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“Our star is really an enormous thermonuclear furnace. At its center, the temperature is between 15 to 17 million degrees Celsius, and roughly 600 million tons of hydrogen get fused into 596 million tons of helium,” says Madhulika Guhathakurta, program scientist for NASA’s Heliophysics Division and lead program scientist for the “Living With a Star” initiative, which studies the ways in which Sun-Earth system affects human life and society. Every second, those four million missing tons are transformed into energy—what we see as sunshine....

As part of the festivities, our hosts put together a special horror movie edition of a game we like to call, “What if characters in old movies had smartphones?” Originally inspired by the tired internet trope about how most Seinfeld episodes would play out much differently if the characters had the ability to call, text, Snap, and ping each other. In this Halloween edition of the game, we picked two players from the audience and read them fake texts that could have come from characters infamous horror movies....

“They were everywhere,” Boehringer told The New York Times in an interview. Boehringer’s team was in the Weddell Sea to study ocean currents and carbon cycles. Instead, the researchers stumbled upon the largest fish nursery on record. Previously, the biggest colony in the books was only 60 nests strong, The Guardian reports. But this new nesting site blows the last record out of the water, with 60 million active nests sprawling across an area about twice the size of San Francisco....

My 2009 Subaru Forester, on the other hand, was a $6,400 purchase from a small establishment by the side of a highway in Vermont in the summer of 2020—a classic Covid-car buy. It’s a very practical ride. So when I had the chance to try driving a McLaren GT for the weekend (a 2021 model that goes for $247,025, to be precise) I knew I’d be getting acquainted with a whole new caliber of car....

Meanwhile, deaths on the roads in 2020 were also up, compared to 2019. NHTSA states that the uptick in 2021 is historical. “The projection [of lives lost] is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history,” the administration said in the recent release. Digging deeper in the statistics for 2021 shows spikes in a couple key areas. Deaths from crashes involving more than one vehicle are up 16 percent; deaths on roads in urban areas are also up by 16 percent; deaths among drivers who are 65 or older are up 14 percent; and deaths among pedestrians are up 13 percent....

The World Health Organization announced this week that COVID-19 kills an average of 3.4 percent of patients, representing a significant increase over the previously estimated death rate of around 2 percent. “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.” On Wednesday, President Donald Trump told Fox News he estimated the death rate of COVID-19 at less than 1 percent, citing the mild symptoms common in most patients as evidence that many cases are going unreported....

The stars must literally align for this rare event to take place. The moon needs to be in its first lunar phase, also known as a new moon. It also has to be at its farthest point from Earth, making it appear smaller in the sky. These circumstances are what allows the edge of the sun to peek out around the moon and form the iconic ring of fire, appearing as a dark disk surrounded by bursts of light....

By morning, the sailors were released. This is not a story about that incident, though it does provide some context. This is a story about those boats. The sailors were on a couple of Riverine Command Boats, first introduced into the United States Navy in 2007. Unlike the Navy’s ocean-going “blue-water” vessels, these are much smaller boats built for “brown water,” or rivers and waters close to coast. For reference, they’re similar in concept to the Swift Boats used by the United States in Vietnam and popularized in the film Apocalypse Now....

Researchers can approximate how much diseases associated with age—like cancer and heart disease—impact our lives by calculating what’s known as disability-adjusted life-years, or DALYs. By looking at the DALYs a country has per 1,000 adults, you can get a sense of how much these diseases are impacting the health of that population. And if you’re a group of researchers who published a paper in The Lancet last week, you can cleverly take the average global DALY and figure out which countries are doing the best and worst at preserving health into old age....

If you’re confused, you should be. The array of so-called health cures that claim to purify your system, cleanse your aura, and just generally give you healthier vibes can be as dizzying as your desire not to get off the couch. But do any of these viral “cleanse” tactics actually help your body? Here’s the scoop on four of the most hyped detoxing techniques. Apple cider vinegar No list of popular cleanses would be complete without the mother of them all: apple cider vinegar....

This is standard procedure at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which recently switched on for the first time since 2018, its beams now more powerful than ever. The LHC, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, is the world’s largest particle collider: a mammoth machine that literally smashes subatomic particles together and lets scientists watch the fountain of quantum debris that spews out. That may seem unnecessarily violent for a physics experiment, but physicists have a good reason for the destruction....

Microsoft announced Windows 11 today with a live-streamed event that outlined the top-level features you’ll find in the update. It includes a visual overhaul, as well as a heap of new productivity, accessibility, and entertainment-oriented features. Here’s an overview of what you can expect when it starts hitting compatible PCs as a free upgrade toward the end of 2021. Plus, when it arrives, Microsoft says that software updates will be roughly 40 percent smaller than in previous versions....

Spotted days ago by various rumor blogs, the new Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Dock went on sale today on Apple’s website for the relatively steep price of $79. Rumors of Apple’s official Watch dock first made its way to the web initially via iGen.fr—when packaging for the item first leaked. High resolution images of the dock in action followed shortly thereafter. Some Apple Watch docks and stands offer walnut exteriors, like from Pad & Quill, or extending mechanisms like Griffin’s charging station....

Prestigious sports car manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari have made a tidy side business selling their trademark sports cars with upgrades to make them more suitable for race tracks than for commuting. In fact, vehicles like the Porsche 911 GT3 and the Ferrari Pista proved to be thrillingly fast and fabulously capable when we track-tested them last year. But they are not only expensive to buy, they can be eye-wateringly costly to repair....

For the study, researchers analyzed clinical records for patients who had donated their brains to the Mayo Clinic Brain Bank and selected 66 patients that were known to have participated in contact sports as young adults. When the researchers examined their brain tissue, they found that 32 percent of the patients showed distinctive signs of CTE . They also discovered two genetic markers that might make patients more susceptible to CTE, since they only appeared in the genetic makeup of patients who had developed the disease....

Jones is designing research, along with doctors, toxicologists, systems biologists, and children’s health specialists around the world, to predict what abnormal substances within the body mean for a person’s health. Those abnormalities could be the presence of chemicals from flea collars or plastics, it could be elevated levels of vitamin D, or it could even be certain gut bacteria. What is the Exposome? An emerging field of science looks at the “exposome”—a term coined in 2005 by cancer epidemiologist Christopher Wild to refer to the totality of exposures that a person experiences over a lifetime and the impacts those exposures have on the body....

Spotify The most fun—and potentially embarrassing—year-end wrap up comes from Spotify, which built a handy little microsite and two curated playlists to commemorate the end of the year. If you go into your playlists, you’ll find a queue of your top 100 songs for the year, as well as a Taste Breakers playlist that suggests stuff outside your normal listening patterns that it thinks you might like. The playlist above is composed of songs from PopSci staffer most-played lists....

Zika virus seemingly has come out of nowhere although in reality, this situation is not unexpected. Much like other generally non-lethal viruses spreading across the world, such as Chikungunya and West Nile Virus, this particular pathogen hasn’t gained significant attention in the public health realm. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the suggested link to microcephaly, little would be done to better understand its biology, pathogenesis, or migration patterns. Now that we know about the possible secondary effects of Zika virus on the fetus, the public health spotlight is squarely on this virus....

Richards brought the amphibians back to his team in native Australia for analysis. He knew that they weren’t any old tree frogs. At first glance they look identical to the common Australian green tree frog. But this species of frog is the color of cocoa, earning it the nickname of “chocolate frog.” Sometimes green tree frogs can be brown, so the question was whether this frog specimen was indeed something new....

In a new book called The Where, The Why, And The How, 75 artists set out to illustrate some of the biggest, strangest, most curious scientific mysteries of our time. Here are 11 of our favorites. Click here to enter the gallery