Before the name Rube Goldberg became synonymous with comically over-engineered chain-reaction contraptions that satirize technology, the eponym belonged to a humble engineer turned cartoonist. Born in 1883, Reuben Lucius Goldberg lived long enough to watch the world transform from horse-and-buggies to lunar landers. “We all want to invent something useful,” Goldberg claimed in a humorous but thoughtful piece for Popular Science in June 1923. In 1923, Goldberg, who’d earned a degree at UC Berkeley’s College of Mining and had taken jobs as a sewer designer and a sportswriter, was already a famous and well-compensated New York cartoonist....

Social psychologist Frank Rosenblatt had such a passion for brain mechanics that he built a computer model fashioned after a human brain’s neural network, and trained it to recognize simple patterns. He called his IBM 704-based model Perceptron. A New York Times headline called it an “Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser.” Popular Science called Perceptrons “Machines that learn.” At the time, Rosenblatt claimed “it would be possible to build brains that could reproduce themselves on an assembly line and which would be conscious of their existence....

Host the holidays on a budget Costco is a retailer with more than 800 warehouses across the United States. If you visit one, you can find a wide selection of groceries, home goods, electronics, and even last-minute stocking stuffers, often at a great value. Whether you’re in charge of cooking the main course, want to bring some delicious sides, or need a last-minute gift, you could cross off your shopping list in one visit to Costco....

Have an Instagram account for your outdoor adventures? Take this 3-axis gimbal on the road, attach it to your iPhone or Android and get the kind of shots that make it seem like you’ve got a whole camera crew. Use sport mode to sweep the field of an athletic event without a shaky picture, or turn on the ActiveTrack 3.0, which uses algorithms to help keep your camera on a moving subject....

The Type 901 is thought to have 4 gas turbine engines, which would give it a top speed of around 25 knots, enabling it to keep pace with Chinese aircraft carriers like the Liaoning. It will have up to five resupply gantries located midship, each of which can deploy palletized ammunition and supplies via cables, or fuel lines. This will allow the Type 901 to replenish multiple warships simultaneously while under sail, a key capability for modern navies....

But there’s a darker side to podcasts… and I’m not talking about their murder-y content. I’m talking about how they tend to drive an AirPod-shaped wedge between friends and loved ones, invading their precious time together. Are you on the wrong side of one of these podcast-divided relationships? Well, there’s nothing to be done about it. Might as well buy your special podcast-loving someone a gift that further fuels their addiction....

At the scene of a mass shooting, the primary focus of law enforcement is identifying and capturing the shooter. When the area is sufficiently secured, through, attention shifts to the victims, and getting them the medical care that they need. Emergency medical services, hospital nurses and doctors, civilians nearby, and even those affected by the event play a role in keeping people alive. How bystanders can help save gunshot victims After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in 2012, the American College of Surgeons formed the Joint Committee to Create a National Policy to Enhance Survivability from Intentional Mass Casualty and Active Shooter Events, with the goal of developing policies and programs that would keep more people alive during mass shooting incidents....

STEP 1 Cut the USB end off the cable for your device and strip the insulation. You’ll use the black and red wires to connect to the adapter. Twist together the other two wires. STEP 2 Cut off the end of the cigarette lighter adapter that does not plug into the cigarette lighter. Use the knife to strip the insulation to reveal the black and red wires. STEP 3 Twist the two red wires together and the two black wires together....

Tazti is a completely free download for Windows, a lighter-weight alternative to software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Tazti doesn’t handle full-text dictation; it’s just designed to work as a control interface. As demonstrated in their video, Tazti responds to voice commands, with a custom interface geared toward popular tasks like pausing iTunes, navigating Facebook, and running web searches. Neat. The caveat, of course: Speech recognition is not a perfect science yet....

Turns out, gardening, dancing, or going for a walk do the trick. All of these activities, according to a new study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, can reduce your mortality risk. And it only takes 10 minutes a week. The study looked at 88,140 American adults, who were all between 40 and 85 years to begin with. Every participant was asked to report what kind of physical activity they did, and for how many minutes per day or week, as part of the National Health Interview Survey....

To start with, there is some good news on the public health front: the budgets for major agencies like Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) aren’t tied up in this particular round of budget negotiations. That means programs like Medicare and Medicaid continue on as usual, and the CDC can still run its regular flu season operations—which is important, because it’s January, and flu season is well underway....

You can read the official announcement here or check out this Last Week in Tech podcast episode, in which we discuss the issue. Click here to find out if you were one of the affected users. What got out? Last we heard, Facebook was conducting an investigation into the matter. Now we have some hard info about who was affected and what information got out there. According to Facebook’s announcement, the vulnerability existed for more than a year, between July 2017 and September 2018....

In a new study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, a team of researchers interviewed 64 athletic trainers in high schools around the country about the barriers that stand in the way of successfully implementing these concussion programs. “Just passing the law does not implement it,” says study author Ginger Yang, associate professor of pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an epidemiologist at the Ohio State University College of Public Health....

The “30 by 30” deal was agreed upon by delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered in Montreal, Canada. The pledge vows to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation. “We have in our hands on a package which I think can guide us as we all work together to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on the path to recovery for the benefit of all people in the world,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu said to applause just before dawn on Monday....

Unlike, say, a peloton of cyclists that are travelling on land by pushing their tires against the ground, fish and birds are moving in a medium that’s all around them, not just below them—and they’re both doing it, basically, with similar mechanisms: what NYU Ph.D. candidate Joel Newbolt, the study’s lead author, refers to as “flapping.” Previous work has demonstrated that “in these groups like schools and flocks, you can do things like reduce the amount of energy it takes to move through the water or through the air,” Newbolt says....

Why is space so cold if the sun is so hot? Excellent question. Unlike our mild habitat here on Earth, our solar system is full of temperature extremes. The sun is a bolus of gas and fire measuring around 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core and 10,000 degrees at its surface. Meanwhile, the cosmic background temperature—the temperature of space once you get far enough away to escape Earth’s balmy atmosphere—hovers at -455 F....

Broader cell connectivity has prompted a big change in mapping methodology. Early on, GPS companies relied heavily on government-provided maps, which they supplemented with road data from fleets of survey cars. As mobile networks grew, companies began gathering data from GPS units and smartphones to monitor traffic and congestion points. In 2006, Tele Atlas, which provides maps to GPS manufacturer TomTom, began allowing users to flag areas where the map was inaccurate so that the company could investigate places that require revision....

The battery will be able to produce a megawatt of electricity for as long as 10 hours, meaning that it is a 10-megawatt-hour device. But this battery is very different from the kind of battery that is in your cell phone, laptop, or electric vehicle. It’s not a lithium-ion battery. It’s a redox flow battery. In a press release, Lockheed Martin refers to the project as “the first megawatt-scale, long-duration energy storage system for the U....

Voice control support Adding devices to Google Assistant The key to connecting smart home devices to Google Assistant is the Google Home app, which you can download for free to your phone for Android or iOS. If you’ve previously set up a Google Home speaker or a Chromecast, you might already have it installed. Assuming you’ve already set up the smart home device you’re adding using the app that came with it, from the front screen of the Google Home app choose Add, then Set up device, then Have something already set up?...

Some corners of the internet act as bastions of healthy discussion, but out there on the wild web, discourse appears worse than ever before. If you’re tired of feeling your blood boil every time you get to the bottom of an article or open up your social media app of choice, here’s how to clean up your internet conversations. If there’s a site that you actually like to read comments on—yes, there are still a few decent ones out there—you can click the Shut Up button in your toolbar or press Ctrl+Shift+X to whitelist that site....