It may seem daunting to pick up a language that you’re totally unfamiliar with, but that’s why apps like Babbel exist. Touted as the #1 top-grossing language-learning app in the world, this language learning platform is developed to help people speak and understand a new language quickly and with confidence. From today until 9/15, you can grab a lifetime subscription for 40 percent off. Developed by over 100 expert linguists, Babbel can help you speak your language of choice in as little as one month....

No matter what roast you prefer, there is a bean that will deliver the sophisticated flavor and bracing caffeine boost you want from your morning (or afternoon or evening or late night) coffee. Here are some of the best we’ve found. If nothing short of a jackhammer to your headboard will get you up and going in the morning, consider these beans. Delivering a rich, dark chocolate-y brew (without being acidic), this is the kind of intense dark roast you’d expect from something called “Kicking Horse Grizzly Claw....

According to new findings published Wednesday in Nature, climate change has accelerated the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet to unparalleled levels, unseen in at least 350 years and likely in the past 7,800. The rate of melt and the resulting runoff falling into the ocean (and adding to a rising sea level) is speeding up over time, thanks to a motley of factors acting as a feedback loop. It’s a startling discovery....

Grado’s $420 Hemp Headphone took roughly two years from inception to production according to company VP, Jonathan Grado. “The highly compressed hemp creates a damping effect between their fibers,” he explained via email. “This produced a fuller sound and we were pleasantly surprised with the amount of depth we heard.” Since each material type resonates differently, Grado tuned its drives specifically to match the substance’s sonic properties. “Our drivers are very good with the mid-range (where most of the information is in most music) so we focused on the low end and the top end,” says Grado....

These boneless fish (yes, they are actually fish) are much-studied and much-reviled for their ability to release a stringy, sticky slime that expands quickly to choke predators and clog up gills. They also have loose, flaccid skin that prevents shark teeth from penetrating their muscular bodies. Biologists are still trying to work out exactly how their famous slime works, though, since it’s something of an engineering marvel. The goop expands rapidly to fill a predator’s mouth, but until recently experts weren’t sure how....

But according to new research published this week in the journal Nature, ancient humans in Europe drank lactose, even without being able to digest it. Only when famine and disease turned lactose into a liability did adults hang onto lactase, the key enzyme that breaks down the sugar. “What we’ve shown is the received wisdom is erroneous,” says study co-author Richard Evershed, an archaeological and paleo-chemist at the University of Bristol....

It’s understandable most drivers don’t give a lot of thought to the gasoline they purchase, most people never even see the product pumped into their tank on a regular basis. We spoke to the experts at Sunoco, a Top Tier certified fuel provider, along with researching independent testing to determine if the effort and expense of being selective on gas choice is worth it. What is a Top Tier gasoline?...

The candymaker receives heaps of fan theories every day—from tart lemon to smooth vanilla—but no one has gotten it right. Today, only a few dozen people know the secret identity; the rest of us have to settle for simpler certitudes. The tang of citric acid makes White Mystery undeniably fruity, and a mixture of sugar and corn syrup adds ample sweetness. The absence of color, however, is the curveball: It deprives the brain of the visual cues that can help taste buds determine the source and the intensity of a given zing....

The project is a tribute to the original NASA LRV, which made its first trip across the surface of the moon during the Apollo 15 mission. It traveled roughly 17 miles over the course of three hours on its first journey, and it remains on the moon. In order to make the replica authentic, Polaris and the USSRC worked with engineers from the original project, including Saverio “Sonny” Morea, who headed up the initial design process during the Apollo days....

With Omicron cases doubling every 1.5 to three days in areas with community transmission, the variant is poised to fuel yet another wave of COVID-19 this winter. This has added urgency to recommendations for people aged 16 years and older who have received two doses of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, or the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, to get a booster shot. The appearance of Omicron is both concerning and frustrating as the pandemic lurches closer to its third year, and much remains to be learned about how it works....

The company has made a name for itself by specializing in creating robots for restaurants like the fry-station-manning Flippy and the soft-drink-dispensing Sippy. Chippy, a modified version of Flippy that can cook and season tortilla chips, is currently being tested at Chipotle’s innovation hub in Irvine, California. Faced with human labor shortages during the pandemic, many restaurants and food service hubs have turned to robots and other automatic machines to fill needed roles....

In an article in New Scientist in March 1960, the British marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy suggested that an ancestor of modern hominids had been forced by terrestrial evolutionary competition to adapt once again to life in the sea. As evidence, he cited various con temporary aquatic mammals thought to have terrestrial ancestors such as whales, seals, and manatees. Some hominids, he claimed, might have been subject to the same evolutionary pressure....

The new research published today in Stem Cell Reports has demonstrated that it is possible to produce rat sperm in sterile hybrid mice. While the technique still needs to be fine-tuned, the study authors say that their approach of adding engineered stem cells from one species to embryos of another species, called blastocyst complementation, has the potential to boost endangered species. If at-risk species aren’t able to maintain healthy numbers, generating their eggs and sperm in a lab could be used as a new tool to build populations up....

Some people just cannot play first-person video games, no matter how much they like them. It’s not a question of talent—the games just make them physically ill. We’re talking about gaming sickness, a kind of motion sickness some people experience specifically when playing video games, and that comes with all the symptoms you probably already know: dizziness, nausea, sweating, headaches, and even vomiting. If you suffer from cybersickness and are looking for a solution that will let you play long enough to finally finish Elden Ring, let us break the bad news: Unfortunately, there’s no scientific evidence that you’ll ever free yourself from the annoying grasp of gaming-related motion sickness....

Putting together tasty cocktails in the great outdoors takes a bit more prep and planning than slinging martinis at your backyard wet bar. So here are some tips and tricks on how to do it right, and two mouth-watering recipes that will surely impress your camp companions. The same goes for drinking glasses. There is an abundance of specialty cocktail vessels made of steel or aluminum that are designed for the outdoors, but any metal or plastic cup will do....

Spotify Wrapped Spotify is rather proud of Wrapped, so you should find this end-of-year summary feature promoted heavily on the front page of the Spotify app when you open it during December. If it doesn’t show up immediately, tap the search button at the bottom, enter “wrapped”, and you should find what you’re after. The main part of Spotify Wrapped works as a story-style slideshow. It will show you how much time you spent listening, your top songs, the music moods and genres you focused on, your favorite artists, and various other statistics....

But eating less at Thanksgiving is a noble endeavor. Perhaps you’re trying to cut down on food waste and want to keep your caloric consumption down to what you’re actually capable of enjoying. Maybe you just don’t want to be painfully full. Or maybe you’re trying to lose weight, or just maintain the status quo rather than entering the usual holiday cycle of binging and dieting. Whatever the reason, sometimes we want to avoid our basest urges—that is, to eat and eat and eat until no more pie can possibly fit inside our bellies....

When you’re ready for another gaming session, the last message you want to see on your console is that you’re running out of space. Help is at hand, though—you can add Xbox One and PlayStation 4 storage with an internal drive and or a new external disk. Open Applications to see your individual games. If there are any you can live without for a while, press Options on your controller, then Delete....

Everything on your smartphone should be protected behind a lock screen—accessible only via fingerprint, a PIN code, or facial recognition—but there will be times when other people have access to your device. Maybe your grandparents want to look at photos of the kids, your nephew wants to play a game, or your partner needs to borrow your phone to check the weather forecast. Whatever the reason, you don’t necessarily want all your files, photos, and videos available for someone else to stumble across....

That’s one of the quirks of memory: the brain focuses on select pieces of an experience, rather than evenly remembering the whole thing. People also tend to remember endings more than middles. “The vacation includes three parts: the time before, the time during, and the time after,” says Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University who studies human decision-making. Ariely is a behavioral economist, meaning he uses psychology to explain economics....