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Several states ditch mask mandates for fully vaccinated people After last Thursday’s announcement from the CDC that masks and six feet of social distancing will no longer be required for fully vaccinated people in most settings, several states are moving toward significantly reducing or removing their COVID-19 restrictions. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced this morning that as of Wednesday, the state will follow the CDC guidelines in no longer requiring masks or social distancing for fully vaccinated people except on public transit and in nursing homes, homeless shelters, schools, and healthcare and correctional facilities....

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, 25 times more powerful than Carbon Dioxide, but thankfully, nowhere near as abundant. Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat from the sun in the Earth’s atmosphere, just like glass traps heat in a greenhouse. Here at sea level, methane is emitted as a byproduct of any number of industries, from landfills and agriculture, to oil and gas resources. The industrial sources of methane are worrying, but of even greater concern are natural sources of methane that have been locked deep under oceans and ice for a very long time....

It was taken by Rover 1-B, one of two Japanese rovers currently hopping around on the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. The duo detached from the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft last week and quickly began sending back mesmerizing images of the asteroid’s stony surface. The solar-powered rovers are small, just seven inches across and less than three inches tall, but they contain cameras and temperature sensors to give astronomers back home their best look so far at a C-type (carbon-rich) asteroid....

Many of the thousands of photographs are grainy, or out of focus. But there are gems hidden in the rough pile of snapshots. Tom Kucy put just a few of the best together, cleaned them up and set them to music, bringing you this lovely short film called Ground Control. Other filmmakers had the same idea. For a faster video (with way more photographs included) check out this effort, from Vimeo user harrisonicus:

If you happen to be one of those people, perhaps you’re seeking more variety in terms of content. Instead of binge-watching Love Island, you may want to pick up a subscription to Curiosity Stream instead and satiate your hunger for knowledge. It’s a streaming platform that specializes in documentaries, and for a limited time, you can get it for 28 percent off during our Back to Education event. Curiosity Stream is an award-winning streaming and on-demand viewing destination where you can discover anything and everything....

The tests were conducted by the Ministry of Defence’s Main Directorate of Armored Forces Combat Training. In the video, the two robots are visible. A small tank-shaped scout advances ahead of a large six-wheeled armored personnel carrier. Behind the large crewed vehicle rolls the tracked logistics robot, also in the same drab military green, and about waist height against the soldiers in all-white standing nearby. It’s not clear how to refer to these bots at the current time....

It’s the total solar eclipse, of course, and this one will achieve inky-black totality as it drifts toward the middle of the Pacific Ocean — where almost no one will see it in person. C’est la vie? Not really. A few clever nerds are barnstorming the region with telescopes, video equipment, and astronomical lineups of guests, which they’ll use to live-stream the eclipse. So if you’d like to procrastinate from work, and learn a thing or two about astronomy, look below for a live Google+ hangout hosted by the folks at Slooh, who run a network of robotic telescopes positioned around the world....

The Pillars of Creation were first made famous by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995. Aside from being exceptionally beautiful, the new JWST image will help researchers identify more precise counts of newly formed stars within the nebula, as well as how much gas and dust is in the region. The goal over time is to build a more clear understanding the dusty clouds and the stars that burst from them....

Called the Data Access Agreement, it will allow investigators from each country to “gain better access to vital data to combat serious crime,” according to the Department of Justice, as they will now be able to directly request data like messages and pictures, for example, from telecommunications providers in the other’s jurisdiction. The US agency said that this is a first-of-its-kind agreement that could help with time-sensitive investigations, including those related to terrorism and child abuse....

This fairly silly-sounding concept is different from terms you might be more familiar with, like the apparent temperature, the humidity index, or the dew point—it’s a bit more complicated, but also more important. Wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is essentially a more nuanced version of the heat index. It takes into account not just the temperature, but also the humidity, wind speed, sun angle, and solar radiation levels (heat index only encompasses temperature and humidity, and assumes you’ll be in the shade)....

The revelations started when Curtis described Nokia’s record in America. “The U.S. hasn’t been Nokia’s strongest suit,” he conceded. But the company aims to change that, having just completed a fact-finding trip around the States, where Americans were “talking about music, talking about gestures, talking about what they want for the future.” Talking about gestures? By “gestures,” Nokia has something in mind beyond spreading or pinching your fingers to zoom in and out of a photo....

Of course, the twisted strands within our bodies carry much higher stakes than even the most chaotic audio cable. Cells would die if they couldn’t efficiently store these helixes in tight quarters while still being able to access their genetic information. Figuring out how they manage to do so is one of the knotty problems Vazquez’s interdisciplinary lab is designed to tackle, often with an eye toward practical applications like novel cancer treatments....

“Their plans are just ridiculous! They’re ridiculous! All of them,” he tells PopSci. For the uninitiated, it’s hard to overstate how influential Douglas Rushkoff is when it comes to digital culture’s bleeding edge. Rising to prominence as a cyberpunk pioneer theorist who helped popularize the early 90’s rave scene, Rushkoff has palled around with the likes of Timothy Leary, Grant Morrison, and William Gibson. He accurately predicted both the dotcom and housing market collapses, as well as the coined phrases “social currency,” “digital native,” and “viral media....

But those three different sorts of matter that each look and act differently aren’t the whole of the universe—far from it. Scientists have discovered (or created) dozens of more exotic states of matter, often bearing mystical and fanciful names: superfluids, Bose-Einstein condensates, and neutron-degenerate matter, to name a few. In the last few years, physicists around the world have been constructing another state of matter: a “time crystal.” If that seems like B-movie technobabble, it’s technobabble no longer....

“In the past, 30 bucks a month meant you had to settle for a slow internet service, unless you wanted to pay a heck of a lot more out of pocket,” Biden said in the Rose Garden Monday. “But over the last few months, my administration has worked closely with internet providers–this is a case where big business stepped up–urging them to cut their prices and raise their speeds.” This new push from the Biden administration follows the 2021 creation of the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides subsidies to reduce internet service costs....

The $6,000 base model is somehow even more curious. It ships with just 32 GB RAM—it’s fast memory, but that’s probably just not enough. Going up to 192 GB pushes the price up by $3,000. The 8- and even 12-core processor options also seem underwhelming for the price. Going up to 16-cores from the base model pushes the price up $2,000 on its own. For storage, the base model comes with a 256 GB, which is almost certainly not enough....

A study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology last week found that white people’s diets contribute more to climate change than those of black and Latinx people. Specifically, researchers pinpointed foods with the highest environmental impacts and determined their consumption rates among different demographic groups. Lead researcher Joe Bozeman, a doctoral student at the Institute of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hopes this novel study will be the first of many that take a more sociological approach to environmental research....

But is it that simple? In a presentation on Social Media Optimization, Neil Patel—the swaggering director of marketing at ACS—waxed poetic on the Social Media Effect. Basically, a fluke piece is picked up on Digg or Delicious and is backlinked so rapidly and frequently that the original site’s Google PageRank shoots up. Instead of the slow, intensive process Patel’s co-presenter (Chris Smith, a strategic consultant for Netconcepts) was espousing, using SME is a speedy and remarkably effective way to game that social media....

Now comes some computational science experts who say we should draw it out even more: maybe vote on one thing at a time–president one day, the U.S. House the next, local library tax districts later that week, and so on. Theory suggests this would be effective at not only lowering costs, but increasing voter turnout. “You can’t say, ‘Today you’ll come in and vote on the first issue, and then we’ll announce the result, and tomorrow you’ll come back again and vote on the second issue....

Maybe you’ve even experienced it yourself. You start to feel lightheaded, your stomach may hurt, your palms are sweaty, your vision closes in, your ears start to ring …. Then you wake up on the floor, staring up the ceiling, and realize you’ve fainted. What happened? Fainting – or what medics more technically call syncope – can be caused by a number of factors. Ultimately it comes down to not enough blood getting to your brain....