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Scientists long thought that nerve feedback from the stomach triggered the brain to send signals of fullness, and research has shown that both stomach stretching and the nutrients in your food play a role in telling your noggin it’s time to slow down. But until now, it wasn’t quite clear which gut nerve endings—collectively known as the vagus nerve—were involved. “We know that food in the GI is definitely important to provide feedback for the brain and regulate how much we’re going to eat,” says study author Bai Ling, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco....

Instead of expensive battery storage, utilities are turning to a low-cost alternative: For a just few hundred dollars, your electric water heater can be made to work like a battery, a fraction of the cost of a Tesla Powerwall. Here’s how it works. Why water heaters? If you’re a homeowner, you may have noticed a man-sized cylinder in your cellar. This is your water heater. Most of these heaters are powered by natural gas or electricity....

SONTE film works like an ultrathin LCD TV. It consists of a layer of conductive liquid-crystal polymer sandwiched between layers of PET plastic. Users trim the film to the size of the window and smooth it onto the glass. A semipermanent adhesive holds the film in place. Each kit comes with a quarter-size clip, which attaches to a corner of the film and plugs into a Wi-Fi–enabled electrical transformer. Once connected, users can control the panel with either an app or a traditional switch....

Ask 100 outdoor enthusiasts to write up a shopping list for a wilderness survival kit and you’ll get 100 different lists. The same is true for preppers building disaster preparedness kits or picking which everyday carry gear to bring with them. We all like different products and worry about different scenarios (and there are specialized survival kits for a variety of perilous situations). Individually, we all have different skill sets and budgets....

Super Follows let people subscribe to your content, while Tips allow them to show their appreciation with one-time payments. Finally, Ticketed Spaces grant you the ability to charge an entrance fee whenever you stream audio from Twitter’s Spaces platform. Most of these features are limited to certain users depending on location, operating systems, and follower count. Still, if you meet the criteria for one or more of these factors, you can easily apply from your account and hope the dollar bills start rolling in....

Because no matter where you live, there’s likely an abundance of plants suitable for human consumption around you that you’ve been missing out on. From flavorful mallow to ubiquitous dandelion, a lot of this flora is considered weed but offer plenty in the nutrition and flavor department. But beware, because not all sites are free for plucking, and not everything that grows is safe to consume. Fortunately, there are several plants that are fairly easy to identify, and also make a tasty–and healthy–tea....

Experimenting with Gmail’s layout is another way to boost your email productivity. It can surface the most important messages first, help you avoid inbox clutter, and give you a different perspective on your mountain of emails. Click the three dots in the top-right corner of your inbox to choose how many unread emails appear on screen at once (up to 50). From the same menu, you can also opt to have the section hide itself when all your emails are read....

Part of that success is how easy it is just to jump in and start watching videos catered to your specific interests. But if you take the time to dig a little deeper you’ll find there are a variety of features and settings that can enhance your TikTok experience in all kinds of ways. If you tap on a hashtag at the bottom of any video, you’ll see recent matches for it, but you can also save it by tapping Add to Favorites....

Spring is tantalizingly close…but this weird winter isn’t over yet. So we collected 10 apps and gadgets to take the edge off the worst of the weather. With a phone that tackles everything from predicting snowfall to surviving freezing temperatures, you can stay toasty until warmer conditions return. Weatherbug Of all the weather-forecasting apps, Weatherbug excels at staying ahead of wintery weather. It can alert you to severe weather conditions, track specific storms, show radar maps for current conditions in your area, and provide detailed forecasts for the next couple of hours....

But a new study published today in the European Journal of Physics goes beyond the culinary gloriousness and focuses on how a chocolate fountain can be used to teach students about fluid dynamics, or how fluids move. A chocolate fountain is ideal for explaining how fluids move because it sends the same fluid (melted chocolate) through a series of different conditions. The chocolate is piped up to the top, runs over a dome, and falls down from the dome towards the next layer in a curtain....

The T-650 debuted at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition as a mock-up suspended in the air with a BAE-made Sting Ray torpedo attached. The torpedo, in service since the 1980s, can already be fired from ships, helicopters, and planes, where it uses sonar and navigation systems to autonomously track and hit targets. Putting it on a drone expands the range at which a ship can hunt submarines, and it also means that smaller vessels have a flexible way to fight that takes up only a minimum of deck space....

A team of aerospace engineers from the University of Arizona and NASA Ames Research Center were inspired to design a new concept for off-world aerial exploration: the Mars Sailplane. Their concept, detailed recently in the journal Aerospace, describes a plane that relies not on any motor or engine, but the power of the wind to soar above the clouds. Creating a vehicle capable of long-term flight on Mars has historically been a difficult task to get off the ground....

The beautiful image shows a detailed view of the ice-covered landscape. The photograph was taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto last July, gathering a stupendous amount of information. This new image shows a strange difference in color between the yellowish high elevations and lighter cream-colored low elevations. Scientists are still trying to decipher the reason for the color gradient. “One possibility is that the yellow terrains may correspond to older methane deposits that have been more processed by solar radiation than the bluer terrain,” said New Horizons researcher Will Grundy....

A singer’s impossible peak You might imagine Mariah Carey or Maria Callas would top the scales, but Brazilian soprano Georgia Brown set the bar by hitting a G in the high 10th octave. Musical experts later confirmed the note, which translates to about 25,000 hertz, earning Brown a Guinness World Record in 2004. A medical device’s dramatic whine Ultrasound machines create energy waves so fast and furious that they can pass through bone, fat, tissue, and other masses....

The concept would allow the Department of Defense to create an aircraft that can fly along coastal waters, deliver supplies to warships, and go underwater for reconnaissance missions for short periods of time. DARPA would also like their submersible aircraft to be able to float on the surface for about three days to provide aid to stranded personnel. Designers have until December 1 at 4:00 pm Eastern to submit proposals....

Carbomorph is essentially a carbon filler within a matrix of biodegradable polyester, a medium that can pass through the printer head of a machine like the Bits and Bytes BFB3000 that the Warwick team has now used to create everything from touch-sensitive gaming controllers, a motion-sensing glove, and a mug that knows how much liquid is in it. These things are pretty far from printing, say, a smartphone or a computer in one go, yet they represent an important step forward....

Subspecies Panthera leo leo, which has a range covering parts of India and western and central Africa, will be listed as endangered. Another subspecies that lives mostly in eastern and southern Africa, Panthera leo melanochaita will be listed as threatened. “The lion is one of the planet’s most beloved species and an irreplaceable part of our shared global heritage,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in a statement....

“Our sense of smell is terrible compared to most other organisms,” says Robbie Girling, an associate professor of agroecology at the University of Reading in the UK. “[Pollinators] really use odors to kind of navigate and move around and communicate with one another.” But Girling, along with other researchers at the University of Reading, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and the University of Birmingham have found air pollutants might throw pollinators off the scent....

Alexa already has the ability to detect what Prasad calls “global” ambient sounds or sound events. These are things like glass breaking, or a fire alarm, smoke alarm going off. Those are events that make your home more safe while you’re away, he says. If anything goes wrong, Alexa can send you a notification. It can also detect more innocuous sounds like your dog barking or your partner snoring. Now, Prasad and his team are taking this pre-trained model for global sound events that they built using thousands of real world sound samples, and are offering a way for users to create alerts for their own custom sound events by manually adding 5-10 examples for a specific sound that they would like Alexa to keep an ear out for at home....