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MyManu CLIK S Earbuds make traveling internationally and communicating with people abroad a legitimate possibility. For anyone seeking to be able to speak with the locals, the earbuds use a proprietary system designed to offer both text-to-speech and speech-to-text translations. MyManu’s wireless CLIK S allows travelers to communicate with people in 37 languages across the globe with real-time speech-to-speech translation. You can translate 1-to-1 conversations or group conversations by speech or text, and a clipboard will show all of the translations....

Users can apply the strips directly to the burn for a dose of benzocaine and therapeutic polymers. It essentially acts the same as a breath strip, sticking to your mouth and dissolving in your saliva. The research will be presented at the 2012 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition. The researchers, who are now based at the University of New Mexico, are currently working on a strip to treat more severe burns that last two to three days....

Taisei Corporation, a Japanese construction company, is doing things a little more subtly, and making skyscraper deconstruction a more eco-friendly endeavor in the process. Through their Ecological Reproduction System (Tecorep), rather than using cranes to take the building apart from the outside, they start from the inside, taking the structure apart floor by floor from the top down. A crane inside the building lowers materials harvested from each floor to ground level, generating electricity to power other equipment in the process....

Washington Post

Waterfall climbing is a critical skill for Hawaiian gobioids–the fish hatch in freshwater streams, but are quickly swept to sea in the fast-flowing currents, and spend most of their adult lives working their way back upstream. Most goby species accomplish this climbing by using a suction-cup-like sucker on their bellies to attach to the waterfall’s rock substrate, then rapidly undulating their bodies to propel themselves upward before quickly reattaching again....

But there are exceptions to every rule. Vulture bees, a trio of stingless species in Costa Rica, never touch buds or blossoms. Instead, they get sugar from fruit and “extrafloral nectaries”—drippy nodules on the stems and leaves of some plants. Vulture bees still need protein, though, and they get it from somewhere else entirely: rotting meat. But putrid flesh poses a few challenges not found in poppies or marigolds. Corpses are full of microbes locked in a territorial battle for the remains....

But those wasps, doing what they do best—killing and eating other insects—are providing invaluable, if overlooked, benefits to the world, according to a recent review of decades of wasp research. “Everybody recognizes that we have honey, and many fruits and vegetables because of honeybees,” says Alessandro Cini, an entomologist who studies insect socialization and an author of the study. “We’re trying to diffuse into society the idea that you should have a different perspective on wasps....

The mission has also had its ups and downs–literally, since the Philae lander failed to anchor into the comet, bouncing half a mile high before landing in a dark crevice somewhere. Last we heard, mission scientists were still trying to establish a stable communications link with the lander, but they’ve managed to extract a surprising amount of information from it nonetheless. For a fun overview of the mission and why the European Space Agency is going to so much trouble to study comets, watch the video at the top of the page....

But that doesn’t mean robots aren’t coming. The current phrase-of-choice at the Pentagon is “manned/unmanned teaming”, where human piloted and autonomous vehicles work together to perform a task or take an objective. Someday, it’s entirely possible that we will simply have unmanned/unmanned teaming, where robot helicopters carry ground robots into battle. And by “someday,” I mean “last October,” when the following test was performed in West Palm Beach, Florida. After the unmanned helicopter lowers the robot onto the ground, the ground robot rolled out to explore the surrounding woods....

That’s what’s going on in the video above. NASA created this animation based on observations of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 290 million light-years away. The animation shows a star getting torn apart by the black hole’s gravity. “The black hole tears the star apart and starts swallowing material really quickly, but that’s not the end of the story,” said Jelle Kaastra, co-author of an accompanying study published in Nature....

Don’t worry, you don’t need any specialized scientific equipment. Bloomberg has created a real-time Carbon Clock that lets people check in on the state of carbon any time they want. What’s more, you can see how the current number (399.428 parts per million at the time of this writing) compares to historical data. As the graph notes, in 1958 when scientists first started measuring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, that number was 316 parts per million....

Even if your cupboard is missing one of the four key ingredients in the classic pancake recipe (milk, butter, egg, and flour) and you can’t be bothered to put on pants to go get it, you can still satisfy those hunger pangs by substituting something else in your kitchen. For the sake of science and our relentless drive to help you live your best life, we tried substituting each of those four ingredients and can definitively tell you how well they worked....

The flick will premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival later this month, and judging by the trailer that Deadline Hollywood posted online yesterday (viewed above), much of the film concerns the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, a perennial subject of interest for Popular Science. Another trailer was released earlier this month, shedding quite a bit more details about the film: There is no official release date on the horizon, but here are some of the most provocative quotes from various documentary subjects who appear in the trailer:...

With some regions of the US experiencing the coldest air of the season right now, it’s necessary to understand what wind chill is and why it’s an important metric. What is wind chill? “It’s how it feels when you’re out in cold weather with wind blowing,” says Bob Oravec, a lead forecaster for the National Weather Service (NWS) at the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. “So it feels colder than it actually is....

“Agnes Morley Cleaveland’s No Life For a Lady had me by the dedication page: To ‘[a]ll those Pioneer Women whose stories can never be adequately told but whose courage, endurance, and determination to hold fast to their highest ideals contributed to the making of America.’ What followed exceeded all expectation. In 356 pages, Morley Cleaveland jovially recounts her experiences growing up in the wilds of New Mexico, a territory at the time of her birth in 1874 and a state by the time of her death in 1958....

There were no real world-shakers at last year’s conference. Apple debuted for macOS Mojave—complete with dark mode, which I have very much enjoyed—and iOS 12. The company also announced ARKit 2, though we haven’t seen much in the way of augmented reality progress since; the one exception may be the nifty Measure app, which uses the iPhone’s camera and AR to measure real-world objects. Perhaps the biggest debut in 2018 was the Screentime feature, which tallies how much time folks spend on their phones and iPads to guilt them into going outside....

In her new book, Mary Roach, the iconic science writer of Stiff, Grunt, and Bonk, takes a deep dive into why, if we care about wildlife, we need to leave it be. This is the world of human-wildlife interactions—something people across the world are becoming more familiar with due to climate change, urban planning, and our ever-changing lives. We sat down with Roach to talk about Fuzz, out today, which is all about our favorite animals, and even some trees and beans, that commit crimes, sometimes unknowingly, from destruction to burglary to manslaughter....

These products are not necessarily targeted at vegans or vegetarians, who comprise around 2 percent of the U.S. population over age 17. Meat, on the other hand, is a well-established market. In 2018 Americans consumed 57.2 pounds of beef, 92.4 pounds of chicken, and 50.9 pounds of pork per capita. Nonetheless, the meat industry is defending its turf—including in the grocery store. Missouri passed a law in 2018 restricting use of the word “meat” to animal-based proteins, and now more than 20 other states are considering or have enacted similar legislation....

Now scientists have discovered the secret to those whiskers’ success: their shape. Unlike the smooth hairs that stick out from the cheeks of cats and dogs, seal whiskers are wavy. They bulge along their lengths, like pea pods. “This shape enhances their ability to detect flows created by fish,” says Heather Beem, author of a study on seal whiskers soon to be published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Nature seems to have designed whiskers in different ways to serve different purposes....

The San Joaquin Valley is one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the US, providing nearly half the nation’s food. The Tulare Basin, a historic watershed in the Central Valley Aquifer system, collects most of its water from the snowmelt runoff from nearby mountains, with some also imported from other aqueducts and canals. The entire aquifer system provides drinking water for about 6.5 million residents. But between California’s recurrent droughts, water shortages, and the increased risk of wildfires, humans have been pushing underground water resources to their limit....