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A great way to combat that is to tell the stories of how science has changed the world and our place in it. One high-profile example is the Oscar-winning movie Hidden Figures, which tells the story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three African-American women at NASA who sent John Glenn into orbit in 1962. There are also less well-known stories, like Audrey Sherman, the so-called 100-patent woman, who started as an intern at 3M while still in high school....

Biden devoted more time to address Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation, and, of course, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Climate change took a back seat, receiving just two direct mentions. The first mention of climate change was when Biden talked about climate change mitigation as a way to create jobs. “We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans, modernizing roads, airports, ports, and waterways all across America,” the president said in his address....

This week’s episode features an extra weird, very special guest: Bill Nye the Science Guy. Take a listen below (or wherever you like to get your podcasts) and keep scrolling for more info on some of the stories we shared. And don’t forget to check out Bill’s brand new podcast, Science Rules! Fact: Your brain can ignore a lot—including a person in a giant gorilla costume directly in front of you....

Well, Breakout Labs is at again, announcing funding ventures for the second time this year. This time, the ideas range from adhesives that mimic the skin of geckos, low-cost sensors that can tell if food has gone bad, metals that repel water, and a mission to fight aging. The overarching trend in this announcement is funding advances in microstructure: three companies use mechanical innovation on a nanoscale to seemingly change the property of the material....

At maximum performance, Blackmagic’s new rig can capture 12,288 x 6480 footage at 60 fps using its Super 35 sensor. That makes each frame essentially an 80-megapixel image. Compare that to the 32-megapixel frames that come from 8K footage or the comparatively paltry 8-megapixels you get out of 4K. Right now, there’s really no way to actually watch 12K footage. Instead, this camera intends to give 8K and 4K productions more flexibility....

In the study, the researchers took fMRI scans of the brains of 78 teenage boys diagnosed with Internet gaming disorder, and 73 subjects without the condition. Then they compared the connections between 25 different regions of the brain in the addicted subjects versus the controls. It turned out that the teens with internet gaming addiction had much stronger connections between several different regions of the brain. Some of these may boost the boys’ cognitive performance....

Many people in the Middle East, and some parts of South and Southeast Asia, use twigs from the arak tree (known as miswak) to clean their teeth. They fray the end of the twig, dampen the resulting bristles with water or rosewater and then rub the bristles against their teeth (see video below). The wood of the arak tree (Salvadora persica) has a high concentration of fluoride and other antimicrobial components that prevent tooth decay....

Even if your needs extend to more advanced features, like an online shop or a web-based booking system, website builders out there have all sorts of tools and will surely be able to help you get what you need. You might actually be surprised at how quickly you can get a webpage up and running. 1. Squarespace Squarespace is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive website builders out there. You can use it to build sites for everything from small businesses to your upcoming wedding, and at the heart of it you’ll find dozens of superbly designed templates to get you started....

Franzen goes to explain that—based on the “modelling” he’s done in his head—there is no scenario in which we can avoid 2ºC of warming, that the challenge is simply insurmountable, and that human nature is at odds with the mobilization required. Perhaps it’s fair to be a pessimist in these times: the climate has indeed warmed by just over 1ºC while carbon emissions continue to climb. It’s going to take sweeping changes to our industrial and transportation sectors to change this, and that probably won’t happen without policies that mandate such an overhaul....

Its swirling cloud layers are evocative of Jupiter, with different colors representing clouds at different altitudes–white is high-altitude, like cumulus clouds here on Earth, while the blue-green swirls represent cirrus-like layers. Winds howl at 560 MPH there, despite an utterly frigid -360°F atmosphere. The south pole is very reminiscent of Saturn, which also has a strange and giant hurricane at its southern end. And that scalloped band near the equator?...

Critter Bitters co-founders Julia Plevin and Lucy Knops just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help grow their business, which started as a design project when the two were students at the School of Visual Arts in New York. They’ve been tweaking their recipe ever since. “Originally back in grad school we had four flavors,” says Knops. “But we narrowed down to perfecting one recipe that highlights the cricket element.” That said, there are other spices in the bitters to help compliment the crickets....

From late June to August of last year, 101 people ended up sick with salmonella, a food-borne bacteria more commonly associated with raw cookie dough, eggs, and reptiles. No one died, but 28 were hospitalized. (Different types of salmonella cause different diseases, including typhoid fever. This outbreak involved the more common presentation colloquially known as salmonella, which involves several days of diarrhea and fever.) About half of all salmonella outbreaks are linked to produce, as we’ve written before—but peaches are, according to the FDA, a new source....

The delta variant of COVID-19 continued to spread aggressively over the past week, as hospitalizations rise among children and adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and a small breakout occurred on a mostly vaccinated cruise ship. Meanwhile, questions remain about whether mixing different COVID vaccines could produce better immunity against the virus. Here’s what you need to know this week. Hospitalizations for COVID in younger populations are at record highs Anyone can get severe COVID-19....

You can’t customize an iPhone as much as you can an Android phone, but there are still ways to make it yours. Serious personalization such as installing a totally new home screen is off the table, but we can show you how to get the next best thing. Set the wallpaper on your home and lock screens Whether you go with a family portrait, graphic design, or photo from a fireman’s charity calendar, a custom wallpaper has always been the easiest way to put your stamp on a device and say, “This....

Nutritionists asked themselves the same question. So they tested it. And it turns out it does matter, though just a little bit. For every daily serving of red meat that people swapped out for some other, healthier food group, their mortality decreased by 17 percent. Meanwhile, folks who ate just a half serving more of red meat per day increased their mortality by 10 percent. The team published these results this week in the British Medical Journal....

On November 5, DARPA announced that Gremlins, its long-in-the-works program to make an air-launched and air-recoverable drone, successfully demonstrated airborne recovery. The flight test, which took place in October, featured two Gremlin drones flying a series of checks. One of those Gremlins latched onto and was loaded inside the C-130. The other, as Defense News reports, crashed during the tests. “Airborne recovery is complex,” Paul Calhoun, DARPA’s program manager for Gremlins, said in a release....

A rare find, the nest is the first concrete proof that tuatara are breeding again, said sanctuary officials of the species that, unlike other reptiles, has two rows of top teeth and a light-sensitive “third eye” on its forehead, which is visible for about six months when it hatches. In an effort to save the species that once flourished in the Mesozoic Era and almost neared extinction in the 1700s because of the introduction of predators like rats, the Karori Sanctuary created 70 tuatara in 2005 and another 130 in 2007, before releasing them into the wild....

Wake up, rub that sleep out of your eyes, and check out the latest installment in our Ask Us Anything video series. It’s based on our ever-popular column by Daniel Engber. Got a question you’ve been noodling over lately? You ask; we answer! Tweet your query to (@PopSci) with the hashtag #AskAnything, or email it to us at askanything@popsci.com.

Ha! Sounds like a military-Santa cover-up to me. So I pinged my own North Pole insider, who identifies himself as Patches the Elf, for the real scoop. “Santa’s keeping things under tight wraps, but I’ve heard the reindeer have been juicing,” Patches says. “I don’t know what he’s feeding them, but they’re doing Mach 6 at a trot. I’ve never seen such a bad case of antler burn (from the air friction, of course)....

Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes, helped uncover the nature of chemical bonds, identified sickle cell anemia as a molecular disease, elucidated some of the most common protein structures, revolutionized our understanding of primate evolution, and is widely hailed as one of the fathers—if not the father—of molecular biology. Oh, and he almost single-handedly spread one of the biggest medical misconceptions of all time: that vitamin C prevents colds. Like the much more malicious myth that vaccines cause autism, it began with quackery....