Spaceborne observation of the planet has come a long way since Flopnik. Today, 150 Earth-observation satellites are in orbit, capturing more than 10 terabytes of information per day. NASA operates, in whole or in part, about 20 of them. The legacy of NASA’s first assignment has radically altered our concept of the planet. In the view from space, political boundaries dissolve, Earth’s parts become a whole, and its changes are made visible and real....
The abundance of recipes available online will yield a similar but not identical treat. Twinkies, notoriously, make use of an arsenal of industrial ingredients like sodium caseinate to ensure an exactly reproducible and shelf-stable texture and flavor. Chances are, you don’t have a full stockpile of sodium caseinate in your cupboard waiting for you to recreate childhood memories, but that sort of thing is more and more available. The industrial baking process is tough to replicate at home as well, says Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed....
It’s a highly significant incident that ended without greater loss of life. Though still a rarity in commercial aviation in general, the plane’s fan-blade failure—along with a similar but nonfatal event in 2016 on the same airline—nevertheless made the public highly cognizant of aging patterns and maintenance needs aboard aircraft, and carrier inspection protocols that work to ensure flying remains a safe proposition. Of course, airplanes have grown safer with each new generation; advanced designs and safety strategies are key contributors to current record-low accident rates....
Professional drone racing is thrilling to watch. Skilled pilots navigate custom-tuned crafts through narrow passages at high speeds, all while wearing VR headsets for a first-person view. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t cut out for that kind of competition and would immediately crash the drone and yarf from motion sickness. The Mambo FPV, however, gives the experience of aerial racing with much lower stakes. The 7-inch drone streams real-time video to your smartphone, which you can place in the included VR headset adapter to get a pilot’s-eye-view of the terrain....
Worldwide, one browser is king, according to a service called StatCounter: Google’s Chrome. By that site’s estimate, Chrome’s market share is nearly 60 percent, while Apple’s native browser, Safari, is currently around 14 percent. Those percentages change if you focus just on the United States, but Chrome is dominant there, too. It’s been a decade since Google released Chrome to the hungry internet-browsing masses, and to mark that ten-year milestone, the Mountain View-based company is releasing a major update (they usually update it every six weeks, but this one is more significant than usual)....
GHGs like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide trap some of the Earth’s outgoing energy and cause the atmosphere to retain heat. The excess heat can alter climate and weather patterns around the world, causing stronger hurricanes and more droughts among other destruction. Reducing the amount of GHGs emitted into the air is necessary to avoid some of the most catastrophic effects of climate change in the future. “While this is the second year in a row that emissions have increased, it nonetheless marks a change from 2021, when emissions rebounded faster than the economic growth rate,” the group wrote in a statement....
But let’s say you’re lucky, and when the judgement day finally comes, you don’t lose anything of importance—maybe because you’re able to recover your stuff, or because you have it backed up. Drive errors can be so cryptic that it’s hard to know whether you’re dealing with a minor blip or a ticking time bomb, so you might ask yourself: is it safe to write more files to the drive?...
GLAAD, an organization working to combat LGBTQ discrimination in the media, graded the social media sites using a 12-point scorecard devised with Ranking Digital Rights and Goodwin Simon Strategic Research. Each platform was graded on a range of criteria from both the user-facing side to the company’s own internal practices. These include a user’s ability to self-identify with inclusive pronouns, the site’s “policy commitment to protect LGBTQ users,” and its efforts to diversify its workforce....
The thymus, a gland located between the lungs, generates T cells, a critical part of the immune system. When it’s functioning normally, the thymus creates “naïve” T cells that can be programmed to combat pathogens that make their way into the body; over time, the thalamus becomes fatty and starts to shrink, reducing its ability to generate new T cells. Increased levels of a hormone called FGF21, produced in the liver, might be able to keep the thymus going....
But what kind of blood would work? And how to serve it? It took a year or two for most labs to successfully raise enough bed bugs to run their experiments, and now they are able to test everything from basic behavior to pesticide efficacy. Here’s how they did it in five not-so-simple steps. Step 1: Pick a blood Bed bugs specialize on human blood, although they’ll bite other animals if given the chance....
The goal is to create an “internet of animals” that can tell researchers how ecosystems are changing in real-time and how animals are responding to those changes. This, they imagine, would be done by combining information from the wildlife wearables with other data on animal behaviors across space, time, and different environments. For example, to understand if the boundaries of wetlands are changing, they would look at shorebirds. If they want to look at snowmelt, they would follow the movement of geese....
Every artillery piece is, in essence, a tube that combines the artillery shell with an explosive propellant, hurling a projectile and pain far away to someone else. The rate of artillery fire is determined by how quickly the crew can aim, load, and reload the gun. For artillery on the ground, that’s a matter of drill and skill, training the humans to lift and load, and clear and seal guns as fast as possible without dropping an artillery round that can weigh over 90 pounds....
Since the passage of the US Animal Welfare Act in 1966, the use of larger critters has steadily dropped—only 800,000 in 2019—but rats and mice continue to be on trend. The US uses more than 100 million of the rodents annually, many genetically engineered for laboratory perfection. This story, penned by H.C. Davis in our May 1927 issue, chronicles the emergence of their furry white ancestors. “Rats that go to college” (H....
A report released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights that STI rates remained alarmingly high in 2020, with reported cases of some infections continuing to climb. “We already had a strained, crumbling public health infrastructure. There are many communities in the United States that do not have STI specialty clinics,” Jonathan Mermin, a senior official with the CDC, said in a call with reporters. “What that led to was an exacerbation of the already increasing trends....
She’s been deeply involved in the program since its original incarnation, Cosmos: A Personal Voyager, which she co-wrote with her husband, the late physicist Carl Sagan. In the show’s third installment, which will air on March 9 on National Geographic, Druyan expands on the lessons and themes of its forerunners. She hopes that the new season—entitled Cosmos: Possible Worlds—will inspire viewers to work toward an improved future by highlighting scientific progress from the past....
The good news is that you don’t need to look at every single laptop out there in detail, because you can quickly narrow your options down by asking a few questions about what you want in your next computer. Consider both portability and power Every laptop is a compromise between portability and power, and they all vary on where they draw that line. A faster and more capable machine needs bigger internal components and more room to keep them cool—which means it will end up larger, heavier, and more battery-draining than a less-powerful computer....
Cleaning video game consoles takes some delicacy, and you want to make sure you use the right tools and solvents, lest you damage labels and plastic. Yellowing from sunlight exposure can be a significant issue as well, and you can pick up many systems on the cheap if you know how to take care of that corn chip-colored coating. So if you’re looking to breathe new life into your TurboGrafx-16, look no further than this list detailing the dos and don’ts of cleaning vintage tech....
A lot of these capabilities are built into the Android and iOS operating systems, and we’ll cover them all here. Google Chromecast You may already be familiar with the little Google Chromecast dongles, which plug into a spare HDMI port on your TV and enable your smartphone to control it. You can pick from the standard Chromecast ($35 from Google) or the Chromecast Ultra ($69 from Google), which adds 4K capabilities....
How to turn off HEIC on an iPhone This one’s for the people who would rather never see “.heic” again. But before you kick it to the curb, you should understand what you’re dealing with. Apple latched onto the high-efficiency image format (HEIF) standard with iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra in 2017, chose HEIC as the file name extension, and has rolled with it for the past four-plus years—it appears to be here to stay....
