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It’s a question I recently encountered in my own personal experience. A few weeks ago, the familiar command that turns my Philips Hue lights on and off stopped working.“OK, Google, turn off the light in the living room.” The lights didn’t budge. I spent 20 minutes repeating the command and digging into the Google Home app, which I hadn’t opened in quite some time—after all, that’s why I have a voice assistant in the first place, right?...

Gabriel, a project by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and funded by the National Science Foundation, is a personal cognitive assistant that “whispers” instructions into a user’s ear, for things like how to change a tire, perform CPR, or even assemble IKEA furniture. It would be like GPS for everyday actions, but one that knows when to shut up, according to principal investigator Mahadev Satyanarayanan. The name comes from the angel Gabriel, who Biblically served as the messenger of God....

A recent heatwave that swept over the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and Canada challenged infrastructure in areas that aren’t used to such high temperatures. Even with heat advisory warnings from public health officials and efforts to stay cool, there were more than 480 reported sudden deaths at the beginning of July across Canada, a 195 percent increase in deaths that would usually happen in a five-day period country-wide. The solution to keeping cities cool and weatherproofing them for safer summers may be holistically investing in better, or smarter, surfaces....

Click through the gallery above to find out the truth about 10 common neuroscience myths. How To Stay Sharp While crossword puzzles and classical music aren’t going to make you smarter, here are three proven strategies to keep your brain at peak performance for your entire life. 1. Get The Blood Flowing In a 2014 study at the University of British Columbia in Canada, women who walked briskly for an hour twice weekly for six months—but not those who strength-trained or did no exercise—increased brain volume in the areas that control thinking and memory....

People develop type 2 diabetes when their bodies stop producing and using insulin, the hormone that helps control blood sugar levels, properly. Things like poor diet, lack of physical activity, and obesity can put people at risk of getting this condition—but genetics play a role, as well. People with a family history of type 2 diabetes are more likely to have it than those without: Over a lifetime, someone with one diabetic parent has a 40 percent risk of developing the condition, and two parents with the condition increase that risk to 70 percent....

Android phones come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. But within, they all run the same basic operating system, that includes settings to let you tailor your smartphone to your needs. In this guide, we collected 24 lesser-known customizations for you to toy with. Before we start, a quick caveat—although the same Android code runs all of these phones, manufacturers often modify the operating system by slapping a software skin on top....

But when you have dietary restrictions—whether that’s allergies, celiac disease, or you’re vegan or vegetarian by choice—indulging in local delicacies far from home can feel stressful and sometimes downright frightening. After all, if one meal has the potential to derail your entire trip, you’re much less likely to indulge with abandon. Fortunately, technology can make travel easier and more comfortable for those with just about any dietary restriction. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that it has completely changed the way we travel,” says Matt Hansen, founder of the travel blog Wheatless Wanderlust, and an adventurer with celiac disease that loves to eat....

The occasion that prompted the President to master telescope optics was the second-ever White House Astronomy Night. About 350 people gathered on the South Lawn after sunset, the familiar semicircle of columns stretching above. A band played “Summertime” as if to will away the 50-degree chill—I was very glad to have a hat and scarf with me as I stood on the lawn. But the evening was bright and clear, at least, with the fat crescent moon high above the horizon in the twilight....

In some ways, they’re right. There are no monuments to the victims. There are no classic works of literature inspired by the disease’s rapid advance. In other ways, though, they’re wrong. How forgotten can a pandemic be if there is an entire PBS documentary about it? After reading countless contagious articles, visiting a virulent exhibit the Museum of the City of New York, and attending infectious events from the New York Academy of Medicine, a simpler, and much more compelling theory, emerged: The Spanish influenza is not “forgotten,” so much as no flu, no matter its impact, is ever really remembered....

If there’s an important post in America’s national defense establishment, chances are that William Perry has held it. He worked as a civilian expert in electronic intelligence in the 1960s, served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and ended his career in government service as President Bill Clinton’s defense secretary from 1994 to 1997. He served on the University of California’s board of governors for the laboratory at Los Alamos—where the first nuclear bomb was developed—and is currently the head of the board at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists....

Not much is known about the mysterious virus. The first cases appeared in December, and some of the afflicted individuals worked in a market that sold seafood and live animals; the food store has since closed so it can be disinfected. The disease may have been transmitted from animals sold at the market to people. Around 70 percent of the new infectious diseases that have emerged in the past three decades are zoonotic, meaning that they can be transmitted between animals and people....

The second coming of air hockey was born from an unlikely source. Nuvation is a company that offers a variety of electronic design services, helping corporations develop everything from MP3 players to space shuttle components. The San Jose-based company was originally contracted by Freescale Semiconductor to create an air hockey robot, to demonstrate the difference in speed between its 8-bit and 32-bit microprocessors. Two months later, with just three employees dedicated to the project, the first prototype of the AHB was demonstrated at a technology forum sponsored by Freescale....

Scientists found the mostly-complete skeleton in 2018 in the Río de las Chinas Valley of Chilean Patagonia and determined it to be roughly 71.7 to 74.9 million years old, dating it to the late Cretaceous. When they further examined the skeleton, the researchers found a baffling mixture of features typically seen in ankylosaurs and stegosaurs. However, its “bizarre” tail didn’t seem to match with the tails seen in either of these famous groups; rather than the traditional spikes or clubs, the newly-named Stegouros elengassen had seven pairs of bony deposits encasing half the tail in a flattened frond-like structure, the researchers reported on December 1 in Nature....

Just take your fave beverage bottle (keep the cap), drop in a flexible solar panel, a step-up switching regulator circuit, a rechargeable battery pack, and a powerful LED, cap it, and you’ll have a self-sufficient garden lantern that is ideal for shedding some light on solving environmental issues. You will have to choose your bottle carefully, though. Clear glass rules. Also, wide-mouth bottles are easier to convert than narrow opening long-neckers....

Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be crashing into the moon in March—an unintended lunar collision that is likely the first of its kind. The piece is a booster from a Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX launched in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The rocket carried NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite on what was supposed to be SpaceX’s first deep space mission....

The easy, no-hassle way: Plug-in adapters Let’s start with the simplest option: Buy a multi-outlet adapter with USB ports and leave it plugged in. There are a few downsides to this option. First, you’ll obviously have to deal with some extra bulk in the wall—that’s unavoidable. Second, it provides 2.4 amps of power across both USB ports—which means it’ll charge two phones at once, or one larger tablet, but it won’t be able to charge a phone and a tablet at the same time....

Some elements of an animated illustration—like rain—appear simple but require a lot of work to implement. Drawing the drops and making them move around the frame can be done manually, but Adobe’s new brush tech uses AI to automate the process. When you paint over an area in which you want rain, you get certain options like the shape of the raindrops and the frequency with which they fall. There are other effects to paint on as well—eight in total....

Since late November, though, four different volcanoes within 110 miles of each other on Kamchatka have been active simultaneously. Experts believe the volcanoes are fed by different sources of magma, making this even more unusual. In mid-January, eruptions from Plosky Tolbachik, one of the volcanoes, began forming a lava lake on the peninsula at its base. AirPano, a group of Russian panoramic photographers, set out to document the geological excitement in 3-D aerial panoramas....

One company planning on tinkering at the intersection of these trends is called Lightmatter, which is going to build the brains of a self-driving prototype vehicle. The company’s microchips set them apart from others in the tech industry: The chips that will do the computing for this experimental self-driving car will be light-based, unlike the traditional chips that employ electrons and transistors. The company, in conjunction with Harvard University and Boston University, has received $4....