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By now, we’re used to Google buying other companies. In fact, back in January, it bought a different smartwatch-related company from Fossil for $40 million. Buying Fitbit is huge, though. Millions of users have trusted Fitbit with data about their health, including sensitive topics like menstrual cycles. Now, that data goes to Google. However, Fitbit specifically called out the idea that the health data customers have provided won’t help ads target them....

Walking directions provide a more direct route than those for driving: they let you walk on one-way streets regardless of which direction you’re going, and ignore “no left/right turn” signs that are vehicle-specific. Google Maps routes you around hills to help minimize huffing and puffing (when it makes sense–the directions won’t alter your course too much), and the travel time estimate is based on walking the route instead of driving it (with accommodations for uphill and downhill travels)....

Stonehenge’s functionality has been discussed endlessly, but these days, people in the know are down to essentially two theories: 1) it was a healing site; 2) it was a place for the dead. Both of these scenarios are conducive to Till’s case, as both are rituals and would have likely involved music. To test the plausibility of Stonehenge being a prehistoric Madison Square Garden, Till and colleague Bruno Fazenda crunched some numbers first....

What to plant, based on where you live Native plants are often your best choice for successful ground covers. If you have pets, you may also want to ensure your preferred plants don’t have seed heads that could attach to animals passing through. Here are some natives for planting in different geographic regions. The first three grow well in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, and Texas in full or partial sun....

Multiple black bears, including Hank, are responsible for more than 150 recent invasions reported in the region, which straddles Northern California and Nevada. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) said in a statement on Thursday that after Hank’s story caught public attention, locals mistook other bears in the area for the same bear. Humans are pretty bad at telling bears apart. To an untrained eye, a large bear with dark fur can look more or less identical to any other large bear with dark fur....

Improved forecasting technology can predict hurricanes and their potential path far in advance, which can be helpful for large scale preparations. But that leaves people in the path of a hurricane with days to await its arrival—and even though experts are better than ever at predicting where a storm will go, there’s still a lot of uncertainty until only a day or so in advance. This long lead time, coupled with the unpredictability, can affect how people prepare for and experience a storm....

When you see the number and span of Zika’s incidence, it’s easy to see why public health officials are worried. This interactive map depicts the number of diagnosed cases of Zika virus by country, denoted by purple circles. It is missing three new cases announced yesterday—two in Australia and one in Ireland, the first to be diagnosed outside the Americas. Officials expect more cases to follow in these places and others....

1914-1918: Balloon jumping Cockpits had no room for storage, so the first military escape aids went to the balloon corps—where any attack could turn explosive. (Thanks, hydrogen gas!) Crews hooked harnesses to chutes attached outside the basket and tumbled out. 1916: Backpack bailing Just 13 years after we first got into airplanes, pilot Solomon Van Meter ­patented a backpack-style contraption to help us hop out of them. An airman would jump from his plane and pull a ripcord, flipping open a tortoiselike aluminum shell full of silk chute....

That’s where remote desktop tools come in. Once configured, these programs allow you to securely connect to a computer from another device. You’ll be able to fully control your computer from any location, and it’ll almost be like actually sitting down to the real machine from afar. Just a decade ago, you’d need a degree in computing to wrap your head around the ins and outs of remote desktop programs....

The announcement is based on principles that touch on issues like AI and jobs, and the relationship between American artificial research and the international community. The first principle lays out the main idea: the U.S. should “drive technological breakthroughs in AI across the Federal Government, industry, and academia in order to promote scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and national security.” In short, the executive order says to the federal government, academia, and private sector: Do more artificial intelligence....

If you favor straightforward and short ingredient lists and eat eggs, you’ll probably like these protein bars. Three egg whites provide the base of the 12 grams of protein in each Rxbar, and get some help from almonds, cashews, and peanuts. Dates provide sweetness, and chocolate, cocoa, berries, salt, and natural flavors distinguish the different choices in each pack. That’s it! Note: they’re chewy—like, really chewy. These high-calorie bars (290 calories each) are packed with 20 grams of brown rice and pea protein....

Lincoln’s crowning achievement in the history books is the Emancipation Proclamation–even though the executive order didn’t actually make slavery illegal or give slaves any rights. The fact remains that Lincoln won the Civil War and kept the union together, and catalyzed the dissolve of slavery. It wasn’t just dumb luck. Lincoln took his title of commander-in-chief seriously, helping develop modern weapons to give the North a fighting chance. The president was really into inventors....

Today, we spend our spare moments a little differently, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual American Time Use Survey reveals. While sports and socialization remain important, modern escapes are increasingly digital and defined by television and video games. Yet who gets to decompress, and how, still varies widely. Map the data and you’ll find that sex, income, and family life determine how we spend our free time. Screen time Kids get a bad rap for watching too much TV....

In the first archaeological survey of its kind, scientists piloting the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) are studying the physical objects used by astronauts aboard the 23-year-old laboratory and mini-community. But the ISS isn’t your typical excavation site with chisels and brushes. Instead of digging up evidence, researchers treated the ISS like an archive, sifting through a library of old and new pictures. The investigation will wrap up its data collection late this month, but once published, its results could provide both sociologists and space historians a window into what life in space really looks like....

Estimating how much of a hazard SARS-CoV-2 poses has been an ongoing challenge, especially as the virus has evolved new strains. Early estimates that COVID-19’s reproductive number (R0)—the number of people each sick person will infect, on average—was around 1.5-3.5 have largely held true. That made it more infectious than the flu or Ebola, but less so than SARS. The delta variant, however, is more than twice as infectious. Each sick person will infect an average of seven others, making it nearly as contagious as chickenpox....

Long answer Anyone who’s tried to make a snowball understands the need for snow of just the right consistency. Start with powdery snow and a ball will fall apart. Start with slushy snow and it will turn into a hunk of ice. The key, then, to a killer snowball is to find snow that’s in the perfect sticky state. According to Jordy Hendrikx, director of the Snow and Avalanche Laboratory at Montana State University, snow at subfreezing temperatures contains no liquid water....

Firefox is possibly more popular than you think. It has around 6.65 percent of the desktop browser market in the US and around 7.66 percent of the market worldwide. It’s the fourth most popular browser after Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. (The percentages change but its ranking doesn’t if you also include mobile web browsers.) In short, this update is going out to millions of people and will likely be yet another nail in the coffin for cookies....

The setting is a friendly rivalry between the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The rivalry even as a name: “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate“, and a weirdly extensive entry on Wikipedia. Pickren, a Georgia Tech student whose grandfather also attended the school, was poking around the University of Georgia website the week before Thanksgiving when he made a striking discovery. The UGA master calendar was unsecured, and with a simple POST command, he was able to add an event that read “Get Ass Kicked By GT” at the time of the rivalry football game....

Self-sealing technology can mitigate the issue of an absent spare tire, freeing up space and providing a way to lighten the overall weight of the vehicle, which in turn improves total driving range. Global manufacturer Dow has announced the launch of a recyclable silicone self-sealing tire solution that will allow drivers to travel long distances even after a sharp object (like a nail) punctures the outer wall of a tire....

The sensors that TITAN will draw data from already exist across many of the domains in which the military operates. Satellites in orbit relay communications, photograph the ground below, observe weather, and transmit geographic coordinates. Planes overhead, ships at sea, and trucks on the ground all carry sensors, each capturing vital information about where enemies might be, and how they might be moving. Meanwhile, TITAN is not a sensor itself, but it exists as a single intermediary point between soldiers and these pre-existing sensors....