The majority of acute appendicitis cases are not complicated by larger issues, like an organ rupture or signs of a tumor. “These patients can be evaluated by antibiotic therapy,” says Paulina Salminen, a surgeon based at the University of Turku in Finland and the lead author of the new study. “It takes some time to create a big change in the mindset of patients, doctors, and surgeons, but this has already started with the promising results....
To some, this came out of the blue. Prior to the invention of the measles vaccine in 1963, more than 90 percent of kids had gotten measles by their 15th birthday. But today, few parents of young children remember what that was like, and the rapidity with which measles spread has taken many people by surprise. To medical experts, though, this was downright predictable. “It’s sort of expected that measles is going to be episodic,” says Katrina Kretsinger, a medical epidemiologist who focuses on vaccine-preventable diseases at the World Health Organization....
Dan Inman had anticipated this moment for months. It was the first Saturday of December 2018—tournament day—and he thought the cars he’d built could outperform anyone’s. They were compact. Sleek. Speedy. He watched anxiously as his pinewood derby racers took their spots at the top of a long, sloping aluminum track. When each heat began, they whizzed down the gleaming course. In the other lanes, the competition hopelessly gave chase....
“She wanted something a little different on her leg: pictures of a cartoon she loved, Peppa Pig,” said de Oliveira Barata, who is based in London. So she designed a unique leg covered in tattoo-like images of Peppa and other pigs riding a bicycle and eating ice cream. Working with Hope made de Oliveira Barata realize there was a market for limbs with flair. Since then, de Oliveira Barata founded the Alternative Limb Project to make artistic prostheses....
RS Pup cycles through one of these pulsations every 41.5 days, with a rapid rise in brightness followed by a much slower descent back into its dimmest state. It’s 200 times larger than our sun and 10 times as massive, with an average brightness 15,000 times greater than our modest host star. The so-called wreath portion of the image is actually a nebula surrounding RS Pup; a region of interstellar space rich with gas and cosmic dust....
“They have a lot of strength in their hands,” says Sim. “Often when gripping a branch, they’ll have three toes on one side and two toes on the other,” as you can see in this image. Chameleons extend their tails for balance, so the fact that this little guy has his curled up into a perfect spiral means he must be pretty relaxed. Taking a look at this bat skeleton you can see the lightweight bones and backwards knees that allow these little mammals to fly....
The devices Microsoft’s Surface Neo is a dual-screen tablet that draws immediate comparisons to the Courier project the company introduced way back in 2008. It’s not a folding screen, but rather a pair of screens attached with a hinge. You can pick it up and use it horizontally, or you can set it down and use it as a laptop. A magnetic keyboard snaps into place on the bottom screen so you can type normally....
Introduced with a sleek product video, the Surface Book is a more high end version of the company’s fourth laptop/tablet hybrid. The magnesium enclosure allows the screen to be removed–much like the Surface. The Surface Book “Outperforms any competitor,” according to Microsoft. Microsoft’s Surface Book specs will be formidable, according to the company during their Windows 10 event. An Nvidia GeForce GPU and high speed GDDR5 memory will power the device....
A new paper suggests that instead of a simple sideswipe that crushed Theia into smaller pieces that formed the moon, the impact was more of a head-on collision that was so forceful that it thoroughly mixed Theia and the Earth together, giving both Earth and the newly formed moon a unified geological signature. The ‘giant impact hypothesis’ has been floating around since the 1970’s, but researchers are still arguing over the exact nature of the collision....
Asteroids striking Earth have been the subject of many potential apocalyptic scenarios—for which humans have never tested contingency plans, until now. On Wednesday, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), an unprecedented attempt to knock an asteroid slightly off its course. The golf cart-size spacecraft, which took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:21 am eastern time, will travel more than 6 million miles and collide with an asteroid moonlet—a small asteroid that orbits another asteroid—named Dimorphos in fall 2022....
To help solve that problem, researchers can apply a gradient filter to the images. The filter increases contrast, bringing the solar weather patterns into focus. Use the slider on the image below to compare a photo of the sun, with and without the gradient filter: And check out NASA’s excellent visualization of the gradient sun here.
Around 8:45 a.m. Eastern time on Monday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the crew filled the rocket with 700,000 pounds of cryogenic fuel. But not everything went according to plan: The Artemis 1 team discovered a hydrogen leak after the rocket was fully fueled. In an actual countdown, the leak would have set off alarms. But in Monday’s test, known as a wet dress rehearsal, the mission management team chose to have the computer ignore the alarm....
“This was part of a search for environmental determinants of disease,” says senior author Andrey Rzhetsky, professor in the department of human genetics and senior fellow in the computation institute at the University of Chicago. The study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology, also adds another item to the laundry list of harms associated with air pollution, which also includes cardiovascular disease, premature birth, infertility, and dementia. The team looked at two datasets, one from the United States, which included 151 million people, and one from Denmark, which included 1....
The bill, known as the Climate and Community Protection Act, would commit the state to powering itself on 100 percent clean energy by 2040. It also mandates a 40 percent cut to all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, and an 85 percent cut by 2050. For the remaining 15 percent, polluters would be required to pursue “alternative compliance mechanisms” to sequester or offset their carbon. Additionally, 70 percent of the state’s electricity must come from renewables by 2030....
The Phobos Surveyor is a new concept from researchers at Stanford, MIT and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The spacecraft would visit the Martian moon Phobos, or maybe an asteroid. Then one or more mace-ball rovers would deploy from the mothership (which would stay in orbit above) and leap and tumble across the surface of the moon or asteroid. Marco Pavone, an assistant professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford, came up with the idea and nicknamed the hopping rovers “hedgehogs” (definitely a cheerier name than mace balls)....
CREAMi takes all the guesswork out of making frozen desserts by streamlining the cooking process, which boils down to filling its container with your ingredients, freezing it for 24 hours, and pressing one of the buttons on CREAMi’s face. The appliance allows you to make anything from hard ice cream to a smoothie bowl and milkshake. There’s even a specific setting for processing your dessert after you’ve added mix-ins to distribute them evenly....
In this case, Nintendo didn’t have a choice: Fans made a big deal out of it thanks to rumors about its capabilities prior to Nintendo announcing the product. As I mentioned in my first look at the console, the Switch OLED doesn’t reflect those rumors. It is very much the same Switch as ever. The main change comes in the form of a larger OLED display, which can show more vivid colors and sharper contrast....
The outline for the Fission Surface Power (FSP) plan is fairly straightforward: An underground, uranium-powered nuclear reactor produces heat and drives a power converter to generate electricity. The nuke plant would churn out 40 kilowatts of electricity, enough power to provide life support to four astronauts with plenty left over to mine oxygen from lunar soil and run moon buggies. NASA is mulling two power-converter designs. Ohio-based SunPower has offered up a pressurized-gas-and-piston Stirling engine, which is going head-to-head with a Brayton-cycle engine that heats compressed gas to spin a turbine by the Colorado company Barber-Nichols [see illustrations below]....
To bridge that gap, there’s the Oculus Link software. It runs on your Windows PC and streams games to your Oculus Quest 2, giving you access to more advanced titles on the device. The platform allows you to game wirelessly through your Wi-Fi connection, but if you prefer a more stable experience, you can connect your Oculus to your PC via a USB 3.0 cable. The choice is yours. Getting started with Oculus Quest 2 games First of all, you need to check that your Windows computer meets the system requirements for Oculus Link....
