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Tucked away in labs, scientists and artists like Peñil Cobo have been culturing creations of art on agar for the American Society of Microbiology (ASM) annual microbial art contest. Since the competition began in 2015, winners from around the world have created images of everything from camels to dandelions—all made from microbes. This year’s winners, announced November 30, painted portraits of their favorite microbiologists, including Rosalind Franklin and Odo Bujwid....

The oven in your kitchen will easily heat up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or so when you want to cook dinner, but the world is full of spaces that get much, much hotter. You may not think about them much, but the filament in an old lightbulb, the interior of a jet engine, and the heat shield on a spacecraft all encounter vastly hotter temperatures. Those environments need special materials to handle that extreme toastiness....

“Within our lifetimes, we may, for the first time, be able to say something scientifically proven about habitability on other planets,” says Rafael Luque, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago who is the first author on the new study published Thursday in the journal Science. “And that’s a major, major step.” In recent years, astronomers have been rapidly detecting new planets orbiting stars beyond our own, called exoplanets....

Using pictures from social media, Stanford researcher Andrej Karpathy trained a 140-million parameter neural network to gauge the ultimate selfie, based on the amount of likes each picture received. Karpathy used a convolutional neural network, a flavor of AI used most often when working with images. It was invented by Yann LeCunn, who now leads AI research at Facebook. First, he showed the network 2 million photos of selfies, which he got by scraping the web for social media posts tagged #selfie....

The OM-D E-M1X’s most interesting feature is the AI tech similar to that found inside high-end smartphones. The feature is called Intelligent Subject Detection AF. The AI can detect different types of subjects such as: motorcycles and automobiles, trains and airplanes and then lock onto the optimal area for subject tracking. Olympus says the focusing is so precise that it will give shooters the ability to concentrate on frame composition while shooting fast moving events....

Harrison had collected the larvae from corals that had survived deadly marine heat waves in 2016, 2017 and 2018. “These surviving larvae are likely to have greater ability to withstand heat stress as they survive and grow,” Harrison said, meaning they could thrive in a warmer world. Pollution from fossil fuels is heating up the planet, rendering ocean waters inhospitable for coral. Even in the more optimistic scenarios, virtually all of the world’s reefs could be eradicated by mid-century....

The name of this program is “Armed Overwatch.” The contract announcement says it “will provide Special Operations Forces deployable, affordable, and sustainable crewed aircraft systems fulfilling close air support, precision strike, and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, requirements in austere and permissive environments for use in irregular warfare operations in support of the National Defense Strategy.” Irregular warfare is a broad term that is easier to define by what it doesn’t include....

MASCOT (the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout) was built by German and French engineers and launched toward the asteroid Ryugu earlier this week, where two other hopping rovers were (and still are!) making their way across the surface. Unlike those solar-powered rovers, MASCOT was battery powered, and only carried enough juice to last roughly 16 hours. It managed to push it to 17, gathering information on what the asteroid’s surface is made of....

But what about the real-world status of the under-appreciated workhorse of the Trek world, the humble tractor beam? Scientists had already been working on models that can push tiny objects small distances using light, but a new version of a tractor beam uses sound instead. In a new paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers figured out a way to manipulate a tiny physical object using what they call, acoustic holograms....

Consider umbrellas a worthy investment. The ones you get from bodegas may shield you from the occasional downpour, but they’re not really made to last. The RainTorch, however, is engineered to withstand any storm, and you won’t even have to pay top dollar to snag one. For a limited time, it’s on sale for an extra 15 percent off with the code SALE15NOV. Check it out: The RainTorch is equipped with all the bells and whistles to help you stay safe and visible during storms....

The hum varies subtly, a matter of millihertz, due to power demand and supply, so that there is a consistent signature associated with any point in time since the recording has begun. Simultaneously, any other recording that’s made in the vicinity of a power line or appliance picks up the faint hum in the background. By matching the hum in the background of a telephone recording with the master record of all electrical humming over the last seven years, the police can ascertain the exact time when the recording was made....

That’s why vitamin supplements are so beneficial, they can provide a reliable way to ensure that your body is getting the nutrients that it needs to function at its very best. The main reason for taking a vitamin supplement is because you aren’t eating well or because your body isn’t absorbing nutrients as efficiently as it could be. Your body may not be able to absorb all of the vitamins and minerals from the foods that you eat, which can cause some types of vitamin deficiencies....

What is the Traeger Timberline pellet grill? The Timberline series represents Traeger’s flagship cookers. It comes in two models: the $3,499 Timberline, with 880 square inches of primary cooking surface, and the $3,799 Timberline XL, which offers 1,320 square inches of grate real estate. Beyond the size difference, both grills share an extremely similar suite of features. Those prices put the Timberline grills far above the realm of most charcoal and propane cookers at the local home store, but Traeger justifies that price with a mixture of versatility and high-end features....

It’s not a secure messaging system, nor is it an encryption program; it’s a game. And a surprisingly understated game at that: a version of solitaire. Sorry to all the simulator fans out there, but you won’t be playing one of the “Tycoon” titles or a remake of whatever the game was that Matthew Broderick played in “WarGames.” The game is a take on the classic game of solitaire, but played with two decks of cards and a timer....

That’s why Williams, chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Columbia University Medical Center, says it’s so important to understand the very real medical reasons that someone might lose a pregnancy. “It takes away a lot of the self blame,” he says. “It de-stigmatizes pregnancy loss when you get down to the level of the molecules.” The majority of pregnancy losses—which are much more common than most people think, and affect around 15 percent of pregnancies—are isolated, and occur because of chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo....

The international team of researchers looked at high-quality genome sequences from 32 living species, including humans, chimps, wombats, rabbits, manatees, domestic cattle, rhinos, bats, and pangolins to create a computer model of what the first mammal’s genome might have been like. These sequences represented 23 of the 26 known orders of mammals. In Linnaean taxonomy, the way to classify living things developed by Swedish botanist Carlous Linnaeus, all living things are divided into three kingdoms (plants, animals, and minerals), and then subdivided into classes, orders, genuses, and species....

Epidemiologists associated with the US Department of Veteran Affairs looked at the medical records of 13 million individuals—mostly white male veterans aged 60 on average—including almost 34,000 who experienced breakthrough COVID-19 infections after vaccination. They found that while being vaccinated greatly reduces risk of hospitalization and death, vaccines only reduce the risk of long COVID by about 15 percent, as the researchers reported in a paper published on Wednesday in Nature Medicine....

Nadia began coughing on March 27. The 4-year-old Malayan tiger’s keepers at the Bronx Zoo in New York City also noticed she wasn’t finishing her daily allotment of raw meat. Concerned, they called in Paul Calle, the zoo’s head veterinarian. The team immobilized and anesthetized Nadia, so she could be put through a series of X-rays, ultrasounds, and routine blood work to look for known causes of respiratory disease in cats....

Two thousand marbles flow through the 3000-part machine. They hit drum heads, fall in cascades, bounce off glockenspiel keys, and turn kinetic motion into aesthetic sound. Molin hand-cranks the marbles through the device, and then toggles various levers and switches to change the sound, turning it from an over-large music box into a musical instrument. Similar devices have been simulated, like the Radeon 9700 Pipe Dream. While that was impressive from an animation standpoint, this marble-wielding masterpiece is very much a physical device....

As seen in a video published by Guinness World Records today on YouTube (and above), a well-padded, helmeted Erban takes several nasty spills going at speeds that are better suited to a car. These various attempts and the final record-establishing run were performed last November on a flat runway at the Portorož airport in Piran, Slovenia, giving Erban enough space to speed up and slow down. The record was measured over a distance of 328 feet (100 meters)....