In its current form, I can’t recommend anyone buy it.But he was kind of right. The Boxee TV isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution I’d thought and hoped it would be. That doesn’t make it bad, though–as a component of a larger cord-cutting scheme, I think it has a lot of merit. What does make it bad is that the thing is nowhere near ready for retail. It performs like an early alpha–as it stands, it is not usable....
Click here to launch a gallery of the winners and highlights of the Microsoft Imagine Cup. Microsoft’s Imagine Cup is an annual student technology competition that draws entries from all over the globe. I rolled into town for the worldwide finals, held this year in New York City. This is the competition’s ninth year, and the first time the finals have been held in the U.S. Over 350,000 students ages 16 and up in 183 countries registered this year to compete in the Imagine Cup’s nine competitions....
Unfortunately, pollinators face several challenges around the world. Honey bees currently suffer from colony collapse disorder, caused by habitat loss, pesticides, and disease. These negative factors also affect native bees. Additionally, butterflies like the monarch are seeing substantial population declines, too. Without pollinators, we’d be lost. No, worse: We’d be hungry. And, in time, our planet would be in serious danger of mass extinction. But research shows that people can help propagate pollinators by planting native species in their gardens....
Most of the nearly 36,000 cases of bunk-bed injury reported per year were found to involve scrapes, bruises, and fractures, including the notorious “bunk-bed fracture”—an impaction of the bone behind the big toe commonly induced by cowabunga leaps. Small children get walloped most often in the head and neck, reports the study, as they “tend to fall head first because of a higher center of gravity.” Yet no child is too old to be spared....
The famous lunar landing mission, Apollo 11, came another three years later in July of 1969. All told, Aldrin spent 12 days in space, 2.25 hours on the moon, and countless periods of time flying fighter jets in the Korean War before retiring from NASA and the US Air Force in the 1970s. His work in the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere and orbit earned him a lifetime of celebrity—and now, an exhibit at a Sotheby’s auction....
“We have always believed that consumers have the right to know what’s in their food. GMO has evolved to be a top consumer food issue reaching a critical mass of 92 percent of consumers in favor of putting it on the label,” wrote president and CEO Denise Morrison in a memo to employees about the decision. (Morrison is citing a Consumer Reports poll from 2014, and you can see a roundup of other polls here....
European countries are developing plans to transform their energy grids as their long-standing reliance on fossil fuels becomes untenable—the escalation of decarbonization efforts are already underway. The European Union has announced it intends to cut Russian gas imports by as much as two-thirds by the end of this year. But when it comes to nuclear power’s role in the transition, nations remain split on what role it should or should not play....
A year and a half later, the Federal Trade Commission fined Lumos Labs, makers of Lumosity, $50 million for deceptive advertising, citing “false or unsubstantiated real-world performance claims.” The agency eventually suspended the fine after Lumos paid $2 million in damages to the FTC. Brain training has nonetheless become a big business, expected to clear $3.3 billion in sales by 2020, according to market-research firm SharpBrains. At Ortman’s company, about 100 clients pay anywhere from $200 to $1,200 a month for help with conditions like ADD, dyslexia, stroke, and dementia....
Tesla introduced their new yoke-style wheel when it revamped its Model S flagship sedan in 2021. Though it operates in all ways like a standard steering wheel, the yoke essentially removes the upper segment of the steering wheel rim. Tesla says this enhances the car’s forward visibility and allows the onboard cameras to more accurately track a driver’s eye movement. This change, Tesla and Lexus claim, could ease the transition from human-driven vehicles to autonomous vehicles, whenever that technology becomes safe and viable....
The future of the climate crisis promises more events like Ida– storms that shower areas with more rain in a few hours than the area usually sees in several months combined, overwhelming storm surge and sewage systems before city officials and agencies can take swift action. Keeping the subway system open or reopened after storms is essential to keeping New York City according to a 2017 survey by Mobilizing the Region, a little over half of city households are car free....
From Branson: It is, at least, an optimistic path forward. Let’s hope the technology rises to the challenge. Listen to Hawking talk to Virgin Galactic’s future astronauts below:
If boiling heat and drought weren’t enough, the fires brimming around the corners of the Pacific Northwest are contributing to a threatening storm system. When temperatures are hot enough, rising smoke from the fires can quickly accumulate into raging pyrocumulonibus clouds. These clouds then form thunderstorms, allowing lightning strikes to wreak even more havoc by brewing new fires. In some cases, you may even see “fire tornados.” NASA has nicknamed these horrifying events “fire-breathing dragon of clouds....
Chelsey Geralda Armstrong, an ethnobotanist with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, takes primary school students out to the sites, on a trail through the conifers. When they get to the edge of the villages, she says, “it’s open. You can still walk through. The dominant species—the crabapple and the hazelnut—are spaced beautifully, like an orchard.” A new study led by Armstrong has demonstrated that these “forest gardens,” the result of careful management by Indigenous communities, have persisted as islands of ecological diversity long after those communities were forced from the villages....
With so much sensitive data on our phones and laptops, it makes sense that we don’t want unwelcome visitors snooping around. That’s why it’s essential to take some security precautions. But you might have let your guard down, and now you think somebody may have spent a few minutes with your hardware. You can easily run some basic checks to help you figure out if you were a victim of an intruder....
Broadly described, the Hexa is a rotorcraft. The vehicle has 18 electric motors, each powering a separate rotor, in a canopy that looks like what would happen if a DALL-E-style AI was asked to draw a tree in the style of a drone. The rotors sit on a latticework canopy, with a rotor on each of the Hexa’s six arms and 12 rotors spaced evenly around the outer ring. Machines like these are also called eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing craft....
To confirm that everything still works, SpaceX plans to perform a static test which would involve firing up the rocket again without actually launching it. This particular rocket probably won’t fly again–SpaceX wants to preserve the history-making booster for posterity. But knowing that it could fly again is important. The whole point of landing the rocket is to recover it and reuse it, instead of just dumping it into the ocean after one use....
Copious evidence from both reports dating as far back as 2016 shows that the Xi Jinping administration’s police program collected pinprick blood samples from somewhere between 919,282 and 1,206,962 of the citizens living within the Tibet Autonomous Region. In total, the samples on file now represent between one quarter and one third of Tibet’s entire population of 3.66 million. The potential ramifications for the methodical genetic roundup are as vast as they are troubling....
The common reed Phragmites australis is a tall perennial grass with long leaves that invades fresh and brackish wetlands. There it crowds out native species, reducing plant diversity. Managers frequently kill it with herbicides and replace it in brackish marshes with native Spartina alterniflora, or cordgrass, during restoration projects. But despite its bad reputation, Phragmites provides many benefits that are generally unknown and unappreciated. After studying salt marsh ecology and the impacts of stressors, including invasive plants, for many years, I have concluded that removing this invasive species wherever it is found – especially along vulnerable coastlines – is a very expensive and often foolish procedure....
“Without even knowing it, early settlers were recording their history for us, and in the most unlikely of ways, in their poop,” said study author Robert D’Anjou, a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Archaeologists already have a few methods for recording the presence of humans in a given area, like charcoal from fires and even pollen from domesticated plants. But these are not always clear indicators, and each has its limits, the UMass-Amherst researchers explain in a new paper....
