Although a version of the device was first described last year in The New England Journal of Medicine, its capabilities were then far more restricted than the current iteration, and relied on a patient attempting to vocally speak words which were then translated by a computer system. “Neuroprostheses have the potential to restore communication to people who cannot speak or type due to paralysis. However, it is unclear if silent attempts to speak can be used to control a communication neuroprosthesis,” reads the research group’s paper abstract....

Except they don’t. A new study published in the journal American Entomologist has some sobering news about insects and intro-to-bio books: They simply aren’t represented. Despite the critical role the critters play in everything from the food chain to disease, they’re overshadowed by vertebrates, taking up less than 0.6 percent of introductory biology texts. And despite the sheer number of insects and their impact on Earth and its inhabitants, mentions of insects in introductory biology textbooks have dwindled over the last 100 years....

Only two—both females incapable of carrying calves— remain at the Ol ­Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. Najin, age 28, has Achilles tendons that could rupture under the weight of a pregnancy. Fatu is younger but barren, thanks to a uterine infection. The world’s last male, Sudan, died in March at the age of 45. But the beloved bull could still sire a calf. Sperm from Sudan (and four other males) is on ice, and Hildebrandt hopes to harvest Fatu and Najin’s eggs....

The tradition started with state highway authorities after World War II, and has since been picked up by municipal plow trucks and homeowners. These days, Americans use 25 million tons of salt each year to deice roads and sidewalks after a blizzard or deep freeze. But are we spreading it correctly, and should we be spreading it at all? Most store-bought versions of deicing salt, or rock salt, consist of plain old sodium chloride....

More than 20 years after its debut, the arcade game Spy Hunter offered to put players in Bond’s driver’s seat, deploying the oil slicks, smoke screens, machine guns and tire-cutters as needed, although the game’s developers never concluded the necessary licensing agreement to put the spy’s name on the cabinet. But, if you have a supervillain-worthy stash of cash, you can get the real thing, complete with all its original top-secret hardware restored and functional....

At the end of Katsuhiro Otomo’s dystopian Japanese anime film Akira, a throbbing, white mass begins to envelop Neo-Tokyo. Eventually, its swirling winds engulf the metropolis, swallowing it whole and leaving a skeleton of a city in its wake. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki–along with the firebombings of Tokyo–were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music and in art....

The JBL PartyBox Encore Essential’s design To put it plainly, the JBL PartyBox Encore Essential can deliver big sound because it’s a big speaker, measuring 10.87 x 12.85 x 11.54 inches and weighing approximately 13 pounds (about 10 pounds lighter than the PartyBox 110, which another PopSci reviewer really does like). The Encore Essential isn’t the portable speaker you toss into a beach bag on your way out the door (though JBL makes plenty of those)....

Johnson was coincidentally born on Women’s Equality Day in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was “simply fascinated by numbers,” starting at an early age, according to NASA. Her local school system only provided education for black students until eighth grade, so Johnson’s family moved 120 miles away to enroll her in high school. She then skipped enough grades to graduate college at 18 years old. After years as a teacher, in her mid-30s, she began working as a “human computer,” performing calculations for the Mercury, Apollo, and Shuttle programs....

Enter the Smart Cleaner for iOS, a lifetime subscription to which you can get for just $23.99 (reg. $149) with code VIP40 at checkout. This is the #1 iOS cleaning app and it helps you delete repetetive photos and videos, organize contacts, and save battery life. It’s earned a 4.5/5 star rating on the App Store with over 30 million downloads! Getting more specific, once you log into Smart Cleaner and prompt it to begin clearing out your phone, it will take a number of steps to create space immediately....

New research presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last month revealed that missing just one night of sleep results in a pattern of brain activity that looks a lot like anxiety. “Sleep loss triggers the same brain mechanisms that make us sensitive to anxiety to begin with—regions that support emotional processing and also regions that support emotion regulation,” says Eti Ben-Simon, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley....

Watch a soldier fly around in this jet suit The Gravity Jet Suit was on our 2018 Best of What’s New list of important innovations. Now, you can watch a soldier navigate a series of obstacles while wearing it. We want one of these more and more every day. Now 74 of the top 100 U.S. merchants now accept Apple Pay Apple’s iPhone-based payment system has been creeping into more and more cash registers, but now Apple Pay has landed a couple of very large retail fish....

As a fan of Sony’s PlayStation Eye accessory, setup proved instantly familiar to me. I simply plugged the Xbox Live Vision Camera into the system’s USB port and was up and running. After adjusting a focus dial and turning up the room lights, I saw myself clearly on the TV screen. Up to four people can participate in 40-plus mini-games, which had me and friends pantomiming such actions as running from rampaging monkeys, tugging ropes, and sprinting inside human-sized hamster wheels....

It’s not necessarily extra-sensory perception, but “presentiment” can be real, and it may be based on physiological cues that biology still can’t explain. It’s something we’ve all experienced to some degree–like when you just know the driver in the lane next to you is coming over, or when you can feel that your boss is coming down the hall and you’d better look busy. Predicting the near future is actually very common, notes Julia Mossbridge, lead author of the study and research associate in the Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University....

Discovered some 130 light-years from Earth, the planet is too dim to be viewed in the optical spectrum. But by analyzing its infrared emissions they were able to determine a few things about its chemical composition and its mass, which falls somewhere between four to seven times that of Jupiter. These kinds of starless planets aren’t unheard of, but they are relatively difficult to detect when they are out there on their own....

“That’s why there’s a lot of optimism because Lula had a good track record at slowing deforestation when he was president before [in 2003 to 2011],” says Stouffer. 

The Mars day, which is called a sol, is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so a Mars rover driver’s schedule shifts by 40 minutes each day. After a few days of jumping ahead by 40 minutes, they would be working in the middle of the night. Life on Mars time totally disrupts their biological clocks, not to mention their personal routines. People hate it. They do it because they can stay awake when the rover is asleep, so the team can assess its performance on the previous day and plan its next moves....

More than 90 percent of Canada’s ice shelves have been lost during the last 100 years. Although much of the loss occurred during a warm period in the 1930s and 1940s, Arctic temperatures are now even higher than they were then, and a period of renewed ice shelf breakup began in 2002. In April 2000, satellite images indicated that a large crack had developed in the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf; by 2002 the shelf had completely split in two....

These elevations are not what you’d call a livable situation for pretty much anyone. That is unless you are a teensy weensy Phyllotis xanthopygus, the yellow-rumped leaf-eared mouse. In February, researchers discovered one of these tiny mountaineers scampering around the peak of the volcano at nearly 22,110 feet above sea level, breaking a world record for the highest altitude a mammal can live at, which was set by the same species last year....

“While I had imagined what the images would look like for years,” said Cherry in a press release on November 19, “nothing prepared me for the incredible detail we could see on that first scan.” A mashup between traditional positron emission tomography (PET) and x-ray computed tomography (CT), the EXPLORER images the whole volume of the body simultaneously, building up a detailed three-dimensional model in less than a minute. Your doctor can then look at cross sections of just your knee or heart, for example, or has the option of zooming out to see all your organs squashed into one image—the “maximum intensity projection”....

Mexico City is a dust bowl, a polluted megalopolis where breathing is hard and newly washed clothes hung out to dry turn stiff by evening. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began clobbering this capital city, residents regularly wore face masks during the frequent air quality emergencies there. Now Mexico City’s bad air pollution—which contributes to high rates of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases—is making the metropolitan area’s 21 million people more vulnerable to the coronavirus....