If you want to play media files saved to your device, or you’re using a streaming app with no Chromecast support, there are hacks available so you can still get your content up on your 4K TV. Apps that don’t support Chromecast Many smartphone apps now automatically detect your Chromecast the moment you hit the cast button—but there are plenty that don’t. If you’re dealing with one of these, you’ll need a workaround....

Feature Creature: Of Sooty Shearwaters, Bird Brains, Bad Acid, and Alfred Hitchcock In the Santa Cruz Sentinel, August 18, 1961, there is an account of thousands of birds raining down from the sky at 3 a.m.—crashing into homes and cars in Capitola and Pleasure Point, California just off Monterey Bay. Eight persons were reported bitten. This is the bird: Ardenna grisea, the sooty shearwater. “The word of the bird invasion spread fast throughout the state,” notes the article, “and a phone call came to The Sentinel from mystery thriller producer Alfred Hitchcock from Hollywood....

First things first: Who can upgrade? With the introduction of the public beta program, anyone with compatible hardware can test-drive the latest iOS (as well as iPad OS and macOS) from the Cupertino kingpin. Just remember that early versions of new operating systems can come with instabilities, incompatibilities, and bugs that might disrupt daily use. We strongly recommend starting off with a spare device. If you are a fearless features explorer without an extra device on hand, make sure to create a backup of any important information you don’t want to risk damaging and then proceed to your iOS download....

Clinicians and advocates hope that this procedure will be the first of many for HIV-positive patients. Every year in the U.S., the organs of more than 500 would-be donors go to waste because they have HIV, even though about 122,000 people are desperately awaiting a life-saving transplant. And while HIV-positive patients can receive organs from donors without the disease, they often die more quickly than non-infected patients while waiting for them, said Dorry L....

The FAA has announced that they will soon allow passengers to keep their electronics on during all parts of flight, because that will not crash a plane. From the FAA announcement: So why the change of heart? The FAA looked deep inside itself, and realized the answer was there all along: So: yay! Although it’s not quite an absolutist decision; there are still some notable gadget restrictions. The airlines will have to prove to the FAA that their planes won’t receive interference from gadgets before they can clear them for full-flight use, so when you’ll be legally allowed to use your gadgets will still vary by what airline you’re flying....

In order to discover and test new materials with computers, researchers have to break up the process into many separate calculations: One set for all the relevant properties of each single molecule, another for how these properties are affected by the smallest environmental changes like fluctuating temperatures, another for all the possible ways any two molecules can interact together, and on and on. Even something that sounds simple like two hydrogen molecules bonding requires incredibly deep calculations....

The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory looks at a wide variety of security devices– locks, seals, tags, access control, biometrics, cargo security, nuclear safeguards–to try to find vulnerabilities and locate potential fixes. Unfortunately, there’s not much funding available in this country to study election security. So we did this as a Saturday afternoon type of project. It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack. It’s a classic attack on security devices....

An attack in Sri Lanka from a suicide bomber killed 14 civilians and the minister of highway and road development as he was signaling the start of a road marathon. 83 people were also injured. Of the other marathon attacks noted by the GTD (three in Northern Ireland and two in Pakistan), only two attacks resulted in any injuries. One in Pakistan caused four, and one in Bahrain caused three....

Lane, a physicist at Kennedy Space Center, was trying to calibrate a laser sensor that would pick up fine dust particles on the moon. The project is part of a NASA effort to protect its lunar heritage. New lunar landers, perhaps from the Google Lunar X Prize or other nations, would likely kick up dust and other material as they touch down on the moon. NASA wants to be sure its six Apollo sites are unperturbed, and understanding dust mechanics will help nail down how close new robotic landers could get....

“To our knowledge, this is the first randomized field experiment that investigates the influence of legal sources on judicial behavior,”said the paper’s lead author, MIT researcher Neil Thompson, in a press release. “And because randomized experiments are the gold standard for this type of research, we know the effect we are seeing is causation, not just correlation.” Thompson previously studied how scientific articles on Wikipedia influenced academic literature on the subject....

Plus transportation. And food, of course. Here’s a full breakdown, infographic-style, from the good people at Neo Mammalian Studios:

The result is a vehicle that looks like a 1961 Volvo, but under the vintage hood is a modern Volvo S60. Now completed, the Maven is a feat of mechanical prowess by Lateiner and her leadership. “We took the S60 and we cut everything off of the outside of it, keeping the floor, subframes, suspension, and engine,” she said. “Then we welded them together; it’s cut and paste. The big challenge was fitting as much of the electronics and the gadgets and the bells and whistles of the S60 hybrid into the PV544....

Comparing websites, spreadsheets, documents, hard drive folders, emails, or photos side-by-side is way more comfortable and can save you a ton of time as you replace all those seconds spent clicking, dragging, and moving the mouse, with a near-instant flick of your eyes. Having double the screen space might not immediately seem like it could revolutionize how quickly you get stuff done, but consider how often you have two or more programs open, and how long it takes you to jump from one to the other....

Internet access at home has become almost as essential as water and electricity (and maybe more so for the most plugged-in of us). But problems getting Wi-Fi to every corner of a building aren’t uncommon. If you do have dead spots in your house, don’t despair. Whatever the size and shape of your space, you can take steps to remedy the problem. Wi-Fi signals struggle to get through concrete or brick walls, and wireless devices such as microwaves and baby monitors can also interfere with Wi-Fi speeds, so bear this in mind when you’re scouting for a location....

Of the movie’s many amazing machines (real and imagined), the Jacob’s Ladder is perhaps the most iconic. It consists of two vertical wires, connected by a buzzing electrical arc that slowly travels upward. The science behind a Jacob’s Ladder is simple: When voltage is applied between conductors—in this case, the two wires—electrons on the positive side want to leap to the negative side. To do that, they have to over- come the insulating barrier of air between the wires....

You probably use your web browser daily for both work and play, but you don’t have to just accept your window to the web as it was when you first installed it. Each popular browser actually offers fairly extensive customization options you should really be taking advantage of. Whether you want easier access to a much-used browser extension, or you’ve gotten tired of your browser’s default colors, you can tweak the individual interfaces of Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge in numerous ways....

There’s one good way to find out if the haunting sounds of stress and despair are coming from your toilet: flush it. Before you do, though, take the lid off the tank so you can look inside. There, partially submerged at the water’s surface, you’ll see an entity that can take many forms: maybe it’s a rubber ball on a horizontal stick, maybe it’s a plastic cup on a vertical pipe....

To get the most bang for your buck on a pro-printing job, you have to first ask: How much can you do without? Do you need a legend (aka silkscreen)—the printed part names on the circuit board? If you designed the circuit and will be the only person building it, you can probably skip the legend. How about a solder mask? This is simply a thin, resistive coating that prevents bridging between areas of the board that are to be soldered....

If you’ve never tried this before, give it a go. While the science on listening to music while gaming is thin on the ground, research shows that sticking some tunes on can boost productivity and mood at work, and help with memory while learning. A lot depends on your individual response to music, the type of music you listen to, and how loud it is. So if this doesn’t feel right the first time, it might be worth swapping to a different mood of music before abandoning the idea....

Annually, the average American eats 13.4 pounds of bananas—our favorite fresh fruit. But since peels can comprise 35 percent of the fruit, a large portion of what we buy goes in the trash. Eating the peels could reduce a significant amount of food waste. And by the way, discarded food is the single largest category of material that ends up in municipal landfills, producing methane—a potent greenhouse gas—as it breaks down....