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Here’s a handy visual guide to the arsenal of the Directorate—China’s fictional new government:

Everyone from cabinet secretaries to members of congress to state leaders to mayors have put in appearances at COP26, either to signal a commitment to more aggressive climate action at the local level, or to present a competing plan for how the US should proceed. Six governors, all Democrats and members of the US Climate Alliance, a group that promotes local climate policy,, have attended: Hawaii’s David Ige, Illinois’ J....

You can tune in to Faraday Future’s press conference live online here. The hype surrounding Faraday Future is almost palpable. The 400-employee car company that is expected to go up against high-end brands like Tesla and promises to make drivers change the way they think about cars. A new car made from an all-new company, rather than a legacy manufacturer, is an exciting prospect for any car lover. Experts expect an all-electric vehicle that can drive far on a single charge....

Intrigued, her boss suggested applying the chemical to fabric. Sherman discovered that H20 and solvents flowed right off anything treated with the stuff, making it both waterproof and stain-resistant. In 1956, after three more years of experimentation, 3M introduced Sherman’s discovery under the brand name Scotchgard. The genius of the unexpected lies in its ability to spur researchers and inventors to reconsider their work just enough to drive innovation. Many of science and technology’s most famous discoveries have been the result of serendipitous strokes of luck....

If you were planning on becoming a photographer, the decision would be easy. However, when it comes to investing your hard earned money in a hobby you’re only starting out with, you’ll probably spend a lot of time asking yourself if it’s a good idea to get a dedicated camera. And if you finally decide to go for it then there’s the whole which-one-to-buy conundrum—and things get even more complicated....

Rubella is like measles’ little cousin: it causes the same kind of red rash, but isn’t as harmful, debilitating, or contagious (it’s even called “German measles” or sometimes “three-day measles”). You might wonder, then, why you should be concerned at all with one person who attended the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and later turned out to have rubella. So let us tell you. You can carry rubella without knowing it Unlike measles, which can kill children infected with it, rubella is rarely dangerous....

We’ve long been a fan of Hillcrest—particularly its innovative Loop remote control (we featured it last year). And it’s that very controller, especially the three patents relating to its motion-control capabilities, at the heart of the suit. The Loop has no numbers and few buttons, instead you swing the accelerometer-stuffed device up and down and right and left to cycle through an onscreen menu. Sound familiar? Hillcrest thinks so. In a statement released this afternoon, the company insists that though it has, “a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights....

If Formiga sees the field, she’ll be the oldest athlete to appear in the tournament, taking the record from the United States’ Christie Pearce, who played in 2015 at 39 years and 11 months old. Other older athletes in France this month include Carli Lloyd (36) and Sinclair (35). The athletes, though, are outliers: The average age of players in this year’s World Cup is 26 years and six months....

GA Tech Professor Mike Stilman, who studies robot navigation among movable obstacles, is studying the cognitive processes that enable humans to grab arbitrary objects and find creative new uses for them. Future robots might scan their environments, see something on the ground, and quickly run through a list of possible uses for the thing. Maybe it sees a chair and realizes chairs have height, so it can use the chair to climb up to reach a window to escape a burning room....

Babies have more bones than you Newborns enter the world with about 300 bones, almost 100 more than the 206 adults walk around with. The bonus bones are part of the un-fused road map of an adult skeleton, and contain gaps of cartilage that allow for extra flexibility and growth potential. As humans grow, cartilage calcifies and our bones fuse together into the complete, adult skeleton we know and love. The process of bone fusing continues well into the teenage years for most people....

2017’s Whitechapel fatberg, the pride of London’s sewer system, at one point measured 850 feet long and weighed 130 tons. That’s roughly the size of 89 Priuses. I’m joking about it being the “pride” of anything—it is, in fact, a horror show of our own making—but it is true that a chunk of the fatberg lives at the Museum of London, where it has reportedly changed color and started sweating....

Shifting the playback speed to 1.25x means you’ll get through 50 hours of podcasts in a mere 40 hours, while at 2x speed you’ll zoom through them in just 25. This approach can save you some serious time, although it’s not for everyone or for every podcast, as you probably won’t be able to take in and ponder everything quite as deeply as you at a normal speed. These tips and tricks can get you right back up to date....

Here’s a look at five of the new software-based offerings en route from the Apple mothership in Cupertino, California, to your devices sometime over the next few months. Undo an iMessage, or edit it With iOS 16, which is the next version of the operating system that your phone runs on, Apple is releasing a nice new perk: The chance to undo a sent iMessage. That means that the note you send somebody and instantly regret can be—in theory—recalled before they see it....

The CDC noted that it’s unclear how Zika has affected these outcomes. For example, 9 to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in first trimester pregnancy loss, making it relatively common. All nine women showed symptoms of Zika–all experienced a rash, and a number of them reported fevers. Between August 2015 and January 2016, the CDC tested 257 pregnant women, and 97 percent tested negative for the virus.

If you’ve been on the bird app for a while you’ll have a lot of data in your archive, so get ready to wait anywhere between 24 and 36 hours before the file is ready to download. A lot of content also makes for a hefty file, so don’t be surprised if your archive is more than a couple gigabytes. Downloading it (and later uploading it to a tweet-deletion platform) will likely take a while....

The High Seas When observing the Moon with the naked eye, the easiest things to spot are the lunar maria. These dark lunar “seas” are quite visible and show up in good contrast to the lighter highland, or terra, areas. The lunar maria were mainly named in 1651 by the Italian priest/astronomer Giambattista Riccioli, whose lunar naming system has been taken as standard. Another astronomer, Johannes Hevelius, suggested a different naming system at the same time, but Riccioli’s system stuck, probably due to the evocative and romantic language he used to describe the seas and oceans....

Heat and droughts caused the most deaths at 19.6 percent, followed by severe summer weather at 18.8 percent and winter weather at 18.1 percent. Together, earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires made up only 3.4 percent. According to Susan Cutter, co-author of the study, the mortality map has applications for emergency response to both natural disasters and terrorist attacks. While the causes of these types of events are very different, there are many parallels in the way that emergency workers respond, a fact not lost on the Department of Homeland Security, which funded the study....

Deep Space Industries will unveil its plans later today at the Santa Monica Museum of Flying, but here’s a sneak peek. Two sets of small satellites will do the initial prospecting and then light mining of near-Earth asteroids.In 2015, DSI will start launching unmanned “FireFly” spacecraft, which will be modular, 55-pound craft that can cheaply hitch a ride with commercial satellites. FireFly craft will study asteroids on journeys of about two to six months....

Materials: • One 8-inch-by-8-inch LED matrix kit • Arduino Pro Mini • Arduino programmer board (six pin-to-micro USB) • Strip of six right-angle break-away male headers • Piezo vibration sensor • Coin cell battery holder (with on/off switch) • Seven 3-inch-long jumper wires • Waterproof plastic box (about 3.5″x2.5″x1″) • Elastic running belt (with zippered pocket) • Two 1.25-inch-long 4-40 screws • Two 4-40 nuts • Two 1-inch-long 4-40 standoffs • Two 8-inch-long Velcro cable ties Tools: Soldering iron, solder, wire cutters, drill with ⅛-inch-long bit⅝⅛, computer, Arduino programming software 2) Stick the six breakaway right-angle headers into the Arduino’s programming interface pads....

On Friday, the sun’s surface erupted with outbursts of charged particles called “coronal mass ejections.” Those particles made it harder for the satellites, which were planned to provide internet access, to maintain their orbits. In a statement on Tuesday, SpaceX said “the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.” The geomagnetic storm itself “was by no means a big event”—it happened at “just the wrong time,” Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center told Space....