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Gilbert and Bartholomaus, who have been married since 2012, first met at an undergraduate research program in the Wrangell Mountains of Alaska in 2006. One day while hiking on Root Glacier, they came across a herd of soft, pillowy clumps of moss—these glacier moss balls, made of moss usually wrapped around dust or sediment, live in small herds on glaciers. After a year of extensive research in 2009, followed by return trips to the glacier for the next three summers, during which they tracked the movements of 30 individual balls using color-coded bracelets, the couple discovered that the ‘glacier mice’ moved in a slow, herd-like motion, traveling around 2....

Not many people live long enough to see their inventions change the world, but Gladys West can count herself among those few. A retired naval mathematician, West spearheaded a mathematical model of the Earth’s size and shape (a.k.a., a geoid), which is an essential layer underpinning today’s GPS networks. Since their launch in 1978, satellite navigation systems have touched nearly every aspect of both private and public life on Earth—from emergency response and power grid systems to turn-by-turn navigation and stock exchange timing....

There are other options, however. Here are some games and activities that think outside the board game and help bring family time up a notch. Board games are great, sure, but they may not be enough stimulation for families who aren’t into sitting quietly. The Outset Media scavenger hunt is designed to be played indoors or out and has minimal accessories (just decks of cards)—so it doesn’t require any real set up or small pieces that are easily lost....

The robots made their way to Greece through the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University and the work of Roboticists Without Borders. As Wired reports: The EMILY robots can pull a rescue line up to 2,400 feet, and can carry up to five people. Once the people have grabbed one, that tether can be reeled in and the people safely placed onboard a seaworthy vessel. EMILY’s batteries only last about 20 minutes, but they can be swapped out easily, allowing more trips to sea....

If you’re considering an upgrade but don’t want to spend an arm and a leg, buying refurbished is your best bet. Even Apple itself sells refurbished models of their computers, all of which have the original macOS or the most recent version and are repackaged in a brand new box with all the accessories and cables. They even offer a one-year warranty and guarantee that the units have gone through stringent functional testing and thorough cleaning....

How to get it This isn’t one of those situations where the new design will spring up on you without prompting—at least not yet. If you want to see Gmail’s new look, click on the little gear icon for your settings and click “Try the new Gmail.” If you have a Gmail account through your job or school, you’ll have to wait until an admin allows your organization to update. For now, you can switch back and forth between the two, but that likely won’t be the case forever....

Collective educational enthusiasm toward homework has ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century in the US. School districts began abolishing homework in the ‘30s and ‘40s, only for it to come roaring back as the space race kicked off in the late ‘50s and drove a desire for sharper math and science skills. It fell out of fashion again during the Vietnam War era before it came back strong in the ‘80s....

Read between the lines Understanding hotel reviews might seem as simple as counting the number of stars each patron gifted the establishment you’re considering (usually between one and five). But it’s actually the language reviewers use that matters most, according to a study published in 2016. The researchers analyzed text in 5,830 reviews of 57 hotels in Moscow, Russia, to show that recurring words and the context of the reviews are what’s truly important....

New research out of Berkeley Lab shows that not every puff is equal, and clearly outlines the factors that increase risk. Temperature, type, and age of the device all play a role in how much harmful emissions the e-cig produces, but the heat was a main point of interest. In the paper, researchers detected significant levels of 31 toxic chemicals, including formaldehyde, acrolein, propylene oxide, and previously undetected glycidol present....

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that the areas of the genome that are related to brain development have variants that may account for some of the behavior differences in different dog breeds. Their findings were published yesterday in the journal Cell, and involved citizen science projects using DNA samples and surveys from dog owners around the world. The study mapped out how dog lineages diversified and changed over time by using genomic data from over 4,000 domestic, semi-feral, and wild dogs from multiple data sets....

The beginning of 2022 brought the first trial run for our toolkit: huge numbers of COVID cases, caused by the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Virologists had to re-enact the early days of the pandemic: identifying the strain, testing its disease severity, and understanding its ability to escape the immune system. The available COVID vaccines were pitted against Omicron, and thankfully, showed good efficacy. By now, these studies were familiar, and early results were shared quickly to inform how public health officials around the world acted to protect populations....

DALL-E 2 is one of the most popular text-to-image generators available at the moment. With more than a million users, it’s no wonder that content created by it seems to be everywhere. (A lot of other text-to-image generators are either in a closed beta, like Stable Diffusion, are not available to the public, like Google’s Imagen, or are much more limited in scope, like Craiyon.) DALL-E 2 takes a text prompt, like “an astronaut riding a horse in the style of Andy Warhol,” and generates nine 1,024-pixel by 1,024-pixel images that illustrate it....

But not so weird that their vision won’t be realized. In mid-2013, some of the earliest concepts will be implemented on a stretch of road in Holland, then later, if all goes well, on blacktop across the rest of Europe. Those concepts include: glow-in-the-dark roads, asphalt paint that transforms in response to road conditions, and lanes that double as electric car chargers. Why redesign highways? “By focusing on highways instead of cars, we’re innovating the Dutch landscape to make ‘smart driving’ possible for everyone (instead of those that can afford the latest cars),” Studio Roosegaarde’s Emina Sendijarevic says over email....

“Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe,” Sheperd Doeleman, the director of EHT and a scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the audience at a National Science Foundation press conference in Washington, D.C. “Because they are so small, we’ve never seen one. We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen, and taken an image, of a black hole....

This week, Apple introduced its new Deep Fusion camera tech for the iPhone 11 as part of the iOS 13.2 software update. For the average user, photos taken under certain conditions will now look more detailed and slightly less noisy. There’s no indicator in the app like there is with Camera mode, so you won’t even know it’s working. But, those somewhat granular improvements took some serious engineering—and a whole lot of processing power—to achieve....

That’s a lot of speakers to choose from. The good news is you don’t need to worry about a host of specs or details—just a few key features that will help you choose one smart speaker over another. First, focus on size, sound quality, and price In addition to the artificial intelligence it carries—more on that later—a smart speaker has three main specifications you’ll need to consider: size, audio quality, and price....

Detergents are greener than they used to be, thanks to industry agreements and numerous state-level bans, but the chemicals they contain are still toxic in high enough concentrations. Bleach, for example, contributes to chlorine in our waterways, and many of the chemicals in our detergents don’t break down easily, only aggravating the problem. It also takes a lot of power to launder your clothes. Dryers eat up 6% of the energy used by U....

But there are going to be times when a simple screenshot isn’t enough, and you’ll need the help of text, labels, scribbles, and other annotations. Your phone and laptop come with the tools to do this built right in, and you’ve got plenty of third-party alternatives you can switch to as well. For a refresher on how to capture grabs in the first place, check out our full guide to taking a screenshot on any device....

How to clean up your Google cloud storage In Google Drive, kick things off by visiting the web interface and looking for the Storage link on the left side of the page. It should say something along the lines of “7.59GB used” underneath it. Click this link and you’ll go to a page that shows how your storage is divided between Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos (you get 15GB total), and which files are taking up space, sorted from largest to smallest....

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t get those skills back. As adults, we handle mathematical problems every day: comparing prices, measuring cooking ingredients, and calculating the time it’ll take us to run several errands, to name a few. Some of those may have us thinking more than necessary, but it’s never too late to get better and faster at solving them. It just takes a little practice. Practice, practice, practice Several studies point out the benefits of being good at math....