The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California voted unanimously on Tuesday to implement a new framework that would limit water use for about 6 million southern Californians. As of June 1, dozens of cities and districts will need to limit residents’ outdoor watering to once a week or reduce total water use below a certain target. Water providers must draft plans to police their customers and could face fines of up to $2,000 per acre-foot of water, about 325,850 gallons, in excess of monthly allocation limits....

“The vision was simple — let anyone on Earth experience the Moon live through the eyes of a robot,” team leader Daniel Shafrir told BBC News. “We weren’t just going to go to the Moon. We are going to bring the Moon back.” This telepresence robot is named Andy, after Andrew Carnegie, the famed industrialist who founded the college. Currently, only the operator controlling this moon rover will be able to see through its “eyes” thousands of miles away....

The photo was taken on September 23, 2021, and released this week by the NASA Earth Observatory. It shows a straight down (or nadir) view of the mountain and Tongariro National Park. According to the Earth Observatory, Ruapehu is an active stratovolcano that is 9,177 feet (2,797 meters) tall at its highest point, making it the tallest mountain on New Zealand’s North Island. Stratavolcaoes are often considered the most picturesque for their slopes, but are also the most deadly....

These lovely bento-style boxes help give you something to look forward to when you take a work break, and might even inspire you to eat more veggies because they look so cute tucked into a tiny compartment. This deceptively simple classic-looking bento set packs a lot of features into one. The two main containers are made of BPA-free food safe plastic, hold up to 20 ounces of food each, and come with a divider to turn the two compartments into three as needed....

Hubble halted suddenly on June 13, when its computers stopped properly communicating with each other. The malfunction placed the telescope in “safe mode,” deactivating all scientific observations and only retaining essential functions. NASA scientists, including a few who had previously worked on Hubble over the past decades, combined their expertise and rallied to find the root of the problem. They even resurfaced some of Hubble’s old, original paperwork—some documents 30 to 40 years old....

The patches making up the face in the image are coronal holes—cooler sections of the sun’s outer layer. This layer is usually around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The coronal holes show areas of high magnetic-field activity that steadily release solar wind. These cosmic gusts are a flow of protons, electrons, and other particles that travel through space. While this image is a visual treat, the activity behind it might prove to be more of a trick back here on Earth....

In a series of recently published papers, including a paper published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics, researchers from North Carolina State University announced that they have created a new form of carbon, called Q-carbon. Pure carbon (without additional elements, such as oxygen, mixed in) has a few distinct solid forms that it can take. The first is graphite, in which the carbon atoms line up to form thin sheets....

Remote Control Apple’s free Remote application is the slickest way to control your AppleTV or Mac’s iTunes with an iPhone, but there are other free apps for controlling your TiVo (code.google.com/p/tivoremote), your MythTV home-theater PC (trac2.assembla.com/mymote/wiki or any computer (code.google.com/p/telekinesis). GPS Device xGPS ($75) uses a small GPS receiver that plugs into your phone, along with software to give you turn-by-turn directions (you must have a jailbroken phone to use xGPS)....

On October 19, NASA will launch the first spacecraft designed to image and map the interactions that take place in this boundary zone. The Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, will be propelled from the Kwajalein Atoll into a high-altitude orbit that will eventually take it about 200,000 miles from Earth, where it will capture images of processes taking place in the termination shock and beyond. “The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth’s orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous,” said David J....

As a researcher on religious politics and health, I believe that Nigeria’s highly mobilized efforts to eliminate polio can teach America how to reverse the increase in measles cases and shore up its public health infrastructure. Working with international partners, Nigerians have combated misinformation, suspicion of vaccine science and religion-based boycotts to go from ground zero for polio on the African continent in 2003 to nearly polio-free in 2019....

Last week, we got to spend a little time playing with the Switch OLED at a demo event in New York. For players who have managed to keep their expectations in check, or at least recovered from the sting of their own expectations, the seemingly technical upgrades coming to the next Switch coalesce into some impressive technical gains for the console’s portable “handheld” mode. With a bigger screen, “enhanced” audio, and more built-in storage, the Switch OLED’s improvements bring technical advantages to using the Switch as a portable device....

During the 2018-2019 flu season, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that about 45 percent of U.S. adults received the flu vaccine. While this is an increase of 8 percent from 2017-2018, it falls way below the national goal of 70 percent of American adults receiving a flu shot. One of the common myths that leads people to avoid the flu shot is that they think the shot will give them the flu....

There’s plenty to say about Quest, but one of the coolest features is its ability to easily show you the room you’re in. Strap on a virtual reality headset, and you’re normally completely isolated from the environment around you. Want to see the real world for a moment? You need to slip off the headset or peek under it. But the Quest offers something different: move your head through a virtual boundary, and a grayscale version of the room you’re in appears....

A few findings of note: The surveyed teachers spent an average of 13.7 classroom hours per year on general evolutionary processes in their biology classes.The majority spent no more than five hours a year on human evolution, and 17 percent did not cover it all.Only two percent of teachers did not teach about evolution, human or otherwise, at all.Thirteen percent of teachers thought an excellent biology course could exist without mentioning Darwin or evolutionary theory....

A new study in the British Medical Journal estimates that roughly one in four antibiotic prescriptions in the U.S. are unnecessary—and that’s being conservative. To figure this out, researchers dug into health insurance claims data to see what kinds of diagnoses patients were prescribed antibiotics for. Some illnesses—like streptococcal tonsillitis, bacterial pneumonia, or lung abscesses—they determined would pretty much always require an antibiotic prescription. Other ailments don’t always merit them, though....

The companies announced last fall that preliminary analyses of clinical trials of two vaccine doses in young children produced a protective effect in kids younger than 2 years old. But those results also suggested the response in kids 2 to 5 years old was not strong enough. As a result, Pfizer and BioNTech said they would evaluate how giving a third dose to kids aged 2 to 5 would impact their immune response....

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, researchers figured out a way to turn grains of pollen into anodes, a component of batteries. “I started looking into pollens when my mom told me she had developed pollen allergy symptoms about two years ago,” co-author of the paper Jialiang Tang said. “I was fascinated by the beauty and diversity of pollen microstructures. But the idea of using them as battery anodes did not really kick in until I started working on battery research and learned more about carbonization of biomass....

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Playing PS4 games on a PS5 introduces new possibilities, though. Thanks to the new and improved hardware, you’ll experience higher framerates and shorter load times. Many games have been optimized to take advantage of the powerful PS5 hardware, maximizing those improvements and increasing visual fidelity. In some cases, developers have even taken the opportunity to go back, tune them up, and release ports made specifically for the PS5. The best PS4 games on PS5 make the most of the new console and its “next-gen” features....

But therein lies the problem. Getting enough silk is difficult. Spiders make the strongest silk that we know about. Unfortunately, spider silk is hard to come by—it’s certainly very hard to get enough for most uses, unless you find an alternative that doesn’t exist yet. But scientists may now have done just that, in a paper published in the journal Matter on Thursday, by tweaking the weaker but far more common silkworm silk to have properties even stronger than spider silk....