The XactSystem’s scope augments the hunter’s aim with calculations from a ballistics computer. A hunter presses a button inside the trigger guard to mark a target with a red dot on the scope’s display. The ballistics computer then takes over. It gathers data from a laser range finder, three gyroscopes and accelerometers, and environmental sensors and then displays a blue X where the shot is most likely to land. As the target moves, a 14-megapixel camera feeds 54 frames per second to an image processor, which continually tracks the target relative to the background....

“We started the business about seven years ago, when we had a vision that drones were going to present a threat,” says DroneShield CEO Oleg Vornik. “It was not quite as obvious back then. People were asking us, ‘Well, a drone can fly maybe 50 meters smack against the nearest tree, and that’ll be the end of it. So why are you trying to do anything about drones used for nefarious purposes?...

The news is historic but unsurprising. Since the 1960s, astronomers have been using atomic clocks to record Earth’s rotation. In 1987, the International Astronomical Union and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics established the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Services to monitor Earth’s rotation and maintain global time. But in recent years, they have observed a peculiar pattern. Earth’s spin is getting faster. In 2020, our planet had the 28 shortest days on record—on July 19, 2020, midnight came 1....

If patients received either of the two drugs early in their disease progression, risk of death dropped to around 10 percent. Overall, only around 30 percent of the patients taking the two drugs died. The fatality rate for the ongoing outbreak with the standard care is around 67 percent. The findings represent a significant step forward, says Jason Kindrachuk, an Ebola researcher and assistant professor of viral pathogenesis in the department of medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba in Canada....

Fortunately for small businesses, the most onerous terms of the law only apply to the biggest companies. If a company has an annual turnover of more than €7.5 billion (~$7.4 billion) in the EU or a market capitalization of €75 billion (~$74 billion) and serves more than 45 million monthly European end users and 10,000 yearly business customers for the previous three years, it is considered a gatekeeper and is obliged to comply with the DMA....

Bonirob, developed by Bosch’s Deepfield Robotics, is billed to eliminate some of the most tedious tasks in modern farming, plant breeding, and weeding. The autonomous robot is built to be a mobile plant lab, able to decide which strains of plant are most apt to survive insects and viruses and how much fertilizer they would need, and then smash any weeds with a ramming rod. How does it know? Bonirob employs a type of machine learning (a stab at artificial intelligence) called decision tree learning....

Naloxone is a medication that restores normal breathing to someone experiencing an overdose when it is administered quickly. It attaches to opioid receptors and reverses and blocks the effects of the drugs and is most effective when used within minutes of the first signs of an overdose. Currently, naloxone can be purchased at some pharmacies without a prescription in all 50 states. This is largely due to workarounds that pharmacies and state governments have created, such as one state health official writing one prescription that can be used by every resident of that state....

Note: You probably shouldn’t do most/any of these things. Deep Fried Explosion Technically, deep frying a frozen turkey still falls within the realm of cooking. Kinda. If you’re cool with the possibility of burning your house down before dinner. Thanks to would-be feasters too hungry to go through the arduous process of cooking their turkey in the oven, Thanksgiving day sees three times as many cooking fires as any other day of the year....

That is about to change for those in Florida. Geoplasma is developing a plant for St. Lucie County to vaporize 1,500 tons of trash a day into pressurized gas, which will then use turbines to generate 60MW, enough electricity for 50,000 homes. Although the process uses temperatures of up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, emissions from plasma gasification plants are considerably lower than standard waste incineration plants. Furthermore, nothing in the process goes to waste—inorganic trash, such as metals, condense in the process and can be used for roadbeds and heavy construction, and even the steam from the high temperatures can be used to generate more electricity....

We first wrote about Harvard scientists’ invention of robotic bees back in 2013. In some ways, not much has changed. The bees are still leashed to their power supply, too small to carry onboard computers and batteries. But in the past two years, they’ve picked up a new trick: they’ve learned how to swim. The bees are so small and light that the surface tension of the water prevents them from delicately sinking into a glass....

Yes! We think this sounds amazing, too! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to share the scent of a bakery you just walked past with a friend hundreds of miles away? Or capture the smell of autumn? Or be like, “What is that smell? I’ll share it with my friends; maybe they can tell me.” Except, Chat Perf is not quite going to make that possible. Based on the story’s description, it seems that the new app is only capable of releasing, upon a remotely issued command, whatever odor has been stored in the smell tank attached to a person’s phone....

Mass transit for commuters and high-speed passenger rail get a lot of attention and capture the imagination, but it is the more mundane movement of goods that presents a worthwhile opportunity for system-wide improvement. Trucks are convenient because they enable flexible point-to-point operation, but they are relatively inefficient, dirty, dangerous, and destructive to our roads. Rather than wait for some still-unrealized technological breakthrough, we could instead expand our national freight rail system....

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had lost his ability to walk in 1921 at age 39 due to polio, founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938. When entertainer Eddie Cantor urged people to contribute to the organization by mailing dimes to the White House, they responded with more than 2.6 million ten-cent pieces, and the catchier March of Dimes was born. (FDR’s profile was later enshrined on the US dime in 1946....

Smartphone cameras can do more than snap pictures of partying friends and sweeping landscapes. With the right apps, your camera can perform feats from translating texts to scanning paperwork. Get to know some of its handiest superpowers. You can work this trick on any phone with the free Google Translate app (for Android and iOS). Once you download the program, open it and choose the languages you need—the one you’re translating from and the one you want to translate to—from the drop-down menus at the top of the screen....

The Dyson Ball Multi Floor Origin includes spot turning, radial root cyclone tech, and a built-in HEPA filter—meaning you can clear microscopic dust from all corners of your home. One-click bin emptying means less time fighting with vacuum bags and more time using the included stair and combination tool for hard-to-reach areas. In addition, a washable lifetime filter means you can save cash and the environment when cleaning your home....

14-Inch Apple MacBook Pro $1,599.99 (Was $1,999.99) This laptop can handle anything you’ll throw at it, which is what makes this $400 discount so impressive. You won’t find a Windows laptop that offers this level of performance at this price, although comparing the M1 series processors against those from Intel and AMD isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. If you favor Mac, but haven’t upgraded to a new Apple laptop because of its price, this is the first pre-Black Friday computer deal you should consider....

The relative is called Discokeryx xiezhi, and they had very short necks. Fully grown individuals today have roughly 6-feet-long necks for swinging around and challenging other giraffes to establish dominance (see video below). But the new findings suggest “necking” may be a more recent evolutionary adaption to fighting. The international team led by Shi-Qi Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing analyzed the unique structure of the fossils’ headgear and neck joints....

Google, Facebook, and several other companies have promised to put more water back into the environment than they pipe in—an exchange they call “water positive.” This means they plan to cut the amount of water needed to run their facilities, while protecting natural waterways and preserving access to clean drinking water in drought-prone areas. The math is based on the number of gallons they want to restore, not newly produced H2O....

People with diabetes frequently suffer from a condition called diabetic retinopathy, where the tiny blood vessels at the back of their eyes (the retina) become damaged and start to leak. About one in three diabetics have this kind of damage, and if left untreated it can cause permanent blindness. With early detection, though, it’s quite treatable. The problem is that many people don’t have access to an ophthalmologist who can diagnose them....