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Jackery Portable Power Station Explorer 300, 293Wh Backup Lithium Battery $209 (was $349) I have one of these 7-pound boxes and it has already proven extremely handy around my house. I’ve used it to power our smartphones, router, and laptops during a blackout. I’ve used it to charge power tool batteries when working on an outdoor project. It even powered a projector and speaker for an outdoor movie night. For $209, you can keep this compact power station plugged in all the time and use it in an emergency....

The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula, which actually doesn’t have anything to do with planets. Instead, it is the result of the implosion of a star called a red giant. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), a star swells into a red giant when a star that is a bit bigger than our sun runs out of hydrogen fuel at its core and red giants can even be hundreds of times wider than the original star....

Scientists calculate that a gram-sized laser-propelled space probe could reach more than 25 percent of the speed of light and arrive at the nearest star in about 20 years. The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is finally leaving the solar system after 37 years of flight at a speed of roughly 38,000 miles per hour or less than 0.006 percent the speed of light. This suggests that with conventional propulsion technology, humanity will never reach even the nearest stars, says experimental cosmologist Philip Lubin at the University of California, Santa Barbara....

They rely on AWS for nearly all their computing and storage needs, including analytics, databases, recommendation engines, and more. Many other companies, regardless of size, also use AWS to run their online operations, which means there are plenty of individuals manning the job. In the tech industry, AWS and cloud computing experts are extremely in demand, and you can capitalize on the demand with the help of The 2022 CompTIA and AWS, Cisco Certification Paths Bundle: Lifetime Access, which not only offers AWS training, but also IT and networking courses, particularly CompTIA and Cisco certification....

A dummy went to space Elon Musk and his band of rocket scientists (and publicists) finally launched the Falcon Heavy rocket last week. You can read about the successful operation here and see why we chose Falcon Heavy as one of our Best of What’s New innovations last year. Some time this week, take a break from filing the TPS reports your boss gave you and think about that dummy flying through space in a billionaire’s used car....

Listen to the latest episode of the Techathlon podcast Before we get into this week’s stories, make sure you listen and subscribe to our weekly Techathlon podcast. It’s a game show that teaches you about important things happening in the world of technology. This week’s episode includes a hands-on with the Oculus Quest VR headset, as well as a look back at technology companies that died untimely deaths. Listen in the player above, subscribe on iTunes, follow us on Stitcher, or add us on Anchor....

But mass-produced leather products aren’t the same as those handcrafted by an artisan. They’ve got a similar look and feel, but often aren’t made with the same high-quality leather and don’t offer the personalization that defines artisan work. So, when it’s time for me to order a new belt or gear for my horse, I go to a skilled leatherworker. Aprille Tomlinson is exactly that. And as a trained artist who taught herself the craft after buying a horse, she knows the appeal of teaching oneself a new trade....

If you’re trying to cut a long piece of wood by yourself, these clamps fill the middle ground between screwing one end of the board to your work surface and actually buying clamps. What’s good about these, too, is that if you’ve got enough scrap wood and random hardware, you can build them for free. Stats Time: 5-15 minutes per clampCost: $10 or lessDifficulty: easy Materials 2 (at least 16-inch) pieces of 2-by-42 fully or mostly threaded carriage bolts (minimum size: 8 inches long, 3/8-inch diameter)4 nuts (same diameter as the bolts)4 washers (same diameter as the nuts and bolts)...

A few weeks ago, I went on a road trip up to the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, near the Vermont border. The car, one of those odd little Volvo hatchbacks, was packed full of camping gear, food, beer, and four people entirely too tall to be sitting in a car the size and shape of a bathtub. We were all hungover, a necessary next-day result of meeting college friends and “showing them New York....

Air pollution affects every human being on Earth, but the extent of its impact is not the same. There are stark disparities in the exposure and impact of air pollution among various racial and ethnic groups, socioeconomic statuses, and geographical locations. Overall pollutant concentrations may have decreased from 1990 to 2010, but people of color are still more likely to be exposed. Air pollution disproportionally affects people of color People of color tend to have a higher exposure to common air pollutants such as particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, says Gaige Kerr, a research scientist studying air quality at George Washington University....

Lots of social insects follow basically the same routine, but honeybees are unique in that their queens can go on multiple mating flights. The goal: increasing genetic diversity. The queen bee will mother every worker in her hive until a daughter takes her place, so the more variation she can add to their pool of potential fathers before settling down, the better. A broad selection of sperm from diverse sources means more genes in the hive, which means a better chance of surviving should disease or environmental disaster knock some of them out....

That is until today, when Microsoft started rolling out a passwordless feature to all of its users, allowing them to log in using methods commonly associated with MFA, like security keys, codes sent over text or email, and authenticator apps. The company announced its plans to make passwords optional back in December 2020, and even though other mainstream platforms like Twitter also said they were heading in the same direction, Microsoft is the first one to do it for both enterprise and free accounts....

In West Africa, scientists are deploying these balloons, which capture mosquitoes and allow the researchers to figure out how high mosquitoes can fly. By doing so, they hope to piece together how the insects and the diseases they carry spread across long distances. Eventually, this information could be used to contain and eradicate diseases like malaria. “This is truly a frontier,” says Tovi Lehmann, who studies the spread of mosquitoes and their pathogens at the National Institutes of Health and was the lead scientist on the new research....

Though it’s currently useless, the human coccyx—commonly referred to as the tailbone—remains nestled at the bottom of the spine, a remnant of our tailed ancestors. Long before human tail-lessness, our early fish relatives had two: A fleshy one and a more flexible fin. As animals took to land, they lost the back fin and kept the fleshier appendage. Eventually, apes ditched them. These primates no longer required tails to maintain balance or send social signals; they shifted their balance backward and began communicating via posture, facial expression, and vocalizations, says Philip Senter, a vertebrate paleontologist at Fayetteville State University....

The study analyzed data from the last two years of the Health Information National Trends Survey (conducted annually by the National Institutes of Health). It found that more than 70 percent of US adults were unaware that HPV can cause oral, penile, and anal cancers as well as cervical cancer, which has been the focus of most public health campaigns to date. Even cervical cancer awareness is low: two-thirds of men and one-third of women don’t know HPV can cause it....

In a new study published today in Chemistry Of Materials, researchers announced the invention of a new flame retardant coating inspired by substances created by the humble mussel. Flame retardants are used to coat flammable materials in thousands of different consumer products, from couches to mattresses. Flame retardants keep these items from bursting into flames, but are often toxic, causing researchers to look for an alternative. Enter the mussel. Mussels and many other animals contain a substance called polydopamine....

The space agency is moving forward on the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). Slated to launch in the mid-2020s, WFIRST is designed to measure the effects of dark energy, while potentially discovering millions of galaxies and providing a glimpse into the atmospheres of alien worlds. WFIRST recently passed a key design review, allowing the scientists on the team to move forward with their mission planning. WFIRST has moved from being “a mission under study” to “a mission NASA is pursuing/intends to execute,” said a NASA spokesperson in an email to Popular Science....

The mission broke with NASA’s intended plan for Apollo. The agency had wanted to test the lunar spacecraft — the main command-service modules and the lunar module — in Earth orbit before sending any mission a quarter of a million miles away. But in August of 1968, the lunar module was falling so badly behind schedule that NASA managers came up with a novel idea. The Saturn V was ready for a manned mission, so why not take a command-service module to the Moon without a lunar module?...