Victor (VC921) – $19.90 This meter feels like a piece of crap. The case is all plastic and wide enough that it will have to sit in the back pocket of your jeans. I dislike the aesthetics of this model so much that I have banished it to my battery room. This meter cannot measure current at all, though that’s common in the mini-meter world. That said, the clunky old Victor has a some cool tricks that the other meters do not have....
The Transporters, developed by a team at the U.K.’s Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, entices autistic children to look at expressions by superimposing actor’s faces onto the fronts of animated toy boats, cable cars, and other kid-friendly vehicles. Kids with autism tend to like mechanical objects with predictable movements. (Although, considering that autism is about four times more common in boys, let’s not overlook a built-in love affair with cars and trucks....
Does chicken even taste like chicken anymore? Maryn McKenna dives deep into the world of antibiotics and modern farming that have made today’s poultry. Big Chicken lays bare the issues of our food system while maintaining a glimmer of hope. Read an excerpt here. The factories offered a shining chance at a new life for the young women who worked there, delicately painting watch faces with glowing radium-inbued paint. A glow suffused their clothes, their skin, and eventually lead to their deaths in a little-known chapter of American history explored by Kate Moore in The Radium Girls....
Eggs were in the news again in 2018 when a report from China on half a million people noted a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease (mainly hemorrhagic stroke) in people who regularly ate eggs, for reasons that remain uncertain but could be due their to contribution to protein intake, as suggested by previous studies in Japan, which has one of the highest intakes of eggs in the world. But now the doom merchants are back, warning that eggs can kill....
Load up Tab Maker in your browser and click Gallery to get a bit of initial inspiration. You’ll see some of the customization possibilities: Photos of space and pictures of cats and dogs are perfect examples of what Tab Maker can do, but it can display images of just about anything. By default, that page shows a Google search box and shortcuts to some of your most frequently visited online destinations, but you don’t have to settle for the default....
The University of California, Davis tested the effects of storage temperature on all kinds of different wine containers–bottles, with or without corks, boxes, bags, bags in boxes. It’s the first study to test all of these prominent ways wine is stored–sorry to canned wine devotees–and it found that the bag-in-box wine familiar to anyone who’s ever been 18 years old is the most vulnerable to temperature changes. Wine at hot or even just warm temperatures (they tested 68 degrees and 104 degrees Fahrenheit) has a tendency to turn gross, changing color to a darker red and bringing out a vinegar flavor....
In the video above 100 Kilobots flock together toward a light source. That may look easy enough for a group of robots (it’s really not, but whatever), but in the second video we see groups of Kilobots similarly seeking out a light source, this time constrained by variously shaped objects that they are carrying. One object is itself moving, repeatedly bending at a mechanically actuated joint at its center. The Kilobots, imbued as they are with swarm intelligence, don’t even get flustered....
The sporting video above is a demonstration of something iRobot and others have been working on for a long time–robotic actuators that are both useful but also safe to use in human environments. The robots that will someday populate our homes and workplaces need to be able to manipulate the physical world around them but for obvious reasons we don’t want them to operate like heavy machinery, with powerful metal actuators and bone-crushing force....
These are among the dozens of rare scenes captured by Doc Ricketts, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)’s robotic rover. For the past many months the 12-foot-long, 10,000-pound submersible has been exploring the undersea canyons off central California—a gateway to the Pacific Ocean’s abyssal plain and the many curiosities that thrive on it. With the rover’s powerful HD cameras and LED lights, MBARI researchers can detect and record wildlife that have hardly ever been glimpsed upon by human eyes....
How are plants so efficient? They’re able to take advantage of some quirks in quantum mechanics, often called quantum weirdness. When a photon hits a plant’s special light-sensing chromatophore, it releases a quantum particle of energy called an exciton. Eventually the exciton makes its way to the part of a cell where it’s absorbed and be put to use in the body. Thanks to quantum physics, no energy is lost in the process....
The Camp fire that engulfed the Northern California town of Paradise is already tied for the deadliest fire California has ever seen. Officials have confirmed 63 fatalities as of Friday, and with more than 600 people unaccounted for, there could be more to come. The mayor of Paradise told the BBC that 90 percent of the town’s residential area is destroyed, and indeed the fire is California’s most destructive on record....
“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release. “This is what we’ve all been waiting for.” Voyager 2 is now more than 11 billion miles from the sun—about 122 times farther than Earth is from our star. Despite traveling at the speed of light, communications from the probe take more than 16 hours to reach the colossal antennas of the Deep Space Network, which listens for the faint pings from California, Spain, and Australia....
That’s a big police drone taking off, unfurling a net, and pursuing a standard-sized quadcopter across a parking lot. Here’s the attack from another angle: The police drone has all the grace of a mechanical jellyfish trying to snag a crab. After catching the quadcopter, the arresting drone sets it down gently. One fewer hostile drone in the sky, with minimal damage to the machine itself. It’s not the first drone to catch drones with a net, but it might be the first police drone to go into service explicitly for that purpose....
This month, a flotilla of spacecraft is set blast off into space with a one-way ticket to one of the solar system’s most mysterious objects: Mars. Two launches have succeeded, and on Thursday, it was NASA’s turn. All three missions are tasked with helping answer a question that has puzzled scientists for decades—is there, or was there ever, life on the red planet? Mars is a dead, cold desert world with a wispy atmosphere....
NASA will broadcast the undocking process starting tomorrow at 7am Eastern. Sadly, the fiery funeral will not be broadcast, but viewers will be able to see a 55-foot robotic arm remove the vessel from the space station beforehand. Watch it here:
Reflections from wet roads can confuse cameras; and dirt and condensation from fog and mist can disrupt sensors, making it hard for cars to accurately perceive the world around them. Additionally, snow and rain have an effect on the frictions of the tires and impact how cars drive. Waymo, the self-driving car company from Google’s parent Alphabet, has a plan for keeping its path clear. It involves using what it calls the Waymo Driver—the core technologies steering its autonomous vehicles—as mobile weather stations, helping the company understand the detailed conditions in which their vehicles are operating and hopefully make better decisions on the road....
“If nearly all [the] population adopted self-imposed measures we would not have to confront the possibility of secondary lockdowns as well as the possibility that we may find our medical systems overwhelmed during the peaks of epidemics,” Ganna Rozhnova, an infectious disease modeler at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and coauthor of the new findings, said in an email to Popular Science. “Overall, it appears to be a relatively cheap solution that would not disrupt economical and societal fabric as much as a lockdown does....
Here’s what you need to know: How does Ebola work? Ebola is actually a group of viruses that appear to be spread by bats to humans and other primates such as apes and chimpanzees. It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, poop, vomit, urine, breast milk, and semen. It can enter a person’s body through cuts in the skin, or through mucous membranes—tissues that line the eyes, nose, mouth, urethra, and vagina....
In 2017, the panel voted for the number 69: the number of Americans killed by lawnmowers every year (they compared it to two, the number of Americans killed by immigrant terrorists). This year’s take is a bit less whimsical. The winning stat for 2018 is 90.5: the percent of all plastic waste that’s never been recycled. It comes from a 2017 study in the journal Science called “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made....
1. Withered on the vine Farmers frequently seed more crops than they think they’ll sell to backstop against leaf-eating pests, catastrophic weather, and sudden spikes in demand. If growers don’t need the excess, they’ll let it sit and rot in the fields rather than pay to harvest it. Producers don’t weigh their unused acres, so we can only estimate how much goes untouched: around 7 percent each year. 2. Vanished on the way Researchers know lots of food gets lost on its journey from the farm to the grocery store, but they struggle to figure out what part of the trip is the most wasteful....
