Deep within the recesses of the Department of Health and Human Services, your embarrassingly slow one-mile run time from high school is collecting dust somewhere. Okay, truthfully, whether or not your sluggish mile time actually made its way to Washington, D.C. has a lot to do with reporting procedures. It also has a lot to do with the era in which you attended high school. And it has a lot to do with if your school forced you to adhere to the somewhat arbitrary Presidential Fitness Test standards in the first place....

Volkswagen first floated the idea of a modern take on the iconic people carrier more than two decades ago, when it unveiled the Microbus Concept at the 2001 Detroit NAIAS Auto Show. Ten years later the automaker teased us again with the Bulli Concept, followed by the BUDD-e Concept in 2016, and then the I.D. Buzz Concept a year after that. Now, many years after the seed was originally planted, VW’s retro-futuristic van is finally a reality....

Pretty much all of the really impressive “biggest snakes in the world”—the 50-footers and up—live online or in Hollywood. (Many of the latter starred in the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger breakthrough hit Conan the Barbarian and are retired now.) But even in the real world, a handful of snake species can grow to immense proportions. The longest of them, pythons, can stretch well beyond the length of George Washington’s 21-foot nose on Mount Rushmore, and there is anecdotal evidence of some specimens reaching 33 feet, or nearly as long as a telephone pole....

Stellacci’s first major step came in 2003, when he created a peculiar coating for metallic nanoparticles. He had been wondering what would happen if hydrophilic, or water-loving, molecules, and their opposites, hydrophobes, were stuck together on the surface of a nanosize sphere. So he ran an experiment and found that the molecules self-organized into alternating stripes, like lines of latitude on a globe. A belt of tiny, spherical hydrophilic molecules sat atop a band of hydrophobes, and so on from top to bottom....

Formally called the “Distributed Gain High Energy Laser Weapon System,” or DGHELWS, the weapon is billed as a protective tool, a kind of defense between soldiers in the field and weapons that mean them harm. By focusing a powerful beam of light steadily on an object, the laser can burn through it, given enough time and enough power. The contract is to deliver a powerful, compact prototype of this laser weapon....

What does refresh rate even mean? If you have used Apple’s refreshed iPad Pros, you may have noticed how smoothly everything appears to move across the screen. It’s particularly noticeable when you’re scrolling through something and the image on the screen doesn’t jitter or lag. That iPad screen uses a 120 Hz refresh rate, which means it can redraw the image on the display 120 times every second. Typical mobile devices, however, are typically locked in at 60 Hz, which means they redraw the image half as many times every second....

As excited as we all may be to get back to normal, the changing or lifting restrictions come with a certain amount of anxiety. The first time I walked into a grocery store maskless after Massachusetts stopped requiring people to wear face coverings indoors, I had a pit in my stomach waiting for someone to yell at me. There are also people who have a hard time feeling safe without a mask on, or comfortable sharing a reduced space with others, even if they’re fully vaccinated....

Fact: Coyotes eat more cats than you might expect By Rachel Feltman A recent study by the National Park Service found that 20% of the average urban coyotes’ diet is made up of cats. (How do they know, you ask? Poop. The answer is always poop.) When I read those findings, I realized how little I actually knew about coyotes. It turns out they’re way more common than I’d thought, and they’re not likely to stop popping up in cities anytime soon....

Fact: Uranium glass was all the rage By Eleanor Cummins This is one of those facts that I can’t stop talking about. I’ve managed to shoehorn it into stories about Iranian nuclear weapons and Game of Thrones dragonglass. But there’s no end to my fascination with uranium glass, which somehow managed to be a household staple for centuries! As you probably already know, uranium is a naturally radioactive heavy metal that nuclear scientists enrich into atomic weapons and power plants....

Spread already tends several large indoor farms, which have a multitude of environmental benefits. The plants can be grown hydroponically without exhausting soil resources. Up to 98 percent of Spread’s water will be recycled, and the factory won’t have to spray pesticides, since the pests are outdoors. Artificial lighting means the food supply won’t rely on weather variables, and the lighting can be supplied through renewable energy. Currently Spread grows about 7....

The study used dietary data from 195 countries to try to probe which foods or nutrients were responsible for the most deaths. Too much sodium and not enough whole grains turned out to be some of the biggest killers, claiming 3 million lives apiece in 2017, with insufficient fruit following up with 2 million deaths. Combined, those three factors accounted for more than half of all diet-related deaths. But that’s not to say that was true everywhere....

Two new enzymes, which naturally exist in the human gut, can convert type A red blood cells to type O, according to a new study published this week in Nature. “The difference between blood of type A, type B, and type O” comes down to “the presence of slightly different sugar structures on the [outside] of the red blood cell”, says Stephen Withers, study author and organic chemist at the University of British Columbia....

So, yes, perhaps a golden eagle didn’t attempt to grab a Quebecois baby. But this whole thing reminded us that raptors–the larger family of birds of prey including eagles, hawks, vultures, and owls–are crazy strong and also sometimes crazy big. So let’s take a look at the craziest, strongest, and biggest raptor that ever existed: the Haast’s eagle of New Zealand. The Haast’s eagle is extinct now, and has been since, probably, around the year 1400, soon after the Maori first settled the South Island of New Zealand....

Aircraft fly using three basic configurations: fixed wing, flapping wing, and rotors. In the last 50 years, inventors have conquered fixed-wing and flapping flight. Now they are on the verge of overcoming the greatest challenge yet: vertical takeoff. To fly a human-powered helicopter, a pilot would likely have to produce 500 watts of power. Even the fittest pilot could not sustain that output, says Antonio Filippone, an aeronautical engineer at the University of Manchester in England who has published two papers analyzing theoretical human-powered helicopters....

This event was part of the Council’s “Future of War” project, which looks beyond the policy world, to that of media, fiction, journalism, and entertainment to see what we can learn about conflicts. I went in expecting to hear a lot about new technologies, like remotely controlled airplanes and improved prosthetics. Instead, I left with a reminder that, for all the technology that goes into it, war remains a deeply, profoundly human problem, and caring for those who fights wars afterwards is a similarly human task....

It’s probably not a stretch to say that, at the very least, your figurative guffaws far outnumber your literal chortles. Brian Moore, a creator of satirical products focused on popular culture, society, and technology, certainly seems to feel this way, as he recently unveiled his latest creation meant to return the acronym to its original roots. Everyone, meet the LOL Verifier: a device that, well, verifies a “LOL.” “I remember when LOL meant ‘laugh out loud,’” Moore explains in his unveiling video posted to Twitter on Tuesday....

Half car, half motorcycle—three-wheelers like Vanderhall Motor Works’ Venice GT ($33,950) are a growing segment in the powersport world. Defined as both a reverse trike and autocycle, this vehicle category blends features of the two- and four-wheeled world for an experience like nothing else on the road. The Venice GT is powered by a General Motors-sourced 1,485cc inline-four. This LFV generation powertrain is used in Chevrolet’s 2016 and newer Malibu automobile and features direct injection, turbocharging, and variable valve timing with a claimed 194 hp and 203 pound-feet torque....

So when Lewis first started dating her now-husband, network engineer Scott Leibrand, they developed their own system. Lewis designed and Leibrand did most of the coding for an algorithm that calculates Lewis’ insulin needs based on her monitor’s readings. After a year of testing, they loaded the program onto a Raspberry Pi and connected it to a battery, the glucose monitor, and a medical USB stick. When Lewis’ glucose level is unsafe, the program automatically sends the correct insulin dosage to the USB stick, which wirelessly commands her insulin pump to inject it....

You control Plen by way of a smartphone app. It comes programmed with hundreds of moves. If you get bored with Plen’s preset routines, you can drive it with a joystick on the smartphone screen. Because its software is open-source, coders can invent new moves. For those who can’t code, a software kit lets you manipulate Plen’s arms and legs using a robot avatar on a desktop computer. Puppeteering has never been more fun....

While there is some preliminary evidence that sunlight, heat, and humidity could slow the spread of COVID-19, the summer months also promise a host of new risks, The Washington Post reports. Soaring temperatures will either compel people wanting relief to go outside, where they could get infected, or the pandemic will force people to stay indoors, where they could swelter. Both the pandemic and extreme heat pose a mortal risk to the elderly and the infirm....