Some experts are marking the move “the most significant environmental treaty that the United States has joined in at least a decade.” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called it, alongside passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, as the “strongest one-two punch against climate change any Congress has ever taken.” But the push to get rid of the extremely potent group of greenhouse gases has a history decades in the making....
That’s why researchers have developed high-tech glasses, called Amblyz, which can be programmed to treat lazy eye. The results of the first clinical trial assessing their efficacy were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Amblyz works because its lenses contain programmable LCDs. If a doctor suggested that a child wear a patch for two hours per day, for example, the lens over the lazy eye would go dark for a few seconds out of every 30 seconds during that time, effectively working as a patch....
Every year, we gleefully give ourselves permission to sit around gorging our belts off over the holiday break without a single workout. Sadly, this is not the best way to ring in the New Year. Yes, it’s only a week, but … A lot of buzz-killing science indicates that the pounds we put on over the holidays seldom come entirely back off. While that extra weight is usually no more than a pound or so, it adds up over time....
Lemur researchers have witnessed this behavior in the wild for years, and knew the stinky courtship ritual was uniquely important to the animals’ way of life. But they weren’t sure what exactly made the smell so intriguing to females. In a paper released earlier this month in Current Biology, olfaction experts at the University of Tokyo break down the chemistry of this natural cologne in the hopes of unlocking its sexy secrets....
Ever feel like your laptop is about to burn your thighs? Or that the fan is spinning so loudly that it sounds like a wind tunnel? Running at high temperatures can permanently damage the computer. Here’s how to detect whether your device is too hot—and make it chill out. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, the electricity in your computer generates heat. Unfortunately, that warmth can damage the same components that produce it....
A handful of aviation industry experts believe the social and economic fallout in the US from the COVID-19 is the worst seen since the market crash of 2008, others since 9/11, while still others say the airline service cutbacks and employee layoffs are simply unprecedented. Calling the current situation dynamic would be an understatement. In the end, comparisons really don’t matter much. What does is, “the bad news is … getting worse,” United CEO Oscar Munoz told employees on March 14, in a letter....
Last week, biologists at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland described one potential, albeit risky, way tardigrades can shuttle around: snail slime. In the lab, the team looked at the relationship between tardigrade species Milnesium inceptum and a land snail species Cepaea nemoralis, and found that the water bears that stuck to the mucus on the snail’s body were able to be transported short distances. However, the secretion comes with a dangerous price: While the tardigrades could move farther with the snails’ help, few of them lived to the end of the sticky journey....
Step 2: Software on a PC wired to the bioprinter instructs a stepper motor attached to the robotic arm to move and lower the pump head (C) with the second syringe, which begins printing a mold. The mold looks like three hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern. Step 3: A matchbox-size triangulation sensor (D) sitting beside the printing surface tracks the tip of each syringe as it moves along the x-, y-, and z- axes....
What does low power mode do? So, what’s the catch? Low power mode reduces the amount of juice your device needs, so it’s not quite running on all cylinders. It works in more or less the same way whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android phone. This mode will automatically kick in when your battery level drops below a certain point, but you can customize where that trigger is, and even turn the mode on manually if you’re happy with the compromises it makes....
From 1998 to 2011, five different space agencies assembled the the largest structure ever built in space. In the beginning, NASA thought the International Space Station would last through 2015. Well, it’s 2015 now, and the station’s 15-year anniversary just passed. It’s holding up pretty well for such an old-timer. Could it survive another 15 years? Over the past few years, the ISS’s life expectancy has been extended to 2020, and then 2024....
This year’s version introduced a new hitting function called “perfect perfect,” which rewards players for getting the timing and the placement of a hit exactly right. But, just like in the real game of baseball, great contact on the ball doesn’t always mean a home run. “I might hit the ball as hard as I possibly can with that batter at the best launch angle,” said Chris Gill, director of gameplay and former pro baseball player, “but if I’m playing in the polo grounds and it’s 500 feet to center field, I might hit a 430 foot fly ball to the center fielder....
But experts think you can make tokamaks in other shapes. Some believe that making tokamaks smaller and leaner could make them better at handling plasma. If the fusion scientists proposing it are right, then it could be a long-awaited upgrade for nuclear energy. Thanks to recent research and a newly proposed reactor project, the field is seriously thinking about generating electricity with a “spherical tokamak.” “The indication from experiments up to now is that [spherical tokamaks] may, pound for pound, confine plasmas better and therefore make better fusion reactors,” says Steven Cowley, director of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory....
This year, Spotify’s personalized rundown of your 2021 soundtrack features your most-played artists, songs, genres and even a music mood board in a click-through interactive story. You can now also “blend” your year of music with that of a friend’s into a melded playlist. (The mood board and blended playlists are new this year.) All of this raises the question: What’s the idea behind showing users how they consumed music?...
HiJENKS is the successor to a similar weapon, the Counter-electronics High-Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. Both weapons were designed to disable electronics without using physical force, such as an explosive blast or the kinetic force from impact. Making a weapon that can disable electronics without causing physical damage to its target is hard, and it might be part of why the Air Force is open to new delivery systems, other than a missile, in this latest iteration....
Printed on an Objet Connex500 printer capable of 600 dpi in the x and y axes, the vinyl analogs are reproduced using a custom-built program that essentially converts audio files into the CAD data necessary to reproduce the analog audio in the printed record grooves–a feat made possible by the relatively high-degree resolution now available in commercially marketed 3-D printers. This resolution is still an order of magnitude or two lower than the resolution of actual pressed vinyl–hence the lackluster sound you get from the 3-D printed records–but the fact that you can do it at all is impressive....
The feature has been available for some time to Google One users on the Premium tier ($100 a year), so if you’re renting cloud storage from the big G, you can also use this feature, no matter what device you have. Setting it up the first time is not as intuitive as you’d hope, but once you’ve enabled it, it’ll be way easier to turn on and off whenever you need an extra layer of security....
But you can also revolutionize the way you use the program by changing how tabs propagate during a browsing session. You can rearrange and pin them, of course, but you can also shift their position down to the side of your screen rather than along the top. The option just made its way back to the latest edition of Safari on macOS, but other browsers have vertical tabs, too. While it might not sound like a major change, it can make a big difference to your browsing experience....
Before he retired from McGill University, Pieter Sijpke used to give his architecture students some pretty cool homework. He once told the class, “I want to be drinking in a snow bar by Friday.” His students went outside and got to work, and sure enough, “we had 50 people inside the snow bar by Friday afternoon.” Sijpke is originally from Holland, where water is usually found in liquid form. So when he moved to Canada, he was fascinated by snow and ice....
It’s easy for reports to get overblown, so we spoke to the folks at AV-Comparatives to get to the crux of the matter. They’re an independent organization that tests the effectiveness of security software on PCs and phones to find what actually works (and what should be avoided like the plague). Here’s what they had to say about the prevalence of Android malware, and what you can do about it....
If your phone doesn’t automatically download the update or prompt you to do so, get started by opening the settings app, tapping General, and selecting Software Update. You’ll have the option to download and install iOS 15.7 or Upgrade to iOS 16. Choose the latter to get the brand new lock screen customization features. There’s a lot to dig into within the hefty update, but before you get bogged down in the details, take a few minutes to mess around with the lock screen settings....
