While it is a far cry from flying cars and hoverboards, smart light switches are a subtly helpful smart home upgrade, and they’ve evolved quite a bit over the past few years. While there are dozens of options to choose from, only the best smart light switches find the right balance between cost and utility. Best overall: Lutron Caseta Smart Home Dimmer Switch and Pico Remote KitBest budget: Kasa Smart Light SwitchBest with motion-detection: GE Cync Smart Dimmer + Motion SensorBest dimmer: Kasa Smart Dimmer Switch (HS220)Best 3-way dimmer: GE EnbrightenBest with a display: Brilliant Smart Home Control...

Best overall: Vizio ElevateBest for the money: Vizio M512a-H6Best for music: Vizio M215a-J6Best for TV: Vizio M21d-H8RBest budget: Vizio V20-J8 How we chose the best Vizio soundbars Vizio’s soundbars cover a lot of ground with their designs and have a little something for everyone. To narrow down the options, we combined our own personal experience with the opinions of trusted peers and online user impressions. Here are some of the key criteria we looked at when compiling our list: The best Vizio soundbars offer some degree of surround sound processing, whether through Dolby Atmos or DTS:X/Virtual:X—object-based surround that assigns each sound a height as well as a horizontal location in a 360-degree sphere around the listener....

Best overall: ExpressVPNBest for speed: SurfsharkBest for reliability: NordVPNBest for ease of use: IPVanishBest for an upgradable free service: ProtonVPNAnother great freemium VPN: Atlas VPN How we selected the best VPN services We gathered user testimonials from our staff and associates, their friends and family, and combed through specs and perspectives to bring you what we can confidently call a consensus on the best VPNs available. We’ve done the research so that you can know before downloading any VPN software or connecting to any VPN servers that you’re not exposing yourself rather than protecting yourself....

To accomplish this, Biden directed the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, to fund feasibility studies for new projects, decrease waste at existing sites, and modernize domestic mines so they can amp up production of critical minerals, The New York Times reported. The president can use the Defense Production Act of 1950 to speedily expand the supply of essential materials and services for domestic industries to promote national defense. Civil transportation and energy are only two of the areas that are covered under this act....

It’s a thin slice of porcelain or plastic, adorned with a shallow engraving. Hold it up to a light, and the translucent relief turns into a shadowy image. Europeans first began making lithophanes around 1800, though East Asians had been doing similar tricks with ceramics centuries earlier. For a time, artisans and primitive factories pumped out lithophane nightlights, lampshades, and drinking vessels. Even lithophane portraits were once fashionable. Lithophanes haven’t entirely vanished from the modern world....

Derived from Randy Sargent’s LM386-based Herbie “photovore” robot, with some circuit enhancements supplied by Dave Hrynkiw and Mark Tilden, this bug robot can be easily built for less than ten bucks (or free if you have some spare parts in your workshop). Self-contained within a discarded DB-9 serial hood, Boo waits passively until some bright light catches its eye. Then it’s showtime. The illumination triggers a tiny vibrating motor embedded in this bot’s abdomen, and it’s off to the races....

Yaniv Erlich has a soft spot for genealogy. A data scientist at Columbia University and the chief science of officer of the DNA test company MyHeritage, he describes many things in the context of family. Columbia and MyHeritage are “mom and dad” and he’s “got to make both happy.” And his 2018 study on a 13 million-member family tree is best measured in terms of his child’s development. “My son was born when I started the study,” Ehrlich says of the seven-year project....

I knew the stunt would be kind of boring. That’s not why I went, last night, to stand outside in the first cold rain of fall without an umbrella. I went because somebody had the brilliant idea to hook up a piano to the Tesla coils so the notes were translated into powerful bursts of voltage–and the further brilliant idea to invite Andrew W.K. to play it, his every absurd note sending a corresponding lightning bolt at Blaine....

Since 2014, the “CV-17” has been under construction at Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Corporation’s drydocks. While the Type 001A largely follows the Soviet design of the Liaoning (ex Varyag) carrier, including a ski-jump ramp for aircraft short takeoffs, some of its more notable changes include a larger displacement, new sensors and optimized aircraft storage. Located on the carrier’s starboard (right) side, the island houses the bridge and flight control center, as well as radars....

Despite their pivotal role in Chinese war-fighting strategy, the service responsible for those missiles, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), remains perhaps the most opaque branch of Beijing’s military. While its new fleet of expanded-range missile systems—from the DF-31 and DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to the hypersonic DF-17—have debuted in parades, there are still a number of profound changes happening in the PLARF that are relatively undisclosed. But by tracking more subtle public announcements and news stories, it appears the number of missile brigades in the PLA has jumped from 29 to 40, an increase of more than 35 percent, in just three years....

Biomass refers to renewable organic materials from plants and animals, which include wood and wood processing wastes, agricultural crops, and animal manure, among others. Natural biomass resources can help fulfill energy demand, and unlike other renewable energy sources, they can also be converted directly into biofuels for transportation use. In 2021, the United States produced about 17.5 billion gallons of biofuels. While this fuel source isn’t without controversy, the global biofuel demand is expected to increase by 28 percent by 2026....

The primary job of this tool is to combine several hard drives into a pool, which you can then access as if it’s one disk. There you can duplicate files and give them different locations within the same pool, so if one hard drive fails, you’ll have a copy. While this redundancy is useful, it’s not a replacement for a full backup—You should still have copies of your most important files elsewhere, in case you lose everything at home through fire, flood, theft, or something else....

This post has been updated. Even as the pandemic begins to wind down and vaccines become increasingly popular, COVID continues to be a significant health threat to the United States. And now that the weather is warming up and flowers are blooming once more, many are facing another tricky question: Are these my seasonal allergies, or have I come down with the novel coronavirus? Here are some questions to ask yourself as you decide how to proceed:...

This post is updated weekly. We are well into year two of the COVID-19 pandemic, which officially began on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the viral outbreak a global event. That came just two months after WHO announced on January 5, 2020, that there was a mysterious virus emerging in Wuhan, China. Since then, more than 647,000 Americans have died from the virus—over 6,000 in the last week alone....

Understanding this incubation period—the time between when a virus enters a person’s body and when they start feeling sick—is crucial for health officials trying to make decisions about how to respond to the outbreak. “As we encourage social distancing and even self-isolation of people who may have been exposed, it’s important to have a good understanding of how long it might take symptoms to appear,” Kyra Grantz, a PhD student in infectious disease epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Popular Science in an email....

So we’ve been the Moon. Now what? Many say we shouldn’t go back–instead let’s go to Mars. But, what if the only feasible way to get humankind to Mars is by way of the Moon? That’s what the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or “Luna-H Map”, is trying to figure out. The SpaceTrex lab at Arizona State University has partnered with NASA to create a tiny satellite with one important goal: to measure and locate the exact amount of water on the Moon....

Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, and slowly made its way towards Mount Sharp, over the next two years, exploring the geology along the way looking for evidence that the red planet might have been habitable in the past. Last winter, the rover became the first to explore dunes on another planet, and recently, it has been at a place called Murray Buttes, exploring formations that were formed from ancient dunes on the planet....

“For now it’s kind of a weird thing, we’re saying that we’re the best in the world at finding nothing, but the prospect of finding new physics a few years from now is entirely feasible,” Chamkaur Ghag, an astroparticle physicist and professor at the University College London and team member of the LUX experiment, told New Scientist. Dark matter is thought to make up 27 percent of the universe (the visible matter in stars and galaxies might only comprise 5 percent of it)....

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science.

Sociologists from the Universities of Minnesota and Arizona suggest that these types of results, which they called “disruptive” findings, have not kept up with the growth of science since 1945, as they reported in a paper published in the journal Nature on January 4. The rate of big discoveries decreased across all fields measured, including social sciences, hard sciences, medicine, and technology. The word disruptive can have many meanings, says Funk, the lead researcher on the new paper....