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Ideal for the sky: MLVOC Travel Pillow This pillow curves to support your head, neck, and chin while seated. It also has a small adjustable lock for the front to hug your neck gently and prevent the pillow from slipping off should you toss and turn. The fabric of the pillow is breathable, so you can finally say goodbye to those sweaty airplane sleeps. This pillow is great for any travel environment and comes with a carrying bag, earplugs, and contoured eye mask....

Although natural development of resistance happens naturally, the process can be facilitated in the matrix of a biofilm. These micro-colonies of bacteria offer the perfect place to dilute out the antibiotic to sublethal levels. As this happens, the individual cells can evolve to develop mechanisms to tolerate the existence of the chemical. If allowed to continue, tolerance can eventually develop into full blown resistance to any concentration. Removing biofilms, however, is not an easy task....

The crew, both of whom are reportedly in “good condition,” went into “ballistic descent mode,” which NASA tweeted involved “a sharper angle of landing compared to normal.” The capsule containing the astronauts successfully separated from the rocket booster and parachuted the ground, where rescue teams in helicopters rushed to meet them. According to the BBC’s Jonathan Amos, the astronauts would have realized something was wrong “because they reported feeling weightless when they should have felt pushed back in their seats” by a booster separation....

Though humans have known about ultrasound for centuries, researchers have discovered more medical uses for it in the past few years, especially in delivering drugs and in healing wounds. That’s because ultrasound creates tiny bubbles in liquid. When they pop, they can push molecules in or out of tissues. If it’s done right, it won’t damage tissues in the process. In this most recent study, the researchers tested ultrasound on human tissues in the lab and on live pigs and mice for two weeks....

Her ancestral wisdom was spot on. Ultraviolet radiation, of which the sun is a primary source, is thought to be a leading cause of skin problems in people—including wrinkles, sunburn, decreased immune function, irritation, and certain forms of cancer. Historically, humans have found ways to protect themselves from the sun. Indigenous populations in Alaska constructed snow goggles out of bone or wood to protect their eyes from UV rays reflecting off the snow....

It’s a totally different kind of search engine—covering everything from math formulas to personal health in an accessible way—and here’s what it’s capable of. Help with your daily life Use a query like “walking 45 minutes, 4 miles per hour” to work out just how many calories your morning run or walk is going to burn. Those values can be adjusted as necessary, or you can replace time with distance traveled....

In the study, David Christiani and his colleagues tested 75 e-cigarette products in total for two contaminants: endotoxin, which is part of the cell walls of a class of bacteria, and glucan, which is part of the makeup of fungi. Chronic exposure to endotoxin is linked to asthma and reduced lung capacity; while the form of glucan they found is known to cause inflammation, which is a big problem in a sensitive system like your lungs....

Resplendent in a red deel with gold spots and a black fur cap, Ts. Maanigumben, a schoolteacher and the oldest of the four players, covers the playing area with a layer of shagai, sheep knucklebones polished and dyed in a variety of vibrant colors. Mainstream Western games have nothing like Multicolored Turtle, which combines strategic play with ceremonial and storytelling components. But for Indigenous Mongolians, the game is both familiar, and a buttress to their traditional nomadic culture....

As he notes in the Instagram post below, it’s amazing to watch lightning and the aurora illuminate the thin bubble of atmosphere around our planet. Response to Peake’s photos and videos from his followers has been overwhelmingly positive, with parents writing to tell him how much he’s inspired their children, people thanking him for taking pictures of their hometowns, and even a few people writing in with requests to see their home countries from space: Some astronauts, like American astronaut and Space Station Commander Scott Kelly, are trained in photography along with other skills as part of their preparations for space....

While SpaceX has been using the original Dragon to carry cargo into space, the Dragon 2 is meant to carry a crew of up to seven astronauts into orbit and eventually all the way to the International Space Station, as well as to land them safely back on Earth using onboard propulsive thrusters. Those thrusters are precisely what SpaceX is testing, to make sure that they can be switched on-and-off in a reliable and controlled fashion....

A few summers ago, Kurt Schwenk noticed a splashy new behavior while watching baby tree frogs shimmy around a tank. “One came to the surface and did something strange,” the University of Connecticut evolutionary biologist says. “When it swam away it left a bubble behind.” Schwenk and his graduate student Jackson Phillips had planned to feed the tadpoles to salamanders for a study, but they quickly switched course. They thought the bubble could be a clue to how young amphibians flex their developing lungs without breaching the water’s surface....

Whether or not you’re a soccer enthusiast, it’s hard to deny the excitement of seeing your home country move closer to the gold. And while not everyone can travel thousands of miles to the games held this year in Qatar, psychologists say there’s good reason to tune into a match. PopSci asked experts about the top five health benefits that come from rooting for a team, even if you’re just on the couch....

Autonomous car company Waymo, a Google sibling and part of Alphabet, has just published a detailed explainer about the newest version of the sensors on some of its vehicles. While Waymo is known for its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, the whips with the latest gear on them are now electric Jaguar I-Paces. The closest analog to your eyes on these self-driving cars is the more than two dozen cameras on each Jaguar....

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers found that while the quantity of fish caught annually did reach its peak in 1996, that peak was much higher than originally thought. Instead of pulling out 86 million tons of fish that year, we actually took 130 million tons of fish out of the oceans. Since then, those numbers have gone down, but not by as much as we thought....

“Microcephaly was just showing up because there was a lot of Zika,” says Karin Nielsen-Saines, professor of clinical pediatrics division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There were clusters because a lot of people were infected.” Nearly a third of infants whose mothers were infected with Zika while pregnant, though, experience developmental problems and other delays, even without microcephaly, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine....

Betelgeuse is kind of a big deal Even if you don’t know the name (outside of the context of saying it three times to make Michael Keaton appear and make fart jokes), you already know Betelgeuse. (It’s really pronounced bet-el-geeze, but follow your heart.) It’s one of the brightest stars visible in the night sky, forming a sturdy shoulder of the constellation Orion. That Orion guy doesn’t skip deltoid day: Betelgeuse is a red giant so massive that if it sat in the center of our own solar system, it would easily consume Earth—along with Mercury, Venus, Mars, and possibly even Jupiter....

But if you’re an animal lover determined to feed your local park’s residents, there are several healthy alternatives. Before you go stock up on snacks, though, always make sure you’re allowed to feed the critters in question—some areas’ rules are more lenient than others. For vegetables, the most important consideration is making sure that the bits and pieces you offer are small enough for waterfowl to handle. Ducks and their relatives aren’t great at chewing—while their bills help break down food, they don’t have teeth, at least in the traditional sense....

To understand why, we have to go all the way back to the birth of a planet—about 4.5 billion years in Earth’s case. Planets form in clouds of dust around new stars. As specks of dust collide, they stick together, forming bigger and bigger clumps. As a planet like Earth grows, its gravity becomes stronger. Earth’s gravity is why we don’t float off into space; when we jump into the air, it pulls us back to the ground....

Theories abound, though, and most involve an overactive immune system. “We have done such a good job of eliminating the threats that the immune system is supposed to manage, that it’s looking for something to do,” says Anne Muñoz-Furlong, CEO of the nonprofit Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network. Parents feed their kids more handy snacks these days, she says, and many of those contain peanuts or their derivatives. “We’re bombarding the immune system with these [food-based] allergens, so it’s attacking those instead....