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Hot Wheels has created a classic 1:64 scale P1 in either Volcano Orange or Supernova Silver, and Lego has a model in Volcano Yellow as part of its Speed Champions series that you can wrench on. It even comes with a minifig driver and orange cones for marking your course. For a while now, Scalextric has been making yellow and orange McLaren P1 slot cars ready for racing, and Maisto has created a 1:14 scale radio-controlled P1 with working headlights and tail lights....

Leap Motion, a company that makes hand-tracking devices and software, wants users to be able to use finger gestures in the air to select items instead, to more seamlessly interact with objects in a virtual space. “Everybody knows how to use their hands,” says Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald. “Right now all input is binary. Fingers can be the solution to that problem.” Leap Motion has been tracking hands and fingers with a desk-based module since 2012, but its technology hasn’t really made perfect sense until the dawn of virtual reality....

When you eat a sour food, the acid in it triggers a response in the taste receptor cells found on your taste buds. The taste receptors release chemical compounds designed to lock into special nerve cells found on the tongue, which then relay messages to the brain. Previous studies have suggested that eating sour foods causes the release of serotonin, a compound that can affect many basic bodily functions such as appetite, sleep, memory, mood, and sexual desire....

December’s rise of the Omicron variant caused a huge swell of coronavirus infections in the US. So many people have been infected that the proportion of Americans who have anti-N antibodies, a type of antibody that shows up in the blood post-COVID infection but not after vaccination, rose from 34 percent of the population in December to 58 percent in February. The highest bump occurred in the youngest cohorts. In December, 44 percent of children aged 0 to 11 years had natural antibodies....

The food labels you see in grocery stores are getting a makeover. By January 2022, products that have been bioengineered, or have an ingredient in them that’s been bioengineered, will require a disclosure telling consumers about the presence of GMOs, thanks to a mandate from Congress. You might already see this new label make its way onto select foods and brands starting this year. The new labeling system might make people wonder, as they frequently have in the past—are GMOs safe?...

Below, some of the best stud finders currently on the market. This electronic stud finder from Tavool can detect studs, pipes, and live wires behind up to 1.5 inches of drywall and plaster and notifies you with visual and audio cues. It comes with a Deep Scan mode for even thicker surfaces, and can tell you the material of the studs, as well as where their exact centers lie. It’s outfitted with an ergonomic grip, which makes it great for projects that require more than one scan in a single go....

This may not spell the total end of Kepler’s mission, though. NASA will still try to figure out a way to use the spacecraft for whatever scientific research it can manage in its current condition, with one reaction wheel short of a workable set. The agency put out a call for scientific white papers proposing alternate uses for Kepler a few weeks ago. Kepler was originally designed to hunt for Earth-sized exoplanets in the galaxy, and during its initial four-year mission, it found more than 100....

Sierra Nevada is not expected to start flying its Space Shuttle-like Dream Chaser vehicle to the ISS until 2019, but it’s expected to be a game-changer for science. Sierra Nevada’s missions will include an option that will have a relatively soft landing and can be quickly and easily unloaded, like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Sierra Nevada anticipates being able to return cargo from the ISS and recover it on Earth within 3-6 hours....

On April 22nd and 23rd, the interplanetary space probe used its long-range telescopic camera to capture images of two stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. The images, which took 6.5 hours to beam back to earth, indicate that the stars appear to be located in different places in the sky than when we observe them from Earth. “It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in a NASA release....

Since 2011, overdose deaths have risen by 54 percent, up from 41,340 to 63,632 in 2016. But within those deaths, there are a number of trends emerging that the whole numbers don’t reveal. Here are four charts that illuminate a bit more. Just five years ago, fentanyl was one of the least common drugs to overdose on. Now it’s surpassed heroin as the number one. Overall overdoses have risen on average nine percent each year in the same time frame, but they haven’t been evenly distributed....

This asteroid is estimated to be between 481.2 yards and 1083 yards in diameter, and astronomers have been tracking it for some time (since 2002, in fact, hence the name). “The trajectory of this asteroid is very well known,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies tweeted on Thursday. On Saturday, it will pass Earth at a safe distance of 3.59 million miles—”about 15 times the distance of the Moon,” they tweeted....

Even if you bristle at the thought of weighing and measuring food—especially when your current self-care routine involves wearing the same pair of gym shorts for 23 days running—small steps toward increasing your understanding of current eating habits can make grocery shopping more manageable and food prep less of a chore. Even if you’re relatively lazy about tracking, it can still have an overall positive effect on your health. Here are some easy tips to get started....

In this outbreak, which started in April 2015, the mosquito-borne virus has spread throughout 26 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. To date, 50 cases have been diagnosed in the U.S. Though none has been acquired through mosquito bites in the U.S., that’s expected to change: “As spring and summer approach, bringing with them larger and more active mosquito populations, we must be fully prepared to mitigate and quickly address local transmission within the continental U....

People are capable of figuring it out, of course, and doing so astonishingly quickly. The best, like 2019 champion Philipp Weyer, solve it in less than 7 seconds. And generally, the whizzes who specialize in getting the jumbled cube back to sides of pure red, blue, green, white, yellow, and orange, make that happen in around 50 moves. While humans have been solving these puzzles for decades, it’s time for artificial intelligence’s turn: AI can now quickly compute a very efficient solution to a scrambled cube....

Excerpted from Encyclopedia of Rainbows: Our World Organized by Color by Julie Seabrook Ream, published by Chronicle Books 2017. Published with permission. Popular Science is delighted to bring you selections from new and noteworthy science-related books. If you are an author or publisher and have a new and exciting book that you think would be a great fit for our website, please get in touch! Send an email to books@popsci....

The PreSonus AudioBox GO’s design The PreSonus AudioBox GO has a footprint of 4.25 inches by 3.3 inches and a height of 1.73 inches, and it weighs in at just over half a pound, or a little more than the average smartphone. The interface features two input channels and two output channels. Input one consists of a combination TRS/XLR jack that accepts line level signals from equipment like samplers and keyboards, as well as microphones....

Most researchers and nutritionists theorized that ultra-processed food makes you overeat, on top of being high in calories, sugar, and fat while being low in fiber. To test that hypothesis, researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases recruited 20 volunteers, evenly split by gender, and kept them in a special wing of the NIH Clinical Center for 28 days straight. Nutrition studies are often plagued by having too many variables you can’t control for....

Studying wormholes is like piecing together an incomplete puzzle without knowing what the final picture is supposed to look like. You can roughly deduce what’s supposed to go in the gaps based on the completed images around it, but you can’t know for sure. That’s because there has not yet been definitive proof that wormholes are in fact out there. However, some of the solutions to fundamental equations and theories in physics suggest that such an entity exists....

The team developed something called a vector-based video codec that attempts to overcome the challenges of a typical vector display. A typical vector display features drawn lines and contoured colors on a screen (rather than the simple, geometrical map of pixels we’re all accustomed to). But it has problems–notably, areas between colors can’t be filled in well enough for a high-quality image to be displayed, the researchers say. A codec takes digital video and can both encode and decode it into a new format (in this case, a vector format)....