Many water flossers are counter-top units, with large reservoirs for water and multiple power settings. However, some come in portable models, perfect for throwing into a suitcase when on the go. While water flossers can’t get into all the narrow spaces between teeth like string floss can, they do cover a larger surface area and, combined with flossing and brushing, help provide a complete cleaning for that fresh-from-the-dentist feeling....
This year’s winner was Florence Metz of the University of Bern. Metz, the first social scientist to nab the winners spot, choreographed a dance based around her PhD work into understanding how policy affects water quality decisions. Water is a contentious issue, especially now with dwindling supplies of fresh water and a growing human population. In addition to humans who need water to drink and bathe, industries use it in manufacturing, and to dispose of waste: Agricultural groups also need water for waste disposal and to water their flocks and crops....
For the past several years, scientists have been creating supersolids at very tiny scales in the lab. Now, a group of physicists have made the most sophisticated supersolid yet: one that exists in two-dimensions, like a sheet of paper. They published their results in Nature last Wednesday. “It’s always been a sort of outstanding goal to bring [supersolids] into two dimensions,” says Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University in Austria, and lead author of the Nature paper....
By manipulating the genes of African clawed frog tadpoles, a group of researchers has found that the ability to regenerate limbs, a trait possessed by many cold-blooded animals, is based on whether or not an animal carries one particular gene. The results of their study are out this week in the journal Cell Reports. The team named this gene c-Answer (short for cold-blooded animals specific wound epithelium receptor-like). They think that warm-blooded animals lost this gene when they evolved from being cold-blooded to warm-blooded....
For the most part, birds take on their migration at night, nearly invisible far up in the air. But BirdCast, real-time software produced by ornithologists at Colorado State University and Cornell University, takes the nocturnal passage of those animals and turns it into maps that can guide you through the seasonal spectacle. Birdcast uses a combination of radar from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather stations—which detects bats, birds, and mayfly hatches, in addition to clods—and federal weather forecasts to predict migration hotspots....
Now, let’s not begrudge developers for wanting to make money—most of us don’t do our jobs for charity—but the scales have tipped to the point where your phone can be actively hard to use. This is why if you have an Android device, you may enjoy F-Droid. This app store is an alternative to Google Play and only includes open-source applications which may ask for donations, but are generally free of both ads and in-app purchases....
Your heart beats around 100,000 times every day. Heart rate is a key marker of cardiovascular activity and an important vital sign. But your pulse is not as steady as a precision clock – nor would you want it to be. As a cardiovascular physiologist, I measure heart rate in nearly every experiment my students and I perform. Sometimes we use an electrocardiogram, such as you’d see in a medical clinic, which uses sticky electrodes to measure electrical signals between two points of your body....
“Run!” one person responded to the video, which has now been viewed about 350,000 times. “Produced by Stephen King,” another joked, joined by more than a few references to the Game of Thrones’ “Winter is coming” tagline. About a minute before Jones posted the video, the National Weather Service inundated cellphones around the New York metro region with a rare emergency alert for a “Snow Squall Warning.” It was the second time New Yorkers received such a push alert, but the Northeast has long experienced the short-lived burst of heavy snowfall characteristic of a snow squall....
It’s just the latest delay for Artemis 1—an uncrewed flight slated to launch from Earth, shoot itself around the moon, and return. The recent setbacks mark a renewed bout of uncertainty over when, exactly, the mission will actually launch. So what’s causing these hold-ups, what are NASA engineers doing to fix it, and will it affect NASA’s long-term lunar dreams? (Spoiler: the answer to that last question is probably no....
“In America and around the world, systems supposed to help with patient care have proven unsafe, ineffective, or biased,” reads the report’s introduction. “Algorithms used in hiring and credit decisions have been found to reflect and reproduce existing unwanted inequities or embed new harmful bias and discrimination. Unchecked social media data collection has been used to threaten people’s opportunities, undermine their privacy, or pervasively track their activity—often without their knowledge or consent....
Federal regulators, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, have been slow to clarify their position on those compounds, the most popular of which is Delta-8 THC, or just “Delta-8.” While the chemicals are nearly identical to the illegal Delta-9 THC, they’re manufactured from hemp, which gives them a protected status. But this week, regulators in Texas appear to have clarified their stance that under Texas law, Delta-8 THC is in fact an illegal drug....
Kim has made the same suggestion in town halls, homes, and refugee camps dozens of times while studying how simple tones evoke deep emotions like hope. But no matter where Kim, a senior lecturer of music composition at the University of Aberdeen, records the thrum, he finds that it releases tension. “You feel a sense of calmness,” he says. “It means the atmosphere is settling.” Kim isn’t a psychologist or neurologist, but he has some pet theories about the factors at play here....
Paying attention to time activates the brain’s supplementary motor area (SMA), says Jennifer Coull, an experimental psychologist at Aix-Marseille University in France. The more we note time’s passage, the more active the SMA becomes, she says, and neuroscientists think the brain misinterprets more SMA activity as more time passed. In studies where people were told in advance that they’d be asked how long a task took, participants focused on time passing and overestimated the activity’s duration....
On Sunday, a reporter from the The New York Times obtained an internal document from TikTok’s engineering team in Beijing that explained how likes, comments, watch time, and shares feed into a recommendation algorithm, which then rates how appealing a video is for a given user. Additionally, a screenshot the Times saw implied that a team of content moderators could see the videos you send to friends or upload privately, which tips an even deeper level of personalization....
As Trump put it: “We’re going to get Apple to build their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries.” Perhaps this sounds like a not terrible idea to you. Except that no one country — not even China — makes all of the components of Apple’s leading products, they just assemble them. And the U.S. has neither the factory space nor the trained workforce to handle construction of Apple’s most popular product, the iPhone, in the immediate future....
He discovered that for e-mail addresses beginning with the letters “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” and “P,” 40 percent of all their mail could be classified as spam; only 20 percent was junk, though, for addresses starting with less popular letters like “Q”, “Z” and “Y.” Common names are also more likely to attract unwanted mail. Spammers often carry out “dictionary” attacks, says Clayton. In other words, spammers who know there is a real person associated with an e-mail—like ann@example....
Across the country, wind-generated power has been showing the potential to be a significant energy generator. Last week, Rock Port, Missouri, became the first city in the United States to generate its electricity entirely through wind-powered technology. Meanwhile, Texas, known for its oil connections, has become the nation’s largest producer of wind-powered energy and is investing almost $5 billion in a wind power project. Still, the United States has a ways to go before it can fully harness the power of wind....
The XO-2 will be designed to consume less power and be half the size of the original XO. In addition to its open source Linux-based OS, the machines will carry a dual boot option for loading Windows. The OLPC group argues the falling price of flat panel screens will make the costs achievable. And, in addition to the new model, Negroponte announced the return of the Give 1, Get 1 program in which U....
The one thing they try not to think about is how much gross stuff they’re ingesting during play. The brave journalists at Popular Science, along with the valiant scientists of Rockefeller University, tackled this question head-on. We’ve got some answers for you. And they’re pretty gross. If you’ve never played, the primary objective of beer pong is to shoot ping pong balls into beer-filled cups on the other side of the table (the not-so-secret secondary objective is to get drunk)....
Gevins uses a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and cognitive tests to measure the effects of alcohol, marijuana, caffeine and other drugs on attention, working memory, the ability to multi-task and more. His company intends to commercialize the testing technology they’ve developed, hoping that it could help doctors measure a person’s cognitive decline, or even adjust prescriptions to keep side effects at a minimum. Via MedGadget
