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I started working from home about six months ago and there are still some things I find quite difficult. If you’ve recently found yourself in a remote working situation, you may be having a hard time, too. So let’s learn from the experts: some of Popular Science and Popular Photography’s most experienced work-from-homers. Set reasonable expectations When you no longer have to leave home for work, it can be tempting to fantasize about all the extra time you’ll have to cross things off your personal to-do list: cleaning, learning to cook, and reading shelves of books, to name a few....

You don’t have to give up your title of the funniest person at the office—there can be a happy ending. Use these three simple steps to quickly turn WebP photos into classic, easy-going JPEGs. WebP as in webpages “I didn’t download a webpage,” you might have scoffed when you thought you downloaded a JPEG or a PNG file and found a WebP instead. Don’t let this file format confuse you, though—WebP files are images, but their name derives from the fact that they’re optimized for the web....

During World War II, a devoted group of botanists guarded the world’s oldest collection of plants over the 28-month-long siege of Leningrad. Nearly a dozen of them starved to death, valuing the survival of the collection over their temptation to eat seeds. These scientists at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in what is today St. Petersburg, Russia displayed extraordinary dedication to ensure an invaluable biological collection had a future, even when they did not....

I had never questioned their name either, but rather quietly, to myself, word-associated bread-and-butter with “reliable”—just like the idiom. What reliable pickles! Always perfect for snacking, on a burger, or chopped up in an egg salad. But no, that’s not quite right either. After decades in the dark, a lightbulb went off when I read this passage in Amy Thielen’s The New Midwestern Table (Clarkson Potter, 2013), this month’s pick for the Saveur Cookbook Club: I realized the answer may be in the name itself: bread-and-butter pickles....

This shouldn’t really come as a shock to any of us. It’s a well-documented fact that patients admitted to the hospital on a weekend have a higher mortality rate than those whose emergencies happen to fall on a weekday, which experts have attributed to understaffing and delayed test results. A group of doctors and researchers in Toronto wondered if a similar phenomenon might apply to the holiday season. A brief editorial note that this particular study is in the annual British Medical Journal Christmas issue, a special volume dedicated to weird, funny, or seasonal studies....

The team of researchers from the UK and Australia, whose findings were published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used sophisticated radiocarbon and luminescence dating techniques on fossils found in Mt Cripps in northwest Tasmania to determine that some species were in existence until at least 41,000 years ago. In other words, the megafauna clearly inhabited Tasmania when humans first arrived there 43,000 years ago....

Marvin Minsky, who passed away at age 88 on Sunday evening, was one of those four researchers. In the 60 years since then, the industries of computer science and machine learning have grown tremendously. Minsky proceeded to found MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which is still a hub of A.I. research. There, he is remembered for not only his life’s achievements and diversions, which span building the first neural network simulator and advising on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but his vision for what artificial intelligence should be....

Recently accepted by the Astronomical Journal, the study maps the infrared wavelengths emitted across Europa. Different materials in the crust give off different wavelengths, providing insight into what Europa’s made of. One of the regions unveiled by the new map could make a perfect landing site for future spacecraft, according to astronomer Mike Brown, a co-author on the paper. Although there are currently no plans in the works to put a lander on Europa, a mission informally named ‘Europa Clipper’ could fly by the small moon after launching in the 2020s, and scientists are pushing to get a lander onboard....

Scientists used computer models to simulate how meltwater will feed new streams and lakes across western North America, and found that retreating glaciers could create thousands of miles of new habitat for Pacific salmon by the end of the century. Understanding where and when these piscine frontiers will emerge will be key for future conservation plans, the researchers reported on December 7 in Nature Communications. “This showcases how climate change is fundamentally transforming ecosystems; what is now under ice is becoming a brand new river,” says Jonathan Moore, who leads the Salmon Watersheds Lab at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and coauthored the new findings....

“Weedy Seadragon Life Cycle” won the Expert’s Choice award for Illustration in the 2016 Vizzies. See all 10 of the winners. This article was originally published in the March/April 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “The 2016 Vizzies.”

Drug companies pledge to vet vaccines for safety and efficacy before they reach public use The race to create a coronavirus vaccine has been unlike any other. Before the pandemic, it took years or even decades for a new vaccine to make it through clinical trials. Now, immunologists and other researchers around the world are fast-tracking these trials to bring a vaccine to market as fast as possible. But with that speed comes concerns about safety and effectiveness....

A new study paints a frightening future picture of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. The study published yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience finds striking evidence that Thwaites is eroding along its underwater base. Thwaites is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and one of the defining characteristic of this area is that the majority of the ice sheet is “grounded” on a bed that lies below the sea level instead of on dry land....

Fast forward almost 160 years, and that quote is serving as the inspiration for a new project to digitize intriguing and, in many cases, endangered plants. Called “Endless Forms,” the initiative brings together 17 research institutions in an effort to scan and share two million plant specimens over the next three years. Matthew Pace, an orchid expert with the New York Botanical Garden, is one of the project coordinators. He says the digitization will focus on plants from 15 families, including succulents, carnivorous creatures, and epiphytes, which are organisms that grow on other plants....

The ultimate application of ISS programs, at least in the near-term future, is to facilitate manned missions to Mars, something space visionaries have been pursuing for decades. But historically, space stations have played a far more integral role in deep space human exploration than just a place to develop technology. I’ve got a massive article coming this weekend about space stations and NASA, but in the meantime enjoy this gallery of some great space station concepts!...

This bridge, however, doesn’t span a stream or send pedestrians along a flyover. Instead, it rests on a laboratory floor. That’s because its concrete blocks—25 of them, each more than half a foot thick—were taken from already-existing walls. To the engineers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland who built it, the bridge is a demonstration: it shows that concrete can be reused. On October 11, they unveiled their handiwork to the public....

This ichthyosaur wasn’t just remarkable because of its massive size, according to scientists who recently analyzed a partial skeleton recovered from the Augusta Mountains. The new species notably lived just a few million years after the very first ichthyosaurs—which were roughly dog-sized—appeared in the fossil record. This means these swimmers supersized themselves much more quickly than whales did, according to research reported on December 24 in Science. “​​This fossil combined with the [other] fauna that we’re finding in Nevada is a true testament to how resilient life is, and how fast evolution can proceed if the environmental conditions are right and the opportunity is there,” says study coauthor Lars Schmitz, a paleontologist at the W....

New satellite data reveals that the “great Atlantic Sargassum belt” extends from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. This yearly bloom might be here to stay, according to a new study, published Thursday in Science. “This is the largest belt of seaweed in the world,” says the study’s lead author, Mengqiu Wang, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida. Sargassum is a brown seaweed with large, leaf-like structures and gas-filled “berries,” which allow it to stay afloat....

While Apple may constantly be making newer products every year, there is no shortage of classics that are still viable options. For example, right now you can purchase a refurbished MacBook Air 11″ in Black at a discounted rate as a part of our Refurbished Event, which runs through September 30th. The refurbished 11″ MacBook Air comes with a 5th generation Intel Core i5 processor, meaning you will be able to accomplish all of your goals quickly because of enhanced processing power....

According to an ESO release on Wednesday, the cosmic gull is mainly made up of three hefty gas clouds containing mostly hydrogen. The one that forms the wings, known as Sh2-296, is the largest and most distinct. It’s an emission nebula, which means stars infuse gas there with so much energy (in the form of radiation) that the molecules within it get excited and glow. This nebula also has dark streaks of dust that hide certain swaths of luminosity....

Unlike traditional LED displays, which are made up of liquid crystals encapsulated in a rigid casing, this LED screen, described in detail in the journal Nature on Wednesday, is wholly made out of a rubber-band-like polymer material. Here’s what to know about the new research. How a traditional LED screen works LED stands for light emitting diode, and LED electronics work in similar ways. The typical LED screens on a TV or a smartphone have several layers sandwiched into a display matrix, which has to contain the liquid crystal layer between two electrode layers, some light polarizing layers, and a RGB color mask that sits between the crystal layer and the viewer....