On the calm, clear surface of the Atlantic Ocean on December 7th, the Zumwalt looked like a giant knife slicing through the water. Or maybe like a submarine that forgot it was supposed to travel under water. The angular profile is built for stealth, and it means that the small crew will spend most of their time inside the modern and high-tech confines of the smooth gray sea-pyramid. In the back of the vessel, there’s a landing pad that can accommodate two helicopters or multiple small drones....

That’s largely due to the three outbreaks in Washington state and New York. Clark County, Washington has officially declared its measles outbreak over, but confirmed 71 cases for 2019, and showed connections between this outbreak and cases in Oregon and Georgia. The CDC confirmed that the ongoing situations in Brooklyn and Rockland County, New York, are “among the largest and longest lasting since measles elimination in 2000,” and cautioned that “the longer these outbreaks continue, the greater chance measles will again get a sustained foothold in the United States....

Joel Cramer was at the pool with his kids when another dad, competing in a big splash contest, got up onto the diving board. He bounced up once, and when he landed on the board for the second time, his quadriceps muscle tore. “It rolled up his leg and balled up near the top of his thigh,” says Cramer, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Nebraska. “[It was] like rolling up a window shade....

That is a lot of time away from pop culture and the earworms of current radio, so we’ll forgive Kelly if his recently released Spotify playlist, titled ‘Songs of a Year Spent in Space’, skews a bit towards ‘dad rock’ and away from whichever OVO jam debuted on SoundCloud last week. Kelly’s two-hour-plus mix, though, is catchy! He followed all the rules outlined by High Fidelity‘s Rob Gordon for how to construct the perfect mixtape, which is an art form: Kelly starts off with a bang with a nod to Rihanna (Jasmine Thompson’s cover of ‘Stay’), Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’, ‘These are the Days’ by 10,000 Maniacs, Coldplay (‘Speed of Sound’), and an appearance by Mr....

Venera was a series of satellites launched by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to study Venus’ environment. It was also the program aimed at returning the first close-ups of the surface of another planet. Over the course of the program, 13 probes successfully reached Venus and transmitted data about our neighbor, eight landed successfully on the surface, and four returned pretty outstanding photos. (The image above is crafted from radar maps, rather than a camera, from the 21st-century NASA Magellan mission....

Scientists wondered how this change in media use impacts well-being. Niklas Johannes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, and his colleagues, were curious about whether different forms of traditional media—which they considered to be music, TV, films, video games, e-books, digital magazines, and audiobooks—had pronounced impacts on well-being and life satisfaction. More specifically, the resulting study that his group published in Scientific Reports last week aimed to examine how people felt after consuming various forms of traditional media....

If you’re still trying to catch up with new launches, and you’re wondering exactly what these standards are—their pros and cons, and whether you should consider them when you buy a new TV set—know it is ok to be a little lost. AirPlay 2 explained Just as its homonymous predecessor, AirPlay 2 is an audio and video streaming protocol designed to play movies, music, and other content across devices on your local Wi-Fi network....

Now Honda has topped itself with something friendlier still. In truth, the 236-pound Navi is a glorified Activa scooter, with the same 7-horsepower 109-cc single-cylinder engine and continuously variable transmission. But it has motorcycle looks and a lockable plastic storage box where a motorcycle’s engine would usually be, lending the Navi the look of an electric motorcycle. And with a price tag of just $1,807, which is less than half the price of the 10-hp, manual-shift Grom, the Navi is easily accessible for many would-be beginners....

Or so you’d think. Even reusable bags come with environmental costs, as many reports have shown. These reports, called life cycle assessments, track the various impacts produced during manufacture, transport, and disposal of different types of bags. But they’re not perfect, and fail to capture what happens to plastic as litter or contamination in the recycling stream. With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of what we know about the impacts of different bag materials....

Most of the time, trees are cleared for agricultural expansion, which means converting forests into croplands and areas for grazing. Deforestation is responsible for around 20 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions every year, making it a huge contributor to climate change. This explains why reforestation, the intentional restoration of forest cover where it naturally occurs, is necessary. “In addition to reducing emissions directly, restoring forests is one of the key tools at our disposal to help moderate excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by drawing down carbon into biomass,” says Lindsay F....

Which, of course, is why it’s called a jump scare. For decades, designers, directors, and writers have worked this psych-out into video games, movies, and even ads. They might throw a few special effects, but they’re usually using the same old formula. The audience knows it too—and eats it right up. Even scientists who research horror aren’t immune to the basic terrors of sudden movements and noise. “There’s this fire truck....

On this week’s episode of Techathlon, our hosts recount some of their favorite discontinued products. Since Halloween is barreling toward us, consider this an incantation to try and resurrect those ill-fated tech products, even if it means creating zombies that will eventually consume us all. You can listen to this week’s episode in the player above, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, join us on Stitcher, follow on Anchor, and even add the show on Spotify....

True to its name, the North American Porcupine’s habitat goes all the way across New England, the Western US, Canada, and up into Alaska. While it’s one of the continent’s largest rodents— measuring up to three feet in length—this spiny friend is nothing to be afraid of. Coming too close to a porcupine can make it agitated and nervous, and it may deploy its best defense mechanism—swinging its thickly quilled tail at you in the hopes of lodging a few spines into your skin....

If we can make this choice with the flowers that beautify our gardens, why can’t we do it with the food crops that sustain our lives? Researchers at The Land Institute in Kansas have been working on a project to address this problem since 2003, and within the next few years, they hope to have a widely available crop that fills this niche. Not only does their perennial grain exist, but Patagonia Provisions (the foodie branch of the outdoor clothing company) has already made a beer out of it....

“We’re predicting that more than 50 million people will be affected by the snow event alone “ Louis Uccellini, director, NOAA’s National Weather Service said in a press teleconference on Thursday. At least 43 weather stations in the middle and eastern parts of the country are launching extra weather balloons, gathering as much data as they can to make the forecasts as accurate as possible. Data collected by the balloons is fed into computer models that help the forecasters predict weather conditions....

The cloud is internet infrastructure at its most abstract. But, the ability of cloud providers to store and secure information, and make it accessible to many approved users at once, is the glue underpinning a lot of work, both remote and not. The Pentagon, which operates hundreds of bases across the world, is a prime candidate for a cloud provider, especially if that cloud can cleanly handle classified information and restricted access protocols....

“The money is in line with the Human Genome Project (technically not quite, HGP was budgeted at 3 billion and cost 2.7 when all was said and done),” said Dr. James Olds, director of the Krasnow Institute. “And the time to spend it is now. The brain is ‘what’s next.’ Neuroscience is finally ready for its Einstein to appear. We’re primed for our great leap forward.” Olds said as much at DOM IV: Reverse Engineering the Brain: Sowing the Seeds for Technological Innovation....

“The battery in a Tesla is composed of a large number of individual cells,” says K.M. Abraham, a recently retired research professor at Northeastern University’s Center for Renewable Energy Technologies. “Under normal conditions they are safe. But if you short circuit a cell, the energy is released in a very short time. It was a pretty serious crash and thousands of cells were probably burned at the same time and that puts out a lot of heat....

But if you want to go beyond default settings, know your smartphone camera still has some interesting options for you to play with. A good example is file format. The most common one is JPEG, where your smartphone compresses the data captured by the camera into a smaller, easier-to-manage file. Then, your phone automatically processes the image to make it look better, adding contrast, saturation, and sharpness. Images in RAW format, on the other hand, are not really images in the strictest sense, but a bundle of all the data captured by the camera....

Last summer, I read the galley of The Infested Mind during research for my own forthcoming book on bed bugs. On October 7th, Lockwood and I talked about grasshopper swarms, bed bugs, and our emotional response to such creatures. Here is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity. Your book is about our complex psychological relationship with insects. What led you to write it? I suppose what led me to it was described in the prologue of the book, which was a particularly disturbing encounter with an enormous a swarm of grasshoppers in Wyoming....