Although some people only litter unintentionally when they are outwitted by wild animals rummaging through their trash at night, millions of others admit to intentionally throwing garbage out of their moving cars. Either way, littering poses serious risks to human and environmental well-being. Luckily, there’s a handful of ways to keep trash out of our environment. Humans are the primary transport for litter According to a new study published last month in Environmental Research Letters, items in urban roadside litter usually originate less than two miles from where they’re found—and humans are primarily to blame....

Thiel’s Breakout Labs has awarded Louis Michaud’s company AVEtec $300,000 to research tornado power. Michaud is a Canadian electrical engineer and entrepreneur. His idea is to create a power plant add-on that would tap into the waste heat generated at a regular gas- or coal-fired power plant. The add-on would work by blowing hot air into a hollow cylinder at a sharp angle, which would cause a swirling air current in the cylinder....

But Chernobyl’s exclusion zone isn’t devoid of life. Wolves, boars and bears have returned to the lush forests surrounding the old nuclear plant. And when it comes to vegetation, all but the most vulnerable and exposed plant life never died in the first place, and even in the most radioactive areas of the zone, vegetation was recovering within three years. Humans and other mammals and birds would have been killed many times over by the radiation that plants in the most contaminated areas received....

There’s been much said about virtual reality being the next big step for gaming, but there’s only one console-maker that’s doubling down on the technology. With Microsoft focusing on augmented reality with their HoloLens, and Nintendo’s NX console being kept under wraps, Sony will likely be the first to bring their fans fully immersive gaming. Which is big news no matter what kind of “fanboi” you are. Playstation VR—formerly known as Project Morpheus (for obvious reasons)—will bring similar tech that we’ve seen in Facebook’s Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to Sony’s gaming platform....

Point Reyes is a 70,000 acre expanse of rolling hills on the California coast, north of San Francisco. Whales migrate just offshore, and rafts of seals pile up on its beaches. And since 1978, the seashore has also been home to a small herd of tule elk. The elk are the smallest in North America, and were driven to the brink of extinction by European hunting and grazing. At their low point, only about 28 individuals remained....

But curcumin is also a photosensitizer, meaning it chemically reacts when exposed to light. In fact, you can use it to print images using a technique called anthotype, which was developed in the 19th century and uses plant emulsions and sun exposure to create pictures on porous surfaces like paper and cloth. Materials 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder2 teaspoons of borax⅕ cup or 50 milliliters of rubbing alcohol ½ cup of water1 sheet of fibrous paper A negative, aka whatever you want to print—this could be a flower, a leaf, or something else...

This isn’t to say that any of the work was bad — it’s not. But awards should either show some creative flair on the part of the granting committee (the aforementioned GFP award), or else showcase research so jaw-droppingly, pants-crappingly awesome (RNAi, Bose-Einstein condensates, scanning tunneling microscopy, and ribosome structure and function) that you can just imagine the heads exploding after publication. The 2012 Physiology or Medicine award felt cobbled together under the loosest of pretenses: “reprogramming cells 2....

“For years, many museum curators and researchers searched for its remains without success, as no thylacine material dating from 1936 had been recorded,” said researcher and comparative psychologist from the Australian Catholic University Robert Paddle, in a statement. “It was assumed its body had been discarded,” he added. The Tasmanian tiger was a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial with sharp claws, that was native to New Guinea, the Australian mainland, and Tasmania for four million years....

“Especially in urban areas, our roads are basically going through a lot of different habitats,” says study coauthor Chatura Vaidya, a PhD candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. Roads can act as a barrier, preventing the typical flow of DNA between populations of pollinators as well as the plants they pollinate, Vaidya says, leading to lower genetic diversity, and even extinction. Vaidya and the study’s coauthor, University of Michigan PhD candidate Gordon Fitch, focused on two native plants: Coreopsis verticillata, a member of the daisy family with small flowers that the researchers presumed would attract smaller pollinators, and Monarda fistulosa, or wild bergamot, which has larger flowers that might attract heftier pollinators, such as bumblebees....

Named EVIE, for Ellipsoidal Vehicle for Inspection and Exploration, the robot can swim as fast as three feet per minute. EVIE uses six jets to move underwater, with an algorithm determining which jets pump water and when. The half of the body that doesn’t house the jets is watertight and sealed, protecting EVIE’s controls, a battery that lasts for up to 40 minutes, an antenna, and inertial sensors. EVIE will inspect ships using an ultrasound scanner....

After being prompted to think about either independence or interdependence, a group of Stanford students were given difficult word puzzles to solve, and later, a physical challenge (squeezing a handgrip for as long as possible). “Chronically independent European Americans” fared much worse when primed to think about interdependence while completing the task. For bicultural Asian-American students exposed to both the independence-loving culture of America and a more communally based East-Asian culture, thinking about either value set was equally motivating....

Meldrum is trying to raise $300,000 in private donations for the project, which pays for some high-tech bells and whistles, like a thermal-imaging camera, that could help find the infamously blurry animal. Meldrum will be running the blimp and camera with another Bigfoot enthusiast, William Barnes, who says he came up with the plan when he saw the creature more than a decade ago. Dubbing the plan the Falcon Project, the duo hopes to have a months-long expedition across the West started by next spring, but so far, to the chagrin of other believers, they haven’t raised any cash to move the blimp skyward....

Using stem cells as the “ink” in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern. The cells were floating in a “bio-ink,” to use the terminology of the researchers who developed this technique. They were able to squeeze out tiny droplets, containing five cells or fewer per droplet, in a variety of shapes and sizes....

But what about melding plants and machines? That’s something that hasn’t been attempted as much. In a study published today in Science Advances, a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University in Sweden discovered a new use for cut roses: electronic circuitry. The lab has been working on the problem off and on for over 20 years. They tried to incorporate electronics into trees back in the 1990’s, but funding problems halted the project....

Here are 16 high-quality screens, gaming mice, keyboards, and laptop accessories on sale for an extra 20 percent off this Black Friday with code BFSAVE20. MagicGrips for Apple Magic Mouse 1 and 2 Did you know that carpal tunnel syndrome, if left untreated, can cause permanent damage to your nerves? The MagicGrips make sure that that won’t ever happen with their cushions that adhere to the sides of the mouse, giving it a spacious concave surface on which to rest your fingers....

When molten glass hits cold water, its outer surface cools rapidly and shrinks as it solidifies. Since the center is still fluid, it can flow to adjust to the outer shell’s smaller size. As that center eventually cools and solidifies, it also shrinks, but now the outer shell is already solid and can’t change its shape to accommodate the smaller core. The result is a great deal of internal stress, as the center pulls the outside in from all sides....

But this plant isn’t for generating electricity. It’s for generating jet fuel. For the past several years, researchers from several different institutions in Switzerland and Germany have been using it to test a method to create propellant—normally a carbon-intensive process involving fossil fuels—using little more than sunlight and greenhouse gases captured from the atmosphere. They published their results in the journal Joule today. What happens inside their tower is a bit of chemistry known as the Fischer-Tropsch process....

Its overall layout remains similar. There are four triggers on top, the familiar PlayStation buttons under your right thumb, a D-pad under your left thumb, and a pair of joysticks for moving around. The touch-sensitive gesture pad at the top now takes up even more real estate than before. So, the controls are where you’d expect them, but the device itself has gotten a total refresh. There’s now a microphone built directly into the controller so players can chat with teammates or opponents in games, even if they’re not wearing a headset, which is a boon for quick conversations or kids who regularly break their mics....