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Britain’s Environment Agency is not the first to dream up or even build a floating domicile of this kind–variations on this theme exist in Canada, Germany, and the U.S. for instance, as well as in some Southeast Asian and Latin American countries (where homes are commonly built on stilts to avoid seasonal floodwaters). But for the UK government to take an active interest in modern buoyant abodes is significant in that it could help drive technology development forward in coming years....

Each titanium caliper weighs just 6.4 lbs., compared to 10.8 lbs. for the current aluminum units and thanks to the stiffness properties of titanium, the lighter printed part is stronger. They are the world’s first brake calipers to be produced by 3-D printing and the largest functional titanium 3-D printed components. The Chiron currently in production employs forged aluminum, eight-piston front calipers and six-piston rear calipers. The fronts are the largest brake calipers on any production car in the world....

The cannon’s power comes from Boyle’s Law, which (simplified) says that pressure is inversely related to volume. For example, if you put the air in a small reservoir under a lot of pressure and then release it into a larger one—such as the barrel of a gun—the pressure will drop. This causes the air’s volume to expand instantly, shooting out any objects, like bullets, sharing that space. Boyle’s Law was also used to great advantage in one of the most historically important air guns of all time: the Corps of Discovery Air Rifle....

What you’ll need There are an infinite number of ways to construct a desk. But for this particular project, I have four criteria I need my diy computer desk to hit. After lots of research, I decided to construct my desk out of a door slab and some adjustable desk legs from Ikea. It knocks all four goals out of the park, and as a bonus, you should be able to find the parts easily, no matter where you live....

For so many people with seasonal allergies, spring means a never ending flow of mucus. Drug store aisles are stock full of pills, nasal sprays, and eye drops, but sometimes that phlegm-busting cocktail just doesn’t cut it. One aisle over are the ever-so-tempting probiotics, which are constantly touted as the cure-all for today’s modern diseases, despite the lack of evidence. But what can they do for allergies? While there’s evidence to suggest that the bacteria that live inside our guts play a key role in our immune systems, there’s no evidence that any individual probiotic available on the market can reduce the severity and frequency of seasonal allergies....

This interactive graphic show the global footprints of the six most common types of cancer. The stark geographic patterns reveal both the role of lifestyle and the power of preventive measures, as well as the places where those measures remain out of reach: [via Visual.ly]

Hot sleeper? Meet this cool new Casper Wave mattress The Casper Wave Hybrid Snow Mattress is part of the new Cooling Collection. It offers the same level of support and pressure relief as the first-generation Wave Hybrid mattress with the addition of new cooling tech that delivers a sleep experience that’s, on average, six degrees cooler than previous-generation models in Casper’s in-house tests. At first glance, the Casper Wave mattress doesn’t look much different from the previous generation in terms of form factor and outward appearance....

This 3,200-year-old find is exciting because it shows that the Ancient Egyptian’s shared our love of cheese—to the extent it was given as a funerary offering. But not only that, it also fits into archaeology’s growing understanding of the importance of dairy to the development of the human diet in Europe. Dairy in diets About two-thirds of the world’s population is lactose intolerant. So although dairy products are a daily part of the diet for many living in Europe, Northern India, and North America, drinking milk in adulthood was only possible from the Bronze Age, over the last 4,500 years....

This achievement at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Heifi, China, comes just days after German chancellor Angela Merkel inaugurated the Wendelstein 7-X, another experimental fusion reactor. At the time, the German group was quite pleased to create 80 million degree Celsius hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second, an achievement now dwarfed by the Chinese machine. However that comparison doesn’t mean too much, as the two machines are in vastly different stages of their life cycles....

But even people who can perceive micro expressions aren’t always accurate. In 2012, researchers in Finland described what they claimed to be the first system that used a computer to detect micro expressions. In the paper, they write that computers are particularly attractive in this field, since humans are only correct about 47 percent of the time. And computers have only gotten better at their craft. In a paper submitted to arXiv, Xiaobai Li and a team of researchers (also in Finland), share their new machine vision algorithm....

Click here to see all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage. Anywhere from one-fifth to one half of SARS-CoV-2 carriers are asymptomatic. In the rest, the virus can manifest as an unwitting selection from a buffet of coronavirus symptoms—coughing, fever, loss of taste, loss of appetite, vomiting, diarrhea, brain fog, fatigue—that’s made the coronavirus wildly unpredictable. That leaves many wondering whether these are coronavirus symptoms or just due to a passing bug....

Lagging tests, uncertain quarantine procedures, and dwindling supplies of medical masks: COVID-19 has revealed issues with how the US handles major disease outbreaks. Now there’s one more problem to worry about. On Thursday, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn released a statement that announced the first drug shortage related to the COVID-19 epidemic—but stopped short of saying what drug it was. Some 80 percent of the medically active ingredients in American drugs come from elsewhere....

Nicoló Filippo Rosso is an Italian photographer living in Colombia. His work has been published and exhibited internationally and earned a World Press Photo Award in 2020. This story originally featured on Undark. Luz Ángela Uriana’s voice trembled as she described the COVID-19 situation in her region. “We are really scared,” she said in a phone call. “There are many cases in our neighboring town.” Worried in particular about her son, who has lung issues, she added that she and others “want Cerrejón to stop activities while this illness is around....

Twitter was among the first platforms to offer dark mode, also called night mode, rolling it out for Android phones in 2016. Available in your drop-down settings, you can click a little half-moon circle to enable it, instantly transforming the page from a stark white to charcoal gray background. But 2018 has proven to be the real year of the dark mode. The blackout strategy has spread to a half-dozen new platforms, including Reddit, Apple OS and iOS, Android phones, and YouTube....

Bowie’s musical persona can be described as chameleon-like, and he took on multiple aliases during the course of his more than four decade-long career, including Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke. However, recurring themes across his work in music and visual media included space, sci-fi, and fantasy. Aside from the various references to space on his seminal 1972 glam rock album “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” Bowie starred in the cult classic films The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Labyrinth (1986) and even took on the role of inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006)....

But now the discoverer of pulsars—super-dense celestial objects that spin in space, producing signals that look something like stars blinking in and out of sight—has won the $3 million breakthrough prize, the largest financial award in the field. And she’s giving it all away to support diversity in science. Credit where credit is overdue In 1967, Bell Burnell was working in the Cambridge lab of Antony Hewish, with whom she had constructed a radio telescope to observe strange cosmic phenomena that were then known as quasars....

So called “directed-energy weapons” use a beam of coherent light to disable attacking troops. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which presidential hopeful John McCain is a member, laser weapons provide a tactical advantage primarily because of their accuracy. In the future, these weapons could be used during combat as a defensive measure, but it’s still unclear whether the Department of Defense will decide to develop them as offensive weapons....

Some 4.5 billion years ago, as the solar system was just forming, large chunks of rocks frequently collided with slow-growing dwarf planets. The results were often cataclysmic for both bodies, reducing them to debris that still pummels Earth today. But sometimes those violent collisions yielded the creation of something shiny and new—perhaps even diamonds. That’s likely what happened when an asteroid smashed a dwarf planet into smithereens in those earliest days of the solar system, according to a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

If that meteor had come just half a minute later, it would have hit somewhere in either the Atlantic or Pacific. Either location would have made some killer waves (literally), but at least it wouldn’t have killed as many dinos. Birds are cool and all, it just might have been nice to have some little raptors running around instead of chickens. They were about the same size anyway, so they couldn’t reach the doorknobs if we put them a little higher....