America S Obsession With Meat Explained

But many citizens are questioning these ingrained appetites. Scientists have shown that burger bites and chicken strips come with health risks and environmental repercussions. Red meat, for example, is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease and colon cancer. And livestock contributes to 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Some are turning to plant-based alternatives, like the Impossible Burger, but for many Americans, breaking up with beef remains difficult....

December 22, 2022 · 5 min · 1065 words · Robert Valenzuela

Amputee Climbs 103 Stories Using Mind Controlled Bionic Leg

Vawter lives in Yelm, Wash., with his wife and two children, but is a patient at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which sponsored the event. The leg is designed to respond to electrical pulses from muscles in his hamstring, according to the Associated Press. When he thinks about climbing a stair and begins to move his leg, the bionic leg synchronizes its movement to his muscles, ensuring a smooth gait....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 286 words · Shirley Armstrong

An Absurd Number Of People Still Play Microsoft Solitaire Every Month

I started playing the game before I even understood the rules. Playing it on a school computer was better than the doing the assigned task. It was the forbidden fun. The game isn’t a fundamental part of Windows anymore—most people have a pretty solid grasp on dragging and dropping here in 2020. Still, however, tons of people get a regular fix of those bouncing cards. According to the anniversary blog post on the Microsoft site, the Microsoft Solitaire Collection has more than 35 million players per month across 200 countries....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 413 words · Irene Russel

An Apple By Any Other Name

David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee just published an article in Social Science Quarterly linking juvenile crime to the popularity of the youth’s name. The researchers created a popularity-name index (PN1) which allowed them to give an empirical value to each name. The higher the PNI value, the more popular the name. The PN1 for Michael, which was the most common name in the study, is 100, while names like Alec, Ernest and Malcolm had a PN1 of one....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 298 words · Bryan Alston

An Army Of Hungry Little Sea Urchins Could Save Hawaiian Reefs

But Hawai’i is also home to a surprisingly positive story of employing one organism to control the growth of another. This summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 500,000 hatchery-raised sea urchins now reside in Kāneʻohe Bay, off the coast of O’ahu. The little echinoderms are munching away at so-called smothering algae, which had once threatened to kill the bay’s corals. Invasive algae started harming the reefs of Kāneʻohe Bay in the 1970s, after they were accidentally introduced through mariculture (the algae easily fragments and spreads into new habitats)....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 696 words · Erik Clark

An Indigenous Scientist S Perspective On Conservation

There is no word for conservation in many of our Native and Indigenous languages. While there are some phrases close to what conservation means in Zapotec, most of these words relate more to “taking care of” or “looking after,” which is not truly embodying what conservation means. When healing landscapes, the word that is used to do this is coined as restoration. Restoration teaches us that in order to heal a landscape, we must get rid of all the invasive species that are known as weeds ....

December 22, 2022 · 9 min · 1811 words · Rudolph Ross

Ancient Fossilized Turtle Egg Found With Embryo Intact

The biggest turtle eggs today are just a few inches long, with papery thin shells. The newfound fossil is massive by comparison. Paleontologists concluded that the egg belongs to the nanhsiungchelyids, an extinct group of land-dwelling turtles that lived alongside dinosaurs 145 to 66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. The turtle parent who laid the hefty egg was likely quite the beast—researchers estimate that its shell was more than 5 feet and 4 inches long....

December 22, 2022 · 3 min · 458 words · Teresa Wishman

Ancient Mars Crater Had Huge Lakes

In a paper published today in Science, researchers announced that the Curiosity rover found geological evidence of ancient lakes on Mars. Scientists had long suspected that Mars had the possibility of lakes–there are plenty of basins and depressions on the Mars surface that would act like perfect bowls, able to hold water. Other observations from satellites has indicated that these depressions once held water. Gale crater, where Curiosity landed, is one of those excellent basins, formed around 3....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 777 words · Daniel Sanders

Apple Releases A 99 Iphone Case With Built In Battery

According to Apple, the battery case gets users an extra 18 hours of internet browsing on LTE or an extra 25 hours of talk time, with 1,877mAh of extra juice. Apple’s Smart Battery Case—like most other products from the company—brings tight software integration with iOS. A battery readout for the case appears on the phone’s lockscreen in addition to the traditional green charging icon. The phone’s notification center shows battery indicators for the iPhone, Apple Watch, and now also the battery case....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 266 words · Peter Mchattie

Apple S Ios 10 Event Will Take Place On June 13

In the past, Apple has given users of its products a window into what software capabilities will be added, taken away from or changed with the next version of its operating system. Last year at WWDC 2015, attendees got a glimpse at iOS 9. Changes to the OS included a picture-in-picture view for the iPad and proactive assistant features in Siri–allowing for abilities such as digging up names in your email inbox when a caller isn’t saved in your contacts....

December 22, 2022 · 1 min · 213 words · Pauline Janssen

Archaeologists Are Creating An Ancient Scent Library

“It’s very tricky, because when archeologists come to the site, obviously the ephemeral and the fluid scents are gone,” Huber says. “We cannot have them anymore, and that’s how we tackle this question. We look for tiny remains of organic residues from the former substance that was used in order to produce the smell.” Huber’s recent Nature Human Behavior paper on the reconstruction of historic fragrances outlined a “call to action” for archeologists to explore this relatively new science....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 837 words · Helen Solomen

Archive Gallery The Science Of Elections

Popular Science’s archives reveal that yes, it has always been this agonizing. The invention of radio brought candidates an exciting new way to get their zingers to voters. We were saved from election fraud by voting machines, but then we worried electronic voting machines might bring it back. And don’t even get us started on the electoral college. (Seriously, don’t. We didn’t write about it.) If you’ve had quite enough of this election, maybe you’d care to lose yourself in the technology of elections past....

December 22, 2022 · 6 min · 1232 words · Timothy Evans

Arduino Muscle Car

In addition to the two motor control outputs, the LV-168 features eight plug-and-use I/O ports, two LEDs (red and green), an 8×2 LCD, a programmable buzzer, three user-definable push-buttons, an analog potentiometer, and an onboard temperature sensor. Supporting these impressive hardware features are six Orangutan-specific Arduino libraries. Just import the appropriate library include link into your project and you can play Bach on the buzzer, display a room’s ambient temperature on the LCD, or drive the motor outputs forward and reverse....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 284 words · Clifton Miles

Are Plant Care Apps Useful

Pixels that reflect chlorophyll. Algorithms that dictate a watering schedule. There’s a whole new crop of apps that hope to revolutionize your relationship with your green companions. Plants have, of course, been around for hundreds of millions of years and startups are all about shaking up the status quo. But houseplants don’t need to be disrupted. I began to collect my personal indoor garden after a brutal layoff, and watching them was an exercise in mindfulness: I smelled the soil, I pinched succulent leaves, I watched as some plants went through their almost undetectable daily pilates....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 795 words · Natasha Buhmann

Astronomers Spot Repeating Radio Burst Patterns From Deep Space

“Every pulse is telling you something new,” says Kaustubh Rajwade, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in the UK who helped uncover the new pattern. “If we had stopped at 10 pulses, we wouldn’t have seen this.” In the late 2000s and early 2010s astronomers began to notice flashes of radio waves dotting the sky. Each speck marked a potentially catastrophic outpouring of energy on par with what the sun produces over decades but compressed into a few thousandths of a second....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 849 words · Gertrude Cottrill

Awesome Vintage Science Illustrations By The Founder Of Popular Science

But what made Youmans’s Atlas really stand out were the illustrations–a series of simple, beautiful diagrams that give form and substance to the invisible world of atomic chemistry. Clearly, Youmans understood–in a way today’s textbook writers don’t seem to–the difficulty students might have trying to understand things they couldn’t see. Which makes sense, actually: Youmans spent much of his life, including his years studying chemistry, in a state of near-total darkness....

December 22, 2022 · 2 min · 399 words · Thomas Lewis

Bath Bomb Sets For A Luxurious Soak

This set from LifeAround2Angels is top-of-the-line when it comes to handcrafted, American-made, natural bath bombs. Each one of the 12 bombs is individually wrapped, brightly colored, and nicely scented. They are about 2 inches in diameter and some contain small flower petals, water-soluble pearls, and flakes of glitter. Select scents include lavender, lemongrass green tea, black raspberry vanilla, and mango papaya. Each one is labeled clearly so you never have to guess the scent you’re using....

December 22, 2022 · 3 min · 434 words · Floyd Willian

Beersci Uncovering The Secrets Of Barley

Some background: Barley is a member of the tribe Triticeae along with other domesticated grains such as wheat and rye. These crops are among the earliest domesticated agricultural grain products–archeological evidence indicates that humans domesticated barley around 10,000 years ago. What the International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium published in the journal Nature last month was a draft–a partially complete map of all of the genes–of the barley genome. It was a remarkable feat, and it took years to overcome the technical hurdles: at 5....

December 22, 2022 · 4 min · 795 words · Luvenia Herbert

Bees Can Tell Time By The Temperature In Their Hive

“The first record of us suspecting this goes back to the 1900s,” says Manuel Giannoni-Guzmàn, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University who studies the sense of time. “There was a German psychiatrist who would sit out in his garden, having breakfast. And bees would come every single day, and they were coming to get his jam. He noticed that bees were coming even on days where he didn’t have any food....

December 22, 2022 · 5 min · 913 words · Myra Gorden

Bell S Sleek New Electric Air Taxi Design Promises Speeds Of 150 Mph And A 60 Mile Range

Bell, the flight company that makes helicopters, as well as tilt rotor craft like the V-280 Valor, is showing off their latest machine in this category at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It’s called the Nexus 4EX. Last year, the company unveiled an earlier iteration, and now, they’ve simplified its design by reducing the number of thrusters that push it through the air. Bell claims that the Nexus craft should be able to wing some 60 miles, hit 150 mph, carry five people total, and do so all with electric propulsion....

December 22, 2022 · 3 min · 608 words · Howard Johnson