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On the set, the movements of puppeteers are transferred to animated characters in real time. Typically, digital TV ‘toons are computer-generated, because motion-capture-based animation takes too long to produce, but Henson’s technology saves months of production time. It also allows for more lifelike scenes. The real-time rendering lets the puppeteers improvise and play off one another, creating a less scripted feel. As a result, Sid is visually crisp, but with interactions that can be just as nuanced as real life....

Since 2015, Pioneer DJ has made XDJ-RX all-in-one DJ systems for DJs who don’t need the complete features of two CDJ-3000s and a DJM-900NXS2 but do need to keep $5,000 in their pockets. These $2,000 2-channel performance systems can operate on their own with Rekordbox-prepared USB sticks or as DJ controllers for Rekordbox software on a computer. The Pioneer DJ XDJ-RX3 system improves significantly on the XDJ-RX2, but is it finally the no-brainer all-in-one Rekordbox system that DJs desire?...

Cancer Alley snakes 85 miles along both banks of the Mississippi, forming a patchwork of sugarcane plantations and petrochemical complexes, the former with a legacy of slavery and soil degradation and the latter with a legacy of spills, explosions, and widespread pollution. As industry has closed in, breathing room has been hard to come by. Many people who live on the industrial fenceline are fearful for their lives. At one fenceline, in Welcome, St....

We rarely think about where it all comes from, but we should. According to a new report on the full life cycle of the world’s plastic production, the long-term environmental results are nothing short of a catastrophe. The report from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) finds the production of plastics — from extraction to manufacture to disposal and steps in between — is a significant source of carbon pollution and set to become a major driver of climate change....

Fact: A special sex hat saved peregrine falcons from extinction By Sara Chodosh Most of us are probably squeamish about talking in too much detail about animals’ sex lives. The associations with bestiality, I guess? Whatever it is, the vast majority of us are grossed out by it. I think that’s why I harbor such an undying appreciation for the folks who go into animal husbandry. They’re just so committed to learning about something that other people would rather not even think about: how to get a particular species off....

Founded by jewelry designers Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, Nervous System actually grows” one-of-a-kind bracelets, earrings, necklaces, and brooches from two of the most unlikely of technological advancements. The first is the open-source programming initiative called Processing. Rosenkrantz and Louis-Rosenberg used Processing to build two algorithms (a particle system one called Radiolaria and a diffusion limited aggregation called Dendrite), which users can manipulate via applets on the Nervous System site....

The first step, says company President Sam Bousfield, is to build a racing plane using a state-of-the-art piston engine, similar to the one in your car only bigger. Piston engines were abandoned in large planes shortly after World War II. Today’s commercial planes have either jet or turboprop engines — technologies based on turbines that generate plenty of power but also guzzle gas. With fuel prices expected to rise, Bousfield sees great potential for the Renaissance design, which he estimates will require one-third the gas of its jet-engine competitors — and fly just as fast....

Don’t feel bad if you’re clueless about your dust. Scientists are not that far ahead of you in terms of understanding the sources and health risks of indoor air and particles. That’s an issue, because people spend a lot of time indoors. Indeed, the average American stays within four walls for almost 90% of their day. So knowing more about how your indoor environment affects your health is vital. To better quantify environmental influences on health, researchers have begun using an “exposome” approach, which considers every last environmental exposure an individual experiences over a lifetime....

Education of the masses on the reality of it and how it affects us personally. —Jason Gibbons Stop driving the car or mini-van 6 blocks to the store and 8 blocks to the gym. It’s not that hard to walk a little, and might help your health conditions. —Blair Whitney The solution is very very simple, or at least obvious: Encourage through any channels available a massive decrease in fossil fuel consumption/emissions....

The maneuver is known as air-to-air refueling (AAR), in-flight refueling, or even just tanking. It plays a vital role in extending the range of fighter planes, and it saves air forces precious time by enabling their planes to cover vast distances without needing to land in possibly unfriendly countries. In the 1990 Gulf War, for example, F-15 fighter jets flew 14-hours non-stop from Virginia to Kuwait—with seven AARs en-route! And just recently, Airbus announced that it had completed, for the first time, a step towards “automatic” air refueling—more on that breakthrough down below....

Previously, the amygdala, an almond shaped area of the brain, was thought to be the brain’s main region for processing fear. But new research from the University of Iowa shows that it may be more complicated than that. Scientists incited feelings of panic in three female patients with damaged amygdalae — women who normally exhibit no signs of fear. This suggests that feelings of intense, overwhelming fear (panic) are located in a different part of the brain than normal fear....

“We have made a system that can take someone with no real skills of excavation and make them into an expert operator, way sooner than would normally be possible,” says Reuben Brewer, a roboticist who led the project. His team at SRI International, a non-profit research institute headquartered in California, has transformed an unwieldy excavator into a smart one with a gamified feel. Traditional excavators have non-intuitive controllers. To move the scooper up and down, the operator needs to execute a right-left motion on the joysticks and levers from within the vehicle....

But this cheetah wasn’t just exceptional due to her advanced age. She came to the zoo at six weeks old, and was raised by Cathryn Hilker, the founder of the Cincinnati Zoo’s Cat Ambassador program. From kittenhood, Sarah was raised alongside an Anatolian shepherd dog—a practice that is relatively common for cheetahs in captivity. Sarah made a lifetime companion of her dog friend, who was named Alexa, until the dog passed away a few years ago....

BOSGAME U56 Mini PC $369.99 (Was $499.99) Several things stood out to us about the U56, but we were especially impressed by the fact that it has a Ryzen 5 5600U processor, 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM (memory) given its ultra low price. You should have plenty of space for a healthy library of games, and shouldn’t experience too much slowdown unless you crank up their settings. The computer is also fast enough to run productivity software like the Microsoft Office suite without breaking a sweat....

If you want them to learn while having fun at the same time, giving them educational toys is the way to go. For starters, you can have them tinker with Petoi Bittle: Palm-Sized Robot Dog for STEM & Fun, on sale for just $299 (reg $329). The Bittle kit comes with a puzzle-like frame and demo codes kids and adults can experiment with, and it’s highly programmable with C++ and Python coding as well as extensible with Raspberry Pi and Arduino....

But it isn’t just as simple as nurture over nature. Children with fearful dispositions are more likely to grow up with conservative values, too. Researchers at University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana confirmed these theories in an important, if not exactly earth-shattering, study published in Psychological Science recently. Psychological scientist Richard Fraley and his colleagues looked at early childhood and youth development data from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)....

Around six feet beneath the city 40 miles north of Rome, the researchers found evidence of a bath complex, large homes, a marketplace, public buildings and monuments, temples, and water pipes used by the city’s locals, which may have numbered in the thousands, says author Martin Millett, a professor of classical archaeology at Cambridge. “What’s really interesting is not just what you can see, but how clearly you can see it,” says Millett....

In a new paper out in Science Robotics, the team behind this creation breaks down how they made this tuna-like robot—a machine that can tense up or relax its tail joint to move at different speeds. This mechanism has allowed the tuna bot to reach high speeds while also conserving energy, a method that could one day help improve swimming robots and even underwater vehicles. Many robotic researchers have been piloting their own robo-fish....

We’re all pretty sick of staying home by now. It’s been at least a couple long months of isolation for most Americans at this point, and as news about COVID-19 hotspots like New York City has gotten progressively less dire, more people have been itching to get out and asking at what point we’ll open back up again. That sentiment has spurred some states to start re-opening businesses and letting people back into public spaces....

IBM was careful to say it didn’t build a realistic simulated complete brain– “Rather, we have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von-Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture,” IBM researchers say in an abstract (PDF) of their new paper. It meets DARPA’s metric of 100 trillion synapses, which is based on the number of synapses in the human brain. This is part of DARPA’s cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE)....