The problem, though, is that console spec sheets can be difficult to navigate. Even if you own a PS4 or an Xbox One right now, you’d be totally justified not knowing what kind of processor it has inside, how much RAM its packing, or how many teraflops it promises (or even what a teraflop is). Here are the most important numbers you’ll need to understand regarding the upcoming Xbox Series X, and what to make of them...
One of the main consequences of selfish gene theory is natural altruism. Animals will routinely lower their own chance of reproducing by helping a sibling raise its chance. While pure natural selection can’t explain any behavior that lowers an individual’s chance of passing on its genetic material, selfish selection explains that by helping a sibling, an individual is helping facilitate the passage of the common genes shared between the two individuals....
Scientists are working to better understand what extreme temperatures do to the human body. A study published today in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation finds that exposure to extremely hot or cold temperatures increases a heart disease patient’s risk of death. “It underscores the urgent need to develop measures that will help our society mitigate the impact of climate change on cardiovascular disease,” study co-author Haitham Khraishah, a cardiovascular disease fellow at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), said in a statement....
Some of that is true. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why, but the rodents in genus Neotoma do seem to possess an instinctual drive toward curation. Even when packrats aren’t living near humans and pocketing our treasures, they gather plant clippings and seeds, which they store in great mounds for future use. Part living quarters, part larder, these so-called middens can also include sticks, stones, bones, and animal dung—the packrat’s own, but also patties and hairy turds discovered out in the world and hauled back for safekeeping....
The novel coronavirus sent the entire planet, including the sailing world, into a complete tailspin, and at least temporarily altered or even erased the very freedom we enjoy while cruising under sail. The following five COVID-19 dispatches from both near and far-flung waters are a testimony to the resiliency and fortitude of sailors everywhere, serving as snapshots of our time. This past spring, the global pandemic resulting from the novel coronavirus upended the world—including the cruising world—as sailors around the planet scrambled to seek safe harbors and dash together new plans even as borders and waterways slammed closed and the notion of “quarantine,” always a feature of the conclusion of a long passage, took on a whole new meaning....
Charon is Pluto’s largest moon, but it is relatively tiny for the Solar System at just 754 miles in diameter (compared to Pluto’s 1,473-mile diameter). One of five moons orbiting the dwarf planet (the others are Nyx, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx), Charon was long thought to be a relatively boring, crater-pocketed world, at least as far as its terrain goes. But thanks to the New Horizons flyby, we now have access to the closest views of Charon ever captured—and they don’t disappoint....
The new findings have far-reaching implications, says Steven Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved with the research. “Until [around] 20 years ago, everyone’s perception of the Kuiper belt was that it would be filled with very cold objects that are barely more than comets and that these would have been in a pristine state since the beginning of the solar system…it was just thought to be frozen and dead for all time,” he says....
Yet these diminutive amphibians have long fascinated scientists. While some biologists have fixated on studying male mating calls, others are now turning to what happens after the frogs mate: a protein foam couples produce together to protect their eggs. That foam, it turns out, could help humans, too: A group of biologists and drug designers have found that the foam has properties that make it ideal for delivering drugs to human skin....
“It’s like a tale of Sleeping Beauty,” says coauthor Nataliia Iakovenko, a biologist at the University of Ostrava in the Czech Republic. Except instead of one hundred years of dormancy, these bdelloid rotifers were most recently kicking around in the Late Pleistocene. And instead of a cursed princess, we’re talking about some extremely hardy worm-like invertebrates, about a third of a millimeter in size, which do not exist in male form and reproduce by cloning themselves....
Record-holding Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter lost to IBM’s Watson last year on national television. Garry Kasparov, often considered history’s greatest chess player, fell to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. Machines outsmarted men, but which machine would outsmart the other? In some sense, neither. Comparing smarts is slippery business, especially with an English major like Watson and a math guy like Deep Blue. “They were both significantly smarter than similar systems of their type when they appeared, but the nature of their intelligence is very different,” says Doug Downey, a machine learning and artificial intelligence researcher at Northwestern University....
You can do this on iOS if you own a pair of AirPods, and on Android if you have Google’s Pixel Buds. More generic gadgets, like the Samsung Galaxy Buds or a pair of Sony wireless earbuds, can receive alerts from any device. As for the rest of the wireless earbuds out there, some support this feature and some don’t. The best way to know is to check online or read the manual that came with your buds....
Google’s Inbox email app will soon be able to answer your emails, by suggesting a few short replies based on the content of the email you received, Google announced today in a blog post. The responses aren’t complex (yet), mainly consisting of phrases like “We’ll be there” or “I’ll check on it.” Smart Reply uses deep learning, a stab at artificial intelligence. Over time, the machine will learn more and more about language, and how you like to respond to emails....
Now, we’re nearing the last stop on the 2018 new flagship smartphone train with Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. And like its competitive siblings, the Pixel 3 doesn’t disrupt that trend. There are changes and new features, of course, but if you’re expecting a profound smartphone revolution, better luck in 2019. What we’re left with, however, is an excellent offering from Google and one of the best Android phones around—mostly thanks to its impressive camera....
Conducted last summer, an hour-long Google Hangout featured Cathy Plesko, an applied physicist from Los Alamos National Laboratory; Peter Thelin, a master optician from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Chris Ebbers, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore; and Vishal Patel, a researcher from Idaho National Laboratory’s Center for Space Nuclear Research (Vishal’s particular area of research is new forms of nuclear power that could fuel tomorrow’s spacecraft). The discussion ranges from what powers R2-D2 (possibly a nuclear source) to why the Death Star needed an exhaust port (something that large invariably generates heat), and that’s just in the first ten minutes....
Until that data is public, however, the broad consensus among scientists is that it’s too soon to know if the general public will need booster shots. “Right now, given the data and the information we have, we do not need to give people a third shot,” Anthony Fauci told CNN on Sunday. “That doesn’t mean we stop there.” So far, Israel is alone in its recommendation: European and Canadian regulators have also said that it is too soon to decide on boosters, though British authorities have begun drafting a plan to roll out booster shots....
And according to a study published today in the journal Communications Biology, that series of expressions might carry its own meaning, almost like a chimp phrase. Over the course of 2019 and into 2020, Tatiana Bortolato, a PhD student from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, spent dawn to dusk following and recording 46 adult chimps in Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire. After capturing 900 hours of primate sounds, she and colleagues from France and Switzerland sat down to pick apart the structure of those calls....
By visiting multiple flight, hotel, and car rental comparison sites, and using Google to find sightseeing information, guidance on traveling with children, and product recommendations, Kim picked up a total of 1,620 cookies—around 20 percent of which were third-party tracking cookies from analytics and ad companies like Google and Facebook. Kim concluded that there was something “insidious” about the whole situation, saying: “In the act of planning a trip online without anti-tracking protection, someone out there now knows about the ages of your children, your partner’s interests, which family scuba lesson you’ve booked and with whom....
Timing If you buy a ticket the day before you need to fly, your deals will be much more limited than if you plan in advance. So what’s the best time to start booking tickets? Peter Greenberg of CBS News suggests booking your trip between 45 and 60 days in advance, depending on where you’re going, because airlines don’t have the data to offer cheaper fares any earlier. Hopper says Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best times for booking if you want cheap deals, but admits there’s no one-size-fits-all formula....
Even if you lack the climate controls of a professional conservatory, you have some power over the conditions inside your home. Want to turn your bedroom into a tropical rainforest? You won’t be able to grow a corpse plant bloom taller than the average human, but you can imitate the lushness of a botanical garden by stealing some of their techniques for your personal plant shelf. This requires some planning....
But we’re not here to talk about pre-made overlanders. Instead, I’m writing to the DIYers out there, many of whom are likely working within a more limited budget. If that sounds like you, let’s roll. If money isn’t an obstacle, acquiring a van-life-ready vehicle is, of course, easy. These days, many companies offer vans specifically equipped for endless road-tripping, though they are pricy. Even used, for example, the ubiquitous Mercedes Sprinter will run you upwards of $35,000....
