Pre-orders for the Oculus Rift will begin at 8am Pacific Time on January 6. The release lines up directly with the beginning of CES, where Oculus had a major presence last year when it demonstrated the third-generation of its developer kit, Oculus DK 3 Crescent Bay. At the time, the company was demonstrating new breakthroughs in virtual reality including the 360º head tracking, more accurate positional tracking, 3D audio and much more....
Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical company Moderna developed the booster, which was approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) after it was found to meet regulator’s standards of safety, quality, and effectiveness. As of late July, Moderna said that it has secured 66 million doses of a vaccine that targets both the 2020 strain of the virus and the new sub-variants. “The first generation of COVID-19 vaccines being used in the UK continue to provide important protection against the disease and save lives....
In Canada, the Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network turned to Anick Bérard, research chair on medications, pregnancy, and lactation at the University of Montreal, and asked her to take an additional look at the drug. Her team found that women who took the antifungal medication during the first trimester of pregnancy, at both low and high doses, were more likely to have a pregnancy loss, in a study published this week of 320,868 spontaneous abortions....
However, according to new research, Escobar’s hippos might not be that out of place after all. In fact, they interact with their environment similarly to the ancient Hemiauchenia paradoxa, a llama-like critter that roamed the same area during the Late Pleistocene roughly 100,000 years ago. The tail end of that era is marked by its extinctions—which some scientists attribute to humans. The world’s most gigantic creatures vanished off the face of the earth, and our ecosystems haven’t been the same since....
It’s not uncommon for a pilot for a major commercial airline to, for instance, start work in Florida at 5 p.m., with her first flight departing an hour later for a five-hour trip across the country, arriving in California just after 8 p.m. local time. Then she might get a short break and fly a 90-minute short-hop flight to to another California city. When she lands from this second flight, she has spent six and a half hours of the last nine in the cockpit....
The A4, a small but growing luxury sedan, isn’t quite in the same league as the Taurus, which at its peak had a larger following than Thin Mints. It is, however, Audi’s number-one model range. The Volkswagen-owned luxury brand aims to clock 1.5 million sales per year worldwide by 2015, and without a highly desirable A4 it has as much a chance of hitting that mark as John McCain does solving the scramble in American Cheerleader....
Enter Dr. Jason Brown, from Dalhousie University in Canada. An avid Beatles fan and amateur musician, Brown had tried for years to play that chord, but it never seemed quite right. “It sounds outlandish,” said Dr. Brown, “that someone could create a mystery around a chord from a time when artists used such simple recording techniques.” Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Brown decided to use the Fourier calculation to decompose the song into its original frequencies and figure out the notes from there....
Usually, these fingerprint scanners use images to determine the contours of a fingerprint. Qualcomm’s new design, announced at CES, uses sound. The American chip manufacturer has harnessed ultrasonic waves to create 3D information about the user’s fingerprint, called Sense ID. This technology bounces ultrasonic waves off the finger and back into the sensor, creating a map of the fingerprint with depth as well as the layout of the finger’s ridges....
Last spring, we rolled out a subsection of our environmental coverage focused on sustainability—more specifically, sustainable living. The premise was simple: Despite systemic and infrastructural hurdles beyond our own personal control, every individual has a role to play in combating the effects of climate change, and even small decisions like which vegetable oil you buy can add up. It all starts with looking at choices, both mundane and major, and asking yourself “is this helping?...
The last year or so has seen a spate of landmark climate change reports that lay out an apocalyptic vision of the future, a vision that is already starting to take shape as rising temperatures fuel hellish wildfires in Australia, punishing floods in the Midwest, and ferocious hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. But it’s not just the grim forecasts of scientists that are coming to pass. It’s also apocalyptic myths from around the world, as increasingly perilous fires and floods echo prophesies from religion and folklore....
Capture 2022 in an entirely different way by scoring adventure cameras and drones that let you take your photography and videography to new heights. Here are 10 options to choose from, all of which are on sale for a limited time: FITT360: Hands-Free Neckband Camera Dubbed as the world’s first neckband type wearable 360-degree camera, the FITT360 is a device that you wear around your neck for hands-free and hassle-free recording....
After the duo, Gary and Brian, discovered the roadrunner while unpacking, they contacted their local police department in Westbrook, Maine, who put them in touch with wildlife specialists at Avian Haven, a bird rehabilitation facility. A volunteer came to help the family wrangle the animal and safely transport it to the center, where it was fed and placed in a more temperature controlled setting. Desert-adapted roadrunners aren’t exactly suited for fall in Maine, so experts are attempting to bring the bird back to its original home....
Ramanathan and his team used the vehicles to study brown clouds, which are created when power plants, cars, factories and other sources pump enormous plumes of pollution into the atmosphere. Ramanathan’s group did their work in the Maldives, where dirty air generated in the Indian subcontinent looms overhead. The Manta planes, which can fly as high as 15,000 feet and stay in the air for hours, measured solar radiation, the size of cloud drops, turbulence, humidity, temperature and more....
The Bosley system for hair replacement is a common surgical procedure known as Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT). FUT usually costs between $10,000 and $15,000 and involves five steps. First, the doctor plans out the new hairline. Then the doctor surgically removes a strip of scalp from the back of the head. Using a microscope, technicians then remove the individual hair follicles from the strip. Finally, the team pokes holes in the bald scalp and inserts the hair follicles into the holes....
There is a magic trick for dealing with these familial hazards: science. Any time someone brings up something you’d rather not share this Thanksgiving, turn to these wacky, wonderful, and downright weird science stories from the past year to steer the conversation into safe waters. The weirdest things you heard this week Want to stop any personal conversation in its tracks? Tell your relatives about the newt that defends itself by pushing its rib cage through its skin and secreting poison to poke its enemies with death needles....
Blowfish testicles Prepared by unlicensed chef Uh oh, paralyzed Check out more PopSci.com, and PopSci.com user, SciKu (under “related articles”), and leave your own indelible mark on the makings of poetic history by leaving a SciKu comment here.
That’s mostly because even the most advanced imaging technology to date hasn’t given them a good enough look at the border between the nucleus and the rest of the cell. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the FEI microscopy company in the Netherlands have used cryo–electron tomography to take 3D images of the insides of cells to learn more about how they function as a whole....
In a new study published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, a team of researchers found that rather than recording speech or sentences, these markings recorded information numerically and reference a calendar. This means that the markings aren’t writing in the same sense of Sumerian writing systems (pictographs and cuneiform) from about 34,000 BCE onward. Instead, the researchers call this a “proto-writing” system that pre-dates other similar systems by at least 10,000 years....
It’s easy to make the same simple photography makes over and over, especially when you’re just starting out. And as soon as you start overcoming one set of mistakes, you start making new ones. It takes a lifetime to learn photography, and even then, you’ll shoot plenty of mistakes—images that will make you cringe down the road. Most photography mistakes, however, aren’t unique failings. They’re the same traps everyone falls into when learning how to take photos....
