The modern mythology of its fated voyage means the mighty ship is never completely out of sight. The tragic romance of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic, the eerie 21st century submarine footage of its algae-eaten prow, and a century’s worth of PopSci coverage constantly recapitulating the icy geometry of that fateful night see to its continued relevance. But now that the virtual reality experience “Titanic Honor and Glory” has arrived, it seems those Hollywood glimpses and scientific inquiries were merely appetizers....

Likely no, according to experts. While consistent diet monitoring can help some people lose weight (maintaining that weight loss is a different story), actual calorie-tracking isn’t as accurate as it might seem. In fact, counting your daily calorie consumption doesn’t always correlate with the amount of energy our bodies consume and burn. “People should not rely on this as the Bible of food intake and expenditure,” says Susanne Votruba, a research dietitian at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)....

Those are much stronger recommendations than most other governing bodies, like the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health or the American Academy of Pediatrics, have made in the last few years. So it might seem like there’s been some shift in the scientific literature to make the WHO come to this conclusion—screen time really must be terrible for our young’uns. Here’s the thing: there hasn’t been. The WHO didn’t even set out to place a recommendation on screen time specifically....

“The single-most interesting insight that came out [of the study] was that people really are very universal when it comes to emoji usage,” he says. “No matter what language you look at, you see a very clear trend emerging.” “We picked a period well in the pre-pandemic because we wanted to study very general trends, not event-specific like after an election,” he explains. The team wanted to examine a time before TikTok, Snapchat, and other platforms emerged—a time in which the majority of social media users were concentrated on Twitter....

But, it wasn’t until I tried the ray-tracing upgrade in the Watch Dogs: Legion that I really appreciated the difference between this generation and the previous one. It’s mostly about the reflections you see within the world of the video game, like with windows. Ray-tracing tech, or RTX, fundamentally changes the way light moves around in a game. It started creeping into PC gaming last year with Nvidia’s powerful graphics cards, but now it’s present in both Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles....

Up until that point, I’d been perfectly happy with the uneven slices and misshapen hunks of cheese I normally cut when I make a cheese board. However, right then and there I realized I had been committing a number of sins against cheese. Even on this side of the Atlantic, experts say standard cutting practices for cheese matter. Lauren Toth, training and curriculum manager at Murray’s Cheese in New York City, says each piece of cheese must have a balanced ratio of rind to paste, which is the technical term for the part of cheese you actually eat....

No Star Wars aircraft is more synonymous with the Rebel Alliance than the X-Wing, and no aircraft was more synonymous with the Allied effort of WWII than the British Supermarine Spitfire. The Spitfire was an extremely versatile single seat fighter aircraft used by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and a number of other nations throughout the Second World War. It was a high performance aircraft capable of reaching faster speeds than many other contemporary fighters of the time, and its excellent maneuverability made it effective in combat....

Detecting these stars wasn’t a big deal—they were all relatively close to Earth and the team compared the detections with existing optical observations—but “discovering them in radio was a big deal,” because they shouldn’t be bright in radio frequencies, says Joe Callingham, a radio astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. He and his colleagues used a massive radio telescope called the Low Frequency Array or LOFAR to look at nearby red dwarfs in radio frequencies, and published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy....

This week, the company announced a new $200 device called Pocket that’s coming in 2020. It promises to play cartridges dating all the way back to the original cracker-sized Game Boy cartridges. The Analogue Pocket is considerably more complex than the original hardware, however. It uses a 3.5-inch screen with a 1600 x 1440 resolution, which is 10x the resolution of the original. This isn’t Analogue’s first foray into the vintage gaming hardware segment....

In a new study out today in Nature, researchers found a way to create a semi-aquatic robot nicknamed the Amphibious Robotic Turtle, or ART. The adorable robot that looks a little bit like a long-legged crab has morphing limbs that can change shape, stiffness, and behavior, as well as use thermoset polymers and embedded heaters to warm up and change shape. Each of these limbs is operated by a shoulder joint with three motors....

Enter Megabite. The app, which is currently only available as source code, analyzes a picture of food and then transforms each food item into a nose, ear, mouth, or eye to form a smiley face. The software first figures out where the plate is in the picture, then individual items, and then rotates them to fit into specific “face” templates. These templates are an arrangement of rectangles, and the software sorts and places food items into each rectangle by how long or wide they are....

Barlow, collaborated with FLIR Systems, a producer of thermal-camera technology, based in Wilsonville, Oregon, to set up a security system in the area around Munu’s enclosure to help protect him from poachers. Black rhinos have faced staggering losses in South Africa: The population fell from about 65,000 adults in the 1970s to fewer than 6,000 in 2018. Munu’s subspecies, the south-western black rhino, is currently classified as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—and in general his species is considered critically endangered....

In a study published in late October in Scientific Reports, a team of scientists showed that small drones can be used to characterize the chemistry of volcanic plumes. Properties like the ratio of carbon dioxide to sulfur dioxide can give clues on what reactions are happening under the surface, and whether an eruption is coming soon. This ratio sometimes changes quickly before a volcano blows. Big, heavy-duty drones can often be a hassle to transport in and around the terrain surrounding volcanoes....

Before we begin, let me set the record straight: The new Popeyes chicken sandwich is better than the Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich—by a country-fried mile. OK, now that we’ve got that out the way, let’s move on to an even better sandwich, the fried rooster. There are plenty of great ways to cook pheasant—roasted, made into soup, or grilled with a beer can up the rear—but my favorite method, at least with breast meat, is with hot oil in cast iron....

This Wolf-Rayet is known as S 308, and it was generated by a star known as HD 50896. It is one of only two known Wolf-Rayet bubbles that emits X-rays. That allowed an international team of scientists to capture it using the European Photon Imaging Camera aboard the European Space Agency’s X-ray imaging XMM-Newton observatory. The green halo marks the end of the shock wave that the star is blowing out into space, while the blues and reds that round out the bubble are the result of powerful solar winds colliding with surrounding material in the region....

“But is it sentient? We can’t answer that question definitively at this point, but it’s a question to take seriously,” Lemoine wrote in the report before sharing about 20 pages of question-and-answers with LaMDA on its self-reported sentience online. In this chat transcript, which he also published on Medium, he probed the chatbot’s understanding of its own existence and consciousness. Lemoine says he decided to go public with these conversations after they were reviewed and dismissed by Google executives (The New York Times says “hundreds” of other Google researchers and engineers interacted with LaMDA and “reached a different conclusion than Mr....

First, a sensor on Howard’s finger detects the color of an object and sends it to a processor in the armband. The armband holds an Intel Edison chip, which analyzes the color and breaks it down into its red, green, and blue components, creating an RGB signal. Then the chip coordinates the scent release: Based on the combination of red, green, and blue, three tubes of scented essential oil—one for each color—open into a mask to create a blended smell....

Core samples from largely unperturbed Lake Suigetsu, which scientists have been trying to obtain and study for almost 20 years, refine one of our best tools for understanding the past 50,000 years on Earth, in other words. “It it is no exaggeration to say that without that ability, fields like anthropology, archaeology and paleoclimatology would not exist as we know them,” said Jesse Smith, senior editor at the journal Science, which publishes the paper today....

Since last year, Ford and its partners have been experimenting with a parking garage where specially-equipped vehicles can park themselves without the need for a human behind the wheel. And as of next month, a venture called the Detroit Smart Parking Lab will open its doors to test smart parking tech in real-world scenarios. Initially, the project materialized in late 2020 when Ford set up shop at the Bedrock Assembly Garage in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood....

Reversing bad habits is difficult, but you can get help from Ultiself, a highly-rated app that offers a science-backed approach to creating your optimal routine and being your best self. For a limited time, you can snap up a lifetime subscription for over 80 percent off. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars on App Store, Ultiself is designed to help you become limitless. Created by neuroscientists, psychology PHDs, and successful entrepreneurs, this actionable, user-friendly app uses AI to find habits that impact you the most and helps you build them fast, making them stick....