I’d always assumed that he’d just burned all the taste buds off his tongue, leaving him desensitized to the pain I felt if a raw pepper came anywhere near mine. But the science of spicy food liking and intake — there’s a whole body of research dating back at least to the 1980s on this — shows there’s more to it than just increased tolerance with repeated exposure. Personality, researchers say, is also a factor in whether a person enjoys spicy meals and how often he or she eats them....

Derived from a Forrest M. Mims, III project, our Make a Guess game adds a 7-segment LED display for helping you visual your numerical guess. Here’s how it works: After you install your alkaline batteries and flick the power switch (S1), you press the button (S2) for sending a pulsing signal from the timer (NE555) to the “up” counting input of the 4-bit up-down counter (74LS193). This input triggers the 74LS193 into a counting mode where it counts upward between 0-15 and then recycles until you release the button (S2)....

Both Windows and macOS come with tools and options for making the most of additional screen space, but beyond that there are plenty of third-party apps to get on-screen elements arranged intelligently. This doesn’t only mean a cleaner, more organized desktop, but also squeezing more productivity or entertainment out of your setup. Windows With an extra display hooked up to your Windows laptop or desktop, head to Settings from the Start menu, then choose System and Display to see your options....

Handmade Music Night, a collaboration between Make Magazine, Etsy, and createdigitalmusic.com, is an open invitation for those who spend their free time tinkering with electronic music-making gadgets to showcase their latest projects. Last Thursday’s event had the air of an interactive science fair, and while some attendees sat in the corner drinking, chatting, and soaking in the sounds, most crowded around the projects for demonstrations and the chance to take the controllers and make a little music of their own....

Space biomedical scientists are publishing the first crop of research papers to stem from the Mars500 mission, which involved the voluntary sequestration of three Russians, a Chinese man, a Frenchman and an Italian-Colombian man inside a small metal bunker. The 17-month mission, unprecedented on Earth or in space, was designed to measure how humans would react to long-term exposure to enclosed spaces and disturbed circadian rhythms, among other problems. One major health problem turned out to be hypokinesis, or uber-sedentariness....

The new Marvel’s Spider-Man game for PlayStation 4, however, doesn’t have this problem. The map consists of a scaled-down, tweaked version of Manhattan, complete with semi-accurate neighborhoods like Central Park and the financial district. Instead of taking the subway between beating up bad guys, however, you simply swing using your web. And rather than feeling like a hassle, moving around this digital city is one of the best parts of the whole game....

The National Weather Service issued an ashfall advisory for portions of the Big Island, with up to a quarter-inch of ash accumulations possible in some areas. The advisory has since been cancelled. Several lava flows were reported in Mauna Loa’s Northeast Rift Zone, but no downslope communities are currently at risk from the lava. However, officials still told people living on the Big Island to be prepared for a worst-case scenario....

Hutchison now makes what many music aficionados consider the finest records on Earth. He meticulously crafts reissues of jazz and classical titles (including his prized Mozart) from the 1950s and ’60s—wrapped in letter­pressed sleeves—that sell for $350 or more. Most labels churn out vinyl by the thousands with modern equipment, but Hutchison’s outfit, the Electric ­Recording Co., mints no more than 300 copies of each ­album. “Some of these very famous studios take the ­original master, and put it onto a digital system to play around with it and process it,” he says....

“BlenderBot 3 is designed to improve its conversational skills and safety through feedback from people who chat with it, focusing on helpful feedback while avoiding learning from unhelpful or dangerous responses,” reads one of the three major takeaways in Meta’s announcement last Friday. But the company also warns that the bot is “likely to make untrue or offensive statements” and cursory interactions with Meta’s chat AI already appear to demonstrate an inability to parse trolls’ entries and consistently identify prejudice, misinformation, and simple decorum....

Most importantly, the new HoloLens shipping to developers early next year will be a stand-alone product, “fully untethered — no wires, no phones, no connection to a PC required,” according to Microsoft’s Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices group within the company. That’s a huge improvement from Microsoft’s earlier prototypes of the device, which were connected to a nearby PC with cables and wires. The company also showed off a “mixed reality” gaming demo on HoloLens called “Project X-Ray,” in which a player equipped with a virtual gauntlet projected on his hand fought off a horde of attacking robots that popped through a hole in the wall of a physical room....

BUTTE, Mont.—Steve McGrath stood in an empty lot a block from his home watching for dust. In this southwestern Montana city nicknamed “The Richest Hill on Earth,” more than a century of mining left polluted soil and water that has taken decades to clean. But at that moment, looking across the road toward Butte’s last operating open-pit mine, McGrath was worried about the air. “Here comes another truck,” McGrath said, pointing to a hillside across the street as a massive dump truck unloaded ore for the mine’s crusher....

Fungi are crucial to nutrient recycling in almost all environments, but it turns out their masses of spores carelessly tumbling through the air might also be beneficial. Recent evidence suggests that spores released into the air from mushrooms act as nuclei for the formation of raindrops in clouds. This may promote rainfall in ecosystems—like those in the tropics—heavily populated by mushrooms and other fungi. Spores are how mushrooms reproduce. (A mushroom itself is actually a sexual structure, but that’s another matter....

Google Earth images of these camera test patterns have been collected in the winter 2013 newsletter of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Known as tri-bar photo targets and largely concentrated in the Mojave desert, they were used for half of a century to test the reliability of American surveillance equipment. This began with the U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes of the Cold War and continued more recently, with satellites and camera-equipped drones....

Lately, all eyes are turned towards the moon. NASA has another launch attempt tentatively scheduled next week for the highly-anticipated Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to orbit Earth’s satellite, one of the first steps to set up an outpost on the lunar surface. But humans—and science fiction writers—have long imagined a moon base, one that would be a fixture of future deep space exploration. About five years before Sputnik and 17 years before the Apollo missions, the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur C....

The largest and most sensitive telecommunications system on the planet, the Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an international array of giant radio antennas. The network is made up of three ground-based facilities around the world, each located 120 degrees apart in longitude (or between 5,000 and 10,000 miles away) from each other, with one based at Goldstone near Barstow, California, another in Madrid, Spain, and the last in Canberra, Australia)....

After donning the headset, players will see themselves inside of a ship in space. By controlling the robot’s arms, users are able to lift objects, move around and more. The implications of this technology could make sending robots in space alongside—or even without—humans a viable option for small repair jobs other smaller taxes. Don’t worry, humans will still be able to travel to space. Musk and Bezos will see to that....

Quotas will likely be used to phase in the ban. Starting with 2026 models, 35 percent of new cars, SUVs, and small pick-up trucks sold in the state would be required to be zero-emission vehicles. This quota would annually increase and is expected to reach 51 percent of all new car sales in 2028 and 68 percent in 2030. The quotas also would allow 20 percent of zero-emission cars sold to be plug-in hybrids, which utilize electricity and gasoline....

The Nikon P1000 has 125x optical zoom, which means it starts a little wider than your typical smartphone camera lens, and can zoom far enough that you can focus on objects that are literally miles away depending on your vantage point. In camera terms, the 125x lens has an equivalent focal range of 24mm to 3000mm. To put that in perspective, the massive, telephoto lenses you’ll typically find on the sidelines of sporting tend to hover between 400mm and 600mm....

Dennis Hong and his team at Virginia Tech were working from the premise that the best way to adapt a robot to a human environment is to mimic the human form. That way it can reach our cabinets and move fluidly through our homes. Now Hong and his team are trying to make something far more complex. This December, as you’ll read in our cover story, CHARLI-L’s descendant, a bulked-up, ruggedized prototype called THOR, will attempt the eight disaster-response tasks that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge....