This version is in full color, and was hooked up to a tower behind me, where three 120-degree cameras scanned the crowd. Their images were then stitched together by a computer into a panorama, and fed into both the lens in front of my face and a laptop on a counter nearby....

But Marcus Drymon doesn’t know it, because he’s too busy studying the real thing as a fisheries ecologist at Mississippi State University. He’s always going out on the Gulf, surveying the waters, pulling up baby sharks, taking a gander at their emptied stomach contents, sending that barf up to Chicago for DNA sequencing… you know, the usual. At least, that’s what he did for his most recently published study, which appeared Tuesday in the journal Ecology....

The 55-inch calf, which Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin Elders named Nun cho ga, meaning “big baby animal,” lived approximately 30,000 years ago, and was entombed at about one month of age in the permafrost during the last ice age. On June 21, Treadstone Mining employee Travis Mudry was cutting through a deep layer of permafrost with a tool known as a ripping attachment when he saw what he thought was the head of an ancient bison....

Bayer recently announced that it would change up the formula of the popular herbicide for lawn and garden care in 2023. The decision was motivated by questions around glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, and whether it causes cancer in humans and harms wildlife. The pharmaceutical and chemical company is facing tens of thousands of lawsuits and billions of dollars worth of settlements that claim health and environmental negligence from glyphosate use....

This image and the video down below are the highest-resolution, best-detailed pictures of Earth at night ever taken to date. The Suomi NPP satellite, designed to study weather phenomena, can look at the dark Earth like never before. It is not nearly as dark as you might think. Highways across the American Midwest flicker in and out at tiny towns and rest stops, like a map of connect-the-dots. Along a line north from Houston, half the country is plunged in darkness, except for the great western oases of Denver and Salt Lake City....

The Rube Goldberg machine above is not the first that art and photography duo The Voorhes have created. But building one composed exclusively of playthings that fit on an 8-foot-by-8-foot bright-yellow wall while still leaving room for the text on the cover—that was a whole other challenge. The two started by looking at items featured in this issue to figure out what role they could take on. A golf club could flip up and tip something over; a camp stove could pop popcorn; with the help of a spring, a boxing glove attached to a skateboard could push a button....

An effective sketch can consist of simply a few minimalist pencil marks, or perhaps a more deliberate pen and ink drawing, in sepia or bold Indian ink. English-speakers only began ‘sketching’ officially in the late 17th century, at least that’s when the word ‘sketch’ (from German skizze or Dutch schets) enters the English language. German skizze, from the early 17th century, captured the sound of the Italian schizzo, meaning quickly splattering or splashing....

Best overall adjustable dumbbells: NordicTrack Speed WeightsBest adjustable dumbbells for beginners: PowerBlock Sport 24 Adjustable DumbbellsBest adjustable dumbbells for lifters: BowFlex SelectTech Adjustable DumbbellsBest adjustable dumbbells for travel: GoXccess Adjustable Dumbbells Weights SetBest budget adjustable dumbbells: LifePro Powerflow Adjustable Dumbbells Set What to consider when shopping for the best adjustable dumbbells When shopping for the best adjustable dumbbells, there are a few things to take into consideration, such as how much weight you want the option of lifting, if you want to take your set on-the-go, and if you want to work out with an app....

Best with a ceramic blade: Andis 63700 BGRC Hair ClippersBest for shaping: Braun BT7240Best cordless: Wahl Professional Magic ClipBest battery life: Beard Trimmer by BevelBest wet or dry: Philips Norelco Multigroom 5000Most luxurious: Philips Norelco MG7791Best budget: Philips Norelco Multigroom Things to consider when picking the best beard trimmers There are a few key features to keep in mind while you peruse the shelves (virtually or otherwise) for a new beard trimmer....

Best overall: Stellar X2Best for vocals: MXL V67GBest for recording on the go: Shure MV88Best to use with a laptop: Rode NT-USBBest upgrade: AKG C414 XLII What to consider when shopping for the best condenser mic From capturing fingerpicked guitars to the loudest amps, thundering drums to the dramatic swell of string quartets, heated discussions to the most subtle of sighs, condenser mics are versatile and their ability to cover many duties has made them ubiquitous in studios worldwide....

So what’s so special about Dyson vacuums? Why do so many people think they make the best vacuum cleaners? The British brand was founded in 1978 by James Dyson and pioneered bagless technology. The inventor was inspired to create something different after the bags on his regular vacuum kept clogging up. Ahead of its time in many ways—Dyson fans were doing without disposable bags, long before the current concerns about the damage that the single-use lifestyle can wreak on the environment—Dyson has continued to innovate to stay ahead of the competition, and the result has been an almost bewildering array of models....