On the morning of March 16, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the US Congress. Through an interpreter, he described the present reality of life in his invaded country: “Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people. Russian troops have already fired nearly 1,000 missiles at Ukraine, countless bombs, they use drones to kill us with precision.” Zelenskyy asked for help via a humanitarian no-fly zone....
“Unfortunately, this is definitely a situation where government regulation needs to step in,” says Allison Nixon, chief research officer with cyber intelligence firm Unit221B, “because private companies have utterly failed to deal with this problem themselves.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was famously SIM swapped in 2019. Both AT&T and T-Mobile were embroiled in lawsuits that accused them of failing to protect their customers from this kind of attack. One cryptocurrency investor even sued a high school senior for allegedly stealing $23....
“There has been a long-standing need for additional effective treatments for treatment-resistant depression, a serious and life-threatening condition,” the FDA’s Tiffany Farchione said in a press release. While that’s entirely true, there’s another way to see the approval of Spravato: a sign of how the American drug system and insurers shape innovation to maximize profit. “In a way, it’s a milestone,” says psychiatrist David Feifel. Feifel is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and the proprietor of a clinic that deals with treatment-resistant depression....
In September, LS9 made headlines with the launch of a pilot plant in its hometown that turns out hundreds of gallons of the biodiesel a week. The plant mixes modified E. coli with sugarcane in large vats of water. The microbes metabolize the sugars and excrete fatty acids that have the same hydrocarbon configuration as petroleum. Unlike other biodiesel setups, LS9’s fuel is easy to collect — it floats to the top of the water and is skimmed off like cream from milk — and can go straight into your gas tank....
Data speeds are 2.8x faster than EDGE according to Apple’s numbers. Apple is also claiming 8-10 hours of talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk time and 5-6 hours of 3G browsing time. All to be taken with a grain of salt as always, but the numbers are impressive. No word on the new battery’s actual capacity.Location-based services provided by GPS, which is augmented by the already-present cell-tower and Wi-Fi location tracking....
Jaxjox KettlebellConnect This adjustable kettlebell has weight options from 12 to 42 pounds, which is handy in and of itself since it’ll spare you from keeping a whole rack of bells in your home. Beyond the space saving, however, the kettlebell itself has sensors inside to help track the content, intensity, and duration of your workout. The hardware is part of a $30 monthly subscription program that provides live workouts via the web kind of like what Peloton does for stationary bike training....
Earth is no stranger to the disruptive forces of sudden climate change. Tree-ring data show that sudden drying in the American West from 900 to 1400 induced one of the most tenacious megadroughts on record, turning river basins into sheets of sand and contributing to the collapse of the agrarian Pueblo “cliff-dweller” civilization. Scientists suspect that increased greenhouse gases may be forcing another shift, but no computer model is yet capable of forecasting if, when, and how fast that shift might be happening....
Psychologist Simone Dalla Bella from Warsaw’s University of Finance and Management and his team asked 40 volunteers to belt out, a cappella, familiar songs such as Jingle Bells and Sto Lat, the Polish version of Happy Birthday. After a number of acoustic tests, the researchers discovered that most of the singers who couldn’t follow a song’s pitch and timing fell into the first of two phenotypes: they were tone deaf yet blissfully unaware of it....
“The FtsZ Ring: A Multilayered Protein Network” won the People’s Choice award for Illustration in the 2016 Vizzies. See all 10 of the winners. This article was originally published in the March/April 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “The 2016 Vizzies.”
I helped develop Bose’s noise-cancellation technology, which works by creating sound with the opposite waveform of what you’re trying to block. That means we have to catalog all sorts of clatter—from the ordinary to the very odd—in this world. Whenever I am out and hear a weird noise, I record it. I have a couple of gigabites of these on my phone. In our lab, my team has a container lined with amplifiers and speakers—called the phunp box—that we use to play the tones, like the rumbles of trains and buses....
And yes, the new app is built around an algorithm precisely tailored for taking selfies. A beta version of the app, currently called 3DSelfie, will be available later this year and is set to be announced on November 23rd. However, the name 3DSelfie is a placeholder as the official name is still in the works and may change by then. In the meantime, Dacuda provided a preview earlier this month at TEDxCambridge 2015....
The answer is a resounding no. Materials matter more today than ever, which is why Popular Science dedicated much of this issue to them. In labs across the globe, scientists are hard at work creating the foundations of tomorrow’s products: ultrasmooth coatings that repel everything from ice (on those lightweight airplane wings) to Staphylococcus aureus (in germ-ridden hospitals); self-regulating materials that alter their properties with temperature or pH; and piezoelectric films that capture wasted energy, even as other smart materials put that energy to more efficient use....
The cars can top 200 mph in some spots on the track and tax drivers circulatory systems with 6g of cornering force in the high-speed turns when the bodywork is generating maximum grip-enhancing aerodynamic downforce. As with the pilots in airborne fighter planes, Formula 1 drivers still have to control their vehicle while enduring these stresses, and because they are racing, they need to continuously make adjustments to keep the car running optimally....
This week, Helen Zaltman of The Allusionst, a fabulous linguistics podcast that you should really already be listening to, stopped by to talk to us about the history of the word bisexual—or perhaps bisexuous? You’ll have to listen to find out. It’s a wild romp all the way through, and includes both bisexual oysters and space stations. Here’s episode five! Fact: The word “moron” was once a clinical term—and it has a dark history By Rachel Feltman My hometown is a weird place: Vineland, NJ is a failed temperance Utopia and allegedly the site of the first use of “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” in a murder case....
Gene therapies emerged–appropriately–about the same time the first human genome was being mapped during the 1990s, though the study of gene therapies goes back as far as the 1970s. They work by actually tampering with a person’s DNA–usually by encoding a functioning gene to replace a mutated one, or by introducing DNA that encodes a therapeutic protein into the body. Clinical trials have gone on for years. Early on, failures caused many to dismiss the idea of tampering with genes....
So this type of research could eventually help us improve a bunch of tools that deal with light, from TV to solar cells. Until that happens, enjoy the beautiful results.
Beat is sort of like a pattern that our brains pull out of a complicated series of sounds. Take Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” It opens with a series of percussive notes—boom boom clap, boom boom clap. The first two are quick, and the third is slow—short short long. The long note lasts just as long as the first two fast notes, and humans hear that pattern as four beats....
Standing and walking from time to time throughout the day is a piece of cake, but when you’re out and about, say trekking or camping or attending a music festival, finding the right time and place to sit and rest can be tricky. It’s far easier when you have the CLIQ Portable Camping Chairs, which is specifically designed to be your comfort companion anywhere. Get a two-pack on sale for just $159....
But like anything we measure, our estimations of elevation are inherently error-prone. When you’re measuring how high a mountain is, being off by two meters (that’s 6.56 feet) it’s not a huge deal. But rising seas can make the same margin of error deadly for coastal areas. And that’s exactly what’s happening. When researchers at Climate Central used a new method called CoastalDEM to estimate the elevations of the world’s coastal areas, the number of people vulnerable to sea level rise nearly tripled previous calculations....
Fritz works for Auraria Library in Denver, assisting people who want to incorporate spatial information into their research. If a student were doing a project about energy, for example, she’d show them how to include the location of every oil well in the state. Outside of her job, Fritz also helps lead a MeetUp group—gathering here tonight—that’s merging data about buildings into a crowdsourced map of the area. The project could eventually help emergency services reach people more rapidly, make small businesses more visible, and show residents how their city (one of the fastest growing in the nation) is changing....
