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TP-Link products, which you can use to do life-changing things like extend the range of your Wi-Fi signal, add to your smart home collection, or turn dumb appliances into smart ones, are on sale for up to 37 percent off. For example, you can get this 6-outlet Kasa Smart WiFi power strip for 31 percent off. From your smartphone, you can control each of the six outlets individually. There are also three built-in USB ports and you can monitor, noting how much energy each device uses....

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The balloon is extremely delicate—it’s made of polyethylene just 0.0008 inches thick—and so it can be easily stretched and torn. If the balloon had launched and the fabric ripped when the capsule was less than 4000 feet high, it would most likely be deadly: At that altitude, the capsule’s recovery parachute couldn’t fully deploy and Baumgartner wouldn’t have enough time to jump out. But weather is just one variable that can make or break a project like this....

We’ll start with the unsettling mushroom shown at the top of this article—the one that looks like it’s oozing blood. The molar-esque devil’s tooth fungus is native to the Pacific Northwest. The red goo is actually a sap made up of excess water absorbed from the forest floor. These mushrooms have a symbiotic relationship with vascular plants—they help the flora absorb nutrients, and in turn receive carbon dioxide. Despite its menacing appearance, this mushroom isn’t poisonous; it may actually have antibacterial properties....

Never you fret. We’ve got you covered. We went back 60 years into the Popular Science archive and found the most exciting gadgets from 1952. There’s options for any budget–from the lightest car available (at the time) to a vintage GPS that’s basically just a map-holder. We also found one gadget, the last slide in the gallery, that would make the perfect present for just about anybody. You’re welcome. Popular Science solved the mystery of why kids get tired of model train sets: “Nine times out of 10 it is because the layout is on the floor....

If you’re one of those viewers, you’ve probably wondered about putting yourself out there and becoming a streamer yourself. You definitely can, but there are some things you need to know first. If buying a new computer is not an option and you have an old, but still-functioning laptop lying around, you can use your most powerful machine solely for gaming and the other for streaming. Dual computer setups are slightly more complicated than running everything off a single machine, so you’ll need a capture card to bridge the gap between the devices....

Why did you write How to Live on Mars and why now? I wrote it to excite a new and younger generation. I grew up in the Apollo era, and there needs to be literature to capture the imagination of the new younger generation. In the book there’s a vision of a future civilization living and growing on Mars — it’s about creating a new branch of human civilization. As I see it, that new branch will have many of the positive and some of the negative aspects of America when it was young — a place where the rules haven’t been written yet....

When you set up a Christmas tree, you bring a little bit of nature into your home. Real or fake, your spot of green creates warm holiday cheer at a time when the forests outside have grown cold and brown. But once you’ve unwrapped the presents, scarfed down the leftovers, and safely stowed away the ornaments, your glorious display piece instantly transforms into waste—specifically, one of the biggest pieces of trash you’ll have to deal with all year....

Our love of the outdoors can bring us into contact will all sorts of unpleasant organisms, though few are as widespread as the tick. These vampiric arachnids can be found across the globe, and many are responsible for transmitting disease. Ticks have been documented transmitting a wide range of protozoan, bacterial, viral, and fungal pathogens to humans, pets, and livestock. And while there are roughly 80 different tick species that can be found in the continental US (and more than 800 found worldwide), there are 10 species that really stand out....

Unlike the actual Universe, however, the Internet’s places do not exist in physical space–there’s no such thing as one website being “close” or “far” from another one; the two are either linked or they are not. While those links don’t correspond directly to any kind of distance or direction, they do suggest a relationship. If, for example, someone built a personal website, and linked to their website through their Facebook page, people would really only arrive at the website via the Facebook page....

And it happened without any warning whatsoever. The meteor, about 10 meters long and weighing more than 1,500 tons, plunged into Earth’s atmosphere on December 18 at around noon local time, bearing down on the Bering Sea (sorry) between Russia and Alaska. The projectile was going about 72,000 miles per hour, at a steep seven-degree trajectory. It exploded into a fireball at a little less than 16 miles above the surface, with an impact energy of about 173 kilotons of TNT....

Conventional 3-D printing generally works by precisely depositing thin layers of heated, extruded plastic or resin one atop the other based on a 3-D digital model of the desired object. Another kind of additive manufacturing, known as stereolithography, builds objects using light-sensitive resins and some kind of light source (a laser, a UV projector, etc.) that precisely cures the liquid resin into a solid (generally creating objects from the top down rather than the bottom up)....

The case exemplifies a problem in the field of conservation biology. “Species require these kind of long-range dispersals,” says Arash Ghoddousi, who researches human-wildlife conflict at Humboldt University-Berlin. Developing corridors to allow wildlife to travel between protected areas has become a global conservation priority. But, as Bruno learned the hard way, while some physical landscapes might allow animals to move, humans often pose the real barrier. “Species are basically kept in the same areas, or their range is even retracted....

The vaccine still has a long way to go before it could be ready for human use. Still, the results are promising, and the researchers are adapting the vaccine to create a version that would be effective against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. “This is a mouse model for a vaccine, so we can’t claim that it perfectly mimics the human immune system and what would happen in humans,” says Paul McCray, a pediatric pulmonologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and coauthor of the new findings, which were published April 7 in the journal mBio....

Popular Science tracked down ground-breaking startups at the Kairos Global Summit. Check out our complete coverage here. You can hear more from Katie on her podcast.

The hatchling looks like a pair of conjoined twins, with two independently moving heads poking out of its green shell. When the turtle splashes around in water, each skull comes up at different times to breathe, and each head controls its own set of three legs. X-rays also show that hidden inside the shell are two distinct gastrointestinal tracts—though they partially share a spine. The Birdsey Cape Wildlife Center in Barnstable, MA, has a terrapin program, so the two-headed reptile was brought in on September 22, shortly after hatching at a protected terrapin nesting site in Barnstable....

The bug was discovered by Reddit user vista980622 and posted to the r/jailbreak subreddit. To replicate vista’s results on your own iDevice, head to the Date & Time section of Settings. After unchecking “Set Automatically,” you’ll want to change the date all the way back to January 1, 1970. Note that this will take you two tries–once you reach the year 2000 you’ll have to go back a screen and then re-enter date selection....

“The team’s tenacity, expertise, and commitment were key in overcoming the past year’s challenges to get us to the recent success,” Heath Collins, the Air Force Program Executive Officer for Weapons, said in a release. That tenacity likely refers to the previous failures of the ARRW in testing. In April 2021, an ARRW failed to leave the wing of the bomber carrying it. During a July 2021 test, the ARRW’s rocket engine failed to start after it was released from a B-52....

Had you met Dew Oliver in 1926, you might have written him a check. A lot of people did, and came to regret it. He was a charming Texan running around Southern California in a cream-colored Stetson cow-boy hat, sporting a walrus mustache and talking up money making schemes. His boldest idea was a plan to capture the wind. Mr. Oliver, like just about everybody else who passed through the San Gorgonio Pass, was mightily impressed by the winds there....

“The take-home message from the findings of the study is that even a relatively modest increase in the practice of safe storage by parents could result in substantial reductions in firearm suicides and unintentional fatalities among youth,” says Michael Monuteaux, a Harvard Medical School professor of pediatrics and epidemiologist who is the first author of the new study. Their findings also suggest that both doctors and public health authorities need to do a better job of conveying that safe gun storage means safer kids, he says....