If you think you’ve got a young computer engineer on your hands, grab one of these monthly STEM Bitsbox coding subscription boxes. Today only, you get half off the first STEM box—just $15. The kits usually go for $30 and are intended for ages 6 to 12. Each month will let your child explore a new coding or STEM concept. They’ll even be able to do things like build real apps via the Bitsbox website....
2. Marantz AV8802A ($4,000 preamp) and MM8077 ($2,400 amplifier) This combination Marantz preamp and amplifier can drive up to 150 watts to seven speakers at a time. It’s among the first systems to process ultra-high-definition 4K through HDMI. It also supports Dolby Atmos—theater-quality audio that places you in the middle of a three-dimensional soundscape. You can also stream your favorite Pandora, Spotify, and SiriusXM satellite radio channels directly to the units....
As the company explained in a blog post, the hope is that this gives developers extra time to familiarize themselves with the new guidance and requirements that are coming with this change, including information they need to provide to Google. By April 2022, developers will need to submit data safety forms to accompany any products they offer in the Google Play Store. This will include the type of data (such as location or contacts) an app collects, how that is used by the app (such as to personalize the experience or for the app’s basic functionality), and how this data is shared with outside sources....
“I’d guess that the marshmallow would reduce the temperature of the hot chocolate,” says Chris Loss, a food scientist and lecturer at Cornell University. Temperature is essentially a measure of energy, Loss says. Fast-moving molecules produce more energy and therefore raise the temperature of whatever entity they are in. According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy flows from high to low concentrations. In the marshmallow-hot chocolate scenario, the hot chocolate’s high energy likely moves to the lower-energy marshmallows....
PopSci chatted with Megan Hryndza, the CEO and co-founder of Mighty Deposits, which helps link people up with banks that make environmentally responsible investments. “It takes a whole lot longer for a bank to change its direction than it does for a person to change their bank account,” she says. “The most impactful and immediate way to align your dollars with your values today is to put some, if not all, in banks performing right now on the issues that are most important to you, and then letting your current bank know why you moved your money....
On the northern edge of the town of Makariv, roughly 30 miles from the center of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces in March reportedly captured a Krasukha-4 electronic warfare system brought by the invading Russian army. While it looks like a shipping container with irregular panels, it is actually a sophisticated signal jammer, designed to incapacitate the early warning sensors on airplanes. Photos of the captured system date to mid-March, though they appear to have not circulated online until March 22....
We’ve named the Soundcore by Anker Life A1 True Wireless Earbuds the best wireless earbuds for exercise under $100, but we’re particularly partial to these wireless over-ear headphones from Anker. Multi-mode noise canceling allows you to choose between Transport, Outdoor, and Indoor modes for customized noise canceling, with two microphones on each earcup detecting and filtering out distracting noises around you. Lossless transfer means you can hear hidden details in “august” by Taylor Swift that you couldn’t hear before, and custom 40mm silk diaphragm drivers reproduce music across a wide frequency (up to 40kHz) so it sounds like you’re in the recording room with Queen Swift herself....
In this study, researchers from several institutions including Oxford University and the National-Kapodistrian University of Athens looked at an ancient retrovirus that’s present in the genes of only some humans, and found that HK2, the retrovirus, is present in people who use injection drugs in both Greece and Scotland at a higher rate than in the general population. They believe that their results offer evidence for a physical cause of addiction, although they don’t currently know the exact mechanism by which it works....
Most AeroGarden models are on huge sale at Best Buy this weekend for Black Friday. If this sounds like the right gift for you or someone you care about, these deals should make giving the gift of easy home gardening a little bit easier on your wallet. AeroGarden Sprout Indoor Garden — $59.99 (Down from $99.99) The smallest AeroGarden, Sprout, is an extremely compact herb garden. It has three seed pod slots to grow smaller plants....
To do this, the spacecraft orbited both Vesta and Ceres, two bodies that are wildly different from each other, but both may hold answers to questions about the earliest days of the solar system. Vesta is the second largest object in the main asteroid belt, and a majority of meteorites that have been found on Earth are believed to come from Vesta. Ceres on the other hand is unique in that it’s the largest body in the asteroid belt, after all it’s large enough to be classified as a dwarf planet....
Every spring, trees and grasses release billions of buoyant pollen granules into the air, using the wind to disburse across the countryside in an effort to reproduce. It’s all about survival; plants that release more pollen have the survival advantage. As an adult and pediatric allergist-immunologist in the Midwest, the onset of spring signals my busy season treating hundreds of patients for their seasonal allergy and asthma symptoms. If you suffer through the season, know that you are not alone....
This is welcome news for troops on the ground, who associate the distinctive “brrrrrrrrrt” of the A-10’s vulcan cannon with battlefield salvation, and bad news for those who find themselves on the receiving end of the A-10’s attacks. For a few more years, the Thunderbolt will stay in the skies, hunting America’s foes. But it has to retire someday. Beloved as it is, the A-10 is an old plane. Designed to hunt Soviet tanks in a potential European war, it entered service in 1975 and it’s remained active ever since....
The star attracted a lot of attention last month after researchers reported an odd phenomenon happening there. Located 1480 light-years away, the star sometimes dims by up to 20 percent–that’s a much larger shadow than a planet could cast. And the dimming happens at an irregular pattern, too. Trying to explain these weird effects, scientists have come up with a variety of hypotheses. Could it be a family of comets?...
Apple AirPods Pro $159 (Was $249 also available at Walmart) Apple’s flagship true wireless earbuds are known and loved for a reason. Make that many reasons: easy Apple device pairing/switching, wear detection, active noise cancellation, transparency mode, adaptive EQ, spatial audio with head-tracking—just to name a few features. They wrap high-tech engineering in a seamless user experience, and at the current Black Friday price they are an undeniable best buy....
However, even with its complicated construction and mind-boggling design, a quantum computer is still a machine that performs operations by employing both hardware and software. Some of those actions are similar to those performed by classical computers. Curious to understand how they function? Popular Science got a look around the quantum center in IBM’s Yorktown Heights, New York campus. Take a closer look at what’s happening inside—starting with something called the qubit (more on what that is in a moment) and zooming out, bit by bit....
1. Vibrating metal Seven of the speakers rely on a filament called a balanced armature, a type of tech common in hearing aids; metal vibrates between a pair of magnets to generate sound. Two armatures ring the low tones (like for a bass), four do the mids (think: guitars), and one hits the highs (e.g., cymbals). 2. Moving membrane A magnet inside a rounded metal enclosure causes a 0.2-inch-diameter diaphragm to pulse, displacing air and pushing audio toward your ears....
According to the analytics firm, data.ai, almost every one of the dozen countries surveyed in its latest overview is maintaining a dramatic increase in app usage since the pandemic’s onset. In Australia, for example, people spent an average of 3.6 hours per day on apps at the beginning of 2020, a number that has since increased 40 percent to around 4.9 hours today. Likewise, Singapore saw a similar percentage rise for its population—from 4....
Among the more remarkable legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic is how quickly federal regulators, the health care industry, and consumers moved to make at-home testing a reliable tool for managing a public health crisis. But that fast-track focus is missing from another, less publicized epidemic: an explosion in sexually transmitted diseases that can cause chronic pain and infertility among infected adults and disable or kill infected newborns. The disparity has amplified calls from researchers, public health advocates, and health care companies urging the federal government to greenlight at-home testing kits that could vastly multiply the number of Americans testing for STDs....
Participation awards have been around for at least 100 years, but lately they have come under fire—perhaps most notably when Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison returned his sons’ trophies in 2015—for creating entitled youth who lack drive. Yet that’s exactly the opposite of what these medals do for little ones, says Illinois-based psychologist and parenting coach Emily Pagone. When toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners compete, they don’t know the expectations adults have for them, Pagone says....
Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis, has dedicated the better part of his career to studying geniuses–people who possess what he calls the highest level of scientific creativity. He thinks they may very well have ceased to exist. It may be that they have been rendered impossible, simply because of the way science works anymore. Other psychologists and even geneticists have argued that modern society is short on astoundingly intelligent members....
