To make the Hyper-Sub sink without sacrificing surface speed, Marion and his team—Gene Mock, a former construction contractor, and Scott Shamblin, an engineer—rethought the ratio of ballast to cabin volume. The ballast systems in most submarines can displace only about 20 percent of the cabin’s volume, but the Hyper-Sub’s ballast chambers double the volume of the cabin. The boat uses a high-pressure pumping system to rapidly fill these chambers with water or air, quickly changing its weight and buoyancy and allowing it to submerge or surface in less than a minute....

“Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change.” Currently, average global temperatures stand at about 1.09 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement, which was signed by 174 countries and the European Union, aims to keep that rise under 1....

Research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reconstructed a history of the jet stream’s path in the North Atlantic from the 700s AD to 2000. The findings suggest that, although climate change hasn’t altered the location of the crucial climate system yet, high emissions could push Europe into a world more like 1374. Wiggles in the jet stream have been implicated in extreme weather over the past year, from the floods in Europe this spring to the heat wave that struck the Pacific Northwest, although the climate’s role in those movements is still an open question....

And CES 2016 was full of stranger products than many gadget shows of the past few years, which is really saying something. Take a look at some of the ones that stood out to the Popular Science crew and left us reaching once again for that all-too familiar phrase: “WTF CES?” Follow all of our coverage from CES 2016, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, full of weird and wonderful gadgets from around the world....

The New York Times reports a massive increase in new holiday movies this year. Disney, Netflix, Lifetime and Hallmark are now in direct competition for viewers’ attention, with both new releases and reruns of the classics. Holiday movies are so popular not simply because they are “escapes,” as my research on the relation between religion and cinema argues. Rather, these films offer viewers a glimpse into the world as it could be....

But there’s a catch: Current LED lights are very blue. And there’s a reason you or someone you know might own blue light-filtering glasses. Scientists think that overexposure to blue light suppresses melatonin and disrupts the circadian rhythms that guide your body to sleep. So researchers are working to create friendlier LED bulbs. One such group has succeeded in making a compound that could alleviate the blue light problem. The researchers believe this work, published in March in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, could one day illuminate what they call “human-centric” lights....

Popular Science is looking for the best-named scientific instruments. We’re concentrating on physical devices, rather than algorithms, surveys, systems, or processes—which means amazing names like GANDALF (Gas AND Absorption Line Fitting algorithm) and GADZOOKS! (Gadolinium Antineutrino Detector Zealously Outperforming Old Kamiokande, Super!) won’t make the cut.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here. Grand Award Winner: Steel with a smaller fossil footprint Steelmaking yields between seven and nine percent of the world’s carbon emissions, mostly due to a specially processed type of coal called “coke.” At temperatures as high as 3,000°F, coke reacts with oxygen in iron ore, purifying the metal into a form needed to make steel—but belching carbon dioxide in the process....

Swanteson-Franz fills a Pyrex bowl with a finger or two of water, pulls a cricket from a bin, and drops it in. As soon as its host hits the water, the nematomorph makes its move, squirming sinuously out of a hole it’s drilled in the cricket’s belly. This appears to be not such a big deal for the cricket. The worm wriggles back and forth, growing longer and longer, but only once in the 50 seconds it takes the worm to emerge does the insect so much as twitch its legs....

The new analysis is described in a study out this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The study provides evidence that the engraving of the leader on one of the coins was an emperor named Sponsian who was considered a historical usurper of power and ruled in the 260s CE. “Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity,” Paul N. Pearson of University College, London and the a lead author of the paper said in a statement....

Popular Science tracked down ground-breaking startups at the Kairos Global Summit. Check out our complete coverage here. You can hear more from Katie on her podcast.

A new paper published Thursday in the journal Marine Biodiversity, details how one group of wood-boring clams has evolved to build chimneys of their own poop as a way to make sure they get more of this marine wood for themselves. The wood-boring clams in the study have shells that are about the size of a pea. They dig into the sunken wood, forming a borehole that becomes their source of food and shelter in a world that is pretty inhospitable....

But with everyone and their mother trying to plan vacations, plane tickets also see a rise in costs. It doesn’t help that airlines are trying to take advantage of the demand to offset fuel expenses. While it’s tempting to book the earliest flight you see, it may not be the most economical move. If you want to save money on tickets without having to scour the internet trying to look for the best deals, let Dollar Flight Club do the work for you instead....

Sometimes the farther away you are from something, the clearer it is. At a distance, you can tell that the pattern in the center of this image differs slightly from the design around it. But get close to the screen, and one pattern appears to overtake the other, making the once-disparate motifs suddenly match. Known as the uniformity illusion, which University of Amsterdam assistant professor Yair Pinto first described in 2016, this sleight takes advantage of the way we gather information through our eyeballs....

This article was originally published in the May/June 2016 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Three Projects That Reinvent Breakfast.”

In 2014, fossil hunters found the remains of a dinosaur on a rocky Welsh beach after a storm. They turned the fossil over to National Museum Cardiff, where researchers from the museum and UK universities identified it as a theropod, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex. In a paper published this week in PLOS One, researchers announced that further work on the fossil led them to conclude that this dinosaur, named Dracoraptor hanigani, lived 200 million years ago and was one of the earliest dinosaurs of the Jurassic period....

The idea that iridescence could be a tool used by animals to hide is over a hundred years old. The “father of camouflage” Abbott Thayer hypothesized that kaleidoscopic coloring for some creatures might help them dissolve into the background. But that’s been a tricky claim to prove. “When most people think about iridescent colors, they think about peacock tails and hummingbird throat patches, colors to get you noticed by potential mates,” Karin Kjernsmo, an evolutionary and behavioral ecologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom told PopSci....

The bright object in the image above might be a piece of the rover that fell off, and if so, NASA scientists want to determine where it came from and what it is. Then they’ll be able to tell whether this will affect the rover’s future activities. We added the arrow because otherwise the object is nearly impossible to see–which gives you a sense of the eagle-eyed examination given every postcard from Mars....

A team of scientists working on the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope in Europe published an overview of a new, freely available data package that covers 27 percent of the Northern sky. The data will be useful for researchers studying everything from the evolution of galaxies, black holes, exoplanets, and certain types of stars. These researchers are also looking for non-experts to get involved–they need your help to spot the wonders of the cosmos in all of those images....

In this pre-Black Friday sale, enjoy an extra 15 percent on these coding and developing courses. Just don’t forget to enter the code SAVE15NOV. EXIN Certified: DevOps Foundation and Professional Bundle Gain a fundamental understanding of DevOps with this course bundle. A springboard to the EXIN DevOps Professional certification, gaining this certification proves that you have mastered the basics of DevOps and the benefits of DevOps principles and practices for the organization....