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While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments. OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet....

The study of mammals’ circadian rhythms has come a long way since then, but in humans, circadian medicine is still in its infancy. However, understanding how our bodies rhythms influence our receptivity to chemicals could have big effects. Researchers at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have created a “human circadian atlas” with information about how our circadian rhythms affect different parts of the body. They hope it will help make the idea of personalized medicine built around the body clock more mainstream, and improve patient outcomes....

About 10,000 species of birds have reduced or absent external genitalia as adults. Many have normal penises as embryos, but as they develop, their penises stop growing and shrink away. (Despite that, male birds still manage to fertilize female birds through internal insemination, just like humans. We’ll get to how in a moment.) To study how male birds lose their penises, the UF researchers examined the embryonic development of birds with penises (ducks and emus) and birds without penises (chicks), among other creatures....

At 4:53 p.m, a former Army surgeon and inventor named John Croushorn strapped an inflatable tourniquet around the limp man’s chest. “We were all covered in blood. The nurse was applying pressure, and I told her to remove her hands,” Croushorn tells Popular Science. “She said ‘No, blood’s just going to go everywhere again.’ And I said ‘It’s okay, you can take your hands away.’ So she did, and she was shocked....

What makes the marginalization of EVs seem so weird is that electric cars once ruled the roost. The first electric-powered carriages appeared in the 1830s, roughly half a century before gasoline-fueled automobiles. In 1900, the battery-powered Columbia was the best-selling car in America, and the land speed record was held by an electric car driven by a Belgian racer known as The Red Devil. More than two dozen electric car companies vied for market share during the early 20th century....

To conserve energy, the practice of turning the lights off when they’re not in use is often recommended. However, it’s not that simple. The energy required to light the room largely depends on the type of bulb. Incandescent light bulbs—the least efficient type of lighting—should always be turned off when they aren’t needed. Meanwhile, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), which are more affected by the number of times they are switched on and off, should only be turned off when leaving the room for more than 15 minutes....

The unusual move comes as the project faces yet another delay in its mission to bring crude oil from tar sands fields in Canada, down through the midsection of the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf Coast. For those of you new to Keystone XL, it’s fair to ask what an oil pipeline has to do with John Kerry, and why this particular pipeline has been taking so long to get off the drawing board....

Now, on to a recap of last week’s news. Lots of new gadgets appeared in Europe The big story last week was the IFA conference happening in Berlin. Europe’s biggest consumer electronics show unleashed a massive wave of new gadgets on the world, including everything from laptops to a massive gaming throne that will make you feel like the emperor of video games. Check out our roundups of the best new gadgets here and here....

The Windows-powered Surface Neo and the smaller, Android-powered Surface Duo don’t use one flexible screen to fold, but rather a pair of screens connected by a hinge. They’re both scheduled to arrive around the holiday period of 2020 and, frankly, they seem pretty interesting. All told, 2019 has been a fascinating year for new gadgets and Google still has its announcement event coming up. Maybe a true tech miracle will come through and this will finally be the year that robot butlers come to fruition....

Reminiscent of the gun-turrets of World War II bombers, the Millennium Falcon’s rotating guns gave Luke Skywalker his first taste of aerial combat, and we can expect to see the Falcon’s crew dispense with some pursuing TIE Fighters. The trailer also highlights Kylo Ren, the new Sith leader who pledged to Vader. As Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri correctly notes, the biggest problem with the prequels wasn’t Jar Jar Binks, but how completely unconvincing Hayden Christensen’s Anakin was as a love-mad Jedi whose passion drove him to evil....

Soccer Return date: Already back, but the quarterfinals starts July 30 While several European soccer clubs opted to blast pre-recorded cheers in stadiums and telecasts, Major League Soccer decided to skip the fake theatrics and lean hard on improved camera technology for faster tracking and tighter shots. The results have gotten positive reviews so far: Sports commentators and writers say they like the natural soundtrack of players yelling across the field and coaches shouting spittle on the sidelines....

But there are also plenty of ways to boost your memory and improve your ability to fully grasp new information or even a skill. It involves various techniques, like creating a memory palace or employing a spaced repetition system. You can get to grips with these techniques with the Become a Super-Learner and Speed Reading Bundle, which is on sale during our Back to Education Event until 8/24. Rated 4/5 stars by verified purchasers, this 7-course bundle is designed to help all learners keep their minds sharp and continue honing their skills in school or at work....

Four centuries later, a crowd-funded spacecraft, the LightSail 2, has become the latest to do just that. While wind as we know it certainly doesn’t blow in space, the ship can directly harness something else: modest nudges from sunbeams that tweak its path as it orbits around the Earth. The Planetary Society, a private space exploration organization, spearheaded the development of the spacecraft to prove that the tiny force exerted when light hits the backside of its shiny sail suffices as a form of transportation—a technology that could someday open up new types of space missions and provide crucial insight into destructive solar storms....

Unusual weather, in which temperatures deviate from long-term averages, is becoming more common as we warm the planet. Compared to pre-industrial times, we’re seeing more frequent heat waves, warm winters, and—in some places—cold snaps. But, in boiling frog fashion, we find such temperature extremes unremarkable after just a few years of repeated events, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. An analysis of 2....

In the study, 500 participants were asked how much they enjoyed different examples of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter foods. Then, they were asked to take a series of personality assessment quizzes to evaluate their aggression, each of the Dark Triad measures (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), everyday sadism (verbal, physical, and vicarious), as well as Big Five personality traits, which include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness. The researchers found that people who liked bitter foods were also more likely to score highly in measures of psychopathy, sadism, and aggression....

Mars is a pretty small planet. It’s diameter is just over half that of Earth, and it has only about one tenth of our planet’s mass. Because of its compact body, Mars may have never stood a chance at keeping its watery surface. New research shows that Mars’s small size and weak gravity made it easier for water to escape the planet’s thin atmosphere and run away into space. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

While mass die-offs on this scale are unusual, there have been many cases in the past several decades where large numbers of marine mammals have perished in infectious disease outbreaks—and climate change is likely to make these events even more frequent, scientists reported on June 18 in the journal Global Change Biology. The researchers examined data collected over the past six decades to determine what circumstances were associated with mass die-offs of whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, and sea otters....

Classical computers have binary switches that represent information as either zero or one. The quantum equivalent of that, called qubits, can represent information as one, zero, or a combination of the two. That’s because instead of having bits that store either on-or-off states, qubits store waveforms. In the quantum field, IBM’s researchers have been hard at work, updating their suite of hardware and software inside a device that aims to solve problems deemed difficult or impossible for the best classical computers available today....

The penguin-friendly bot is named ECHO, an autonomous, remote-controlled ground vehicle created by the Marine Animal Remote Sensing Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. ECHO is part of a larger international, multidisciplinary research effort called MARE, which monitors the impact of human-induced change on the Southern Ocean. “We all know that the world is changing, and that change will have dramatic effects on biodiversity and on ecosystems, especially in very remote areas, like Antarctica,” says Daniel P....