Hurricane Harvey S Record Setting Floodwaters Were Packed With Pollution And Disease

Atkins, who lives in Missouri City, Texas, near Houston, spent the day ensuring that the older residents in his neighborhood had enough of their medication, and he helped evacuate people who were stranded. After he got home, he noticed an insect bite on his left arm, just above the wrist, but thought nothing of it. He took a shower and ate dinner. By late evening, the bite was nickel-sized. He ignored it until the next morning, when it was even bigger....

December 30, 2022 · 6 min · 1163 words · Sherri Mata

If Fruit Flies Live Without Sleeping Why Can T I

“It’s been thought that [the need for sleep] has a similar architecture” to the need for food, says study author Giorgio Gilestro, a systemic biologist at Imperial College London. But in this new study, Gilestro and colleagues found that male flies deprived of sleep lived as long as regular fruit flies, while female fruit flies also deprived of sleep died earlier, but only by an average of three days. Three days is about six to eight percent percent of the 40 to 50 day lifespan of a fruit fly....

December 30, 2022 · 4 min · 667 words · Richard Philhower

Inject Rhino Horns With Poison That Ll Stop Poachers

The trade in rhino horns is immensely profitable; rhinos are huge but not particularly hard to kill, since they need a lot of water and can be reliably found at watering holes. The horns are powdered and used in traditional Chinese medicine, prescribed for fevers and convulsions (not as an aphrodisiac, as is sometimes thought). So the Rhino Rescue Project began investigating something unorthodox: why not make the horns unusable as medicine?...

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 317 words · Irina Berrian

Innovations In Driving The Automatic Transmission

If not, check this out: I defy anyone who isn’t a mechanical engineer or who doesn’t work in the transmission industry to make sense of this schematic. There are, of course, plenty of things about cars that are hard to understand. Wiring looms, for example. The innards of limited-slip differentials. How the [with a bicycle](https://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2002-04/speed-record/ Many drivers don’t want – or don’t know how – to shift gears manually. And especially before synchomesh was commonplace, only a small percentage truly mastered the technique....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 216 words · Robert Self

Inside China S Zero Covid Policy

Setting zero COVID as a goal and enacting policies to meet that goal are two separate things. New Zealand and Australia also pursued zero COVID until last fall, when the Omicron surge overwhelmed their precautions. But China has held its policy, and ramped up its response to meet Omicron in spite of substantial costs. Understanding exactly how China has done so is important for figuring out whether the country can stay the course for Omicron....

December 30, 2022 · 7 min · 1447 words · David Seiwell

Is It Loud In The Ocean

In March 2017, oceanographers used this rare moment of tranquility to drop six hydrophones into the water and spend a few days trying to assess what the big blue sounds like without human interference. They clearly heard the snap of shrimp claws and the grunts and groans of fish crescendo into a nightly chorus. People imagine the ocean as serene, but the deep has never been the silent world that conservationist Jacques Cousteau once called it....

December 30, 2022 · 5 min · 969 words · Richard Reynolds

James Webb Telescope Is Headed For Lagrange Point 2

This is the technical name for a delicate gravitational tipping point. JWST is bound for where, in the Earth-sun pair, the gravitational pull of Earth perfectly balances out the much stronger gravity of the sun. JWST’s designers planned for their telescope to drift there, because there, the telescope can work without gravity nudging it out of place. “We knew that we needed to keep JWST at L2,” says Stefanie Milam, a NASA planetary scientist on JWST....

December 30, 2022 · 5 min · 891 words · William Mack

Kits To Help You Grow Your Own Mushrooms

Oyster mushrooms are low in calories and provide antioxidants—and these coral pink oyster mushrooms have a lovely color to boot. Grow your own oyster mushrooms with this easy-to-handle kit (all you really have to do is open it up and spray it with water). It’s backed by a 100 percent ‘grow guarantee’, too, so if you don’t succeed you’ll get a full refund. Lion’s Mane contains bioactive substances may be good for your brain, heart, and gut....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 170 words · Jennifer Lewis

Last Week In Tech Airport Troubles Folding Phones And A Test To Find Out If You Re Tone Deaf

Loop wants to bring back milk-man-style product deliveries I’m too young to have had milk delivered to my house, but a company called Loop is trying to modernize the concept. The plan is for UPS drivers to dump a package, containing common grocery items in reusable containers, on your doorstep. For example, instead of buying a cardboard pint of ice cream, you’d get a metal container of Rocky Road that you’d return when it’s empty....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 544 words · Cheryl Arias

Lenovo Yoga 9I Review Transforming Into A Great 2 In 1

The Lenovo Yoga 9i’s design The thing that immediately stands out about the Lenovo Yoga 9i is its 14-inch display. It varies by configuration, ranging from a 1920 x 1200p LCD panel—the 16:10 equivalent of 1080p—and the far more luxurious 4K OLED. The model we tested falls in the middle, a 2880 x 1800p OLED touchscreen with DisplayHDR 500 True Black certification. It’s a fantastic-looking screen, particularly when watching Dolby Vision (+Atmos) movies and TV shows....

December 30, 2022 · 6 min · 1161 words · Curtis Ober

Lhc Re Creates First Moments Of The Universe And Sets New Energy Record

Today, the operators of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced that the machine (the world’s largest particle accelerator) had achieved stable beams, and was successfully smashing together tiny particles of lead at incredibly high energies. The collision reached energies that were twice as large as those produced by any previous collision experiment (1045 trillion electron-volts). The collision between the streams of positively-charged lead particles (they’ve been stripped of negatively-charged electrons) results in the release of an immense amount of energy, and the creation of a primordial mass of particles, with “temperatures about a quarter of a million times those at the core of the sun” according to physicist John Jowett in a press release from CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research, the scientific group that operates the LHC)....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 205 words · David Echeverria

Little Home Wrecker

To make the Hackzall’s compact and comfortable profile, engineers put a dogleg between the handle and the blade to hold the motor (most recips place the motor in-line). A lightweight gearset carries the motor’s spinning motion around the bend to the blade, which traces the same oval-shaped cutting motion as a full-size recip. Although the Hackzall can use standard reciprocating-saw blades, Milwaukee sells special four-inch blades, which are thinner and make a finer cut....

December 30, 2022 · 1 min · 91 words · Thomas Miller

Logitech Lift Ergonomic Mouse Review Ergo Easy

In April 2022, however, Logitech released a more casually minded version of its champion vertical mouse: the Logitech Lift. It carries over most of the MX Vertical’s best features but in a smaller, lighter, rubber-coated design. It’s also slightly less expensive—$79.99 versus $99.99 for the MX Vertical. Unlike the MX Vertical, however, which practically begs you to learn all its tricks and program it to perfection, the Lift’s friendlier design and lower cost come without expectations....

December 30, 2022 · 5 min · 881 words · Jennifer Ammon

Maki Goes To Entscoc15

As if by fate, my first stop upon entering the exhibit hall was the expansive Bioquip booth. Though it might have had something to do with the crowd they had gathered. On display and up for sale was a fantastic collection of live and pinned athropods. Bioquip also provides a huge range of entomological equipment, from specimen cases to microscopes to light traps for collecting. Not to mention some more unique tools… I didn’t get to see it assembled, but they also have an insect bazooka....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 597 words · Alan Brey

Many Glaciers Aren T As Thick As We Thought

In a new study involving more than 800,000 pairs of satellite images from 2017 and 2018, researchers were able to determine how fast and how far water from melting glaciers traveled. They could then find how much water these glaciers hold, and determined that the world’s mountain glaciers hold 20 percent less water than previously thought. While that means that glacier melt from mountains will contribute less to sea-level rise, it also means that there is less fresh water available for communities that rely on glaciers as a water source....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 464 words · John Hansen

Mapping Disease Data Collaboratively

HealthMap uses complex algorithms to scan news aggregators such as Google News to find a new pathogen name, location, severity, and other data. You can select the aggregator, and the disease, and view according to a timeline and by geographic region. It’s essentially a mash-up of Google maps and Internet news, but not as a homespun concoction: it’s highly useful and accurate. Site creators Clark Freifeld (a research software developer in informatics at Boston’s Children’s Hospital) and John Brownstein (an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard) know that the aggregator sites are never 100 percent accurate, so they use Bayesian filters (the same ones used for spam filtering) to weed out erroneous data like a Red Sox game with “an outbreak of home runs....

December 30, 2022 · 2 min · 321 words · Aubrey Deane

Mars Insight Lander Yields New Data Crust To Core

It took about a year, but the detector began sniffing out so-called Marsquakes in early 2019. Now, three different studies based on InSight’s seismic data, all published yesterday in the journal Science, give us an unprecedented look inside our planetary neighbor. Using measurements from around 10 Marsquakes, along with knowledge of Mars rocks acquired through Martian meteorites and other Mars data, the teams were able to divine new knowledge about the structure and evolution of the red planet....

December 30, 2022 · 4 min · 718 words · Caroline Shank

Meet The Health Care Workers And Patients On The Front Lines Of Another National Crisis

Monte is trapped in a cycle, too. After skipping his medications, he experienced a psychotic break that got him arrested. He went through several more fits in jail, and at one point, was tear gassed by guards in his cell. Over the course of five years, psychiatrist and filmmaker Kenneth Rosenberg shadowed Johanna, Monte, and a handful of other patients, nurses, and doctors through the morass of Los Angeles’s psych wards....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 480 words · Travis Graham

Meet The Oregon Wildlife Refuge Currently Occupied By Armed Protestors

Described in a brochure as “One of the crown jewels of the National Wildlife Refuge System,” Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is home to 320 bird species and 58 mammal species. Thousands of people visit every year, but currently the only humans on the property are a group of protestors armed with guns. That there are people with guns on the Wildlife Refuge is not inherently unusual. Hunters are regularly permitted to shoot certain birds in designated areas on the refuge....

December 30, 2022 · 3 min · 577 words · Cedric Weil

Meet This Gorgeous Newly Discovered Andean Lizard

Despite its abundance of unique species, the area is largely unexplored by biologists and ecologists. In the 1980s, wars against rebel armies and drug traffickers disrupted the region, preventing scientific expeditions. Recent surveys since the turn of the century have discovered a dozen new species of amphibians and lizards including a new type of glass frog and an arboreal iguana. One of the latest creatures discovered is a new species of wood lizard named Enyalioides Feiruzae, or the Feiruz wood lizard....

December 30, 2022 · 4 min · 674 words · Terri Scott