In Appalachia, small animals like squirrels, rabbits, and songbirds often bear the brunt of human activity. We cut down the trees they nest in, we hit them with our cars, and our cats and dogs drag them to our doorsteps, among other unfortunate situations. The goal of wildlife rehabilitation is to get these animals healed and back into the wild as quickly as possible. In cases when they’ve been seriously injured beyond hope of returning to their natural habitats, rehabbers may use them for education purposes to teach others about wildlife rehabilitation, but only if they’re comfortable....

With its Olympic license being revoked after these games, let’s pay tribute to Jennie Finch by profiling a pitching machine, a method to improve your eyesight and little bit more about softball’s secret weapon. Seeing is Succeeding Hitting a baseball isn’t the toughest thing in sports. But hitting a softball might be. The reaction time to hit a softball is actually less than hitting a baseball (more on that below)....

But DSCOVR has gone quiet. The spacecraft shifted into a “safe hold” status on June 27, which effectively halts its scientific measurements as it remains stationed in orbit nearly a million miles away from the Earth. “NOAA is addressing a performance issue with the DSCOVR satellite,” John Leslie, a spokesperson for NOAA, told Popular Science in a statement. “Engineers have placed the satellite into a ‘safehold’ position, while they first diagnose and then work to fix a technical issue in the system that maintains the satellite’s position....

“It’s a revolutionary study,” says Ernestina Schipani, a medical doctor and professor of orthopaedic science at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new research. The paper, she says, completely changes our understanding of the sympathetic nervous system—the “fight-or-flight” response—by demonstrating that bone is “critically important” to its function. Until now, Schipani says, she and the rest of the scientific community thought it was adrenaline, a well-known hormone produced by the adrenal glands located above the kidneys, that kickstarted fight-or-flight....

Placing an electrode array in patients’ lower backs, researchers have found, can activate spinal circuitry in a way that repairs motor function. The needle-like implants deliver electricity directly to specific locations along the backbone. Exactly why these pulses restore walking, though, is something of a neurological mystery. A spinal cord injury can interrupt the connection between a person’s extremities and their brains, leaving them unable to move their limbs in some cases....

The latest menstrual product to come under scrutiny is period underwear. On January 7, journalist Jessian Choy reported in Sierra that a nuclear scientist had found a group of chemicals called PFAS in several pairs of Thinx period underwear she mailed to him for testing. PFAS (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) have been found in many materials, including food wrappers, water-repellent fabrics, cleaning products, and paints. They’re linked to a number of health problems, including cancer and decreased fertility....

Kilmister had for years lived the lifestyle synonymous with rock ‘n roll musicians of his era — sex with thousands of women, disregard for authority, etc. — and thanks to a petition circulating on Change.org, the memorialization of the hoarse-throated singer and bassist might soon have a scientific bent. Four super-heavy chemical elements were recently added to the periodic table, completing the seventh row of what is an elementary school hallmark, and the 25,000-plus supporters of the petition hope the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry names one of those elements ‘lemmium’ in support....

Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, has a team of engineers building basic robotic building blocks that can be taught to work together. After they learn their skills, the individual robots can be modified or used for a variety of purposes. The goal is to develop a robot skill set that can be reproduced–from self-assembly and pattern recognition to shape-changing. “Our robots aren’t really designed for one particular problem,” said Nicholas Farrow, a research assistant in computer science who is working on the project....

A spokesperson for NHTSA told Popular Science Wednesday it has now opened a “Preliminary Evaluation” to “evaluate the scenarios” in which Tesla drivers can interact with the gaming offerings available on the dashboard screen. The vehicles included in this investigation are Tesla Models 3, S, X, and Y from years 2017 through 2022. The Associated Press, which first reported on the NHTSA evaluation, says this equates to about 580,000 cars....

What is the Polk React Soundbar? At $250 retail, this isn’t a pricy soundbar, though it’s designed to compete with more expensive models including the excellent-but-expensive Sonos Beam. Polk touts the Alexa connectivity as one of its main features and it’s actually required if you want to get the best performance out of when you’re streaming music (more on that later). The bar is just the start In addition to the React soundbar itself, Polk also offers supporting gear to help build out an entire surround sound system....

Here at Popular Science, we got an unsolicited shipment of Halfpops last week as a part of a promotion for a bizarre coding contest where hackers solve coding puzzles, and then receive Halfpops in exchange for promising to protect the Halfpops staff in the event of an artificial intelligence apocalypse. Work stopped while the perplexed staff snacked on the partially popped popcorn kernels like the ones you find in the bottom of a microwaved bag, crunchy like corn nuts but with a popcorny flavor and a healthy dose of hulls that got stuck in our teeth....

A new study from the University of Cambridge has started to unravel the mystery, though. Muscle is generally thought to be borne from stress. When you put strain on your body, it responds by building itself back stronger. But rather than generic stress, the researchers found that at least one of the key signals to grow more muscle comes from an enormous protein called titin. Titin wraps around the myosin filaments that compose individual muscle fibers, and when muscle fibers contract, a part of titin becomes exposed that’s otherwise inaccessible....

So what did they get right? For starters, the G1 uses the Google Android operating system. When you first turn on the device, you’ll see a prompt to either create a new account or to sign on with your existing Gmail account. Since 100 million people use Gmail already, many users will likely choose door number two. There is hardly any fanfare when you first use the G1: your Gmail messages arrive automatically using push technology so you don’t have to click send/receive....

Rhinos are nearly blind as a bat and tend to fly solo, which makes detecting an unfriendly hunter or defending themselves from one a tricky task. But a winged, vampire-like frenemy could be the difference between a rhino roaming scot-free and being surrounded by danger. The relationship between rhinos and oxpeckers goes way back. In fact, the Swahili word for the bird is quite literally “the rhino’s guard.” In a seemingly mutualistic relationship, the oxpeckers ride around on the backs of rhinos, picking ticks off their backs and giving out a warning hiss when predators including humans ventured too close....

The Terra satellite used its Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer to capture both the visible and infrared sections of the spectrum, which enabled it to produce pictures that highlight the coverage of the floods. The white streaks in the second image are clouds. Try to ignore those and it’s incredibly clear just how much the surrounding waters have encroached on the land. And these aren’t empty lands. There are several big cities in the region....

You can gain a better understanding of deaf culture and transcend the boundaries of speech and communication and learn how to sign with The Complete 2022 American Sign Language Lifetime Membership Bundle. It’s on sale now for just $29.99 (reg. $242). Get to grips with the basics of American Sign Language starting with the alphabet and gradually advancing to more complex signs that can be used in real-life situations, ranging from pleasantries to those needed for medical emergencies....

But the Egyptian scribes were vague on a few arguably important points. For one, they failed to put down, in straightforward language, whether or not the assassination was successful. Egyptologists have mostly interpreted cryptic phrases like “the overturning of the royal bark” to mean that the Rameses III was in fact dead before the trial, but the documents also say that the court received direct instruction from their king. Fortunately–Egyptians being Egyptians–the empire also left behind an impressively well-preserved Rameses III....

Yale researchers asked 65 people, who ranged in age from 12 to 50, to make some decisions in a fake lottery, each with different degrees of risk. Sometimes their odds of winning were clear, but sometimes they were ambiguous, so the participants couldn’t be sure how likely they were to win. When the risk was precisely stated, adolescents were just as likely to avoid them as anyone. But when risks were unclear, they were more OK with them than other age groups....

Kappa Andromedae is part of what’s known as the Columba stellar moving group, and at just 30 million years old it is relatively young (our Sun is estimated to be more like five billion hears old). That’s significant if only for the mode of discovery–young stars are good targets for directly imaging exoplanets because their planets (also young) tend to retain more heat leftover from the formation process and thus reveal themselves more readily via infrared emissions....

Scientists still don’t know what causes these enormous bursts of energy, but they have a lot of ideas. Cosmic strings, stellar birth, collapsing neutron stars, evaporating black holes, and of course, aliens, are just a few. Most Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) aren’t discovered until months or years after they occur, when scientists are sifting through the data deluge from telescope observations. But in a study just published in Nature, a team of scientists developed a way to detect the bursts swiftly, then alert other telescopes that can help study the phenomenon....