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That’s at least according to unpublished research funded by Burger King. On Tuesday, the fast food chain announced the launch of a “methane-reduced” patty, complete with a country music-powered video of children extolling the virtues of reducing methane. Mason Ramsey (the yodeling Walmart kid), emerges from the rear of a cow, singing “When cows fart and burp and splatter/well it ain’t no laughing matter.” (Again, it’s mostly burps! Not farts!...

Why copper needs careful care Copper is a fairly soft metal, which means copper pots scratch easily. Plus, the chemical reaction between oxygen and copper (oxidation) can cause the shiny, reddish-brown sheen of your cookware to turn black. When copper oxide comes into contact with moisture (even just the moisture in the air), it will eventually form a green-tinted copper carbonate (also called patina or verdigris, it’s what gives the Statue of Liberty its iconic color)....

This species’ struggle against human activity and flooding makes the story of Monty and Rose, a celebrity plover couple from the north side of Chicago, that much more important. After nesting and summering on Lake Michigan for three summers, this May, Monty unexpectedly died from a fungal respiratory infection. Rose has also not been seen since she flew off to Florida last winter. Still, their story has continued to resonate nationwide in birding circles and locals’ hearts....

While the timing was familiar, the update arrives during a shakeup in Apple’s software ecosystem. Rather than simply splitting all of its devices across iOS and macOS, the company now introduced iPad OS, which gives the near-ubiquitous tablet some room to grow on its own, outside the shadow of the iPhone. While Catalina may not fundamentally change the way you work on your computer right now, it lays the groundwork for some big changes down the road and blurs the line between iPad and computer even more....

“We think of it as cellphones or hybrid electric vehicles, but it also has an effect for people who don’t have access to electricity,” says Bonnie Charpentier, President of the American Chemical Society. “I just came back from a trip to Botswana where I was out in the bush with no modern conveniences, but our guide had a cellphone and a solar panel.” But despite how ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries are, few of us have any real sense of why they work so well....

But the Trump administration has always hinted to NASA in that it hoped to see this happen sooner, and on Tuesday, the White House made this explicit. At the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, and nearly 50 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Vice President Mike Pence said the 2028 deadline was “just not good enough.” The administration is now directing NASA to land astronauts on the south pole of the moon by 2024—four years earlier than anticipated, and “by any means necessary....

Despite decades of scientific and technological achievements, some people still think that funding NASA is a waste of money. However, when you do the calculations, it turns out we are actually getting a great value from this government-run agency. What NASA Gives Us We can thank the Cold War for NASA’s existence in the first place. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower realized we were losing the space race....

Like a blood clot in an artery, the enormous container ship was stuck in the Suez Canal, cutting off the flow of goods at a crucial byway in the world’s circulatory system of trade. On Monday, March 29, the vessel finally was “successfully refloated,” the Suez Canal Authority said. The 1,300-foot-long vessel, the Ever Given, initially became lodged in the waterway on Tuesday. While jammed in the canal, the ship had delayed hundreds of other vessels, the AP reported, and cost billions of dollars daily while it impeded traffic....

↑ Matt Wilkins, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Science Outreach at Vanderbilt University The U.S. Geological Survey distributes these half-gram metal bands to help us track birds as they migrate south for the winter. Some of the fliers weigh just a few tens of grams themselves. ↑ Timothy Warrington, research scientist at FREDsense Technologies During my doctorate, I was breeding millimeter-​long transgenic worms, barely visible to the naked eye, by sticking DNA into their gonads....

Charcoal itself is simply the carbon residue left over after slow heating high-carbon-content materials like wood, coconut shells or even sugar to remove most of the water they contain. It’s lightweight, highly portable, and burns for a long time at a reliable temperature. Thanks to these properties, humans have used charcoal as fuel for thousands of years. And you know humans: If it’s around them, at some point they’re likely to try to eat it....

From his statement to the committee: The majority of the Inspector General’s recommendations aren’t disclosed because the “recommendation includes Sensitive Security Information,” some changes are obvious. The Inspector General’s statement and testimony both noted that while the TSA is required to conduct manual reviews of aviation worker records, “due to the workload at larger airports, this inspection process may look at as few as one percent of all aviation workers’ applications....

In fact, this factory is just the beginning of what the corporation calls, in a press release, its “global battery offensive.” While a VW battery cell factory already exists in Skellefteå, Sweden, four more planned factories will follow a similar setup as the new one in Salzgitter, which will act as a type of blueprint. After this facility in Salzgitter, the next one is planned for Valencia, Spain; there will be a total of a half-dozen factories in Europe alone by 2030....

Today’s episode is our season 2 finale, and it’s one of our best yet! Now is the perfect time to binge all your old Weirdest Thing favorites. We’ll be back again in a few weeks. Fact: America’s first celebrity athletes were competitive endurance walkers By Claire Maldarelli Modern-day Americans often express their love of sports with downright rabid displays of fandom. We design gear for the express purpose of tailgating, we build giant playing fields, and we bedeck ourselves in pricy memorabilia....

The most surefire way to confirm a wormhole’s existence would be to directly prod a black hole and see if it’s hiding a bridge to elsewhere, but humanity may never have that opportunity. Even so, researchers could rule out some of the most obvious scenarios from Earth. If the monster black hole residing in the churning center of the Milky Way, for instance, is more door than dead end, astronomers could tease out the presence of something on the other side....

Habshi photographed the weevil by using a reflected light technique and stacking together 128 micrographs. “The main challenge was to show the black body against the black background without overexposing the skin and scales,” he said of the winning image Second place went to Rogelio Moreno of Panama for an image of a fern sorus—a clustered structure that contains and produces spores. To capture the fern sorus Moreno used a technique called autofluorescence which involves shining ultraviolet light on the subject, the vibrant colors of Moreno’s final image indicate the varied maturity stages of the sporangium within the fern sorus....

More than 70 percent of textiles used in the U.S. ends up dumped in a landfill or burned instead of recycled. Threads from the washing machine or a landfill then eventually make their way to waterways. Enter sustainable fabrics. One company in particular, Lenzing, an Austria-based sustainable fiber producer that developed TENCEL, which are fibers that biodegrade rapidly in comparison with other regularly used fibers like polyester, creates fiber from raw material from wood....

1. Maps Regional outfits like Outdoor Trail Maps in Colorado or the ­Appalachian Mountain Club in the Northeast provide local details, such as trail routes. They also have standard cartographic info like elevation, GPS coordinates, and the topographical lines that show terrain contours. 2. Sleeve Thanks to a zip ­closure with heat-welded seams, the Sea to ­Summit TPU translucent envelope will protect your precious chart in ­water up to 33 feet deep....

Research shows that podcast hours reached an all-time high last year, with the average user listening to less music and more pod episodes. But where does that leave those who still enjoy good ‘ol radio? If you’re the type to consume all audio types and want your content consolidated in one place instead of hopping from one app to another, TuneIn is your new best friend. And for a limited time, you can grab a premium plan for over 60 percent off....