If you struggle to fit reading into your day, the best audiobook apps let you multitask and listen to the latest releases while driving, exercising, or even making dinner. Audiobooks are increasingly popular, and by 2022, more than 140 million Americans had listened to one, according to Publisher’s Weekly. 

Audiobook apps vary in features and the breadth of their libraries. Many require a monthly or yearly subscription, and some offer media beyond audiobooks, such as podcasts. Voracious listeners may prefer a subscription service where you can indulge in as many audiobooks as you want in a month. But if it takes you a month or two to get through an audiobook, a pay-per-book platform will probably be more economical. 

Ultimately, the operating system of your devices, your listening preferences, and budget will all factor into the app that’s right for you as you discover your next great adventure.

1. Best overall: Audible

Founded in 1995 and acquired by Amazon in 2008, Audible is one of the pioneers in the audiobook space. The service lets you get your hands on almost any title that’s in audiobook form. You’ll also get access to podcasts, exclusives, and originals that are only available on the platform. 

Audible offers two membership tiers, and both provide access to the Audible ‘Plus’ catalog, which contains more than 10,000 audiobooks. The Audible Premium Plus membership adds one credit per month, so you can buy books outside of the Plus catalog, giving you access to an additional 470,000 audiobooks. Without the premium membership, you can purchase credits to listen to more audiobooks.

The platform also lets you keep access to your Audible books even if you cancel your subscription. In contrast, similar apps, like Scribd, only provide access to purchased books as long as you subscribe to the app. Others, like Hoopla and Libby, let you peruse your local library’s list of audiobooks. But they only provide access for a few weeks before you have to get on the reading list again. 

2. Best for iPhone: Apple Books

Apple Books is a convenient way to get digital reads and audiobooks that sync to all of your Apple devices. Unlike many audiobook apps, Apple Books isn’t a subscription service. It works more like a digital bookstore, where you pay for each book. 

For those who only listen to a book or two a month, Apple Books might cost less than a subscription service. Plus, if you have months where you don’t have time to listen at all, you won’t be paying for an unused subscription. There’s also a decent selection of free audiobooks that includes classics such as Pride and Prejudice if your budget gets tight. 

Beyond the monetary pros and cons, the app itself offers a robust library that’s easy to navigate, thanks to effective categorization. You can browse thousands of titles by popular genres, but you can also search by other categories such as free books, new and trending, book club picks, and Apple recommendations. And you can sample short snippets before you make your final decision. 

The library goes beyond audiobooks to digital titles as well. In theory, you could do most of your reading, audio or otherwise, in this single app. Your Apple devices will require iOS 10 or later, but you can sync across the board, including iPads, iPhone, some iPods, and some Apple Watches. Bonus—you also have the option to download and import Audible titles, so add that to your Audible tips and tricks list if you find yourself moving between the two.

Apple Books is free for iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.

3. Best for nonfiction: Blinkist

Blinkist isn’t just an audiobook app. It’s not even just a book app. This unique app focuses on all things learning, from podcasts and book summaries to audiobooks. It’s some of the best value you’ll get if you’re focused on nonfiction, even more so if you’re usually short on time. 

The app offers book summaries in manageable 15-minute chunks, and includes popular books like Atomic Habits by James Clear. You can download titles to access them offline or send them to Kindle. Books are arranged by topics, including love, self-help, memoirs, autobiographies, and more. Popular new releases and classics are readily available. The goal is to “feed your brain” and improve your mind and body with content that fits a busy lifestyle. 

[Related: Tips for learning two languages at once]

Blinkist is an easy way to access facts and books you might not have time to get to otherwise, and it doesn’t take long before you get personalized recommendations based on your preferences and habits. You get a seven-day free trial, then it costs $15.99 per month for the monthly plan or $8.24 per month if you opt to pay yearly.

Blinkist is available on iOS, iPadOS, and Android.

4. Best free: LibriVox

Subscriptions and monthly purchases can quickly add up. For those on a tight budget, LibriVox offers free (and legal) audiobooks. Their catalog consists of more than 40,000 books available in the public domain, read by volunteers. 

You won’t find the latest releases, but you can catch up on classics. The books are DRM-free so you can download audiobooks as many times as you’d like and listen when you’re offline or on other devices. This matters because DRM (Digital Rights Management) prevents unauthorized copying of copyrighted content, but can cause problems on your devices, too. No need to worry about all that with LibriVox, though, because every bit of its content is in the public domain. 

The interface isn’t sleek or fancy, but it offers bookmark and timer features to support your basic listening needs. If you’re up for a bit of out-loud reading, you can volunteer to read a book yourself. However, the quality of the narration varies by volunteer, so you may skip some books because the storytelling doesn’t do it justice. Still, you can’t beat free audiobooks and a platform that celebrates the love of literature. 

LibriVox is available for iOS, iPadOS, and Android.

5. Best budget: Chirp

Chirp is where thrift store meets audiobooks. It’s owned by BookBub, an author promotion site. Thousands of subscribers scramble to get deals on new or popular books, like $5 for a Harlan Coben audiobook. The deal on any one particular book usually lasts a few days and listings show a countdown for how much longer the deal will last. Authors vie for the best promotions because of Bookbub’s extensive reach.

Chirp fits into the picture by offering discounted audiobooks. For listeners, Chirp is a win for the savings, and for authors, the platform is a great way to  find new readers. You pay by the book rather than a subscription fee. And the depth of the discounts vary.

On the downside, deals are limited, so you have to act fast when you see a book you want. The app itself is free, and you get to keep the audiobooks you purchase, so it’s a great way to build your library on a budget.

Chirp is free for iOS, iPadOS, and Android.

The post The best audiobook apps for books and podcasts appeared first on Popular Science.

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Researchers are training robots to perform an ever-growing number of tasks through trial-and-error reinforcement learning, which is often laborious and time-consuming. To help out, humans are now enlisting large language model AI to speed up the training process. In a recent experiment, this resulted in some incredibly dexterous albeit simulated robots.

A team at NVIDIA Research directed an AI protocol powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 to teach a simulation of a robotic hand nearly 30 complex tasks, including tossing a ball, pushing blocks, pressing switches, and some seriously impressive pen-twirling abilities.

[Related: These AI-powered robot arms are delicate enough to pick up Pringles chips.]

NVIDIA’s new Eureka “AI agent” utilizes GPT-4 by asking the large language model (LLM) to write its own reward-based reinforcement learning software code. According to the company, Eureka doesn’t need intricate prompting or even pre-written templates; instead, it simply begins honing a program, then adheres to any subsequent external human feedback.

In the company’s announcement, Linxi “Jim” Fan, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, described Eureka as a “unique combination” of LLMs and GPU-accelerated simulation programming. “We believe that Eureka will enable dexterous robot control and provide a new way to produce physically realistic animations for artists,” Fan added.

Judging from NVIDIA’s demonstration video, a Eureka-trained robotic hand can pull off pen spinning tricks to rival, if not beat, extremely dextrous humans. 

After testing its training protocol within an advanced simulation program, Eureka then analyzes its collected data and directs the LLM to further improve upon its design. The end result is a virtually self-iterative AI protocol capable of successfully encoding a variety of robotic hand designs to manipulate scissors, twirl pens, and open cabinets within a physics-accurate simulated environment.

Eureka’s alternatives to human-written trial-and-error learning programs aren’t just effective—in most cases, they’re actually better than those authored by humans. In the team’s open-source research paper findings, Eureka-designed reward programs outperformed humans’ code in over 80 percent of the tasks—amounting to an average performance improvement of over 50 percent in the robotic simulations.

[Related: How researchers trained a budget robot dog to do tricks.]

“Reinforcement learning has enabled impressive wins over the last decade, yet many challenges still exist, such as reward design, which remains a trial-and-error process,” Anima Anandkumar, senior director of AI research at NVIDIA’s senior director of AI research and one of the Eureka paper’s co-authors, said in the company’s announcement. “Eureka is a first step toward developing new algorithms that integrate generative and reinforcement learning methods to solve hard tasks.”

The post Watch what happens when AI teaches a robot ‘hand’ to twirl a pen appeared first on Popular Science.

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The rear camera on your iPhone 15 (also present on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max) is more powerful and versatile than you might have realized. It features a 48-megapixel sensor but default settings only allow it to take 24MP snaps.

The good news is that you can delve into your iPhone’s settings to switch your camera to full capacity and get more detail in your photos. There are some trade-offs you should know about, and the exact options vary depending on the iPhone you’re using. But if you’re serious about your smartphone photography, you should learn about the modes available to you and how they work.

How the iPhone 15 cameras work

When you take a photo on your iPhone 15 without the ultrawide or zoom sensors, iOS uses  the main 48MP sensor to create a 24MP shot. There are two reasons for that—first, it keeps file size down, and second, it allows pixel binning, which means the camera combines multiple pixels to capture more light and produce a better image.

However, if you have the room on your iPhone to store the resulting snaps, you can switch to 48MP photos. Professional photographers often make the switch because capturing more pixels provides more flexibility over the final shot by letting you take control over how those pixels are processed. 

[Related: Check out some of the winners of the latest iPhone Photography Awards]

But you should know there are differences depending on the iPhone you’re using.  The dual-lens on the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Plus, has a slightly inferior 48MP sensor than the triple-lens on the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max—the number of pixels is the same, but the pixel-capturing tech isn’t quite as good.

The other key difference is that the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max can capture RAW images, which Apple calls ProRAW photos. This format provides all the raw data from a digital image, providing photographers even more control and options over their work. RAW snaps take a little longer to process, use up a lot more storage space, and need some photo know-how to optimize, which is why the average smartphone photographer doesn’t bother with them.

The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus don’t have the processing grunt to manage RAW snaps, but they can still capture 48MP images in either HEIF or JPEG format. The result is still 48MP-size pictures but they’ll be slightly compressed, which takes away some of the manual post-processing control you get with RAW images. In certain ways, using a HEIF or JPEG format (which you can also do on the Pro models) goes halfway between shooting 24MP snaps and 48MP ProRAW, with the added benefit of significantly cutting down file sizes.

If you’re considering making the switch to 48MP photos, bear in mind that means a slightly longer time between tapping the shutter button and seeing your image on screen. What’s more, the dynamic range (the spread between the darkest blacks and the whitest whites) won’t be quite as good without pixel binning. 

How to change the iPhone 15 camera settings

Having absorbed all of that information about photo formats, you’re ready to start making changes. Head to Settings in iOS, then tap on Camera. Unless you’re already shooting in RAW, your first choice will be between High Efficiency (HEIF) or Most Compatible (JPEG) for the image format.

Which one you pick is really up to you and will depend on what you’re doing with your snaps after you’ve taken them. HEIF tends to result in smaller file sizes, but JPEG is generally compatible with a broader range of software on desktop and the web. There’s plenty of information about both online.

[Related: The easiest ways to back up iPhone photos without iCloud]

To unlock the 48MP photos, turn on Resolution Control (on the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus) or ProRAW & Resolution Control (on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max). On the latter models you can also tap Pro Default to pick your preferred format: The list includes HEIF Max (up to 48MP), JPEG Max (up to 48MP), ProRAW 12MP, and ProRAW Max (up to 48MP). Underneath these options, Apple lists the average file size for each format, so you have an idea of how much space each picture will take up—10MB for a 48MP JPEG, for example, and 75MB for a 48MP ProRAW.

Launch the camera on your iPhone, and the new 48MP option will appear in the corner. It’ll be crossed out to begin with, so tap the icon to turn it on and choose which format you want to shoot—HEIF Max, JPEG Max, or RAW Max. On the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, press and hold on the icon to switch between HEIF/JPEG and ProRAW. Note that you won’t get the option to switch to ProRAW on the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.

By default, the Camera app will forget that you enabled 48MP photos when you switch to another app, so the option will be crossed out again when you come back to it. To tell the camera to keep the 48MP enabled, open the iOS Settings screen, tap Camera, Preserve Settings, and then either Resolution Control or Apple ProRAW & Resolution Control, depending on your iPhone model.

Note that because of the way the iPhone 15 produces photos, it will default back to 24MP whenever you’re taking Live Photos or macro shots, or using Night mode or the flash. This will happen no matter what settings you’ve changed simply because those different modes require different types of image processing.

The post How to unlock the hidden, more powerful camera on the iPhone 15 appeared first on Popular Science.

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On October 10, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary dedicated a ship called the Proteus in a ceremony on the River Thames. The vessel, which looks like someone started building a ship and then stopped halfway through, is the first in the fleet’s Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance program, and is a conversion from a civilian vessel. 

In its new role, the Proteus will keep a protective eye on underwater infrastructure deemed vitally important, and will command underwater robots as part of that task. Before being converted to military use, the RFA Proteus was the Norwegian-built MV Topaz Tangaroa, and it was used to support oil platforms.

Underwater infrastructure, especially pipelines and communications cables, make the United Kingdom inextricably connected to the world around it. While these structures are hard to get to, as they rest on the seafloor, they are not impossible to reach. Commercial vessels, like the oil rig tenders the Proteus was adapted from, can reach below the surface with cranes and see below it through remotely operated submarines. Dedicated military submarines can also access seafloor cables. By keeping an eye on underwater infrastructure, the Proteus increases the chance that saboteurs can be caught, and more importantly, improves the odds that damage can be found and repaired quickly.

“Proteus will serve as a testbed for advancing science and technological development enabling the UK to maintain the competitive edge beneath the waves,” reads the Royal Navy’s announcement of the ship’s dedication.

The time between purchase and dedication of the Topaz Tangaroa to the Proteus was just 11 months, with conversion completed in September. The 6,600-ton vessel is operated by a crew of just 26 from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, while the surveillance, survey, and warfare systems on the Proteus are crewed by 60 specialists from the Royal Navy. As the Topaz Tangaroa, the vessel was equipped for subsea construction, installation, light maintenance, and inspection work, as well as survey and remotely operated vehicle operations. The Proteus retains its forward-mounted helipad, which looks like a hexagonal brim worn above the bow of the ship.

Most striking about the Proteus is the large and flat rear deck, which features a massive crane as well as 10,700 square feet of working space, which is as much as five tennis courts. Helpful to the ship’s role as a home base for robot submersibles is a covered “moon pool” in the deck that, whenever uncovered, lets the ship launch submarines directly beneath it into the ocean.

“This is an entirely new mission for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary – and one we relish,” Commodore David Eagles RFA, the head of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, said upon announcement of the vessel in January.

Proteus is named for one of the sons of the sea god Poseidon in Greek mythology, with Proteus having domain over rivers and the changing nature of the sea. While dedicated on a river, the ship is designed for deep-sea operation, with a ballast system providing stability as it works in the high seas. 

“Primarily for reasons of operational security, the [Royal Navy] has so far said little about the [Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance] concept of operations and the areas where Proteus will be employed,” suggests independent analysts Navy Lookout, as part of an in-depth guide on the ship. “It is unclear if she is primarily intended to be a reactive asset, to respond to suspicious activity and potentially be involved in repairs if damage occurs. The more plausible alternative is that she will initially be employed in more of a deterrent role, deploying a series of UUVs [Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles] and sensors that monitor vulnerable sites and send periodic reports back to the ship or headquarters ashore. Part of the task will be about handling large amounts of sensor data looking for anomalies that may indicate preparations for attacks or non-kenetic malign activity.”

In the background of the UK’s push for underwater surveillance are actual attacks and sabotage on underwater pipelines. In September 2022, an explosion caused damage and leaks in the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. While active transfer of gas had been halted for diplomatic reasons following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the pipeline still held gas in it at the time of the explosion. While theories abound for possible culprits, there is not yet a conclusive account of which nation was both capable and interested enough to cause such destruction.

The Proteus is just the first of two ships with this task. “The first of two dedicated subsea surveillance ships will join the fleet this Summer, bolstering our capabilities and security against threats posed now and into the future,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in January. “It is paramount at a time when we face Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, that we prioritise capabilities that will protect our critical national infrastructure.”

While the Proteus is unlikely to fully deter such acts, having it in place will make it easier for the Royal Navy to identify signs of sabotage. Watch a video of the Proteus below:

The post This weird-looking British ship will keep an eye out for sabotage beneath the surface appeared first on Popular Science.

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Editing photos on an iPhone may seem intimidating, given all the options and settings, but it’s accessible to all skill levels. Thanks to its user-friendly interface and intuitive controls, you can easily enhance your images with preset effects or manually adjust settings to achieve the desired look. No expensive editing software necessary.

The iPhone’s photo editor also offers advanced features such as selective editing, which allows you to make precise adjustments to specific areas of your images. Additionally, you can easily share your edited photos directly from the app by posting them to social media platforms or sending them to friends and family. 

How to edit photos on an iPhone

Since most of us snap pictures on the fly, we are not thinking about the composition or lighting when we take the photo. We are trying to capture a moment as quickly as possible. Thankfully, that’s where post-editing comes in. Like icing a cake, editing images gives them a finished look. And editing photos on an iPhone might be even easier than messing around with gloopy buttercream.

Crop, rotate, or flip your photo

Was your selfie interrupted by a random bystander? No worries; that’s why there’s the crop tool. Cropping is one of the easiest and fastest ways to remove unwanted elements or distractions from the frame. Trimming the edges can also help improve a photo’s composition by adjusting the placement and balance of elements within the frame. In Photos, tap any thumbnail to view it in full screen. To start making changes, tap Edit, then tap the crop icon to choose one of three ways you can crop a photo.

1. Manual crop: With the crop icon selected, drag the rectangle’s corners to enclose the area you want to keep in the photo. Tap Done to crop.

2. Zoom crop: Alternatively, you can crop iPhone images by activating the crop tool and pinching them to zoom in. When the photo appears as you want it cropped, hit Done to save.

3. Use a preset ratio: Tap the aspect ratio icon in the upper right corner (a small rectangle with other rectangles stacked on top), then choose one of the cropping options, including square, wallpaper, 9:16, and 5:4. Hit Done to save the change.

• Pro tip: If you choose a ratio crop, such as 9:16, you can select a vertical or horizontal orientation by tapping the two rectangles below the image.

How to rotate a picture on iPhone

Tap the rotate icon (a square with an arrow curving around one corner) to turn the photo 90 degrees at a time. Keep going until you get the orientation you desire. Hit Done to confirm the changes.

How to flip a photo on iPhone

Touch the flip icon (mirrored triangles with an arrow above them) to reverse the image horizontally. Tap Done to save your edits.

Just know that if you don’t like your crops, rotations, and/or flips at any time during the editing process, you can tap Cancel in the lower left corner of the screen, then hit Discard Changes. 

Straighten your image and adjust the perspective

Sometimes, you don’t notice tilted or skewed lines in a photograph until after you take it. Fortunately, altering the perspective is simple with the iPhone’s editing software. Open a photo on your iPhone, tap Edit, then hit the crop icon.

Under the photo, you will see three options for straightening the horizontal lines in the photo and adjusting the vertical and horizontal perspectives. When you choose the one you want to use, drag the slider underneath to make precise changes. There is also an Auto option at the top of the screen, which will automatically adjust the photo based on the selected adjustment.

1. Straighten: This adjustment, well, straightens out horizontal lines within a photograph.

2. Vertical perspective: Corrects or modifies the perceived height or angle of objects in a photo, straightening vertical lines that may appear tilted or distorted.

3. Horizontal perspective: Changes horizontal lines and angles in photos, ensuring parallel lines and your desired alignment. 

After editing the perspective, select Done to save your changes; if unsatisfied, hit Cancel, followed by Discard Changes.

Adjust light and color

Light and color are important factors when editing photos on an iPhone—and anywhere, really—because they affect an image’s overall mood and visual appeal. The right lighting will bring out the subject’s features, add depth, and make important details stand out. In the same way, changing a photograph’s colors can make the viewer feel certain emotions, set a particular mood, or even send a message. Your phone’s Photos app has several tools that will let you adjust the light and color of your pictures.

[Related: How to take better selfies]

To begin, open the photo you want to alter. Tap Edit, then swipe left under the image to view the effects you can edit. The quickest and easiest way to make adjustments is to tap on Auto, and the slider under the Auto tab will allow you to adjust the intensity of the iPhone’s suggested edit.

If you prefer complete edit control, though, the iPhone photo editor lets you adjust each effect individually for a custom edit. The effects you can alter are:

• Exposure: Increasing exposure can make an image brighter, while decreasing it can create a darker and more dramatic effect. 
• Brilliance: Enhances an image’s overall clarity and vibrancy, making it more visually striking.
• Highlights: Brings out the brightest areas of an image, adding a sense of brightness and contrast.
• Shadows: Darkens the darker areas of an image, creating depth.
• Contrast: Makes the difference between light and dark areas more pronounced.
• Brightness: Changes how light or dark the photo is overall, but not as dramatically as adjusting exposure.
• Blackpoint: Adjusts the darkest point in an image, allowing for greater control over the overall tonal range.
• Saturation: Affects the intensity and richness of colors in an image.
• Vibrance: Similar to saturation, but designed to enhance the colors more subtly and naturally. 
• Warmth: Adjusts the color temperature of an image, making it appear either warmer (more yellow/orange) or cooler (more blue). 
• Tint: Adjusts the overall color balance of an image, adding a subtle hue to the entire picture. 
• Sharpness: Enhances the clarity and detail of an image, making edges and fine textures more defined.
• Definition: Improves an image’s overall sharpness and clarity by enhancing the distinction between different elements and adding depth. 
• Noise Reduction: Reduces digital noise in an image, resulting in a smoother and cleaner appearance. This helps minimize the grainy or speckled effect that can occur in low-light settings. 
• Vignette: Darkens the corners and edges of the image, creating a subtle or dramatic spotlight effect.

To use an effect, tap on its icon and drag the slider underneath to make precise adjustments. The outline around the button indicates the degree of adjustment, and you can toggle between the edited effect and the original to see how much you’ve changed the photo.

Apply filters

Filter effects enable you to easily add creative and artistic elements to your photos, resulting in more visually appealing and captivating images. To apply a filter, open a photo, tap Edit, then tap the Filters button (the three overlapping circles) to pull up the filter effect options. There are nine to choose from. Use the slider underneath your chosen effect to adjust its intensity, and if you need to remove a filter, tap Original. Hit Done to confirm the edit.

Portrait mode editing tips

If you’re someone who likes to use Portrait mode, you’ll need to be familiar with the iPhone’s Portrait mode-specific enhancements. These allow you to adjust the depth of field (also known as bokeh), which is the range of distance within a photograph that appears in sharp focus and makes the subject stand out. Portrait mode’s editing tools also include studio lighting effects for added flexibility and creativity. 

When you open a photo taken in Portrait mode, you will see two editing options not available in the regular photo mode. The effect at the top with the little “f” is f-stop, or depth of field. The circles at the bottom of the screen are lighting effects.

Adjusting the f-stop will increase or decrease blurring in the background. The smaller the f-stop, the more blur you’ll see. A larger f-stop will mean less blur. Tap the f-stop icon, and a slider will appear at the bottom of the screen, allowing you to adjust the effect.

To adjust the lighting, tap one of the effects. You can choose from natural, studio, contour, stage, stage light mono, and high-key light mono. Move the slider to the left or right to increase or decrease the effect. 

Write or draw on a photo

It can be fun to write or draw on a picture, and the iPhone makes it easy to do so. Choose a photo, then go to Edit and tap the pen-shaped button. Use the various drawing tools and colors to draw on the picture.

You can tap the plus button to magnify or add a caption, text, shapes, or even your signature. Tap Done to save your changes, or tap Cancel if you don’t like them.

How to undo photo edits on an iPhone

Don’t worry if you make an editing mistake—the iPhone’s Photos app gives you plenty of opportunities to undo your edits.

Undo and redo edits: While editing a photo, tap the left and right arrows at the top of the screen to undo and redo multiple edit steps.

Revert an edited photo: If you save changes and decide you do not like the edit, you can open up the photo, select Edit, and then hit Revert to restore the original version. 

Copy and paste edits to multiple photos

The iPhone allows you to copy edits from one photo and paste them onto one or more others, an ability that is particularly useful when you’re trying to edit a series of similar photos. Start by opening the photo that contains the edits you want to copy. Then tap the More Options button (three dots), followed by Copy Edits. Hit Cancel, then the back button to return to your photo library.

From there, tap Select, then touch the thumbnails of the photos to which you want to apply the edits. Finally, select Paste Edits from the More Options menu.

How to remove the subject from a photo on an iPhone

Although you can’t edit the background of a photo with the iPhone’s Photos app (you’ll need to install a separate app for that), you can cut and paste one part of the picture—the subject.

To do so, the photo’s subject and background should be clearly distinct, and the background shouldn’t be too busy or similar to the subject. Start by opening an image, then pressing and holding the subject. You should see a white glow around the subject, and a window should pop up asking you to Copy or Share. If that doesn’t work, move your finger around and try again—sometimes, it takes more than one attempt to select a subject.

When it does work, your iPhone will automatically separate the subject from the background, and you’ll be able to copy and paste it into another app, or share it using standard sharing options.

If necessary, change the date, time, or location

Your iPhone stores the date, time, and location in the photo’s metadata. If you need to alter this information, you can. Open the photo you want to change, then tap the More Options button (three dots) in the upper right corner. Touch Adjust Date & Time or Adjust Location, enter the new information, and hit Adjust.

To change the date, time, or location of multiple photos at once, tap Select, touch the thumbnails of the images you want to change, and follow the steps above. Don’t worry if you change your mind, either—you can undo your metadata edits by tapping the More Options button, followed by Adjust Date & Time or Adjust Location, then Revert.

FAQ

The post How to edit photos on an iPhone—a detailed guide appeared first on Popular Science.

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For most Americans, eggs matter a lot. In a year, an average American is estimated to eat almost 300 eggs (that’s either in the form of eggs by themselves or in egg-utilizing products like baked goods). We truly are living in what some researchers have called the Age of the Chicken—at least geologically, the humble poultry will be one of our civilization’s most notable leftovers.

Food systems in the US are fairly centralized. That means small disruptions can ratchet up to become large disturbances. Just take the exorbitant egg prices from earlier this year as one example. 

To push back against supply chain issues, some households have taken the idea of farm to table a step further. Demand for backyard chickens rose both during the pandemic, and at the start of the year in response to inflation. But raising a flock can come with many unseen challenges and hassles. A new startup, Coop, is hatching at exactly the right time. 

[Related: 6 things to know before deciding to raise backyard chickens]

Coop was founded by AJ Forsythe and Jordan Barnes in 2021, and it packages all of the software essentials of a smart home into a backyard chicken coop. 

Barnes says that she can’t resist an opportunity to use a chicken pun; it’s peppered into the copy on their website, as well as the name for their products, and is even baked into her title at the company (CMO, she notes, stands for chief marketing officer, but also chicken marketing officer). She and co-founder Forsythe invited Popular Science to a rooftop patio on the Upper East side to see a fully set up Coop and have a “chick-chat” about the company’s tech. 

In addition to spending the time to get to know the chickens, they’ve spent 10,000 plus hours on the design of the Coop. Fred Bould, who had previously worked on Google’s Nest products, helped them conceptualize the Coop of the future. 

The company’s headquarters in Austin has around 30 chickens, and both Barnes and Forsythe keep chickens at home, too. In the time that they’ve spent with the birds, they’ve learned a lot about them, and have both become “chicken people.” 

An average chicken will lay about five eggs a week, based on weather conditions and their ranking in the pecking order. The top of the pecking order gets more food, so they tend to lay more eggs. “They won’t break rank on anything. Pecking order is set,” says Barnes. 

Besides laying eggs, chickens can be used for composting dinner scraps. “Our chickens eat like queens. They’re having sushi, Thai food, gourmet pizza,” Barnes adds.  

For the first generation smart Coop, which comes with a chicken house, a wire fence, lights that can be controlled remotely, and a set of cameras, all a potential owner needs to get things running on the ground are Wifi and about 100 square feet of grass. “Chickens tend to stick together. You want them to roam around and graze a little bit, but they don’t need sprawling plains to have amazing lives,” says Barnes. “We put a lot of thought into the hardware design and the ethos of the design. But it’s all infused with a very high level of chicken knowledge—the circumference of the roosting bars, the height of everything, the ventilation, how air flows through it.” 

[Related: Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages]

They spent four weeks designing a compostable, custom-fit poop tray because they learned through market research that cleaning the coop was one of the big barriers for people who wanted chickens but decided against getting them. And right before the Coop was supposed to go into production a few months ago, they halted it because they realized that the lower level bars on the wire cage were wide enough for a desperate raccoon to sneak their tiny paws through. They redesigned the bars with a much closer spacing. 

The goal of the company is to create a tech ecosystem that makes raising chickens easy for the beginners and the “chicken-curious.” And currently, 56 percent of their customers have never raised chickens before, they say.

Key to the offering of Coop is its brain: an AI software named Albert Eggstein that can detect both the chickens and any potential predators that might be lurking around. “This is what makes the company valuable,” says Barnes. Not only can the camera pick up that there’s four chickens in the frame, but it can tell the chickens apart from one another. It uses these learnings to provide insights through an accompanying app, almost like what Amazon’s Ring does. 

[Related: Do all geese look the same to you? Not to this facial recognition software.]

As seasoned chicken owners will tell newbies, being aware of predators is the name of the game. And Coop’s software can categorize nearby predators from muskrats to hawks to dogs with a 98-percent accuracy. 

“We developed a ton of software on the cameras, we’re doing a bunch of computer vision work and machine learning on remote health monitoring and predator detection,” Forsythe says. “We can say, hey, raccoons detected outside, the automatic door is closed, all four chickens are safe.”

The system runs off of two cameras, one stationed outside in the run, and one stationed inside the roost. In the morning, the door to the roost is raised automatically 20 minutes after sunrise, and at night, a feature called nest mode can tell owners if all their chickens have come home to roost. The computer vision software is trained through a database of about 7 million images. There is also a sound detection software, which can infer chicken moods and behaviors through the pitch and pattern of their clucks, chirps, and alerts.

[Related: This startup wants to farm shrimp in computer-controlled cargo containers]

It can also condense the activity into weekly summary sheets, sending a note to chicken owners telling them that a raccoon has been a frequent visitor for the past three nights, for example. It can also alert owners to social events, like when eggs are ready to be collected.  

A feature that the team created called “Cluck talk,” can measure the decibels of chicken sounds to make a general assessment about whether they are hungry, happy, broody (which is when they just want to sit on their eggs), or in danger. 

There’s a lot of chicken-specific behaviors that they can build models around. “Probably in about 6 to 12 months we’re going to roll out remote health monitoring. So it’ll say, chicken Henrietta hasn’t drank water in the last six hours and is a little lethargic,” Forsythe explains. That will be part of a plan to develop and flesh out a telehealth offering that could connect owners with vets that they can communicate and share videos with. 

The company started full-scale production of their first generation Coops last week. They’re manufacturing the structures in Ohio through a specialized process called rotomolding, which is similar to how Yeti coolers are made. They have 50 beta customers who have signed up to get Coops, and are offering an early-bird pricing of $1,995. Like Peloton and Nest, customers will also have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $19.95 for the app features like the AI tools. In addition to the Coops, the company also offers services like chicken-sitting (aptly named chicken Tenders). 

For the second generation Coops, Forsythe and Barnes have been toying with new ideas. They’re definitely considering making a bigger version (the one right now can hold four to six chickens), or maybe one that comes with a water gun for deterring looming hawks. The chickens are sold separately.

The post Finally, a smart home for chickens appeared first on Popular Science.

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First officially unveiled back in 2019, Tesla’s electric Cybertruck impressed and amused the public with its angular, “Blade Runner-inspired” design and purported features including reinforced glass, stainless steel body, and a lack of door handles. Although originally slated to arrive in reservation holders’ driveways in 2021, the EV release faced numerous delays exacerbated by COVID-19 pandemic supply chain issues. This week, however, Elon Musk said Tesla’s long-delayed Cybertruck will finally roll off the company’s Giga Texas lot on November 30, when Tesla is now scheduled to begin delivery. However, the company’s CEO cautioned investors against early celebrations.

During the company’s Q3 earnings call on October 18, Musk stressed that both customers and shareholders should “temper expectations,” particularly for the Cybertruck’s initial profitability. Tesla faced various challenges with scaling and ramping up production. Musk went as far as to say, “we dug our own grave with Cybertruck” during the vehicle’s multi-year hype campaign.

[Related: Tesla’s Cybertruck is the latest lofty promise in the world of electric pickups.]

“Cybertruck is one of those special products that comes along only once in a long while. And special products that come along once in a long while are just incredibly difficult to bring to market to reach volume, to be prosperous,” Musk opined, as reported by The Verge on Wednesday.

The Cybertruck base model was initially estimated at $39,900 in 2019, but Tesla is expected to announce updated pricings during its November 30 release event. No price ranges are currently available on Tesla’s website, but customers can still put down a refundable $100 deposit for a Cybertruck with the promise to “complete your configuration as production nears.”

In the meantime, multiple companies have released their own electric truck options, including the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian’s R1T. During this week’s Tesla earnings call, the company stated that it had the capacity to produce more than 125,000 Cybertrucks annually. Musk said he saw a potential for Tesla to produce 250,000 Cybertrucks in 2025. Musk said that more than one million people have reserved the Cybertruck so far.

[Related: Here is what a Tesla Cybertruck cop car could look like.]

The product may not be ready, but the concept keeps iterating itself. In September, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison teased concept art for a Cybertruck cop car including EV’s recognizable design beneath red and blue emergency lights, a bull bar, and multiple Oracle logos. “Our next generation police car is coming out very soon,” Ellison, a “close friend” of Musk, said during his presentation at the data service giant’s CloudWork conference to audible murmurs in the crowd. “It’s my favorite police car. It’s my favorite car, actually. It’s Elon’s favorite car.”

Musk’s desire to release an electric pickup truck dates as far back as 2012, when he tweeted he “would love make a Tesla supertruck with crazy torque, dynamic air suspension and corners [sic] like its on rails.”

“That’d be sweet…,” he added at the time.

The post Elon Musk says ‘we dug our own grave with Cybertruck’ ahead of its November release appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Peerless Auto-Trac Light Truck/SUV Tire Traction Chain		SEE IT	Peerless Auto-Trac chains offer excellent traction while being one of the easiest sets of tire chains to install.
Best for trucks		Security Chain Company Quik Grip		SEE IT	These large chains offer maximum durability to support the weight of heavy duty pickup trucks.
Best budget		Security Chain Company Super Z6 Cable Tire Chain		SEE IT	These large chains offer maximum durability to support the weight of heavy-duty pickup trucks.

When driving on snowy and icy roads, often the one thing that can keep you from getting stuck is a good set of tire chains. These vehicle accessories consist of metal chains that install around the wheels of your vehicle to maximize traction in snowy and icy conditions, making them a necessity for those who live in regions that see extreme winter weather each year. In fact, some states even require snow chains if traveling in certain mountainous areas during extreme winter weather. Finding the right set can be challenging, as not all tire chains are identical. They come in different sizes, materials, and tread patterns to suit different types of vehicles and varying severities of winter weather. Many models are designed to be easy to install, reducing the time one has to spend out in the cold. Learn what features are vital to consider when shopping for these winter weather vehicle accessories and find out why the models below are some of the best tire chains on the market.

• Best overall: Peerless Auto-Trac Light Truck/SUV Tire Traction Chain
• Best heavy-duty: AutoChoice 6 Packs Car Snow Chains
• Best low-profile: Glacier Passenger Cable Tire Chain
• Best for trucks: Security Chain Company Quik Grip
• Best budget: Security Chain Company Super Z6 Cable Tire Chain

How we chose the best tire chains

In reviewing more than 25 sets of tire chains for this article, we considered what sets best suit vehicles ranging from smaller cars to large SUVs and heavy pickup trucks, keeping the following considerations in mind:

Traction: Although traction isn’t the only thing, it’s clearly the most important factor in tire chains. We chose only models that provided ample traction.

Durability: I only included chains made from steel alloys that could hold up to supporting the weight of a vehicle in difficult weather conditions. This included traditional tire chains and those that use steel rollers or coils.

Installation: Tire chains are typically installed in extreme winter weather on the side of a road or in a snow-covered driveway. With this in mind, we only chose tire chains that one could capably install in these conditions. Tire chains with self-tightening features outranked those that required manual tightening.

The best tire chains: Reviews & Recommendations

Whatever kind of vehicle you drive, you don’t want to go out in the winter without the best tire chains, because even the best heated gloves, socks, and vests (even a battery-powered electric blanket) don’t keep you as comfortable as getting home and out of the storm safely. We’ve rounded up the best options on the market. from heavy-duty to budget-friendly picks.

Best overall: Peerless Auto-Trac Light Truck/SUV Tire Traction Chain

SEE IT

Why they made the cut: This pick eliminates the major headache with tire chains—putting them on—with an innovative design that essentially automates the installation process, making them one of the most user-friendly options on the market.

Specs

• Material: Manganese alloy chain
• Shape: Diamond
• Size options: 14 to 20 inches

Pros

• Easy to install
• Excellent traction with a diamond-shaped pattern
• Durable steel alloy construction

Cons

• A little on the heavy side

Tire chains generally aren’t user-friendly. Most require you to jack the car up to properly tighten them to the wheel, which often involves paying someone else to do the work. That’s not the case with Auto-Trac’s Peerless tire chains, which use a tensioning system that automatically tightens the chains to the wheel. To install, simply attach the internal cable to the tighteners that run around the outside sidewall of the tire and begin driving to activate the ratcheting system that tightens the chains.

The diamond pattern of this set of chains not only facilitates the automatic ratcheting system, creating a tight grip around the tires, but it also makes for better performance by creating more surface area and improving traction.

In addition to being easy to install, this set is durable, thanks to its manganese steel alloy construction and heavier gauge chain links. Of course, that gauge also makes these chains on the heavy side at 15 pounds for the set. With sizes ranging from 14 to 20 inches, this set of chains is one of the more versatile options on the market, capable of fitting light trucks, SUVs, and cars.

Best heavy-duty: AutoChoice 6 Packs Car Snow Chains

SEE IT

Why they made the cut: The thickness and coverage of these chains take the traction one can get from a set of tire chains to another level. And while the installation may take longer, it’s less complicated.

Specs

• Material: Steel
• Shape: Squares
• Size options: 14 to 20 inches

Pros

• Heavy-gauge chains provide optimal traction
• Separate pieces make them easier to install
• Fits a wide variety of tire sizes

Cons

• Installation is more time-consuming
• Expensive

One look at this set of tire chains from AutoChoice, and one can see that they are much beefier than other models, thanks to sets of six thick chains for each tire. With their thicker gauge and square design, these chains dig into snow and ice to provide ample traction. The chains are divided into six separate pieces per wheel—a six-pack—which attach independently. The chains have thick straps that consist of tendon material that thread through the rims and tighten to the wheel in a similar fashion to ratcheting tie-down straps.

This design has both positives and negatives. By having separate pieces, they’re easier to install, as there is no need to untangle and line up a single stretch of chain or jack up the wheel. Simply apply one set, then move on to the rest. On the flip side, attaching six separate sets of chains to each wheel is time-consuming.

While this set of tire chains is on the pricier side—you’ll need to buy a set of six per wheel—it does include some useful extras, including two pairs of gloves, a long hook to help with mounting, and a fiber-absorbent towel.

Best low-profile: Glacier Passenger Cable Tire Chain

SEE IT

Why they made the cut: Although there is a trade-off in traction, we love the low-profile design of this set of chains, which makes them suitable for most cars.

Specs

• Material: Steel rollers
• Shape: Square
• Size options: 14 to 20 inches

Pros

• Fits type S low-profile vehicles
• Lighter weight makes them easier to install
• Affordably priced

Cons

• Traction isn’t as good as standard tire chains

Tire chains can be tricky with passenger vehicles with S clearance, which means there is limited space between the wheel well and the tire. Adding the additional thickness of snow chains can damage the car as the chains scrape against the wheel well when the suspension flexes. In fact, some car manufacturers will even void warranties if they find that a car has used chains that are too bulky for the wheel well.

Glacier solves that problem by creating tire chains that aren’t really chains at all. Glacier’s tire chains actually consist of a set of hardened steel rollers that run perpendicular to the tire treads and secure to a thick gauge wire cable that runs the circumference of the tire’s outer sidewall.

The result is a tire chain with a low enough profile that it can fit S-clearance passenger vehicles. And, at 6 pounds, these chains are also easier to install than heavier sets. Keep in mind that there is a trade-off. While these roller-style chains will improve vehicle traction for snowy weather, they don’t provide the same traction as a set of traditional tire chains.

Best for trucks: Security Chain Company Quik Grip

SEE IT

Why they made the cut: Though they may be tougher to install, you can’t argue with the fact that these chains offer the superior traction and durability that heavy-duty trucks driving on snow-covered roads require.

Specs

• Material: Alloy steel chain
• Shape: Square
• Size options: 15-20 inch

Pros

• Durable all-chain construction
• CAM tightening system makes installation easier
• Thicker gauge chains provide superior traction

Cons

• Harder to install than other types
• Won’t work with low-clearance vehicles

Larger trucks and SUVs require heavy chains that won’t break under intense weight or extreme conditions. Thanks to their durability, these thicker steel alloy manganese chains are one of the best options for full-size trucks. They’re even rated to work with farm equipment and dual-wheeled trucks.

Security Chains’ tire chains have a square configuration design, which provides maximum start-up traction. We like this set in particular because of the integrated CAM tightening system that eliminates the need to use tensioners to tighten the chains. The Quik Grip chains that don’t have this feature are less expensive, but we think it’s worth the additional cost to save the hassle of purchasing tensioners separately.

Even with the CAM tightening system, these chains are more difficult to install than other options, but the superior durability and traction they offer make them a must-have for heavy-duty trucks that face severe winter weather. Remember that these chains won’t fit trucks with S-class clearance requirements.

Best budget: Security Chain Company Super Z6 Cable Tire Chain

SEE IT

Why they made the cut: These tire chains are inexpensive and versatile, capable of fitting most cars, trucks, and SUVs. We also like the design, which makes them easier to install than other tire chains by eliminating the need for manual tightening.

Specs

• Material: Alloy steel coils
• Shape: Diagonal
• Size options: 14 to 20 inches

Pros

• No need to manually tighten
• Low profile makes them compatible with most vehicles
• Affordably priced

Cons

• Steel coils do not provide as much traction

This versatile set of tire chains from Security Chain is easy to install, affordably priced, and will fit vehicles with restricted clearance around the wheels. They consist of alloy steel traction coils thinner than standard chains, making them compatible with most cars. They only require a quarter-inch of sidewall clearance, so they’re suitable for most cars and SUVs as well as trucks.

These tire chains are also easier to install than other models thanks to rubber connectors that hold the coils taught, eliminating the need to tighten the chains manually.

This set of chains also preserves handling better than bulkier chains while preserving such important safety features as anti-lock brakes, traction control, and all-wheel drive. Keep in mind there is a trade-off. The low profile and limited coverage of the coils do provide less traction than larger sets of tire chains.

Things to consider before buying tire chains

Traction

Perhaps the most important trait to consider is how well the chains will keep you from getting stuck. The rule of thumb is rather straightforward when it comes to traction. The thicker the chain and the more coverage on the tire tread, the better the traction. Chains with heavier gauge steel links will dig into snow better than coils or rollers, providing better traction. Keep shape in mind as well: Square-shaped chains may provide better traction for getting started but diamond-shaped chains provide better directional traction, which means better handling.

Material

Please pay attention to what the chains are made from, which will determine their durability. Generally speaking, a steel alloy with manganese is considered “high strength” steel, which can better withstand the pressures exerted on it when functioning as a tire chain. While chains may have superior strength, steel alloy rollers and coils are also quite strong. In addition to the chains, pay attention to other materials they use to hold them in place. While rubber and thick nylon straps may be durable enough for cars and light trucks, heavy-duty trucks require all-chain construction.

Size

Size is important because the tires must be compatible with the size of the tires on your vehicle. Tire chains are not one size fits all. Most models of tire chains come in a broad range of sizes to suit different tire sizes. Tire chain manufacturers include size charts that correspond to the model numbers of their products. Check the size of your tires (printed on the sidewall of each tire) and match that size to the right model tire chain.

Installation

Most likely, you’ll be installing tire chains in inclement weather, so it’s important to purchase chains that you can install as quickly as possible. If you have a car or small truck, consider purchasing a set of tire chains that are self-tensioning. Self-tensioning chains take a little more work to install initially, but they don’t require you to tighten (and retighten) the chains manually.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best tire chains

• Best overall: Peerless Auto-Trac Light Truck/SUV Tire Traction Chain
• Best heavy-duty: AutoChoice 6 Packs Car Snow Chains
• Best low-profile: Glacier Passenger Cable Tire Chain
• Best for trucks: Security Chain Company Quik Grip
• Best budget: Security Chain Company Super Z6 Cable Tire Chain

Choosing the right tire chains requires finding a product balancing good traction and easy installation. The Peerless Auto-Trac Light Truck/SUV Tire Traction Chain excels on both fronts, making it one of the best all-around tire chains you can put on your car or truck. If you’re looking for a set of chains to outfit your heavy-duty pick-up truck, then consider going with Security Chain Company Quik Grip, which offers superior traction and durability.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio, to video games, to cameras, and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best tire chains of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

The post Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains appeared first on Popular Science.

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You are more than a data point. The Opt Out is here to help you take your privacy back.

AMERICANS SPEND A LOT of time in cars. Whether you have a long commute, enjoy riding with friends as they drive around, or just like sitting in the parking lot for a bit of solo time, a car might feel like an extension of your home—an intimate space for you to sing out of tune or seek silence in the middle of your day.

Unfortunately, if you’re in a car that was manufactured within the past few years, that environment isn’t as private as you think it is. Carmakers have been adding sensors, cameras, and microphones to their vehicles to improve safety and usability, but these bits of tech are also collecting a hefty amount of data that the automotive industry and other companies are selling and sharing. And don’t think this applies only to car owners: Your privacy is also at risk if you rent a car or are simply sitting in a passenger seat.  

These newer cars know what you say, where you go, and possibly even whom you’re sleeping with and how often. It’s scary, but what’s scarier is that consumers currently have little choice but to consent. 

More than computers on wheels

Cars have been equipped with onboard computers and sensors for a while now. The tools’ applications have always been rather practical—letting you know when your fuel tank is close to empty or when your machine is due for an oil change, even allowing you to get full system diagnostics via Bluetooth. But as technology advanced, so did the role of electronics within every vehicle. Now cars can help you master parallel parking, respond to your voice commands, and even alert you to the presence of other drivers as you change lanes.

“A lot of this can be used as safety features, but [car companies] are not going to let the opportunity to collect data and make money off of that slip away. They’re not just doing it for safety,” says Jen Caltrider, program director for Privacy Not Included, a series of privacy-focused consumer product reviews, at the Mozilla Foundation. 

The same navigational tool that guides you to your destination, for example, is collecting your location data, and the sensors that show which passenger hasn’t buckled up can tell if you’re alone or not, where people are sitting, and if there’s any movement. Those capabilities alone provide hundreds, if not thousands of data points every day that go straight to the car manufacturer’s servers. It’s hard to tell if any of that information is encrypted or not, Caltrider says.

Other than what your car’s sensors and cameras track, manufacturers also learn about you from other sources. If you’re buying a car, the data harvesting starts with every visit to the dealership or the brand’s website, and it continues when you enlist the help of a bank or some other type of financial institution to pay for your car. Then, when you drive home in your new ride, manufacturers keep gathering data through the car’s app. You can choose not to use the app, but it’s likely you’ll lose access to any vehicle features that require it, such as remote ignition. And then there’s what Caltrider and her team call “connected services,” including insurance companies and navigation and entertainment apps like Here and Sirius XM, which have basically become data brokers in the vehicle data industry. The bad news is that it’s unclear exactly how the information flows, how it’s shared, and where and how it’s stored. 

Your car might know too much about you

In September, Caltrider and her research team at the Mozilla Foundation launched an in-depth analysis of the privacy policies of 25 car companies doing business in the US, including the most popular ones: Toyota, Ford, Chevrolet, and Honda. The results? The Mozilla team labeled cars the worst product category it has ever reviewed for privacy.

When you read the privacy policy for any app or device, it’s common to feel confused. Tech companies have been writing privacy policies for decades, and they generally include broad or vague terms that make you feel as if they care about your data—or at least don’t make it obvious that they don’t. Car privacy policies are different: way more explicit and entirely absurd.

“Car companies are moving into the tech company world,” Caltrider says. “But they’re so inexperienced at it and it really shows.”

One of the wildest privacy policies in the Mozilla Foundation’s report is Nissan’s, which requires users to consent to the collection of sensitive information including sexual orientation, sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information. The document also says this data can be sold or disclosed to third parties for targeted advertising. It’s not clear how exactly Nissan is collecting this data or if it’s currently capable of doing so, but the fact that you’re agreeing to all of this by simply buying a Nissan is problematic enough. 

And these requirements don’t affect only drivers and car owners, as consent is murky territory in the land of vehicle privacy policies. For one thing, cars don’t grant the same control over data collection that your phone does. Most of the time, car owners will see a request for permissions on a single screen that pops up when they first set up their new car, and they may not be able to go back to it and revoke those permissions later on. 

That also means there’s assumed consent from anybody who steps inside the vehicle. Privacy policies like that of Subaru make it clear that terms and conditions affect everyone on board, regardless of whether they’re the vehicle’s registered owner or not. This means that the company burdens Subaru owners with the responsibility of informing all their passengers about the privacy policy and assumes that people are agreeing to it just by stepping into the car. It’s a safe bet that no ride-share driver or courteous coworker has ever read you a long list of types of data collection you needed to consent to before they’d give you a ride home. 

Car manufacturers, vehicle data hubs, and other actors in the industry, like insurance companies, calm concerned drivers and passengers by promising that the data they collect and save is anonymized, meaning it cannot be traced back to specific people. While anonymizing data is a common practice that’s meant to protect individuals’ privacy, research has shown that it’s not always effective and that the owner of any anonymized data can be easily re-identified when the information is combined with other datasets. This is especially true when location data is involved, Caltrider says. 

As we’ve mentioned, targeted advertising is one of the main uses car companies and third parties have for collecting data with vehicles, but it’s not the only one. More than half of the manufacturers analyzed in the Mozilla Foundation’s report say they can “share your information with the government or law enforcement in response to a ‘request.’” This leaves a lot of room for abuse, as there are no details about whether this request can be as informal as a call or an email to the right person, or if it must be a powerful document, like a court order. 

Unlike with home security cameras, it’s hard to tell exactly how many times these companies have responded to requests from police and other law enforcement agencies. But a 2021 Forbes investigation revealed that both Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been requesting information from three companies in the vehicle data industry, including General Motors, which is the parent company of Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC. 

Regulation is the answer

The automotive industry in the US is huge—it brought more than $156 billion to the US economy in 2022, and more than 75 percent of Americans own a car. You’d imagine that such a rich market would include several car brands privacy-savvy users can choose from, but the Mozilla Foundation report is categorical: When it comes to data protection, they’re all bad. 

This leaves people who need to buy a new car with little choice but to consent to data collection. And it leaves their passengers with even less choice. Because it’s not only luxury vehicles that come equipped with sophisticated sensors and cameras—classic sedans like the Toyota Corolla and family SUVs like the Ford Escape also have them. As much as we’d like to say there’s an individualistic DIY way to snatch back your privacy, there’s not. You’ll have to appeal to the powers that be.

“Get mad and contact your elected officials,” says Caltrider. “It’s past time the US had a strong federal privacy law.”

She also recommends not using your car’s app, but acknowledges that this is a bandage solution and might not be an option for some people. Some of the features people need, like being able to warm the car in cold weather by turning it on remotely, require the use of the software. 

Using our power as constituents and asking our elected officials for laws that protect our data is the best chance we have of taking back the intimacy we once found inside our vehicles. Car companies simply aren’t going to change on their own—just like tech companies, they have no incentives to do so.

“And it’s not like they have a long history of ethical behavior,” Caltrider says. “They have quite the opposite.”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Video calls are a part of life now, but they can be a nightmare if your hardware is not up to par. You can upgrade your setup with a USB microphone (which can come in real handy if you’re putting up video calls on your TV) but if you’re a Mac user with an iPhone, you already have all you need. 

You can use your phone as a microphone when you make video calls from your Apple computer. This functionality is part of a feature called Continuity Camera, and it’s easy to set up. Any iPhone made after 2018 and running iOS 16 or newer will work, while all Macs running macOS Ventura or newer will fit the bill.  

How to set up Continuity Camera in macOS

To use your phone as a microphone on desktop video calls, you’ll need a Mac and an iPhone signed into the same iCloud account. 

Start by making your computer recognize your handheld device as an available sound source. On the Mac, click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of the screen and open System Settings. In the left-hand panel, go to Sound, and under Output and Input, click the Input tab. 

[Related: 7 tips and tricks to get more out of Apple’s newly updated Messages app]

You will see your iPhone as an audio source—select it. You’ll automatically see a full-screen pop-up on your phone with a couple of buttons. The Pause button on your phone to temporarily mute yourself when on a call, while Disconnect will completely remove your iPhone from your Mac’s audio inputs list. Don’t hit this button unless that’s what you want, otherwise you’ll have to go through the setup all over again. 

Once your computer recognizes your iPhone as a microphone, you can select it as the preferred audio source from most video call apps, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. 

• In Zoom, find the audio settings by clicking zoom.us in the upper left corner of your screen, then go to Preferences, and click the Audio tab. You can choose your iPhone under Microphone. 
• In Google Meet, click the three dots left of the hangup button in the bottom toolbar and go to Settings. You’ll be able to choose your iPhone in the Microphone options. 
• In Microsoft Teams, click the three-dot menu to the left of your name, click Settings, and head over to Devices. You can select your iPhone in the Microphone drop down menu. 

I’ve found using an iPhone as a microphone during video calls comes in very handy, particularly if I’m part of a group of people taking the call on a single device. I put the phone on the table, between everyone, while my laptop sits far enough so that we all fit into the camera frame. That usually means the microphone is too far away to pick up our voices, so the iPhone is extremely helpful—the speaker can even hold it while they talk and pass it along when they’re done, if necessary. 

[Related: 6 great features to try out in the iOS 17 public beta]

You can also use this feature to turn your laptop into a karaoke machine: your iPhone instantly becomes a wireless microphone. 

The post You can easily turn your iPhone into a Mac mic appeared first on Popular Science.

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Airborne lead levels in the US have declined an impressive 99 percent since 1980 thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but leaded gas isn’t gone completely. While large jet aircraft do not use leaded fuel, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 220,000 smaller, piston-engine aircraft capable of carrying between two and 10 people still run on leaded aviation gasoline, or “avgas.” 

Today, the EPA took its first step towards attempting to finally phase out air transportation’s lingering lead holdouts with a new endangerment finding announcement highlighting the adverse effects of even minuscule levels of airborne lead. With the new findings, the EPA argues that leaded avgas endangers public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act—and because of this, the US could finally see its first-ever avgas lead limitations.

“The science is clear: Exposure to lead can cause irreversible and life-long health effects in children,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan via the agency’s October 18 announcement. “Aircraft that use leaded fuel are the dominant source of lead emissions in our air.”

[Related: The US can’t get away from lead’s toxic legacy.]

The federal level determination earned support from legislators including House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). “[The] EPA’s conclusion confirms what constituents in my district and Americans across the country know all too well—emissions from leaded aviation fuel contribute to dangerous lead air pollution,” Lofgren said via the announcement. She also cited the disproportionate exposure to leaded avgas in many poorer and minority communities near general aviation airports.

Lead’s neurotoxic effects have long been understood, especially its dangers to younger children, as it  negatively affects cognitive abilities and slows physical growth. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control announced a redefinition of “lead poisoning,” lowering the threshold for toxic exposure from 5 micrograms per deciliter of a child’s blood down to just 3.5 mgs per deciliter. Even with the added stringency, however, the EPA reiterated in its October 18 announcement that there is no evidence of any threshold to fully reduce lead exposure’s harmful effects.

[Related: Leaded gas may have lowered the IQ of 170 million US adults.]

The new avgas endangerment finding does not carry any regulatory or legal weight itself. Instead, it opens the door to a future phaseout of avgas for small aircraft. Last year, the FAA and industry leaders announced their “Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions” (EAGLE) program aiming to “achieve a lead-free aviation system” by 2030. The FAA has already approved usage of a 100 octane unleaded fuel capable of being used by piston-engine aircraft, although the EPA notes it is not yet commercially available. A lower octane fuel is also available at an estimated 35 US airports, with plans to “expand and streamline the process for eligible aircraft to use this fuel.”

As The Washington Post notes, however, the EPA’s and FAA’s attempts to phase out avgas come as Congress considers a long-term reauthorization of the FAA that would all but require smaller airports to continue offering leaded avgas.

“While today’s announcement is a step forward, we cannot be complacent,” Lofgren added on Wednesday. “We must finish the job and protect our nation’s children from all sources of lead.”

The post Small planes are still spewing toxic lead across the US, EPA says appeared first on Popular Science.

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On October 8, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean, as part of an American response to the surprise and staggering attack on Israel’s military and civilians by the armed group Hamas. Then, on October 14, Austin sent the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean. 

The United States Navy maintains 11 carrier strike groups, which are formations including not just the namesake carrier and its aircraft, but also an escort fleet of other ships. The carriers are the most visible, tangible expression of naval power abroad, and the deployment of two carrier strike groups is both a threat of force and shows where the US most wants to attempt to deter the outbreak of further violence through that show of force.

The attack that sparked the deployment of the two US carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean started with bulldozers, drones, motorboats, and paragliders. Gaza is home to two million Palestinians, of whom about half are under the age of 18. Hamas, the militant group elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and which has not held an election since, broke through the wall maintained by Israel around the Gaza Strip, and launched attacks killing an estimated 1,400 people in Israel, including civilians. Retaliatory airstrikes, launched by Israel’s military against Gaza, have killed over 2,700 people, including civilians, and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. The death totals, especially in Gaza, continue to increase, as hospitals run out of supplies. The situation is evolving and has complex roots.

Beyond Hamas and Israel, there’s a chance that the outbreak of violence could expand to involve regional military players, like Iranian-backed Hezbollah north of Israel in Lebanon, Iran itself, or other countries in the region. President Joe Biden has traveled to Israel to meet with its government. 

An aircraft carrier, complete with escort ships and fighter firepower, is designed to fight the planes and ships of nations more than it is built to root out fighters with rifles hiding in city blocks. In the October 8 announcement of the deployment, Austin said the Ford Carrier Strike Group was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to “bolster regional deterrence efforts.” In the October 14 announcement, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group’s deployment was part of moves to “signal the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war.”

To better understand the US force projection in response to this outbreak of violence, it is important to understand aircraft carriers, and the fleets that escort them.

What is a carrier strike group?

Alone, an aircraft carrier is a powerful weapon. The size of a small town, one carrier can be a tempting target. The Nimitz-class carriers, which make up most of the US carrier fleet at present, carry around 5,000 to 5,200 people. This crew is primarily devoted to operating and maintaining the ship, which is powered by a pair of nuclear reactors, while about 1,500 of that crew is dedicated to flying and maintaining the 60 or more aircraft flown from a carrier. 

Ford-class carriers, the planned replacement for the Nimitz class, are crewed by just over 4,500 people total, and can carry and launch over 75 aircraft. (Currently there is one Ford-class carrier in the fleet, which is the USS Gerald R. Ford.) Both Nimitz and Ford-class carriers are 1,092 feet long, their decks constituting the runway for takeoff and landing of planes at sea.

Because carriers are so large—by design, they have to be—they make enticing targets for enemies at war. “Carrier Group” as a phrase first appears in the Popular Science archives in a July 1985 story called “Invisible Subs” that describes ships as either “submarines or targets.” The ship-mounted weapons on carriers are largely defensive: anti-air and anti-missile Sea Sparrow missiles, Phalanx Close-In Weapon Systems designed to intercept rockets, and other projectiles with radar-targeted bullets.

Those weapons should be seen as a last line of defense for carriers. The first lines of defense are the other ships that accompany carriers as they move about the globe.

In Secretary Austin’s announcements, he names specific ships in each carrier group. The USS Gerald R. Ford is escorted by the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy, as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt. The USS Eisenhower is escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and is carrying the nine aircraft squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 3. In general, a carrier group has between three and four surface ships escorting it, as well as an assumed (but not announced) attack submarine traveling near the fleet underwater.

Carrier Air Wing 3 includes four squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornets, jet fighters that can fly over 1,200 nautical miles; these jets can carry a range of weapons including anti-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, guided and unguided bombs, and more. These planes are the primary strike force of the carrier group, allowing the US Navy to attack and destroy vehicles, people, and buildings far from shore. In addition to the strike fighters, a carrier air wing includes E-2C Hawkeyes, which are big flying tactical radars; EA-18G Growlers, which carry electronic warfare weapons for jamming and obscuring enemy sensors; and Seahawk helicopters, which can be used to launch anti-tank missiles and for submarine hunting, among other roles.

The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers are, as the name suggests, armed with an array of missiles, including cruise missiles to hit targets on land, as well as anti-submarine missiles and torpedoes to protect against enemies underwater. Guided missile destroyers are similarly armed, with anti-air missiles as well as part of the regular complement.

Much of the equipment of a carrier strike group is built around the particular vulnerability of aircraft carriers to anti-ship missiles and submarines—threats that are unlikely to be a factor for deployments in the eastern Mediterranean. The offensive firepower, from cruise missiles to guided bombs dropped by fighter jets, enable the carrier groups to pose an outsized threat. 

The presence of a carrier strike group can be seen as a form of deterrence, and deterrence is a strategic bet that the presence of massive retaliatory power is enough to prevent an armed group from trying to advance their political aims through violence. If the actions of other armed groups in the region can be shifted, deterred, or delayed by the presence of the US Navy, this would be the force that can do it.

The post What are carrier strike groups, the ships the US sent near Israel? appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		SimpliSafe 10-Piece Wireless Home Security System		SEE IT	Comes with everything you need for security inside and outside your home.
Best customer service		Ring Alarm Pro, 14-Piece		SEE IT	Talk to a real person and get your questions answered fast.
Best budget		Tolviviov Wi-Fi Door Alarm System		SEE IT	Easy to use for people of all technical skill levels.

If you’re worried about crime impacting your household, it makes perfect sense to buy one of the many smart home security systems that have popped up over the past few years. However, with abundance comes analysis paralysis. To what system should the savvy, safety-conscious consumer turn? We investigated the market to bring you the best smart home security systems so you can pick the best choice for your living situation and loved ones.

• Best overall: SimpliSafe 10-Piece Wireless Home Security System
• Best customer service: Ring Alarm Pro, 14-Piece
• Best monitoring: ADT 8-Piece Wireless Home Security System
• Best modular: Wyze Home Security Core Kit
• Most compatible: Abode Security System Starter Kit
• Best budget: Tolviviov Wi-Fi Door Alarm System

How we chose the best smart home security systems

While nearly every product you buy enters your home at some point, there is something particularly intimate about inviting in a smart home security system. Unlike shoes—something that only needs to function well enough when called upon—your smart home security system needs to function perfectly 24/7/365. That’s why one of the bigger ranking factors this time was brand satisfaction. Cybersecurity and data protection were other key factors because, while less is often more, in the world of security more really is more. You’re only as strong as your weakest entry point.

This guide was compiled after many hours of careful research; facts and opinions were cross-examined by editors. Ordinary users were asked about their experiences using these devices, and we interacted with customer service agents throughout the course of compiling this guide. Each company’s personal website and plan information were thoroughly checked for the most up-to-date service plan information possible.

The best smart home security systems: Reviews & Recommendations

Our selection of smart home security systems comes from a wide variety of well-known and trusted brands with a broad array of attached services. While kits differ, they all typically include sensors for your doors and/or windows and an alerting mechanism. One of our picks is sure to match your budget and lifestyle.

Best overall: SimpliSafe 10-Piece Wireless Home Security System

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The SimpliSafe 10-Piece system is a very complete kit that starts the security before your door is opened.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Easy
• Sensors: 4 door/window sensors, 2 motion sensors, 1 indoor camera, 1 outdoor camera
• 24/7 professional monitoring: $28/mo. (Optional)
• Smart protocols: N/A, but Alexa- and Nest-compatible

Pros

• Outdoor cam so your security starts before an intruder enters your home
• Comes with one free month of 24/7 professional monitoring service
• The variety of parts gives you a more complete sense of security
• Optics and branding

Cons

• Must learn to set up each part correctly

If you’re looking for a system that is essentially complete directly out of the box, the SimpliSafe 10-Piece Wireless Home Security System is the kit for you. It includes a variety of sensors and indoor and outdoor cameras, meaning you should feel fully protected in your home. While each piece is easy to install in and of itself, you’ll have to learn and think about the placement of each part—however, you’ll be able to handle it on your own if you can handle a strip of 3M tape or a screwdriver. Let’s review each part individually to get a good picture of how they will function together in your home:

The SimpliSafe base can hold up to 100 SimpliSafe security devices and is the central hub for your equipment. It is also capable of emitting a 95dB alarm. The push-button keypad lets you arm and disarm the system with a PIN. Having four entry point door/window sensors will allow you to protect the primary entryways to your home, while the two motion sensors—which are designed to be pet friendly and decorative—protect the areas of your home with too many entry points or windows.

What makes the SimpliSafe 10-piece system better than the 12-piece version is the inclusion of both an indoor and an outdoor camera. Suppose you’re used to the grainy, near-worthless security cam footage often seen in local news coverage. In that case, you’ll be particularly happy with the full colors, 1080p quality, and night vision offered by SimpliSafe. For those concerned with privacy, the indoor camera comes with a stainless steel shutter, so you won’t have to worry about having your private moments enter someone’s data tables.

Finally, the package set comes with an official SimpliSafe flag that declares your home protected by SimpliSafe. While no one can guarantee that this will deter all criminals, there will be at least a few that will back down.

Best customer service: Ring Alarm Pro, 14-Piece

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Why it made the cut: Go from dialing a number to “Hello” in 1 minute, 18 seconds.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Easy
• Sensors: 8 door/window sensors, 2 motion sensors
• 24/7 professional monitoring: Between $4-$20/mo. (Optional)
• Smart protocols: Z-wave

Pros

• Fantastic phone technical support
• Dual keypads for increased flexibility
• Provides range extender for large homes
• Multiple 24/7 monitoring plans to choose from

Cons

• Overhyped WiFi functionality

The Ring Alarm Pro 14-Piece set has fantastic customer service and is a great smart home security system for larger homes. Its impressive networking and dual keypad design (some home security systems only allow for one keypad) allow for larger coverage areas than some of the best smart home security systems. With customizable ringtones, you’ll always know which door is being opened in your home. The Ring Alarm Pro even comes with Wi-Fi 6 functionality via its hub. This feature is handy but gets a bit overhyped, sometimes eclipsing what counts—there are better Wi-Fi 6 routers out there.

What should you get excited about with the Ring Alarm Pro? A very approachable DIY setup where a real human is there to help you quickly. After just a few button taps to specify exactly what we wanted, we could—right here, right now—contact a customer service agent 1 minute and 18 seconds after dialing Ring’s customer service.

Best monitoring: ADT 8-Piece Wireless Home Security System

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Why it made the cut: ADT is amongst the most experienced and best professional monitoring companies.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Intermediate
• Sensors: 4 door/window sensors, 1 motion detector 
• 24/7 professional monitoring: $19.99/mo. (Optional)
• Smart protocols: Z-wave

Pros

• Highly experienced monitoring team
• Perfect size for families
• Optics and branding

Cons

• Occasional installation snags
• Only works in the U.S.

The ADT 8-Piece Wireless Home Security System is all you need to get started with the highly regarded ADT security model. It’s a brand that takes itself seriously, providing a yard sign to let customers proudly display their security status on the lawn. Sure, it is part marketing, but it’s also part confidence in the ADT name alone being able to ward off potential neighborhood thieves.

The package itself includes door/window sensors and a motion sensor, with the kit being targeted to owners of two- or three-bedroom homes. While not difficult, installing the sensors can take some time as you manually pair and label each one within your system. You can install them using the included adhesive backing or a more traditional screw-in technique. The time investment should feel closer to “weekend project” than “plug’n’play” for the typical first-time user.

When combined with the optional professional monitoring from ADT, it can almost feel as if you have a dedicated housesitter while you’re away.

Best modular: Wyze Home Security Core Kit

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Why it made the cut: Wyze’s Home Security Core Kit is just that, a quality core kit that can be easily added to as needed.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Easy
• Sensors: 2 door/window sensors, 1 motion sensor
• 24/7 professional monitoring: $9.99/mo
• Smart protocols: N/A

Pros

• Very affordable and complete starter kit
• Comes with three months of free professional monitoring
• Can easily add on more sensors or cameras
• Guided setup via Wyze app

Cons

• Service plan essential
• Only works in U.S.

If you prefer to wade through new technology instead of diving directly into the deep end, the Wyze Home Security Core Kit will be the best smart home security system for you. For starters, the core kit itself is very affordable, covers two entry points plus a room of your choice, and provides months of complimentary professional monitoring service to give you a taste of how Wyze works.

Once you’ve decided how much you like the system, you can start adding more components immediately. Finish off the rest of your home’s entry points with more door/window sensors, or transform your setup into a video surveillance system by adding a Wyze cam. Leak and home climate sensors are also available.

The modularity, as well as the stick-on setup guided by the Wyze app, gives the Wyze Home Security Core Kit a very DIY air to it. You can be confident that you, by yourself, should be able to install it. Unfortunately, the rugged individualism this inspires is dropped down a notch—it requires a 24/7 monitoring subscription for the device to truly shine. You’ll just have sensors, but the keypad won’t work after the three-month free trial runs out. The Wyze Cam add-on will also lose smart features and extended storage. Still, the service is cheaper than market averages, you probably wanted it anyway.

Most compatible: Abode Security System Starter Kit

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Why it made the cut: Abode goes way beyond just Z-wave and Zigbee.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Easy
• Sensors: 1 door/window sensor, 1 motion sensor
• 24/7 professional monitoring: Between $7-$22/mo. (Semi-optional)
• Smart protocols: Zigbee, Z-wave, Homekit, IFTTT

Pros

• Connects and works with just about anything
• Variable professional monitoring options
• Sub-30-minute total setup time
• Easily expandable

Cons

• Limited sensors in starter kit
• Reviews note poor customer service

Can’t decide between Zigbee and Z-wave, so want access to both? Not sure if you want to use Alexa or opt for a Google home security system? Need HomeKit or IFTTT support? It’s time to look at an Abode Security System, a home security system that connects with all of these in some way.

The Abode Security System Starter Kit is a perfect way to get set up with the system, as it includes the main hub, a couple of sensors, and a key fob. You’ll find it surprisingly easy to set up and get going—even technological turtles report installation times of under 30 minutes—but will quickly find yourself wanting other pieces if you don’t have, for example, home security cameras from an existing, compatible system. If you decide to stick with Abode products, you can choose from glass break sensors, water leak sensors, smoke alarms, and indoor/outdoor cameras to tailor the system to your needs.

While all owners have access to alerts and live video feeds, more “advanced” features—such as video storage—require you to subscribe to one of Abode’s plans, either the Standard (self-monitoring) or Pro (professional monitoring).

Best budget: Tolviviov Wi-Fi Door Alarm System

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Why it made the cut: This is the best smart home security system under $100.

Specs

• Installation difficulty: Easy
• Sensors: 5 door/window sensors
• 24/7 professional monitoring: No
• Smart protocols: N/A

Pros

• Simple to use system with keychain fob and app control
• Very loud alarm
• Affordable for all pricing
• No monthly payments

Cons

• Supported by 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network only
• Lower brand recognition

If you’re wanting to avoid overly techy solutions to your problems and save money in the long run while doing so, the Tolviviov Wi-Fi Door Alarm System is worth checking out. Tolviviov systems, in addition to being budget-friendly, also happen to be the best smart home security systems for elderly people due to their extremely loud alarm systems and manual keychain controls. It still has app functionality, including Alexa support, for those wanting a more modern feel.

Considering the price range, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Tolviviov system doesn’t have a professional monitoring system. However, this lack comes with a silver lining, as systems with professional monitoring on a recurring monthly subscription often tie other features into it. With the Tolviviov, what you see is what you get. A loud siren to alert you to entries, app alerts that tell you what sensor was disturbed, and the option for Alexa voice support. It’s simple, but it works.

The main concerns for the Tolviviov system are its connections and brand recognition. The Tolviviov only works with the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band. Be prepared to isolate the 2.4GHz band. Lastly, the brand recognition just isn’t there yet. Sure, the super loud alarm will make burglars scram, but you won’t get the same response from the name “Tolviviov” that you will from an “ADT” sign in your yard or a Ring video doorbell near your front door.

What to consider when buying the best smart home security systems

From the surface, the best smart home security systems appear to be quite similar, just different collections of the same parts. This is compounded by the fact that, when things are running smoothly, our residential security systems blend into the background of our lives. However, if you do even a tiny amount of digging, you’ll see that there is more complexity in both the hardware and the included customer service plans than meets the eye.

Options for 24/7 professional monitoring

If you have a smart home security system that alerts you when intruders come into your home, or when your house faces other problems, you are all in the clear, right? While it is a nice thought, it is potentially untrue if you are incapacitated or unable to reach your phone to assess the threat (such as while out at work or on vacation).

Typically, 24/7 professional monitoring services come as part of a subscription fee, usually around $30 per month. While all systems retain some functionality without the subscription, others only provide limited service without the full subscription.

Zigbee and/or Z-wave connection

Much like Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Z-Wave represent frequency bands that can connect the pieces of your smart home security system together. Zigbee systems typically run faster, but burn through batteries quicker, while Z-Wave systems can have a bit of response delay but require less battery maintenance work.

In reality, which of the two systems is better depends on your overall network. If you have a lot of Z-Wave products already, going with another Z-Wave device is great because they are all mandated to work together. Zigbee devices can usually “find” each other but don’t always interconnect in a fully functioning way, sorta like pairing non-Apple headphones to your iPhone via Bluetooth. 

Another possibility includes using neither system and operating solely through Wi-Fi and the system’s own proprietary hub. If you are looking for a smart home security system and not a full smart home network, this should be fine. Alternatively, super-compatible systems can connect to both networks and have other connection options as well. Whether you want to go with Zigbee or Z-Wave or both is entirely up to you.

Branding and flags

Some smart home security systems have a flag to stick in your lawn to scare potential thieves away. Some customers are happy to see it, but others are skeptical about the usefulness of a sign to deter thieves, who might use the info to “crack” through the system.

What does the science say? Our friends at Bob Vila took a deep dive into the research on security signs and crime deterrence. Here are some of their findings:

• ~25% of criminals will skip a home with a security sign.
• ~50% of criminals will skip a home with a security sign and a visible camera.
• The optimal locations for such signs are in a place visible from the street and in the backyard.
• Branding matters. A recognizable or easily searched-for brand name works best to convince thieves your home is really protected.

Privacy

Whenever you bring something into your home, you want to feel comfortable about your privacy. This goes doubly so for home security products that can record and monitor the inside of your home. As such, you should pay particular attention to a brand’s privacy track record.

Take, for instance, the recent controversy over Anker’s eufy brand, which promised end-to-end encryption but didn’t deliver. If that wasn’t damaging enough, the company’s initial response was to merely change their privacy commitment statement. They’ve since come clean, but the sour taste still lingers.

For full transparency, this is not the only brand to have publicly suffered a privacy breach. In 2021, a former ADT technician pleaded guilty to charges of criminal spying while employed at the company. Important things to note here are how well ADT handled the situation compared to eufy, that their internal procedures and systems have since been changed to reduce the likelihood of a similar situation happening in the future, and that this was an incident involving a single employee and not the company at large. The ADT system in this guide does not include a camera.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best smart home security systems

• Best overall: SimpliSafe 10-Piece Wireless Home Security System
• Best customer service: Ring Alarm Pro, 14-Piece
• Best monitoring: ADT 8-Piece Wireless Home Security System
• Best modular: Wyze Home Security Core Kit
• Most compatible: Abode Security System Starter Kit
• Best budget: Tolviviov Wi-Fi Door Alarm System

Getting one of the best smart home security systems in 2023 is not as difficult as in years past. Installation should be smoother due to the simplicity of wireless Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Wi-Fi connections that can integrate these systems with the existing smart home gadgets you already own. With app integration and voice support, you can get the truly convenient home security you desire.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best smart home security systems of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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After years of hints and false starts, the Internal Revenue Service will be finally testing a free federal direct tax filing pilot program for select citizens in 13 participating states in 2024. The move marks a major moment in a years’ long path towards offering Americans a no-cost federal filing alternative to third-party services such as Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block—an $11 billion industry that has come under increased Federal Trade Commission scrutiny over allegedly predatory practices, deceptive advertising, and privacy concerns.

[Related: How to avoid tax season stress]

In an October 17 announcement, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel called the pilot stage a “critical step forward” in testing the “feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the IRS.” Warfel added that information and data gathered during the 2024 pilot program will help direct future iterations of the Direct File program, as well as help the IRS assess benefits, costs, and operational challenges.

Residents of Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York are already confirmed to integrate Direct File into their systems for the 2024 tax season, which begins in December. Meanwhile, Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming “may be eligible to participate” due to their lack of state income taxes. Atop the state-based restrictions, only certain filers will be eligible to participate based on specific types of income, as well as limited credits and adjustments.

[Related: Calling TurboTax ‘free’ is ‘deceptive advertising,’ says FTC]

In September, the FTC ruled Intuit must stop labeling its products as free unless a stringent set of conditions are “clearly and conspicuously” displayed to consumers. But even without proper labeling, security and privacy concerns have long surrounded the private tax filing industry. In 2022, a major investigation uncovered companies including H&R Block, TaxSlayer, and TaxAct all routinely shared customers’ sensitive financial information with third-party advertisers via the Meta Pixel.

The free code, made available via Facebook’s parent company, marks a tiny pixel on participating websites to subsequently track information regarding people’s digital activity. Roughly one-third of the 80,000 most popular websites online utilize Meta Pixel (PopSci included); the tracking cookie ecosystem provides the majority of many online companies’ revenue streams. Many of the companies profiled by the investigation have since ceased using Meta Pixel for such purposes.

But even using a federal e-file program potential requires supplying personal identification information. In 2022, the IRS announced a new policy requiring US citizens to submit a selfie via the popular, controversial third-party verification service, ID.me, to access their tax information. The IRS walked back the policy plan following an outpouring of public criticism. It is unclear if ID.me will be a mandatory component of the forthcoming Direct File program. The IRS did not respond to PopSci regarding the issue at the time of writing.

The post The IRS’ free online tax filing program will be super exclusive in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you’re splurging on a foldable phone like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, make sure you’re getting your money’s worth by exploring all the options and features the handset has to offer.

When you’ve got twice as many screens as normal, you get a lot more functionalities and flexibility: From quickly getting apps running side by side, to dragging and dropping texts and images between them.

1. Customize full screen apps

Unfortunately, not every Android app is developed to run on a screen as large as the main display of the Galaxy Z Fold 5. You might see black bars at the side of certain apps, as well as other odd behavior.

But you can fix this by going to Settings, then Display and Full screen apps. Pick an tool, and choose how you’d like it to show up. Full screen is the option to go for if you don’t want any black bars, though it may cause some distortion on certain apps.

2. Drag and drop between apps

With two apps open on screen, the Z Fold 5 is very adept at transferring content between them. Try tapping and holding an image in your web browser, for example, then dragging it across to an email you’re composing on the other side of the screen. The system will drop the picture right into the message—no copying, pasting, or saving required.

[Related: 7 Samsung phone hacks you need to try right now]

Note that this feature doesn’t work in every single app, but it will run smoothly in a lot them: Google’s Gmail and Chrome, Samsung’s Gallery and Notes, and Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Outlook, are some of the apps that support dragging and dropping.

3. Bring up the Flex panel

Flex mode is when you make a 90-degree angle with the Z Fold 5, so you have one half laying flat on a surface while the other is propped up straight. This allows certain apps to display different content on each side. Try opening the Camera app to see what we mean— you’ll see the shutter window at the top and the camera controls underneath.

There’s also the Flex panel, which will work with any app that supports multi-window use (most now do). Open Settings and then go to Advanced features > Labs > Flex mode panel, and enable the feature.

Now, when you turn your phone to landscape mode, you’ll get a little Flex panel icon (a gray diamond shape) in the lower left hand corner. Tap the icon to make the panel pop up: you’ll get a little touchpad to use with the app that’s on the top half of the screen, as well as quick access to certain features and the screenshot tool.

Try using the Flex panel with a web browser to see how useful it can be: You’ll be able to select links and elements on screen just as you would on a desktop operating system.

4. Get more content on screen

Make your way to Settings and go to Display and Screen layout and zoom. This page lets you change the size of the fonts and other elements on screen, which means you can get more content on your Z Fold 5 display at the same time—whether you’re working with one or multiple apps on the screen.

5. Switch seamlessly to the cover screen

By default, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 treats the larger main screen and the smaller cover screen separately, so apps that you’re using on the big display won’t automatically switch over to the outer display when you close the phone.

But if you would like to transfer apps seamlessly, open up Display from Settings, then tap on Continue apps on cover screen. You’ll be able to have this happen with all apps, or only with specific ones.

6. Change how multi window works

One of the key advantages of a foldable device like the Z Fold 5 is how easily you can get multiple apps and windows up alongside each other. Most of the time the Z Fold 5 handles this perfectly well on its own, but you can make some tweaks by heading to Settings, and then going to Advanced features and Multi window.

For example, you can enable Swipe for split screen. This feature will let you swipe in with two fingers from the left-hand edge of the main display to go from full screen mode to split screen mode. When you do, the Z Fold 5 will prompt you to choose another app to go alongside the one you’re already looking at.

7. Customize the taskbar

The taskbar at the bottom of the screen is crucial for getting around your foldable phone and the apps on it, so make sure it’s set up the way you want it. From Settings, pick Display and Taskbar, and choose how many recent apps you want to see at the bottom of the screen. You can also completely hide the taskbar, if you prefer.

[Related: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 review: Powerful vibes]

From the Display screen you can also select Navigation bar and choose whether you want to navigate your phone using gestures or the traditional back, home and recent buttons. If you’re not sure about the differences between these two options, you’ll see explanations for them on screen. Just keep in mind that using gestures will free up more space on the taskbar for you.

Note that the apps on the left of the taskbar are the same as those in the dock on the home screen. You can drag apps in and out of the dock if you want to change this selection.

The post 7 tips to get the most out of your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 appeared first on Popular Science.

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There used to be a joke that if Microsoft made cars, your car would crash twice a day for no reason at all. But the reality of software-defined cars (that is, vehicles in which clever coding has as much say as masterful machining in determining a car’s characteristics) is demonstrated by the 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray, whose smart software lets the car’s new electric motor deliver supplemental power to the front wheels so imperceptibly that the driver would have trouble guessing that the latest version of America’s sports car has all-wheel drive.

That’s because the Corvette’s signature 6.2-liter, overhead-valve, LT2 small block V8 is still roaring, powering the rear wheels with its 495 horsepower, just like in the base Stingray model. But now there’s that 160-hp electric motor up front, running off a 1.9 kilowatt-hour array of LG lithium-ion batteries deftly tucked into the car’s central tunnel.

This $104,295 vehicle is a regular hybrid-electric, with no external power plug, so the battery is small and gets its juice entirely from the gas engine and from regenerative braking that turns the electric motor into a generator when the car slows. Having that extra 160 hp and 125 lb.-ft. torque on tap is “like having a nitrous oxide tank that fills itself,” remarked chief engineer Josh Holder, referring to the “NOS” gas made famous by The Fast and the Furious movie franchise for giving combustion engines a burst of extra power.

The quickest Corvette ever

But rather than the explosive power delivery from NOS, the E-Ray’s omnipresent electric motor “torque fill” just makes the car constantly more muscular. This power, combined with the traction of all-wheel-drive, makes the E-Ray the quickest Corvette ever, with a 0-60 mph acceleration of 2.5 seconds and a 10.5-second quarter mile time.

Those times are achieved using the E-Ray’s Performance Launch mode, which uses the car’s various software-controlled systems to optimize power delivery from the gas and electric motors to deliver the fastest possible acceleration.

The driver can keep the E-Ray’s battery topped off so that it is ready to deliver that boost by pressing the Charge+ button. If you ever watch Formula 1 races, you’ll see a car’s rear light flashing when the driver is building the state of charge in its battery in preparation for a passing attempt on a car ahead. The E-Ray’s Charge+ button on the center console, down by the driver’s right thigh, ensures that the battery’s virtual NOS tank is fully topped off with electrons.

The Corvette Z06 we tested last year is nearly as quick, but that car produces its power with more noise and drama. The E-Ray appeals to the enthusiast who wants a comfy ride that also happens to be ludicrously fast. And if you need to sneak out of your neighborhood in the morning without annoying the neighbors, let the small block V8 sleep late and cruise out on electric power alone using Stealth mode to reach speeds as high as 45 mph.

Other driving modes with pre-set performance parameters include Tour, Sport, Track, and Weather. Each of those optimizes the car’s sound, power delivery, stability control, traction control, and dynamically adjustable magnetic suspension damping to match those conditions. Additionally, drivers can select their own preferences in My Mode and Z Mode.

Driving the Corvette E-Ray on and off the track

The E-Ray rolls on the same wide wheels wrapped in meaty Michelin rubber and enclosed by the same 3.6-inch wider fenders as the Z06, but the rubber on those wheels is Michelin’s Pilot Sport all-season tire to make the E-Ray compatible with rain and snow. I didn’t encounter those conditions on the roads around Denver or during my track drive at Pikes Peak International Raceway, but I could feel the E-Ray’s stability and surefootedness.

In addition to the all-weather tires, the E-Ray is also available with the same Michelin Pilot Sport 4S summer tires as are used on the base Stingray version. And as on that car, these excellent tires provide the consistent grip, comfort, and durability drivers want in everyday driving. And as I found track testing the Stingray, these tires are really not at home on the track, where they quickly turn hot and greasy compared to true track tires, losing their grip after thrashing through just a few hard corners.

No matter, that’s not the E-Ray’s purpose. Yes, it is fast, but the similarly priced Z06 ($111,295) is the weapon of choice for track rats. The E-Ray is for drivers who want that kind of speed in a car they can enjoy every day in comfort.

Even with its all-wheel-drive traction, the E-Ray is not penalized by sluggish steering response on corner turn-in, as is typically the case with cars that route power through the front wheels. That’s because the computer is smart enough to know when and how much power to send from the electric motor to the front wheels.

It can even let the driver induce a drift in corners, spinning the rear wheels without the front-drive power interfering with the sideways-sliding fun. That car-straightening front power is welcome when driving home from work in bad weather, but it can spoil the fun on the track, so the E-Ray knows when to have the electric drive step back and let the V8 do the work.

A weighty issue 

Just as the E-Ray rolls on the same wide wheels as the Z06, it also packs the same Brembo carbon ceramic brakes inside them to help slow the car. This is in addition to the E-Ray hybrid-electric regenerative braking, which does much of the car’s stopping. 

But the big brakes are important, because while the hybrid system adds braking power, it also adds mass. Chevrolet says the E-Ray weighs 3,774 pounds as a coupe and 3,856 pounds as a convertible, which means that it is about 350 pounds heavier than the Z06 and 400 pounds heavier than the Stingray.

This is in spite of a huge effort by the car’s engineering team to minimize the weight penalty of the electric motor and battery pack. “We put the highest bounty on weight of any car we’ve ever done,” recalled Holder. Even with that effort, electric motors and batteries are still heavy. “It is the heaviest Corvette we’ve ever done,” Holder acknowledged, adding, “but it is the lightest hybrid we’ve ever done.” 

The E-Ray matches the slower Stingray’s EPA fuel economy rating of 19 mpg in combined driving, with a score of 16 mpg city and 24 mpg highway. The Z06’s rating depends on the exact equipment, but it is either 14 mpg or 15 mpg in combined driving. City driving in either case is a dismal 12 mpg.

The added mass is low in the chassis, with the electric motor between the front wheels and the battery pack in the central spine running between the seats in the cockpit, so the center of gravity is low. Engineers mask that weight with savvy chassis control with the magnetically controlled adaptive dampers and the aforementioned massive brakes, so the E-Ray never feels heavy on the road.

As with the seamless power delivery, credit the brainy calibration by the Corvette team’s programmers in creating the reality of their choice rather than the one suggested by physics. It turns out that software-defined vehicles are far better than the old Microsoft joke predicted.

Take a look at my track drive, below:

The post The new electrified E-Ray is the quickest Corvette ever appeared first on Popular Science.

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Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name. Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal blue trail. The source of its bright wake—the probe’s remarkable propulsive system—will switch on within the first 100 days of the mission.

A mechanism known as a Hall thruster will propel the Psyche through space. This thruster glows blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas also used in headlights and plasma televisions, to move the spacecraft forward. This is the first time this tech, which has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015, has been used to travel beyond the moon—but what makes it so special, and why is Psyche using it?

When planning a space mission, engineers are focused on efficiency. Carrying chemical fuel along for the massive interplanetary journey would be like trying to drive around the entire world while having to keep all the gasoline you need in the trunk, because there are no rest stops along the way—it’s just not feasible. To get to its destination, Psyche would need thousands and thousands of pounds of chemical propellant.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly]

To get around this problem, engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in many flavors: “There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars,” explained NASA’s Psyche chief engineer Dan Goebel in a blog post. But space travel uses two kinds in particular, known as ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. “They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion,” Goebel wrote. Rather than burning fuel, electric thrusters rip off the electrons from the propellant’s atoms in a process known as ionization. Then they chuck those ions out at some 80,000 miles per hour. This generates a higher specific impulse—which Goebel says is “equivalent to miles per gallon in your car,” but for spacecraft—than chemical fuels, enabling a thruster-powered spacecraft to go farther on less propellant.

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make a plasma (the fourth state of matter) and spew ions into space. NASA’s Dawn mission used these to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but they’re not the fastest—according to NASA, it would take the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Definitely not race car material! 

[Related: Want to learn about something in space? Crash into it.]

Hall thrusters, on the other hand, use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle, producing a beam of ions. They don’t get quite as good “mileage” as ion thrusters, but they pack a bigger punch. The Psyche team picked this system because it allowed them to make a smaller, and therefore more cost-efficient, spacecraft. 

For the thrusters to work, the spacecraft needs power—which it gets from the sun, via solar panels—and something to ionize. For Psyche, that’s xenon gas. “Xenon is the propellant of choice because it’s inert (it doesn’t react with the rest of the spacecraft) and is easy to ionize,” explained Goebel. It also gives the thrusters their remarkable blue shine. Psyche carries about 150 gallons of the stuff, and gets about 10 million miles per gallon. 

Now that the mission has launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft’s systems to ensure they’re ready for the journey. At some point in this period, those glimmering blue thrusters will turn on.

If Psyche proves to be a success, Hall thrusters will be likely to make an appearance on future space missions. They offer “the right mix of cost savings, efficiency, and power, and could play an important role in supporting future science missions to Mars and beyond,” said Steven Scott, program manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar, which built the thrusters, in a press release. Thanks to these propulsive devices, Psyche should reach its destination in the asteroid belt in just 3.5 years—and we can’t wait to see what lies at the end of its electric blue trail.

The post NASA’s Psyche spacecraft will blaze an unusual blue trail across the solar system appeared first on Popular Science.

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THE FIRST TIME Joy Buolamwini ran into the problem of racial bias in facial recognition technology, she was an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology trying to teach a robot to play peekaboo. The artificial intelligence system couldn’t recognize Buolamwini’s dark-skinned face, so she borrowed her white roommate to complete the project. She didn’t stress too much about it—after all, in the early 2010s, AI was a fast-developing field, and that type of problem was sure to be fixed soon.

It wasn’t. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015, Buolamwini encountered a similar issue. Facial recognition technology once again didn’t detect her features—until she started coding while wearing a white mask. AI, as impressive as it can be, has a long way to go at one simple task: It can fail, disastrously, to read Black faces and bodies. Addressing this, Buolamwini says, will require reimagining how we define successful software, train our algorithms, and decide for whom specific AI programs should be designed.

While studying at MIT, the programmer confirmed that computers’ bias wasn’t limited to the inability to detect darker faces. Through her Gender Shades project, which evaluated AI products’ ability to classify gender, she found that software that designated a person’s gender as male or female based on a photo was much worse at correctly gendering women and darker-skinned people. For example, although an AI developed by IBM correctly identified the gender of 88 percent of images overall, it classified only 67 percent of dark-skinned women as female compared to correctly noting the gender of nearly 100 percent of light-skinned men. 

“Our metrics of success themselves are skewed,” Buolamwini says. IBM’s Watson Visual Recognition AI seemed useful for facial recognition, but when skin tone and gender were considered, it quickly became apparent that the “supercomputer” was failing some demographics. The project leaders responded within a day of receiving the Gender Shades study results in 2018 and released a statement detailing how IBM had been working to improve its product, including by updating training data and recognition capabilities and evaluating its newer software for bias. The company improved Watson’s accuracy in identifying dark-skinned women, shrinking the error rate to about 4 percent. 

Prejudiced AI-powered identification software has major implications. At least four innocent Black men and one woman have been arrested in the US in recent years after facial recognition technology incorrectly identified them as criminals, mistaking them for other Black people. Housing units that use similar automated systems to let tenants into buildings can leave dark-skinned and female residents stranded outdoors. That’s why Buolamwini, who is also founder and artist-in-chief of the Algorithmic Justice League, which aims to raise public awareness about the impacts of AI and support advocates who prevent and counteract its harms, merges her ethics work with art in a way that humanizes very technical problems. She has mastered both code and words. “Poetry is a way of bringing in more people into these urgent and necessary conversations,” says Buolamwini, who is the author of the book Unmasking AI. 

Perhaps Buolamwini’s most famous work is her poem “AI, Ain’t I a Woman?” In an accompanying video, she demonstrates Watson and other AIs misidentifying famous Black women such as Ida B. Wells, Oprah Winfrey, and Michelle Obama as men. “Can machines ever see my queens as I view them?” she asks. “Can machines ever see our grandmothers as we knew them?” 

This type of bias has long been recognized as a problem in the burgeoning field of AI. But even if developers knew that their product wasn’t good at recognizing dark-skinned faces, they didn’t necessarily address the problem. They realized fixing it would take great investment—without much institutional support, Buolamwini says. “It turned out more often than not to be a question of priority,” especially with for-profit companies focused on mass appeal. 

Hiring more people of diverse races and genders to work in tech can lend perspective, but it can’t solve the problem on its own, Buolamwini adds. Much of the bias derives from data sets required to train computers, which might not include enough information, such as a large pool of images of dark-skinned women. Diverse programmers alone can’t build an unbiased product using a biased data set.

In fact, it’s impossible to fully rid AI of bias because all humans have biases, Buolamwini says, and their beliefs make their way into code. She wants AI developers to be aware of those mindsets and strive to make systems that do not propagate discrimination.

This involves being deliberate about which computer programs to use, and recognizing that specific ones may be needed for different services in different populations. “We have to move away from a universalist approach of building one system to rule them all,” Buolamwini explains. She gave the example of a healthcare AI: A data set trained mainly on male metrics could lead to signs of disease being missed in female patients. But that doesn’t mean the model is useless, as it could still benefit healthcare for one sex. Instead, developers should also consider building a female-specific model.

But even if it were possible to create unbiased algorithms, they could still perpetuate harm. For example, a theoretically flawless facial recognition AI could fuel state surveillance if it were rolled out across the US. (The Transportation Security Administration plans to try voluntary facial recognition checks in place of manual screening in more than 400 airports in the next several years. The new process might become mandatory in the more distant future.) “Accurate systems can be abused,” Buolamwini says. “Sometimes the solution is to not build a tool.”

Read more about life in the age of AI: 

• Why AI could be a big problem for the 2024 presidential election
• The logic behind AI chatbots is surprisingly basic
• This AI program could teach you to be better at chess
• The first AI started a 70-year debate
• Will we ever be able to trust health advice from an AI?

Or check out all of our PopSci+ stories.

The post How this programmer and poet thinks we should tackle racially biased AI appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Leading American electric vehicle makers Tesla and Rivian are supporting a controversial pact between carmakers and automotive repair organizations that critics say is an attempt to undermine legislation that would make it easier for Americans to fix their cars.

For several years, the American car industry has been feuding with automotive service groups and right-to-repair advocates over who should control access to telematic data, information about speed, location, and performance that cars transmit wirelessly back to their manufacturers. Many in the automotive repair industry say this data is essential for fixing today’s computerized cars, and that it should be freely available to vehicle owners and independent shops. Increased access to telematic data, repair advocates argue, will drive down the cost of repair and keep vehicles on the roads for longer. This is particularly important for EVs, which must be used as long as possible to maximize their climate benefits and offset the environmental toll of manufacturing their metal-rich batteries.

These arguments have led members of Congress from both parties to introduce a bill called the REPAIR Act that would grant car owners, and the mechanics of their choosing, access to their telematic data. But the auto industry, which stands to make billions of dollars selling telematics to insurers, streaming radio services, and other third parties, contends that carmakers should be the gatekeepers of this data to avoid compromising vehicle safety. 

In July, ahead of a congressional hearing on right-to-repair issues, an automotive industry trade group called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation announced it had struck a “landmark agreement” with repair groups regarding telematic data sharing — an agreement that ostensibly preempted the need for legislation. A few weeks later, Tesla and Rivian, neither of which is a member of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, announced their support for the agreement. The only problem? Major national organizations representing the automotive aftermarket and repair industries weren’t consulted about the agreement, don’t support it, and claim it won’t make cars easier to fix.

The new agreement “was an attempt by the automakers to distort the facts of the issue and create noise and confusion in Congress,” Bill Hanvey, president of the Auto Care Association, a national trade association representing the aftermarket parts and services industry, told Grist. The Auto Care Association is among the groups that was not consulted about the agreement.

This isn’t the first time the auto industry and repair professionals have reached a voluntary agreement over right-to-repair. 

In 2002, the Automotive Service Association, one of the signatories on the new agreement, struck a pact with vehicle manufacturers to provide independent repair shops access to diagnostic tools and service information. Then, shortly after Massachusetts passed the nation’s first right-to-repair law focused on vehicles in 2013, manufacturers and organizations representing the aftermarket, including the Auto Care Association, signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, nationalizing the requirements of the law. That law granted independent mechanics explicit access to vehicle diagnostic and repair information through an in-car port. 

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the right-to-repair advocacy organization Repair.org, believes automakers signed the 2014 MOU “in order to prevent more legislation—and particularly more legislation that they would not like.” Automakers objected to including telematics in the 2014 MOU, according to Hanvey. “Because, at the time, the technology was so future-looking, the aftermarket agreed to get a deal in place,” he said.

Telematics is no longer technology of the future, however. Today, manufacturers use telematic systems to collect reams of real-time data related to a vehicle’s activity and state of health, potentially allowing manufacturers to evaluate cars continuously and encourage drivers to get service from their dealers when needed. Independent mechanics, meanwhile, need drivers to bring their vehicles into the shop in order to read data off the car itself—if the data is accessible at all.

In 2020, Massachusetts voters passed a ballot measure called the Data Access Law requiring carmakers to make telematic repair data available to owners and mechanics of their choosing via a standard, open-access platform. Shortly after voters approved it, Alliance for Automotive Innovation sued Massachusetts to stop the law from going into effect, arguing that it conflicted with federal safety standards. The federal judge overseeing the lawsuit has delayed ruling multiple times, keeping the requirements in legal limbo for nearly three years. In June, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell decided to begin enforcing the law, lawsuit notwithstanding. 

While fighting Massachusetts’ Data Access Law in court, automakers were also negotiating their own rules on data sharing. The agreement that the Alliance for Automotive Innovation announced in July included the imprimatur of two repair groups: the Automotive Service Association, a not-for-profit advocacy organization that lobbies states and the federal government on issues impacting automotive repair, and the Society of Collision Repair Specialists, a trade association representing collision repair businesses. 

Dubbed the “Automotive Repair Data Sharing Commitment,” the new agreement reaffirms the 2014 MOU by requiring carmakers to give independent repair facilities access to the same diagnostic and repair information they make available to their authorized dealers. In a step beyond the 2014 MOU, the new agreement includes telematic data required to fix cars. But carmakers are only required to share telematic repair data that “is not otherwise available through a tool,” like the in-car port used today, “or third party-service information provider.”

Because of those caveats, critics say, the agreement effectively changes nothing about telematic data access: Carmakers are still able to decide what data to release, and in what format. Independent shops may still be forced to read data off cars that manufacturers and their dealers have immediate, over-the-air access to, or they may have to subscribe to third-party services to purchase data that dealers receive at no charge. 

What’s more, the qualification about dealerships suggests Tesla and Rivian wouldn’t have to provide any telematic data whatsoever, since neither company works with dealers. That’s especially problematic, Hanvey said, considering both companies make cars that rely heavily on telematic systems. In a pair of class action lawsuits filed earlier this year, Tesla customers alleged that the company restricts independent repair by, among other things, designing its vehicles so that maintenance and repair work rely on telematic information Tesla exclusively controls. 

“The EVs are much more technological, much more reliant on code, and the repairs are much more complicated,” Hanvey said. “It’s difficult enough getting them repaired today, and if you take out the aftermarket, it’s going to be even more challenging for consumers.” 

Neither Tesla nor Rivian responded to a request for comment.

The voluntary nature of the agreement weakens it further, critics say. The Massachusetts Data Access Law and the REPAIR Act under consideration in Congress—which would also require manufacturers to give vehicle owners direct, over-the-air access to telematic repair data via a standard platform—would carry the force of law. By contrast, “there’s no distinction about what happens if this MOU is violated,” Hanvey said. 

Gordon-Byrne told Grist in an email that carmakers haven’t universally complied with the 2014 MOU. “And outside of Massachusetts there isn’t any statute to force compliance,” she said. 

“The problem,” Gordon-Byrne continued, “is lack of enforcement. If the parties don’t like the arrangement—they can talk about it once a year.” Indeed, the new agreement includes a yearly review of the terms by the signatories, as well as the establishment of a panel that will meet biannually to discuss any issues parties have raised regarding repair information access and to “collaborate on potential solutions where feasible.”

The Automotive Service Association and the Society of Collision Repair Specialists don’t represent all of the stakeholders who care about telematic data, which in addition to carmakers, dealers, and mechanics, includes companies that sell and distribute aftermarket parts. In fact, these two signatories appear to represent a small slice of the auto repair industry, which included more than 280,000 U.S. businesses this year, according to market research firm IBIS World. The Automotive Service Association did not provide membership numbers when Grist asked, but there were 1,243 U.S.-based businesses listed in its online directory as of this week. (Several major carmakers are also affiliated with the group, including Nissan, Ford, and Audi.) The Society of Collision Repair Specialists, which didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment, includes approximately 6,000 collision repair businesses, according to its website. 

The Auto Care Association, meanwhile, represents over half a million companies that manufacture and sell third-party vehicle parts, and service and repair cars. And it’s not the only group that feels the new agreement doesn’t go far enough: So does the Tire Industry Association, which represents roughly 14,000 U.S. member locations that make, repair, and service tires, MEMA Aftermarket Suppliers, representing several hundred aftermarket parts manufacturers, and the Auto Care Alliance, a group of state and regional auto service provider networks with 1,200 members across the country. None of these groups was consulted in advance about the new agreement.

The data sharing agreement “is history repeating itself once again,” Ron Turner, director of the Mid-Atlantic Auto Care Alliance, said in a statement, referring to the voluntary industry agreements of 2002 and 2014, which the organization claims stymied national legislation and have not been adequately enforced. The groups promoting it, Turner said, “are slowing down much-needed legislation and enforcement the automotive industry has needed for decades.”

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation feels differently about voluntary agreements. Brian Weiss, vice president of communications at the trade organization, told Grist in an email that the 2014 MOU “has been working well for almost a decade” and the new data-sharing agreement builds off it. Weiss declined to respond to specific criticisms of the agreement, offer examples of telematic data that carmakers would have to release as a result of it, or explain why the Auto Care Association, a signatory on the 2014 agreement, wasn’t included in the new one.

Robert Redding, a lobbyist for the Automotive Service Association, told Grist that voluntary agreements have worked for its members, too, citing the service information agreement the group negotiated with carmakers in 2002. (The Automotive Service Association was not a party to the subsequent 2014 MOU.) The new agreement, Redding said, was the result of a yearlong negotiation process, and he believes parties came to the table “in good faith.”

“We feel very good about the agreement,” Redding said. “This worked for service information, and we believe it’ll work for vehicle data access.” 

The groups backing the new agreement are already using it to argue that further regulation is unnecessary. In a September 22 court filing in the lawsuit concerning the Massachusetts Data Access Law, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation touted the agreement as evidence of the car industry’s “ongoing effort to ensure that consumers enjoy choice with respect to the maintenance and repair of their vehicles.” 

Several days later, at a September 27 hearing of the House Energy Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce, Automotive Service Association board of directors chairman Scott Benavidez testified that the new data sharing agreement “nullifies the need for the REPAIR Act.” It was similar to an argument the group made nearly 20 years earlier when it opposed a national right-to-repair act for vehicles, arguing that the voluntary agreement it negotiated with carmakers in 2002 rendered legislation unnecessary.

Dwayne Myers, CEO of Dynamic Automotive, an independent auto repair business with six locations in Maryland, was disappointed to see the Automotive Service Association publicly oppose the REPAIR Act. Myers has been a member of the organization for about a decade, but he says he wasn’t consulted about the new agreement in advance of its release and he doesn’t believe it should be used to undermine laws guaranteeing access to repair data.

“They could have just remained quiet and let their MOU sit there—they didn’t have to oppose the right to repair,” Myers said. “To me it just felt bad. Why as an industry aren’t we working together, unless you’re not on our side?”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/tesla-and-rivian-signed-a-right-to-repair-pact-repair-advocates-are-skeptical/

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Your choice of search engine makes a big difference in the relevance (and privacy) of your search results. The first search engine, known as Archie, was developed by a student at McGill University and released in 1990. Today, there are more than 20 search engines that range from powerhouses like Google to lesser-known, more specialized options. 

Some search engines, such as Google, highlight their AI assistants, but the truth is that artificial intelligence has been behind search engines for years. But if you want an assistant to winnow search results, AI can help you get more relevant results. 

Even if you use a browser with a built-in search engine, you’re not beholden to it. You can, for example, add search engines to Google Chrome, giving you extra options when you want to perform photo searches or need extra privacy. Before you set your default search engine, though, consider how you use searches and how you feel about data privacy. These factors can direct you toward the top search engine for your inquiring mind.

1. Google

Google is the No. 1 search engine used today, handling more than 83 percent of searches, according to Statista. That number may rise or fall depending on the month, but needless to say, Google’s got the majority of the market when it comes to searches. 

Google is a robust search engine that powers sites like YouTube and integrates full-service features like Google Workspace. It’s much more than a search engine that allows you to gather everything from your latest curiosity to professional collaboration in one place. 

In February 2023, Google introduced Bard, an AI-powered search assistant. Search engines have used AI algorithms for years to identify patterns and customize search results and ads to individual users, but we’re entering a new age of heavy focus on AI. If you’re hoping Bard will hold up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though, it’s got a ways to go. That said, with the speed that AI adapts, it may not be long before Google has a leading assistant for generative as well as search purposes. 

This engine also gets high marks for the layout and variety of features like snippets, knowledge panels, and “people also ask” sections that can help you further refine results. On the downside, Google is a data hog and hangs onto your information to customize your experience. On one hand, you’ll see ads and results that are more relevant to your likes and preferences. On the other hand, privacy issues and data usage are real concerns. Some people find Google more than a little invasive.

2. Bing

If you’re looking for search engines other than Google, Bing is a top contender. Bing doesn’t have nearly Google’s market share, but it’s second in popularity worldwide. Microsoft created Bing in 2009 and has developed it into an impressive search engine, especially when it comes to the integration of AI. 

The Bing search results pages on Bing look eerily similar to Google’s. Many users may have a hard time telling the difference between the two. However, Bing’s image, video, and map searching abilities are some of the best, with the video and image features topping the market.

Bing also offers a rewards program, which earns you points every time you shop or search with Bing. After you’ve accumulated enough points, you can redeem them for gift cards or use them to donate to your favorite charity. You earn about five points per search, so doing a lot of online research could earn you a few bucks each month. 

Like Google, Bing collects data to customize the ads and searches that appear, which you may or may not appreciate. Consequently, Bing, like Google, might not be the best choice if privacy is your top concern.

3. DuckDuckGo

If all that data collection has your skin crawling, DuckDuckGo is worth a try. If you compare Google vs. DuckDuckGo vs. Bing, DuckDuckGo might not be as comprehensive, but it puts privacy over pure search power. It doesn’t store your data, track you, or collect cookies. You’ll still see ads, but they won’t be customized based on your searches. 

This search engine uses its own crawler and incorporates a few other search engines, but not Google. The company skips the monster search engine in an effort to provide a different user experience. It’s organized similarly to other search engines, with search categories at the top for images and videos that match your search.

[Related: 7 ways DuckDuckGo can help you find exactly what you need]

However, there’s only one results page per search, which is kind of nice if you’re easily overwhelmed by Google’s millions of results when all you’re doing is looking for the best WiFi routers. While DuckDuckGo isn’t set to dethrone Google, it’s gained a steady following with the privacy it offers.

4. Startpage

Startpage approaches search with a philosophy that’s similar to DuckDuckGo by focusing on security and privacy. It keeps prying eyes (and advertisers) from following your every virtual move by refusing to log your search history or save your personal data. That does mean some searches take a little longer. But some users find it worth it for the privacy that remains after they hit exit. 

Startpage uses Google to populate results, which means you’ll get robust results without the targeted ads. The uncluttered search page is a breath of fresh air from some of the larger engines, which can feel like ads are slapping you in the face while you scroll.

This engine also offers an Anonymous View that lets you visit pages without sharing any information about yourself. The process works by removing your IP address before sending the query. Startpage also offers the option of StartMail, a secure email platform.

5. Yahoo

Yahoo has been around since 1994 and uses Bing’s search engine to create results, so expect similar groupings, but it uses its own tech for certain searches, including trending ones. Though not as elegant as Bing or Google, Yahoo’s search page offers categories like weather, news, sports, and trends as well as access to Yahoo’s email service. Yahoo Finance is another big draw and provides quick access to the latest in what’s happening on the stock market. 

If you’re primarily after news and finance info, Yahoo’s got it in spades. You don’t even have to do a Yahoo web search to see the latest headlines with eye-catching photos to boot. Yahoo Maps is another place that sets this engine apart, thanks to an open-source Open Maps service. 

Yahoo also offers subscription-based services like Yahoo Finance Plus for even more insight into the market, investments, and companies on the rise. And, of course, it includes free features like Yahoo Mail.

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Currently, the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight takes 18 hours and 50 minutes: It connects Singapore’s Changi Airport to New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport. But is that trek necessary? With AI-assisted flight routes, electric planes, and other tech poised to change air travel, it’s only a matter of time before long-haul flights become more efficient. And more importantly, are long flights like that safe for your health?

There are a few health risks linked to flying (aside from being swarmed by mosquitoes or breathing in dog farts), but tacking on a few more hours probably won’t have much of an impact.

“If it’s one-seventeenth of the trip, it’s not that big of a deal,” says Fanancy Anzalone, an aerospace medicine physician and past president of the Aerospace Medical Association. Still, he says, “There’s a multitude of things that you need to be concerned about when you do go on a long-haul flight.”

Cramped conditions

Sitting still in a cramped seat for hours isn’t just unpleasant—it can lead to deep vein thrombosis, when blood clots form in the legs because of poor blood flow. The longer you don’t move, the greater your risk. Worst-case scenario, the clot can break free and lodge in the lungs. Fortunately, this is rare. And you can cut down on your risk by getting up and walking around or flexing your legs.

Passengers “really need to think about getting up anywhere between three to four hours and walk around,” Anzalone says. “But by sitting on your chair and just pumping your legs—in essence pressing down on your heels and up with your toes—that little bit can make a big difference in whether somebody is going to have [deep vein thrombosis].”

Dry air and germs

So you might be out of luck if you’re seated next to someone who is already ill. However, the idea that the recirculating air on a plane abets disease transmission is a myth. “Airflow and circulation of cabin air is quite sophisticated technically, so there is usually no high risk of getting infected even if you have someone [sick] sitting two rows before,” says Jochen Hinkelbein, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Cologne in Germany and treasurer for the European Society of Aerospace Medicine.

You should be more concerned about the tray tables, bathrooms, and other germ-gathering surfaces you’re likely to come into contact with, even though they do get wiped down after flights. “The major airlines that are flying long-haul in my experience do extremely well in making sure that the airplane is as clean … as possible,” Anzalone says. But he does recommend traveling with disinfecting wipes or sanitizer. Really, it’s best to touch as little as possible.

Radiation and air pressure

There’s not much you can do about the cosmic rays, though. Each time a passenger flies, they are exposed to a tiny amount of radiation from space. “The more time you’re on the plane, the more radiation exposure you’ll get,” says Steven Barrett, an aerospace engineer at MIT.

However, the radiation most travelers are exposed to in a given year falls comfortably within the recommended radiation exposure for a member of the public. “The very frequent travelers who are flying on long-haul flights could potentially go above the recommended limits of radiation exposure,” says Barrett, who has calculated how much radiation flyers are exposed to. “But that’s not within the region where you’d have any real health concerns.” It’s unclear how harmful these still-low levels of radiation exposure are, or if they are harmful at all, he says.

Pilots and other flight crewmembers do spend enough time in the air that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers them radiation workers. The agency recommends they try to limit their time on flights that are very long, fly at high altitudes, or fly over the poles.

Another concern is that the air pressure is also lower on a plane than it is at sea level. This doesn’t bother most people. However, the thin air can cause problems for those who are old or have heart conditions or other pre-existing illnesses.

Overall risk factors

Ultimately, the longer a flight is, the more time you have for something to go wrong. And planes have become larger in recent years, which also increases the probability of in-flight medical emergencies.

“Traveling itself is becoming more and more popular, more and more convenient even for the old ones with … pre-existing diseases,” Hinkelbein says. “So we have an unhappy triad which is the setting is not ideal for unhealthy persons, the persons are older and older and having more pre-existing diseases, and not moving within the aircraft cabin, drinking only a little bit.”

For these crises, airline staff are equipped with medical kits and equipment such as defibrillators. “Every one of the long-haul flights have a way by radio to connect to physicians that are available around the world to talk to them,” Anzalone says. “I have talked to pilots about medical issues that are on board and how to handle it, do you divert or not divert.”

However, very few airlines have forms to document when passengers do get sick, Hinkelbein says. He’d like to see standardized forms and an international registry where all in-flight medical problems are reported. “Then you can try to figure out what are really the most [frequent] causes of in-flight medical problems.”

For the vast majority of people, though, even the longest flights will pass uneventfully. “The flying public on major airlines is very safe,” Anzalone says.

Plane emissions

In fact, a plane’s most profound influence probably isn’t on the passengers—it turns out that airplanes cruising miles above the Earth’s surface can cause problems down below.

“The main health impact is probably emissions that come from them and the health impacts for people for the ground,” Barrett says. He and his colleagues have estimated that 16,000 people globally die each year because of air pollution caused by planes. These emissions, which are linked to lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease, came from planes at cruising height as well as those in the midst of takeoff and landing.

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Despite decades of innovation, solar powered cars remain comparatively expensive and difficult to mass produce—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to pack a serious punch. At least one prototype reportedly handled an off-road sojourn across the world’s largest non-polar desert at speeds as fast as 90 mph.

Designed by a team of 21-to-25-year-old  college students at the Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology, their Stella Terra recently completed a 620 mile (1,000 km) test drive that began in Morocco before speeding through portions of Tangier and the Sahara. While miles ahead of what is currently available to consumers, the army green two-seater could be a preview of rides to come.

[Related: Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels.]

As highlighted by The Guardian on Monday, the aerodynamic, comparatively lightweight (1,200 kg) Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a clear, sunny day without recharging. This is thanks to the car’s solar converter designed in-house by the students, which turns 97 percent of its absorbed sunlight into an electrical charge. For cloudier situations, however, the vehicle also includes a lithium-ion battery capable of powering shorter excursions. For comparison, the most efficient panels available today only sustain roughly 45 percent efficiency, while the vast majority measure somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. According to The Guardian’s rundown, Stella Terra’s panels actually proved a third more efficient than designers expected.

In a September project update, Wisse Bos, Solar Team Eindhoven’s team manager, estimated Stella Terra’s designs are between 5 and 10 years ahead of anything available on the current market. But Bos also stressed their ride is meant to inspire similar experimentation and creativity within the automotive industry.

[Related: Swiss students just slashed the world record for EV acceleration.]

“With Stella Terra, we want to demonstrate that the transition to a sustainable future offers reasons for optimism and encourages individuals and companies to accelerate the energy transition,” Bos said at the time.

While the innovative, army green off-roadster is unlikely to hit American highways anytime soon, the students believe larger auto manufacturers’ could look to Stella Terra to help guide their own plans for more sustainable transportation options. Speaking with CNN on Monday, the team’s event manager, Thieme Bosman, hopes companies such as Ford and Chrysler will take notice of such a vehicle’s feasibility. “It’s up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles,” Bosman said.

And if off-roading isn’t your thing, don’t worry: Solar Team Eindhoven’s previous teams have also designed luxury vehicles, self-driving cars, and even mobile tiny homes powered by the sun.

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On October 13, President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced plans to develop seven regional clean hydrogen hubs across the US. The hubs will receive $7 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen.

These new hubs aim to produce more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually. They are estimated to help eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the combined annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars. 

According to the White House, advancing clean hydrogen is essential to achieving President Biden’s “vision of a strong clean energy economy that strengthens energy security, bolsters domestic manufacturing, creates healthier communities, and delivers new jobs and economic opportunities across the nation.” 

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element on Earth. However, it rarely exists on its own in nature and instead is usually found in compound form like in water (H₂0). Elemental hydrogen is also an energy carrier, meaning it can transport energy in a usable form from one place to another. However, hydrogen must be produced from another substance in order to do this.

Hydrogen fuel is made by separating water molecules, sometimes using a device called an electrolyzer. Fuel from hydrogen can also be produced from natural gas during a process called steam methane reforming that combines methane with steam. 

While a clean fuel itself, the current processes used to make it is anything but clean. Large quantities of fossil fuels are used, which emit greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Energy companies are working to advance cleaner versions of making emission-free hydrogen fuel and California, Texas, and Colorado are already working to become clean hydrogen centers.  

[Related: This liquid hydrogen-powered plane successfully completed its first test flights.]

These newly announced hubs will be focused on the goal of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen production. This huge undertaking will require large amounts of renewable energy to power the manufacturing process. It could also require additional nuclear power and a large network of carbon storage facilities that will grab and bury emissions in the regions where natural gas is still used to make hydrogen.

Cleanly manufacturing hydrogen could help decarbonize multiple industries in the US, as hydrogen is used to make fertilizer and is important in the chemical and petrochemical industry. 

“This has potential to be transformative,” Oleksiy Tatarenko, who focuses on hydrogen at RMI, a clean energy advocacy group, told The Washington Post. “But we need to get it right from day one. We need to ensure this hydrogen can demonstrate climate benefits.”

How long will this take?

Granholm tells PopSci that the initiative provides the US with the opportunity for,  “creating an entirely new economy around hydrogen and putting thousands and thousands of people to work, particularly people who have powered our nation for the last century.” 

The hubs will be an asset in bringing hydrogen production up to scale, to reduce the currently high costs of hydrogen production. It also incorporates multiple industries from construction to operations to design. 

“For the seven hydrogen hubs, it’s about a one-to six-investment, meaning for every dollar the federal government puts in, six dollars come from the private sector, so it’s government enabled, but private sector led,” says Granholm. “These projects are not just one year projects, these are projects that last several years to be able to plan and design, build, and operate.”

Where will the ‘hydrogen hubs’ be located?

The seven new hydrogen hubs will stretch across 16 states and are organized by geographic region.

“These states that were selected are not awardees yet. There’s a negotiation period that will occur between selection and award. So there is a period of time there for states to make sure that they’ve got an environment that will make these hubs of success, “ explains Granholm.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

The Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey will repurpose old oil infrastructure and use renewable and nuclear electricity from both established and innovative electrolyzer technologies.

The Appalachian hub will be located across West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. This hub is slated to be among the largest in terms of production and will use the region’s methane gas to derive hydrogen. 

The California hub will span the entire Golden State and encompass the busy ports Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland to produce hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass.

A Gulf Coast hub will be based in Houston, Texas, and could potentially expand into Louisiana. Houston is the traditional energy capital of the US and the plans for this hub include large-scale hydrogen production through both natural gas with carbon capture and renewables-powered electrolysis.

The Heartland Hydrogen hub spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota will use wind energy to derive hydrogen in an effort to decarbonize the region’s critical agricultural sector. 

The Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan will further decarbonize industrial sectors by using hydrogen in steel and glass production, power generation, refining, heavy-duty transportation, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The Pacific Northwest hub in parts of Eastern Washington State, Oregon, and parts of Montana plans to produce clean hydrogen exclusively from renewable sources.

“The hub design in itself is important because it creates clusters of supply and demand that are close to one another, minimizing the need to tackle challenges that would come with moving hydrogen long distances,” Adria Wilson, the hydrogen policy lead at Breakthrough Energy, told CNBC.

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If you’re an Apple user, you probably have an iCloud account and several devices filled with your personal information. Whenever high-profile data leaks and hacks hit the headlines, you may think that Apple’s known dedication to security will keep you safe, but that’s no reason to get complacent. There’s plenty you can do on your own to ensure it’s extra-hard for people to snatch up your data.

Once you’ve taken some time to enable two-factor authentication, strengthen your passwords, and work through the security tips listed below, you may want to stay in the same headspace and continue with other important accounts. For starters, check out our guides to locking down your Facebook and Google accounts.

Apple security basics

You should be putting up strong barriers at every door into your Apple world. That means a long, unique password on your MacBook, a lengthy PIN on your iPhone, and a long, unique password for your iCloud account. Passwords should contain a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters, plus special characters and numbers, to make them as difficult to crack as possible. (And no, “Passw0rd!” isn’t good enough.) Don’t base your passwords on your address, birthday, or pet’s name, either—a savvy attacker might research this information in order to get past your defenses. Finally, avoid using the same password for both your Mac and iCloud. That way, even if one gets cracked, the other still has some protection.

[Related: All the ways you can customize your iPhone lock screen]

One of your best defenses will be your common sense. Hackers often trick people into revealing their login details, rather than running a sophisticated brute force attack. Be wary of phishing links in emails and on social media, and be suspicious of any that immediately ask you to log in with your Apple ID credentials.

When it comes to Apple device security, Apple is your best ally. Its operating systems (macOS, iOS, and iPadOS) all encrypt data by default. This means nothing can be pulled from your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook without the right password or PIN code.

Enable Apple’s two-factor authentication feature

Apple accounts can be better protected with two-factor authentication (TFA). This feature is available for most major online accounts and means that entering your account will require an extra code beyond your username and password.

In the case of Apple’s two-factor authentication, attempting to log in will trigger a message sent to your phone number or a code that displays on another device associated with your Apple ID. For example, if you’re setting up a new iPhone, you’ll see the code on your existing MacBook.

To turn on two-factor authentication on iOS or iPadOS, open the Settings app and tap your name at the top of the screen. Then choose Password & Security to find the two-factor authentication option. On macOS Ventura or later, click the Apple menu, head to System Settings, and click your name. Then click Sign-In & Security and hit Turn On next to Two-Factor Authentication. Follow the instructions to set everything up.

[Related: 7 sweet new features in macOS Ventura]

If you’re using macOS Monterey or an older version of Apple’s operating system, you’ll find the TFA settings by opening the Apple menu, choosing System Preferences, selecting Apple ID followed by Password & Security, and turning the feature on from that screen.

Once you’ve logged into a device with your Apple ID, password, and TFA code, that device will be marked as trusted, which means you won’t need to log in using TFA again. It’s therefore important that you do have passwords, PIN codes, and other types of protection on your computers and phones to prevent unauthorized access.

Manage Apple security in your web browser

To configure other parts of your security setup, open your Apple ID account page in a web browser. Make sure your registered email addresses and trusted phone numbers are up to date and secure, because you might need them if you ever lose access to your account.

Under the Devices heading (in the menu on the left), you can see the iPhones, iPads, and computers associated with your account. Use this opportunity to remove any devices you no longer use or don’t recognize. It’s a good idea to check this list fairly regularly, just in case your account has been compromised or you’re signed in somewhere you shouldn’t be.

Any web browser on any computer will also let you access the iCloud suite of web apps and services. If you’re on a public computer or a machine you share with others, be sure to sign out after you’ve finished. Some browsers may ask to remember your password. You can allow this on your personal computer, but make sure that something else will prevent a guest from accessing the browser. For example, set up a user account password for getting into the operating system.

When you’re on iCloud.com, you can also sign out of all browsers where you’re currently signed in. To do this, click your Apple ID avatar in the top right corner, hit iCloud Settings, select Sign Out Of All Browsers, and click Sign Out. This way, you’ll ensure no one’s using your iCloud account with any other browser except the one you have open.

Other Apple security tips

The app stores Apple has built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS do a very good job of keeping you safe from dangerous software and viruses. On your phone or tablet, you shouldn’t have to install anything from outside the iOS App Store. On your computer, however, you may need to venture outside the walls of the macOS App Store every now and again. If you do, read user reviews and web write-ups to double-check the safety of any program you install.

As for your devices’ physical security, you definitely want to hope for the best, but plan for the worst. So take the time now to consider what you’ll do if, despite all your precautions, your iPhone, iPad, or computer are compromised. We recommend turning on the Find My feature on your devices. This will let you locate and remotely wipe your device via the web if it falls into the wrong hands, but if you’ve simply lost your tech inside your own home, you can use Find My to get it to play a sound.

On iOS or iPadOS, tap your name in the settings to find the Find My app, and on macOS Ventura or later navigate through Apple menu > System Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Find My. If you’re using macOS Monterey or earlier, you’ll need Apple menu > System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud > Find My Mac > Allow.

[Related: How to turn off your location on an iPhone]

Meanwhile, if you’ve gone all-in with your Apple products and got yourself an Apple Watch, you can use the wearable gadget as a secure way to unlock macOS, saving you the trouble of typing out a password each time. To set up the feature on macOS Ventura or later, open the Apple menu, click System Settings, hit Login Password, and choose Use Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac. On macOS Monterey or older, work through Apple menu > System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General to find the same Apple Watch unlock setting.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2017.

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In Dawn McKenzie’s free time, she soars high above the ground in a hot air balloon, as she has since she got her FAA-issued ballooning license when she was 19.

Ted Gauthier, McKenzie’s dad, taught her how to fly. Gauthier and four of his five brothers took up ballooning decades ago, and he passed his skills to his daughter, the only woman in the family to pick it up. They flew together until he passed away in 2021, and McKenzie resumed flying Daydream, the 62,000 cubic foot balloon her father built.

This July, McKenzie competed in the 2023 US Women’s Hot Air Balloon National Championship with her uncle Marty (her dad’s brother) as her crew chief. Piloting one of these beautiful, colorful vessels takes extensive research before each flight—mainly on weather elements like wind, clouds, and precipitation—and a fair measure of courage, especially when in a basket all alone. McKenzie relishes the challenge.

This is how the flight process works.

Wind power

Flying a balloon is serious business. It’s the oldest form of human-carrying flight, McKenzie says, and has an excellent safety record. The weather “pretty much has to be perfect” for a hot air balloon pilot to take to the skies. As they get ready to fly, hot air balloonists check the weather from every angle, carefully analyzing wind speeds on sites like RyanCarlton.com (run by a hot air balloon instructor of the same name) or Windy.com.

“That information also helps us determine where we might take off depending on where we’re trying to fly,” McKenzie says. “We have to make sure that there isn’t rain or storms in the forecast, and we need at least five miles of visibility. If the dew point is too close to the temperature, there is likely fog.” If there is fog, she can’t fly.

As an experienced pilot, McKenzie has a checklist of items before she takes to the air. Weather analysis, crew preparation and briefing, navigation planning, launch site selection, a pre-flight inspection, and more. (Her day job also involves transportation; she’s a communications manager for Ford, an expert on trucks like the Super Duty, F-150, F-150 Raptor, Ranger, and Maverick.)

[Related: The biggest hot air balloon in the US was built to carry skydivers]

Once she’s in the basket and off the ground, McKenzie continues to monitor the weather and wind closely, manages the fuel in her propane tanks, scans the area for obstacles, and engages in constant aeronautical decision-making, which is a systematic approach to the mental process used by pilots to consistently determine the best course of action in response to a given set of circumstances.

“The most challenging thing is the uncertainty of the weather,” McKenzie says. “We’ll go out to the field and be ready to go but we’ll have to wait for it to calm down. You have to be really flexible and patient, which can be challenging.”

Getting ready to fly

To start, McKenzie picks her launch spot depending on which direction she wants to travel, based on the wind. Then, she and her crew assemble the burner components and connect it to the basket. They tip the basket on its side and spread out the balloon fabric (called the envelope), connecting the cables from the balloon envelope to the basket. Employing a powerful fan, the crew holds open the mouth of the balloon to inflate it with cool air. McKenzie turns on her propane tanks, ensures her crew is ready, and uses the burner to shoot a 15-foot-long, 5-foot-wide flame into the balloon, heating the air to stabilize it and make the balloon rise. 

Once there’s enough heat inside the envelope (the fabric portion of the balloon system that holds the heated air mass), it becomes buoyant and floats up, trying to rise above the cooler surrounding air. It takes a lot of upward force (or buoyancy) to counteract gravity when you consider the mass of the basket and all its passengers, which is why hot air balloons are usually so massive. One of Dawn’s balloons is 90,000 cubic feet and about eight stories tall. 

[Related: This Florida teen is making a business out of rebuilding old-school auto tech]

At the top of the balloon, a giant circular panel of material called a parachute top is used to vent heat or deflate the envelope. Held in place by Velcro tabs during inflation, the parachute top is connected to a long red line that pilots use to let hot air out of the balloon; it quickly seals back up. In that way, McKenzie controls her climb or descent.

Steering is dependent on the direction of the wind. As the balloon climbs higher, it’s getting wind from one direction or another, and knowing which way it’s coming from and at which altitude determines where the pilot should fly to get where they’re going.

“Sometimes, when you’re lower to the ground you’ll go left, and higher you’ll go right, for example,” McKenzie says. “The winds are constantly changing, so we’re looking at the reports ahead of the flight and after we set up and even once we’re in the air.”

McKenzie likes to fly during the few hours around sunrise and sunset, as do most pilots, because during the day, there is often thermal activity that isn’t safe for ballooning. Those thermal vertical currents make it more difficult to control the balloon, adding a serious element of danger to be avoided as much as possible.

“Heat off the pavement makes the unstable air rise up and forces warm air upward,” McKenzie says. “It pushes the balloon up with it, so you might start to climb or fall when you hadn’t planned to do that; it’s really unnerving.”

Wind between 10 to 12 knots (about 12 to 14 mph) is ideal, she says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes a knot as one nautical mile per hour, used to measure speed; a nautical mile is slightly more than a standard mile on the ground.

“You don’t always know exactly where you’re going to land, but that’s exciting,” McKenzie says. “That makes it an adventure.”

The post This hot air balloon pilot learned how to follow the wind from her dad appeared first on Popular Science.

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Niobium can be found in steel, particle accelerators, MRI machines, and rockets, but sourcing it is largely limited to a handful of countries including Brazil and Canada. Earlier this month, however, Chinese news outlets announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of ore deposit in Inner Mongolia containing potentially vast amounts of the superconductive rare earth element. According to Antonio Castro Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore speaking with the South China Morning Post, the new resource trove could even be so large that it would make China self-sufficient in its own niobium needs.

The ore found in Inner Mongolia—dubbed niobobaotite—also contains large quantities of barium, titanium, iron, and chlorine, according to a statement from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) earlier this month.

Discovered in 1801, niobium is named after Tantalus’ daughter Niobe in Greek mythology due to its chemical relationship to tantalum. Almost 85-to-90 percent of all mined niobium in the world goes towards iron and steel processing production. Adding just 0.03-0.05 percent to steel, for example, can boost its strength by as much as 30 percent while adding virtually no extra weight. That prized performance enhancement is comparatively difficult to obtain, however. The element only occurs within the Earth’s crust at a proportion of roughly 20-parts-per-million.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

In addition to its many current uses, niobium is of particular interest to researchers hoping to further the development of niobium-graphene and niobium-lithium batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widespread rechargeable power sources, but remain restricted in terms of charge times and lifespans, as well as safety concerns. Earlier this year, researchers working on improving niobium-graphene batteries estimated future iterations of the alternative could fully charge in less than 10 minutes alongside a 30 year lifespan—approximately 10 times longer than current lithium-ion options.

As promising as the discovery may be for China, labor concerns will almost undoubtedly be an issue for outside observers. The nation has a long and troubling history of exploitation within the mining industry. Rare earth mineral mining also generates a wide array of pollution issues.

Brazil is by far the world’s largest exporter of niobium, with Canada trailing far behind in second place. China currently needs to import about 95 percent of its niobium supplies, but the newfound deposits could dramatically shift their sourcing to almost complete independence. Meanwhile, the US is currently working towards opening the Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in southern Nebraska, which when opened will be the country’s first niobium mining and processing facility.

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Internet access, whether wired or wireless, has become one of the most precious commodities of our time. But that leaves us singularly unprepared when we lose that access—such as when we travel to the signal-free middle of nowhere or a storm knocks out power to our home router. There are plenty of ways you can avoid being completely cut off from your work and entertainment, though, and using Google Chrome offline is one of them.

The catch, however, is that you’ll have to set up offline access before your internet connection dies. We recommend activating the settings below as you read this article, so you don’t forget and regret it later. When you’re done, consider poking around the settings within your other most-used programs to see what offline features they offer, or download some of the best offline apps. Then, no matter what type of computer you’re on, Chromebook or not, you won’t have to completely give up when those WiFi bars disappear.

Access Gmail offline

If you use Gmail in your browser, you can get into your inbox without a web connection. While you’re still online, simply click the cog icon in the top right, select See all settings, open the Offline tab, and check the box next to Enable offline mail. Doing so will sync recent emails to your computer’s hard drive. Unfortunately, this function can’t make new emails magically appear when your internet is down. But it will let you browse through messages you’ve already cached, and compose new replies that Gmail will automatically send when you get back online.

Keep working

Google Drive and the three online apps within it—Docs, Sheets, and Slides—have an offline mode you can activate when there’s no internet available. You’ll need to set it up before you lose your web connection: From the main Google Drive interface, click the cog icon in the top right, followed by Settings, and finally tick the box under Offline.

This will sync your recent documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to the local storage on your hard drive. It will let you create new documents and edit existing ones in your Drive account, although you won’t be able to access big files like videos and music (unless you download them separately first). Offline Chrome will save all your changes to disk, just as they would normally be saved to the web. Once your browser detects an internet connection again, it will sync everything to bring your files back up to date.

Check your schedule

Beyond Gmail and Google Drive, Google has made most of its web apps work offline—including Google Calendar. You can’t create new events when you’re offline, but you can browse your schedule and respond to invitations. Google Calendar will send those responses when you’re back online.

Stay entertained

It doesn’t matter whether your favorite music or video streaming service works offline—Chrome can play downloaded files in many popular formats, including MP3 tracks and MP4 movies. So as long as you saved your preferred entertainment options to your device ahead of time, you can rock out or kick back no matter what your internet connection looks like. Just drag a file from your hard drive into an empty Chrome window, and it will start to play.

If you’re looking for a place to start, the platforms you use want to keep you engaged and are more than willing to help. Both Spotify and Netflix, for example, have detailed instructions for how you can access their content without internet access. Once you’re all stocked up, you can enjoy accessing the files via Chrome.

Catch up on your reading

Losing your internet connection gives you a great opportunity to catch up on all that reading you’ve been meaning to get around to. But if all that reading happens to be on the web, you’re stuck. The free Pocket Chrome extension can help. Open an article that you’d like to read in Chrome, and Pocket will let you save it for later perusal, when you have more time to do so.

Play games

You can even enjoy certain online games while Chrome’s offline. From the physics-based puzzler Cut the Rope to the all-time classic FreeCell Solitaire, you should be able to find something to while away the time until the internet returns. As long as install your favorite games while you still have internet access, you’ll be good to go.

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On May 30, Canadian defense company Roshel Defence Solutions officially launched its new armored troop transport, the Senator model Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. Part of the launch was surviving a series of tests to prove that the vehicle can protect its occupants. 

The testing was conducted by Oregon Ballistic Laboratories and done to a standard called NATO “STANAG 4569” level 2. (STANAG means “standard agreement,” and 4569 is the numbering of that agreement.) What that means in practice is that the Senator MRAP is designed to withstand a range of the kinds of attacks that NATO can expect to see in the field. These include bullet fire from calibers up to 7.62×39mm at roughly 100 feet (30 meters). Why 7.62×39mm caliber bullets? That’s the standard Soviet bullet, which has outlasted the USSR itself and is common in weapons used across the globe.

In addition, STANAG 4569 dictates that the vehicle must survive a 13 pound (6 kg) anti-tank mine activated under any of the vehicle’s wheels, as well as survive a mine activated under the vehicle’s center. Beyond the bullets and mines, the vehicle also has to withstand a shot from a 155mm high explosive artillery shell burst landing 262 feet (80 meters) away. 

All of this testing is vital, because a troop transport has to advance through bullet fire, keep occupants safe from mines, and travel through an artillery barrage. That NATO standards are designed to withstand Soviet weapons is a convenience for any equipment exports aimed at Ukraine, but also means the vehicles are broadly useful in conflicts across the globe, as an abundance of Soviet-patterned weaponry continues to exist in the world. 

To showcase the Senator MRAP in simulated attack, Roshel released two videos of the testing. The first, published online on May 29, features a bright green checkmark in the corner, “all tests passed” clearly emblazoned on the video as clouds of destruction and detonations appear behind it.

A second video, released June 16, shows the Senator MRAP in slow motion enduring a large TNT explosive hitting it on the side. The 55 lbs (25kg) explosive is a stand-in for an IED, or Improvised Explosive Device. IEDs were commonly used by insurgent forces in Iraq against the United States, and in Afghanistan against the NATO coalition that occupied the country for almost 20 years. While anti-tank mines tend to be mass-produced industrial tools of war, IEDs are built on more of a small scale, with groups working in workshops generally assembling the explosives and then placing them on patrol routes.

It was the existence of IEDs, and their widespread use, that prompted the United States to push for, develop, and field MRAPs in 2006. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles were not a new concept. South Africa was one of the first countries to develop and field MRAPs in the 1970s, putting essentially a V-shaped armored transport container on top of an existing truck pattern. The resulting “Hippo” vehicle was slow and cumbersome, but could protect its occupants from explosives thanks to the V-shaped hull deflecting blasts away. 

MRAPS did not guarantee safety for troops on patrol, but they did drastically increase the amount of explosives, or the intensity of attack, needed to ambush armored vehicles.

“The presence of the MRAP also challenged the enemy, since the insurgents had to increase the size of their explosive devices to have any effect on these more survivable vehicles. The larger devices, and longer time it took to implant them, increased the likelihood that our troops would detect an IED before it detonated,” Michael Brogan, head of the MRAP vehicle program from 2007 to 2011, told the Navy’s CHIPS magazine in 2016.

The Senator MRAP features, like its predecessors, a V-shaped hull. It also benefits from further innovations in MRAP design, like mine-protected seats, which further reduce the impact of blast on their occupant. Inside, the Senator can transport up to 10 people, and Roshel boasts of its other features, from sensor systems to weapon turrets. For as long as IEDs and mines remain a part of modern warfare, it is likely we can expect to see MRAPs transporting soldiers safely despite them.

Watch one of the tests, below:

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This article was originally featured on The Markup. This article was copublished with the Los Angeles Times and AfroLA. This series was made possible through support from the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.

Ed Dorini’s house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac that snakes its way up a hill in the Sun Valley area, one of Los Angeles’s northernmost corners. It’s a small enclave whose residents are a little Whiter and a little wealthier than the rest of the city. In this neighborhood, “people take care of their properties,” said Dorini in an interview in his home.

Dorini, 64, came to L.A. as an immigrant from Canada in the early 1980s when he “had nothing” and built a business in real estate. The home he owns is one he earned with hard work, which includes remodeling parts of the house himself. He’s proud of it, and he’s intent on keeping it safe: Three years ago, he installed 10 Ring cameras to monitor his property and its various entrances. 

“Everybody here has guns and dogs. People aren’t afraid to use them, and I think that’s probably a deterrent,” he told The Markup. “And cameras are, too.”

At times, he’s also found Ring’s companion app, Neighbors, useful. Both Neighbors and Ring are owned by Amazon, and the former is a social platform where Ring doorbell users—and people who join the app independently—can publish posts and footage about things happening in their neighborhood, such as theft or missing pets. 

In February 2022, Dorini wrote two posts with accompanying videos about what he considered a safety issue: “Illegal dumping onto [name of street redacted] drive. Anyone recognize this truck.” Fifteen minutes later, he wrote: “Anyone recently have a bathroom demoed by someone with this big dump truck. Call me.”

Both of these posts landed in the inbox of 15 officers with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) who had opted in to receive crime alerts posted on Neighbors. Dorini’s post was one of over 13,000 Neighbors posts published by Angelenos that were automatically forwarded to LAPD officers, detectives, and sergeants in just over two years, according to email correspondence that The Markup received via public records requests. 

Neighbors has built a forum in which private citizens can monitor one another in service of keeping neighborhoods “safe,” as the company puts it.

That raises important questions: safe for whom, and from what? While homeowners may believe their cameras and posts are preventing break-ins and theft, some research has shown that surveillance is a poor deterrent of such property crime. And by trusting their cameras to keep watch for them, users render themselves blind to the ways in which community surveillance breeds paranoia, perpetuates prejudice, and puts people at heightened risk of police or vigilante violence.

In the United States, where police disproportionately kill, harm, and jail Black, Latino, and Indigenous people compared with White people, this translates into an additional risk to Black lives. That is particularly true when, as The Markup’s analysis of Neighbors posts in L.A. and research from other academics has found, its most active users live in Whiter, more affluent areas. 

“[Neighbors is] a continuation of a long history of communities coming together and creating their own surveillance systems that shape who they believe belongs somewhere and who doesn’t belong somewhere,” said Ángel Díaz, visiting assistant professor at USC Gould Law School. “And that is something that we have enshrined not only through law enforcement, but through laws around disorderly conduct and things like that.”

The Markup worked with students from the NYCity News Service at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY to perform the public records requests (full disclosure: Craig Newmark is also a funder of The Markup).

Our analysis of a random sample of Neighbors posts found that over 30 percent of the posts the LAPD received did not describe criminal activity, even if users classified them as “crime.” The content of these posts often included behavior residents deemed suspicious, such as someone “‘checking cars.” Moreover, according to emails between Neighbors employees and the LAPD, only posts classified as “crime” were supposed to be forwarded to officers—but this did not always happen. Dorini, for example, classified his posts that landed in officers’ inboxes under “safety.”

“Reports of suspicious behavior are coded ways of saying someone does not belong, which in many affluent areas correlates with targeting people of a different race,” Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University and author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement,” told The Markup in an email.

“In affluent communities that rely on police to keep out ‘the other,’ they will feel more comfortable reporting the suspicion,” Ferguson explained. “In less affluent communities that have more complex relationship[s] with the police, the decision to report suspicion will be more circumspect.” 

As of September this year, 2,604 police departments across the United States have forged partnerships similar to LAPD’s with Amazon’s Ring network. In addition to that, 589 fire departments and 66 local government agencies have also signed on. It’s part of a marketing strategy at Ring that targets not just retail customers but also law enforcement agencies, without always making the relationship between police and Ring fully clear to its consumers. 

The Markup reached out to 24 consumers whose posts were forwarded to LAPD officers, and three people responded. None were aware that their information had been subject to police monitoring, though they had differing perspectives on the role of law enforcement. 

One person, Lenin, who did not want to give his last name, was surprised and said it was “not cool” that LAPD was receiving these alerts. 

The majority of people interviewed, however, were unfazed.

“Honestly, I don’t really care either way, you know,” said Dorini’s neighbor, Juan Longfellow. “Everyone has cameras. So, I mean, it’s kind of everywhere. […] I’m not one of those people who’s afraid for my privacy or whatever.”  

When The Markup told Dorini about Neighbors sending posts to police, he was delighted.

“I like it,” he said. “If [police] got thousands of other ears and eyes out there, [helping] them get involved with, you know, dealing with issues—well for me, that’s a good thing.” 

Ring does not hand over footage from consumer doorbell cameras to authorities unless they have a warrant or there’s a life-threatening situation. Ring spokesperson Mai Nguyen also said that posts on Neighbors do not reveal the addresses of users or the Ring device’s owner. Footage and information posted on Neighbors, however, is allowed to be shared, according to the terms of service.

Moreover, although Ring refers to its programs with police departments as “partnerships,” the LAPD’s spokesperson doesn’t see it as one.  

“We do not work specifically with RING. We work with citizens, or whoever has a RING system, as part of a crime investigation,” wrote Officer Drake Madison in an email response to a query from The Markup. “Video surveillance is a great tool. Unfortunately, we will not be speaking on the RING system at this time,” he added in a final email. 

(Read “Amazon’s ‘Neighborhood Watch’ Might Be Turning Police Officers Into ‘Reddit Moderators” for more on the connections between Ring and police departments). 

‘It started to become a neighborhood thing’

The area where Dorini lives is typical of areas where Ring camera users tend to be concentrated: it’s slightly Whiter than the Los Angeles average and also wealthier, according to Census Bureau data. Walking in the neighborhood, security systems are prevalent—half of the two dozen homes on Dorini’s block have visible cameras.  

Even though crime rates ticked up in Los Angeles between 2018 and 2022, they were still well below levels in the 1990s, and the crime rates in Dorini’s area and adjacent neighborhoods remained the same or decreased during the same time period, according to a USA Today analysis of data collected by the nonprofit Crosstown.

The Markup analyzed the connection between income and Ring camera usage using a database of Neighbors posts from 2018 to 2020 that Princeton researcher Dan Calacci shared with The Markup. We narrowed down the database, which consists of nearly 875,000 posts, to only Neighbors posts located in 25 of the biggest cities in the U.S. where Ring partnered with the police, and found that Los Angeles was among four cities where users in neighborhoods with higher income levels tended to post more often. 

When The Markup further analyzed Neighbors posts published in 2019 in Los Angeles, we found an even clearer trend: Richer areas of the city posted roughly six times more on Neighbors than poorer areas. 

Much of what Dorini and his wife would see on their Ring footage was wildlife—cheeky coyotes crawling through backyards or deer trotting along—but it was also a way to keep an eye on the property and keep people from “monkeying around our house.” As he scrolled through the Ring app, it displayed live feed after live feed of the spaces around him. 

Being a Ring owner gave him a different benefit, too, he said. “We didn’t really realize that it was going to have a network situation. […] We noticed that it started to become like a neighborhood thing.” 

The neighbors on this block all know one another, and they will often work together to ensure their homes are safe, Dorini said. Once, he said, he and his neighbors used their security camera footage to help police track down an alleged burglar who had walked through their backyard. Dorini said he was unaware of whether the person was accused of stealing in their neighborhood. 

Elsewhere in the Sun Valley area, one person wrote a post in 2018—which was categorized as “stranger”—about a “Hispanic man with sleeping bag.”

“This just happened and it doesn’t show on video. Male Hispanic in his 20’s with a sleeping bag was hanging out by our driveway,” the post read. “Asked him to leave twice and he said he had been hiking and said he used sleeping bag to sit on his hike. We told him to leave as he doesn’t belong here and he got very annoyed, and a neighbor followed him down the street. Please be careful!”

Ring did not respond to specific questions about Neighbors and did not comment on the data analysis methodology shared with them ahead of publication. Instead, Nguyen, the spokesperson, shared general overviews of Ring’s work with police and its content moderation policies.

“Ring does not tolerate racial profiling and hateful content when it comes to content on Neighbors,” Nguyen said. “We’ve invested many resources to help us deliver on this commitment—Neighbors has strict community guidelines, trained moderators, user flagging capabilities, and other tools in place to help create a safe place for all members of the community. We prompt users to review their posts for potential bias before submitting to Neighbors, and all content submitted to our app is reviewed before it’s published to help ensure it adheres to our community guidelines.”

Ring updated its guidelines in 2021 to require community members to publish posts based on actions they’ve observed or recorded, rather than those they deemed suspicious. On the website it said that “Neighbors acknowledges that posts reporting concerns about an individual can be influenced by implicit bias and profiling—even if unintentional.” But it is unclear how much of an effort Ring has made to ensure that people follow these guidelines. 

“The paranoia of somebody’s imagination is making its way into that of other people,”  said Díaz, the visiting law professor at USC, about neighborhood platforms like Neighbors. “And so, if you’re just passively keeping up with alerts and read them and move on with your day, you get inundated with this fear that your neighborhood is very unsafe, based on unsubstantiated accusations that are oftentimes more reflective of people’s own prejudices than anything else.”

Calacci’s analysis of his own database of Neighbors posts found that people who are homeowners and live in White “enclaves” (White neighborhoods surrounded by other White neighborhoods) are more likely to post on the platform. His analysis also showed that majority-White neighborhoods that tend to call 311 to sweep homeless encampments also post more on the Neighbors platform. 

“Such calls bear the closest resemblance to the notion of neighborhood gatekeeping—they literally entail policing presence and belonging in a neighborhood,” Calacci wrote in his paper, which was published last year. 

In 2021, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition audited the police department’s Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program, in which community members were encouraged to report suspicious activities to help officers prevent terrorism attacks. The coalition’s analysis showed that close to 60 percent of reports were filed in communities that were predominantly White, and that roughly half of them were deemed unfounded. 

Hamid Khan, the coalition’s founder, said programs like SAR show that police will often hear from anonymous voices from largely White neighborhoods. Technology like Neighbors’ email alerts to LAPD just streamlines this process, “so that’s where the license for racial profiling comes in,” he said.

Who’s left behind?

Drive south from Dorini’s home for about an hour—down to near Broadway and 92nd Street—and you’ll find yourself where Ernie Arzu lived when a Neighbors post he wrote about a friend’s missing dog got forwarded to the LAPD.  

His post about a Yorkshire Terrier named Bella Dior was like many others in his neighborhood: missing animals posts made up about half of the 12 Neighbors posts The Markup was able to identify in Calacci’s database to be from his area. The neighborhood  is 77 percent Latino and 19 percent Black; by comparison, Dorini’s is 64 percent White, 20 percent Latino, 12 percent Asian, and two percent Black.

Only one post from Arzu’s area of South Los Angeles was categorized as suspicious behavior.

Arzu had bought a Ring camera, largely to keep an eye on his 15-year-old daughter who he said “sometimes likes to sneak out,” but doesn’t check in on the footage all that much. 

Arzu is a Black personal trainer and caretaker, whose family is originally from Belize. He’s lived in the city since 1986, when he moved there as a 10-year-old.

“I’ve been in L.A. for as long as I can remember,” he said. 

The crime rate in his neighborhood is 93 crimes per 1,000 residents, compared with the citywide average of 60 per 1,000 residents across the city at large. But despite people who live in the area experiencing more crime than the average Angeleno, Arzu said that LAPD would rarely help. 

The only time Arzu called the police when he was living there was when he saw “young kids” vandalize a neighbor’s home. The police did not arrive at the scene until five hours after the call, he said. Arzu was doing yard work in front of his house when the officers arrived. Instead of looking for the teens who had destroyed his neighbor’s property, Arzu said they asked him for his ID, assuming he did not live at his residence.

“[The LAPD] don’t really mess with us. There’s nothing positive. And it’s nothing negative,” he said.  

Past research has shown that Black people experience more violence and harassment from police, as well as harsher policing strategies than their White counterparts. Tufts University Assistant Sociology Professor Daanika Gordon describes how in more affluent, White neighborhoods, police act as “responsive service providers” while Black populations are simultaneously over-surveilled and socially controlled—not to mention neglected and under-policed when it comes to emergency services. 

But the lack of help also had a different impact: Arzu’s wife would obsess over crime on Neighbors. She felt unsafe in the neighborhood, so earlier this summer, Arzu and his family decided there was no other recourse than to move away.

“My wife wants to move. She [doesn’t] like the neighborhood. There’s crime,” he said. “I don’t see no crime, but apparently there is. Then you know, it’s just a little quiet neighborhood to me.”

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The post Accidental spies: Amazon Ring owners may be unknowingly emailing police appeared first on Popular Science.

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How many of the apps on your phone are you actually using on a regular basis? It’s not uncommon to have a bunch of apps you installed and eventually forgot about, each of them taking up precious space on your device and making it more difficult to find the tools you actually want to use.

Apple and Google know about their users’ struggles with unused apps, and they’ve built features into iOS and Android to try and handle it. You should know how your phone’s operating system handles forgotten apps behind the scenes, how these features benefit you, and how you can disable them if you want to.

How to offload unused apps on iOS

Apple’s iPhones have a feature called Offload Unused Apps that can help you with your app-hoarding problem, and it’s been around since iOS 11 launched in 2017. It’s sort of a middle ground between having an app installed and uninstalled: The bulk of the app is gone, but data and documents relating to it—like your settings and any files you’ve created in it—remain on your phone. The app icon will also stay on your home screen, with a small arrow next to its name, and you can fully reinstall it by tapping this icon.

This feature is off by default, but you can enable it by opening the Settings app and selecting General, iPhone Storage, and Enable next to the Offload Unused Apps heading. It will then run automatically, so you might notice apps you haven’t opened in a while being offloaded in the background without any input from you. You can follow the same steps to turn the feature off.

[Related: All the ways iOS lets you edit your lock screen]

On the iPhone storage screen, you’ll see how much space you can free up by offloading apps, but Apple doesn’t offer a whole lot of detail about how this works—how long an app has to remain unused for to qualify, for example, or whether your iPhone starts offloading apps once you reach a threshold of remaining storage. You’ll have to try it to see if you like it, but remember that you can easily restore offloaded apps if it isn’t for you.

If you don’t want iOS to automatically offload apps, you can do so manually and individually whenever you want. From the same iPhone Storage screen in Settings, scroll down to the app you want to offload and tap on it. Then choose Offload App on the next screen to partially remove it from your phone. The same screen will let you reinstall the app if and when you need to, or delete it entirely.

Offloading unused apps on Android

Android’s built-in feature for managing unused apps is called Auto Archive. It’s still relatively new, and it works a lot like the offloading iOS does: Auto Archive will free up to nearly 60 percent of an app’s storage space, without removing the app itself or your data from the device, Google says. After being archived, the app will still be there, but a lot of its data and files will have been removed until you need it.

Auto Archive isn’t enabled by default, but Android will prompt you to turn the feature on if you try to install an app and there’s not enough room left on your phone. If this happens, tap Turn on to enable Auto Archive and install the app, or No thanks if you want to try to clear some space manually.

[Related: 9 hidden Android features you’re missing out on]

You can also enable Auto Archive from the Play Store app on your phone: Tap your Google account avatar (top right), then choose Settings and General to find the Automatically archive apps toggle switch. Even when this is on, the process only kicks in when your device starts to run low on available storage.

Google isn’t specific about which apps it archives first, but “infrequently used apps” are apparently first in line. There’s no option to manually archive individual apps, as there is on iOS, but you can wipe all the data stored by an app. To do so, open Settings and head to Apps, tap on an app, choose Storage and cache, and hit Clear storage. Depending on the app, the data you remove could include messages, emails, or playlists that have been synced to your phone.

The post One quick way to automatically save space on your phone appeared first on Popular Science.

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This week, the US Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to a device that uses ultrasound waves to blast apart tumors in the liver. This technique, which requires no needles, injections, knives, or drugs, is called histotripsy, and it’s being developed by a company called HistoSonics, founded by engineers and doctors from the University of Michigan in 2009. 

According to a press release, this approval comes after the results of a series of clinical trials indicated that it can effectively destroy liver tumors while being safe for patients. Now hospitals can purchase the device and offer it to patients as a treatment option. The machine works by directing targeted pulses of high-energy ultrasound waves at a tumor, which creates clusters of microbubbles inside it. When the bubbles form and collapse, they stress the cells and tissues around them, allowing them to break apart the tumor’s internal structure, leaving behind scattered bits that the immune system can then come in to sweep up. 

Here’s the step-by-step process: After patients are under anesthesia, a treatment head that looks uncannily like a pair of virtual reality goggles is placed over their abdomen. Clinicians toggle through a control screen to look at and locate the tumor. Then they lock and load the sound waves. The process is reportedly fast and painless, and the recovery period after the procedure is short.

Through a paired imaging machine, clinicians can also see that the sound waves are targeted at the tumor while avoiding other parts of the body. A robotic arm can also move the transducer to get better aim at the tumor region. In this process, the patient’s immune system can also learn to recognize the tumor cells as threats, which prevented recurrence or metastasis in 80 percent of mice subjects.

While the approval of the device is a big step for broadening the options for cancer treatments, the use of sound waves in medicine is not new. Another platform called Exablate Prostate by Insightech was cleared by the FDA for human trials in prostate cancer patients (although clearance is not quite the same thing as an approval). Nonetheless, the results have been encouraging. The histotripsy technique is being applied in many preclinical experiments for tumors outside of the brain, such as in renal cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and musculoskeletal cancer. 

Beyond tumors, a similar technique called lithotripsy, which uses shock waves, has been a treatment for breaking apart painful kidney stones so they become small enough for patients to pass. 

Watch the device at work below:

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The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is one of the most dramatic natural disasters in recorded history, yet so many of the actual records from that moment in time are inaccessible. Papyrus scrolls located in nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, for example, were almost instantly scorched by the volcanic blast, then promptly buried under pumice and ash. In 1752, excavators uncovered around 800 such carbonized scrolls, but researchers have since largely been unable to read any of them due to their fragile conditions.

On October 12, however, organizers behind the Vesuvius Challenge—an ongoing machine learning project to decode the physically inaccessible library—offered a major announcement: an AI program uncovered the first word in one of the relics after analyzing and identifying its incredibly tiny residual ink elements. That word? Πορφύραc, or porphyras… or “purple,” for those who can’t speak Greek.

[Related: A fresco discovered in Pompeii looks like ancient pizza—but it’s likely focaccia.]

Identifying the word for an everyday color may not sound groundbreaking, but the uncovery of “purple” already has experts intrigued. Speaking to The Guardian on Thursday, University of Kentucky computer scientist and Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales explained that the particular word isn’t terribly common to find in such documents.

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth, and even mockery,” said Seales. “Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish. The Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion. What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

The visualization of porphyras is thanks in large part to a 21-year-old computer student named Luke Farritor, who subsequently won $40,000 as part of the Vesuvius Challenge after identifying an additional 10 letters on the same scroll. Meanwhile, Seales believes that the entire scroll should be recoverable, even though scans indicate certain areas may be missing words due to its nearly 2,000 year interment.

As The New York Times notes, the AI-assisted analysis could also soon be applied to the hundreds of remaining carbonized scrolls. Given that these scrolls appear to have been part of a larger library amassed by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, it stands to reason that a wealth of new information may emerge alongside long-lost titles, such as the poems of Sappho.

“Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine,” one papyrus expert told The New York Times. “The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”

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Sam Kreigman and his colleagues made headlines a few years back with their “xenobots”— synthetic robots designed by AI and built from biological tissue samples. While experts continue to debate how to best classify such a creation, Kriegman’s team at Northwestern University has been hard at work on a similarly mind-bending project meshing artificial intelligence, evolutionary design, and robotics.

[Related: Meet xenobots, tiny machines made out of living parts.]

As detailed in a new paper published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Journal of Science, researchers recently tasked an AI model with a seemingly straightforward prompt: Design a robot capable of walking across a flat surface. Although the program delivered original, working examples within literal seconds, the new robots “[look] nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth,” Kriegman said in Northwestern’s October 3 writeup.

And judging from video footage of the purple multi-“legged” blob-bots, it’s hard to disagree:

After offering their prompt to the AI program, the researchers simply watched it analyze and iterate upon a total of nine designs. Within just 26 seconds, the artificial intelligence managed to fast forward past billions of years of natural evolutionary biology to determine legged movement as the most effective method of mobility. From there, Kriegman’s team imported the final schematics into a 3D printer, which then molded a jiggly, soap bar-sized block of silicon imbued with pneumatically actuated musculature and three “legs.” Repeatedly pumping air in and out of the musculature caused the robots’ limbs to expand and contract, causing movement. During testing, the robot could walk half its body length per second—roughly half as fast as the average human stride.

“It’s interesting because we didn’t tell the AI that a robot should have legs,” Kriegman said. “It rediscovered that legs are a good way to move around on land. Legged locomotion is, in fact, the most efficient form of terrestrial movement.”

[Related: Disney’s new bipedal robot could have waddled out of a cartoon.]

If all this weren’t impressive enough, the process—dubbed “instant evolution” by Kriegman and colleagues—all took place on a “lightweight personal computer,” not a massive, energy-intensive supercomputer requiring huge datasets. According to Kreigman, previous AI-generated evolutionary bot designs could take weeks of trial and error using high-powered computing systems. 

“If combined with automated fabrication and scaled up to more challenging tasks, this advance promises near-instantaneous design, manufacture, and deployment of unique and useful machines for medical, environmental, vehicular, and space-based tasks,” Kriegman and co-authors wrote in their abstract.

“When people look at this robot, they might see a useless gadget,” Kriegman said. “I see the birth of a brand-new organism.”

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An annular “ring of fire” eclipse is always a bewitching event. This year, timed just right to herald in spooky season, the October 14th solar spectacular will cut a path of near darkness in the Western hemisphere through Oregon, Texas, Central America, Colombia, and northern Brazil. 

Eclipses can be more than just emotionally stirring. Solar eclipses, when they happen, create waves of disturbances across electrically charged particles in the Earth’s ionosphere—a layer of the upper atmosphere that plays an important role in radio frequency communications. Here, the heated and charged ions and electrons swirl around in a soup of plasma that envelops the planet. 

To understand the effect that eclipses have on this plasma, scientists from NASA are planning to shoot a series of 60-feet-tall rockets up to collect information at the source.

The ionosphere sits between 60-300 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, which is roughly 37-190 miles up. “The only way to study between 50 kilometers and 300 kilometers in situ is through rockets,” says Aroh Barjatya, director of the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab and principal investigator on the upcoming NASA sounding rocket mission, which is called Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path. By in situ, he means quite literally in the thick of it. 

[Related: A new satellite’s “plasma brake” uses Earth’s atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk]

“Satellites, which are flying at 400 kilometers, can look down, but they cannot measure in the middle of the ionosphere. It can only be doing remote sensing,” he adds. “And the ground-based measurements are also remote sensing.” Rockets are a relatively low-cost way to get right into the ionosphere.

Along with the rockets, the team will be sending up high-altitude balloons that will measure the weather every 20 minutes. These balloons will cover the first 100,000 feet, or about 19 miles, above the ground. Then come the stars of the show: three sounding rockets fitted with both commercial and military surplus solid propellent rocket motors. The trio are designed to give a view of the changes in the ionosphere over time, and they will be launched directly into the shadow of the eclipse from a site at the White Sands facility in New Mexico. One of the rockets will be sent up right before the eclipse, one during, and one after. Because they’re sounding rockets, they will go up to the target height, and come back down, which means that they’re equipped with a parachute recovery system. 

“If you think of a big orbital vehicle sending a satellite up, they’re going to reach 14,000 miles/hour when they get into space. So they’re going to reach that orbital escape velocity and put their payload into orbit, and it’s going to stay up there for a long time,” Max King, deputy chief of the Sounding Rockets Program Office at NASA GSFC, Wallops Flight Facility, explains. “Ours are what we call suborbital. So they go up, but by the time we’ve gotten into space, we’ve slowed down to zero, and start falling back into the atmosphere. Over that curved trajectory, we get about 10 minutes in [the ionosphere] where we can take measurements and conduct science.” 

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

Ten minutes may not seem very long. But a lot of data can be gathered during that time. As the rockets reach the ionosphere, electrostatic probes will pop out, measuring plasma temperature, density, as well the surrounding electric and magnetic fields. There’s a telemetry system that sends data back to the ground continuously. 

The main objective of the mission is to study the plasma dynamics during the eclipse that can impact radio frequency communications. Any sort of unexpected turbulence can disrupt signals to a satellite, GPS, ham radio operators, or over-the-horizon radar that the military uses. “Ionosphere is the thing which bounces radio frequencies, and all of the space communications go through the ionosphere,” Barjatya says. 

After the October mission, they’ll search the desert for the fallen parts of the rockets and refurbish the remnants of them for a second set of launches in April 2024 during the next eclipse, just so they can study its effects on the ionosphere a bit further out from the direct path. Getting more details about what happens to the ionosphere when the sun is suddenly blotted out will give researchers insight into what radio frequencies get affected, and how widespread the disturbance is. It will allow models to better prepare for these potential disruptions in the future. 

NASA has launched quite a few rockets during eclipses. The last big campaign that NASA did was in 1970, where they launched 25 rockets in 15 minutes. “In 1970 the eclipse went right above the Wallops facility [in Virginia],” Barjatya says. But those rockets were mostly meteorological rockets. Today’s rockets each contain four small payloads filled with scientific instruments. “One rocket launch gives me five measurements at the same time,” he adds. “So one rocket of today is actually equal to five rockets of 1970.” 

These rockets are not specialized for only glimpsing at the sky during eclipses. In fact, NASA uses them in about 20 missions a year, worldwide. “We go where the science is,” King says. Sounding rockets can be used to launch telescopes for spying on celestial bodies, supernovas, star clusters, or even flares and emissions from our own sun. 

The main launch sites in North America are at the Wallops facility in Virginia, and the White Sands facility in New Mexico. Outside of the US, Norway is also a big launch site. There, scientists are using them to observe Northern lights and other auroral phenomena. Or, they could be used to take a gander at something called the cusp region, the closest portal in the sky to near-Earth space. “The cusp region is where the magnetic field lines all come into the same point,” King notes. “The only way you can really study that is to shoot a rocket through it.”

The agency will be live-streaming the launches, which you can watch here.

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One e-toy for every person on Earth—that’s the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children’s gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste—like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems—are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, “nontraditional” e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This “invisible e-waste” is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year—and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

[Related: People will throw away about 5.3 billion phones this year.]

According to UNITAR’s findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to “almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks,” enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles–the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year.

“People tend to recognise household electrical products as those they plug in and use regularly. But many people are confused about the waste category into which ancillary, peripheral, specialist, hobby, and leisure products fit and how to have them recycled,” Pascal Leroy, Director-General of the WEEE Forum, said in a statement ahead of International E-Waste Day. The WEEE Forum asks that instead of trashing the e-waste, consumers bring it to “the appropriate municipal collection facility” in their area.

Leroy’s organization states e-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, and to deal with it properly, many more people need to recognize these “invisible” examples.

“A significant amount of electronic waste is hidden in plain sight,” says WEEE Forum member, Magdalena Charytanowicz, via the announcement. “Sadly, invisible e-waste often falls under the recycling radar of those disposing of them because they are not seen as e-waste. We need to change that and raising awareness is a large part of the answer.”

Charytanowicz cites past informational campaigns that successfully raised awareness about the many issues surrounding plastic pollution, and points to the UN’s treaty on plastics due next year. “We hope the same will occur in the e-waste field,” she adds.

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Best Overall		National Geographic Glowing Marble Run		SEE IT	Lots of pieces make this set very flexible.
Best budget		ELONGDI Marble Run Set		SEE IT	Save money or buy several sets to expand the builds.
Best wooden		Hape Quadrilla Wooden Marble Run Construction		SEE IT	Wood materials will last longer than plastic.

Marble run toys are classic games that not only provide fun and excitement for your child but also help build STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) and other skills like visual tracking, dexterity, and hand-eye coordination. From wooden constructions to magnetic pieces to glow-in-the-dark marbles, marble runs vary in design and style. You can find marble runs for toddlers 3+ or more challenging options suitable for older kids. Please be mindful that these games can be a choking hazard, so don’t leave this game around babies or unattended toddlers. Here are the five best marble runs of 2023 that you can convince your kids are just real-life Minecraft.

• Best overall: National Geographic Glowing Marble Run
• Best plastic: Ravensburger GraviTrax
• Best wooden: Hape Quadrilla Wooden Marble Run Construction
• Best magnetic: PicassoTiles Marble Run Magnetic Tiles
• Best budget: ELONGDI Marble Run Set

How we chose the best marble runs

Unlike consumer electronics for kids, marble runs don’t have a ton of hard specs or setup requirements to compare. We started by taking a wide survey of the available models and then narrowing it down to specific options that promise durability and flexibility. Kids can get bored easily when toys only offer one play pattern, so flexibility is critical in keeping little ones interested. 

We also focused on sets made from durable materials because they last longer than their cheaper, flimsy counterparts. We used a combination of personal experience, editorial reviews, user feedback, and feature comparisons to choose the best possible models. 

The best marble runs: Reviews & Recommendations 

While comparing features can be useful, we have some specific recommendations for different people. While we’ve broken the picks down into categories, there’s always overlap, so peruse all options for best marble runs before purchasing.

Best overall: National Geographic Glowing Marble Run

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This marble run comes with 50 glow-in-the-dark marbles, 1 UV keychain light, and sturdy construction for fun gaming.

Specs

• Ages: 8+
• Dimensions: 17.5 x 7.5 x 13.5 inches
• Batteries: 1 CR2 battery required (included)

Pros

• Excellent brand reputation
• 12,000 positive reviews
• High quality
• Sturdy
• Glow in the dark

Cons

• Blacklight isn’t impressive
• Glow could be brighter

This glowing run comes with 250 pieces, including glowing marbles resembling “galaxies in the dark.” It also has a storage pouch and a UV keychain light to make the marbles glow brighter and last longer.

This kit is super high-quality with ample reviews to back it up. You can get great height with stackable towers, and it’s easy to assemble. 

One of the only cons is that some say the black light isn’t very bright, but you can keep the marbles under a flashlight or lamp to make them shine even brighter. 

Best plastic: Ravensburger GraviTrax

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Kids 8 and up can enjoy the Speed Set, the deluxe version of the Starter Set, plus extra features and accessories like flips, loops, spirals, and cannons. 

Specs

• Ages: 8+
• Dimensions: 13.5 Inches (H) x 4 Inches (W) x 20.5 Inches (D)
• Batteries: None required

Pros

• 6 million sold worldwide
• Excellent brand reputation
• High quality
• 185 pieces

Cons

• Pricey
• Could have more base pieces

For kids ages 8 and up, this marble run set features everything from the GraviTrax Starter Set, plus some components from the Bridges and Tunnels expansions and four additional accessories. These accessories include the Magnetic Cannon, Flip, Loop, and Spiral. In total, it offers 185 pieces and 10 different track layouts to play with. 

The GraviTrax encourages kids to start simple and build, allowing this set to grow with your kid developmentally with more challenging elements. It doesn’t require batteries.

Reviewers love the variety in the set and how positively their kids responded to the game. However, some customers wished there would have been more base pieces for building more towers. Buying more sets will provide more options.

Best wooden: Hape Quadrilla Wooden Marble Run Construction

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Made from high-quality and durable birch wood, this marble run has tons of fun features like seesaws, straightaway rails, and three spiral funnels to keep your kids engaged.

Specs

• Ages: 4+
• Dimensions: 21.34 x 13.39 x 5.43 inches
• Material: Wood

Pros

• High-quality wood, durable
• Non-toxic, FSC-accredited
• Lots of features 
• Lots of positive reviews

Cons

• Can be wobbly
• Colors could be more distinguishable 
• Pricey

This wooden marble run is a high-quality, multifunction construction set that encourages spatial awareness and problem-solving. It offers seven different color blocks made from non-toxic, FSC-accredited birch and rubber wood.

The Quadrilla Vertigo features a mix of spins, drops, seesaws, straightaway rails, and three spiral funnels to keep kids (and curious parents) entertained. Some of the pieces have toggles, which keep the marbles going in unpredictable directions.

The only knock on this was it doesn’t include organizational materials to keep the wooden pieces safe from scratches and dings. The colors could also be more distinguishable from each other. It’s pricey, but given the high quality and natural wood material—a bonus if you’re cutting down on household plastic—it’s worth the premium.

Best magnetic: PicassoTiles Marble Run Magnetic Tiles

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This colorful magnetic tile marble run and 3-D race track comes with 10 different geometric shapes, including columns, slopes, slides, funnels, and U-turns.

Specs

• Ages: 3+
• Dimensions: 16.51 x 13.24 x 5.32 inches
• Material: Steel, Plastic

Pros 

• Fairly priced
• Good for toddlers
• Can be used with other PicassoTiles sets
• BPA-Free, Lead-Free, Non-Toxic

Cons

• Could be sturdier
• Some say need to purchase more than one

Choose from a 40-, 70-, or 150-piece set that comes chock-full of 10 different geometric shapes like columns, slopes, slides, funnels, and U-turns. The steel-weighted marbles and a 3-D race track are perfect for building on imagination and STEM skills. 

Some reviewers recommend getting at least two sets to really make this product shine. Add marble run tubes to your tiles to help them snap into place for added sturdiness. 

It’s fairly priced—depending on the number of pieces, it ranges from under $30 to under $70—and is made from non-toxic, BPA-free, lead-free, and child-safe materials. Note: it can be used with other PicassoTiles products, excluding the mini tiles with the PTG set. 

Best budget: ELONGDI Marble Run Set

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This inexpensive and colorful marble run game for kids ages 3 and up comes with 105 pieces made from non-toxic and BPA-free plastic, all under $40.

Specs

• Ages: 3+
• Dimensions: 12.4 x 9 x 3.4 inches
• Material: Plastic

Pros

• Inexpensive
• Simple and straightforward
• Colorful
• Non-toxic, BPA-free plastic
• Great for toddlers

Cons

• Not the highest quality

This budget-friendly set comes with 105 marble run pieces to create elaborate, continuous setups. The bright, colorful nature of the pieces will likely do well to keep a little one’s attention.

This is a simple marble run without a ton of frills and features. It can stack 2 feet high and is great for toddlers and little ones (but be sure to keep an eye on them—these pieces can be a choking hazard). 

Note that the plastic is BPA-free and non-toxic, but because of the price point, the material isn’t the highest quality. Hot tip: some users recommend constructing your run on a rubber mat—the dining table can make it less sturdy and tip over. 

What to consider when buying the best marble runs

These brainy toys are a great way to get creative juices flowing and reduce tablet time. Here is what you should know when shopping for the best marble runs.

Age

Marble toys will list their age restrictions or recommendations. Be sure to look for an age-appropriate toy when shopping for your little one. Marbles are, by their very nature, choking hazards, so these are probably best to avoid for very little ones. And make sure they’re stored in a safe place, like a toy organizer, when not in use.

Materials

Some marbles are made of glass, while others are made of plastic. You can find magnetic sets, wooden options, and more. Some sets can expand if you buy more pieces to go with them, so if you think it may be a big hit, opt for something you can build on later.

Durability

Depending on price point and material, the toy’s durability can vary. Some will be sturdier and some more flimsy—so always read the reviews! For toddlers, you might afford to get something a bit more flimsy, but a wobbly marble run could definitely frustrate older kids. Maybe they can take out that irritation in the backyard on their ATV.

FAQs

Final thoughts about the best marble runs

• Best overall: National Geographic Glowing Marble Run
• Best plastic: Ravensburger GraviTrax
• Best wooden: Hape Quadrilla Wooden Marble Run Construction
• Best magnetic: PicassoTiles Marble Run Magnetic Tiles
• Best budget: ELONGDI Marble Run Set

Marble runs are the perfect educational toy that not only entertains and excites your little ones but also helps build valuable skills! Get off the screen and into twists, turns, slides, flips, loops, and spirals with the fun of the best marble runs. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Last week at a ranch outside Dallas, Texas, hundreds of people gathered to hobnob and discuss topics like transportation, aviation, drones, and more. Some were clad in cowboy hats. The event, called the UP.Summit, included investors, politicians, business leaders, representatives from large companies like Airbus, Bell, Boeing, as well as relatively newer players like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation that are working on electric aircraft. 

On display was gear and hardware from companies like Wisk, Zipline, Jedsy, and much more.  

Take a look at some of the flying machines and other gadgets and equipment that were at the event, which is put on by investment firm UP.Partners. 

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Artificial intelligence programs’ impressive (albeit often problematic) abilities come at a cost—all that computing power requires, well, power. And as the world races to adopt sustainable energy practices, the rapid rise of AI integration into everyday lives could complicate matters. New expert analysis now offers estimates of just how energy hungry the AI industry could become in the near future, and the numbers are potentially concerning.

According to a commentary published October 10 in Joule, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Business and Economics PhD candidate Alex de Vries argues that global AI-related electricity consumption could top 134 TWh annually by 2027. That’s roughly comparable to the annual consumption of nations like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomenon.]

Although de Vries notes data center electricity usage between 2010-2018 (excluding resource-guzzling cryptocurrency mining) has only increased by roughly 6 percent, “[t]here is increasing apprehension that the computation resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.” Given countless industries’ embrace of AI over the last year, it’s not hard to imagine such a hypothetical surge becoming reality. For example, if Google—already a major AI adopter—integrated technology akin to ChatGPT into its 9 billion-per-day Google searches, the company could annually burn through 29.2 TWh of power, or as much electricity as all of Ireland.

de Vries, who also founded the digital trend watchdog research company Digiconomist, believes such an extreme scenario is somewhat unlikely, mainly due to AI server costs alongside supply chain bottlenecks. But the AI industry’s energy needs will undoubtedly continue to grow as the technologies become more prevalent, and that alone necessitates a careful review of where and when to use such products.

This year, for example, NVIDIA is expected to deliver 100,000 AI servers to customers. Operating at full capacity, the servers’ combined power demand would measure between 650 and 1,020 MW, annually amounting to 5.7-8.9 TWh of electricity consumption. Compared to annual consumption rates of data centers, this is “almost negligible.” 

By 2027, however, NVIDIA could be (and currently is) on track to ship 1.5 million AI servers per year. Estimates using similar electricity consumption rates put their combined demand between 85-134 TWh annually. “At this stage, these servers could represent a significant contribution to worldwide data center electricity consumption,” writes de Vries.

As de Vries’ own site argues, AI is not a “miracle cure for everything,” still must deal with privacy concerns, discriminatory biases, and hallucinations. “Environmental sustainability now represents another addition to this list of concerns.”

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Adjusting to prosthetic limbs isn’t as simple as merely finding one that fits your particular body type and needs. Physical control and accuracy are major issues despite proper attachment, and sometimes patients’ bodies reject even the most high-end options available. Such was repeatedly the case for a Swedish patient after losing her right arm in a farming accident over two decades ago. For years, the woman suffered from severe pain and stress issues, likening the sensation to “constantly [having] my hand in a meat grinder.”

Phantom pain is an unfortunately common affliction for amputees, and is believed to originate from nervous system signal confusions between the spinal cord and brain. Although a body part is amputated, the peripheral nerve endings remain connected to the brain, and can thus misread that information as pain.

[Related: We’re surprisingly good at surviving amputations.]

With a new, major breakthrough in prosthetics, however, her severe phantom pains are dramatically alleviated thanks to an artificial arm built on titanium-fused bone tissue alongside rearranged nerves and muscles. As detailed in a new study published via Science Robotics, the remarkable advancements could provide a potential blueprint for many other amputees to adopt such technology in the coming years.

The patient’s procedure started in 2018 when she volunteered to test a new kind of bionic arm designed by a multidisciplinary team of engineers and surgeons led by Max Ortiz Catalan, head of neural prosthetics research at Australia’s Bionics Institute and founder of the Center for Bionics and Pain Research. Using osseointegration, a process infusing titanium into bone tissue to provide a strong mechanical connection, the team was able to attach their prototype to the remaining portion of her right limb.

Accomplishing even this step proved especially difficult because of the need to precisely align the volunteer’s radius and ulna. The team also needed to account for the small amount of space available to house the system’s components. Meanwhile, the limb’s nerves and muscles needed rearrangement to better direct the patient’s neurological motor control information into the prosthetic attachment.

“By combining osseointegration with reconstructive surgery, implanted electrodes, and AI, we can restore human function in an unprecedented way,” Rickard Brånemark, an MIT research affiliate and associate professor at Gothenburg University who oversaw the surgery, said via an update from the Bionics Institute. “The below elbow amputation level has particular challenges, and the level of functionality achieved marks an important milestone for the field of advanced extremity reconstructions as a whole.”

The patient said her breakthrough prosthetic can be comfortably worn all day, is highly integrated with her body, and has even relieved her chronic pain. According to Catalan, this reduction can be attributed to the team’s “integrated surgical and engineering approach” that allows [her] to use “somewhat the same neural resources” as she once did for her biological hand.

“I have better control over my prosthesis, but above all, my pain has decreased,” the patient explained. “Today, I need much less medication.” 

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Traffic lights are the worst—not only do they put stops in your journey, but all those stopped cars pollute the local environment. According to one paper, pollution can be 29 times worse at city intersections than on open roads, with half the emissions coming from cars accelerating after having to stop. Many companies are developing tech that can make intersections “smarter” or help drivers navigate around jams. Google, though, has an AI-powered system-level plan to fix things.

Called Project Green Light, Google Research is using Google Maps data and AI to make recommendations to city planners on how specific traffic light controlled intersections can be optimized for better traffic flow—and reduced emissions. 

Green Light relies on Google Maps driving trends data, which Google claims is “one of the strongest understandings of global road networks.” Apparently, the information it has gathered from its years of mapping cities around the world allows it to infer data about specific traffic light controlled junctions, including “cycle length, transition time, green split (i.e. right-of-way time and order), coordination and sensor operation (actuation).”

From that, Google is able to create a virtual model of how traffic flows through a given city’s intersections. This allows it to understand the normal traffic patterns, like how much cars have to stop and start, the average wait time at each set of lights, how coordinated nearby intersections are, and how things change throughout the day. Crucially, the model also allows Google to use AI to identify potential adjustments to traffic light timing at specific junctions that could improve traffic flow. 

[Related: Google’s new pollen mapping tool aims to reduce allergy season suffering]

And this isn’t just some theoretical research project. According to Google, Green Light is now operating in 70 intersections across 12 cities around the world. City planners are provided with a dashboard where they can see Green Light’s recommendation, and accept or reject them. (Though they have to implement any changes with their existing traffic control systems, which Google claims takes “as little as five minutes.”) 

Once the changes are implemented, Green Light analyzes the new data to see if they had the intended impact on traffic flow. All the info is displayed in the city planner’s dashboard, so they can see how things are paying off. 

A big part of Green Light is that it doesn’t require much extra effort or expense from cities. While city planners have always attempted to optimize traffic patterns, developing models of traffic flow has typically required manual surveys or dedicated hardware, like cameras or car sensors. With Green Light, city planners don’t need to install anything—Google is gathering the data from its Maps users.

Although Google hasn’t published official numbers, it claims that the early results in its 12 test cities “indicate a potential for up to 30 percent reduction in stops and 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” across 30 million car journeys per month. 

And city planners seem happy too, at least according to Google’s announcement. David Atkin from Transport for Greater Manchester in the UK is quoted as saying, “Green Light identified opportunities where we previously had no visibility and directed engineers to where there were potential benefits in changing signal timings.”

Similarly, Rupesh Kumar, Kolkata’s Joint Commissioner of Police, says, “Green Light has become an essential component of Kolkata Traffic Police. It serves several valuable purposes which contribute to safer, more efficient, and organized traffic flow and has helped us to reduce gridlock at busy intersections.”

Right now, Green Light is still in its testing phase. If you’re in Seattle, USA; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Manchester, UK; Hamburg, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Haifa, Israel; Abu Dhabi, UAE; Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, India; and Bali and Jakarta, Indonesia, there’s a chance you’ve already driven through a Green Light optimized junction.

However, if you’re a member of a city government, traffic engineer, or city planner and want to sign your metropolis up for Green Light, you can join the waiting list. Just fill out this Google Form.

The post A new Google AI project wants to improve the timing of traffic lights appeared first on Popular Science.

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The 2018 winner of PopSci’s annual Best of What’s New continues to impress. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still edging closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has ever achieved, and it’s setting new speed records in the process. According to a recent status update from the space agency, the Parker Solar Probe has broken its own record (again) for the fastest thing ever made by human hands—at an astounding clip of 394,736 mph.

The newest milestone comes thanks to a previous gravity-assist flyby from Venus, and occurred on September 27 at the midway point of the probe’s 17th “solar encounter” that lasted until October 3. As ScienceAlert also noted on October 9, the Parker Solar Probe’s speed would hypothetically allow an airplane to circumnavigate Earth about 15 times per hour, or skip between New York City and Los Angeles in barely 20 seconds. Not that any passengers could survive such a journey, but it remains impressive.

[Related: The fastest human-made object vaporizes space dust on contact.]

The latest pass-by also set its newest record for proximity, at just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s plasma “surface.” In order not to vaporize from temperatures as high as nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield to protect its sensitive instruments. These tools are measuring and imaging the sun’s surface to further researchers’ understanding of solar winds’ origins and evolution, as well as helping to forecast environmental changes in space that could affect life back on Earth. Last month, for example, the probe raced through one of the most intense coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever observed. In doing so, the craft helped prove a two-decade-old theory that CMEs interact with interplanetary dust, which will improve experts’ abilities in space weather forecasting.

Despite its punishing journey, NASA reports the Parker Solar Probe remains in good health with “all systems operating normally.” Despite its numerous records, the probe is far from finished with its mission; there are still seven more solar pass-bys scheduled through 2024. At that point (well within Mercury’s orbit), the Parker Solar Probe will finally succumb to the sun’s extreme effects and vaporize into the solar winds— “sort of a poetic ending,” as one mission researcher told PopSci in 2021.

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Officials from the US Coast Guard confirmed on Tuesday that a salvage mission successfully recovered the remaining debris from the OceanGate Titan submersible. The 22-foot-long vessel suffered an implosion en route to the Titanic almost four months ago. Five passengers died during the privately funded, $250,000-per-seat voyage intended to glimpse the historic tragedy’s remains, including OceanGate’s CEO and Titan pilot, Stockton Rush.

According to the Coast Guard’s October 10 press release, salvage efforts were underway via an agreement with the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage & Diving following initial recovery missions approximately 1,600-feet away from the Titanic wreckage. Searchers discovered and raised the remaining debris on October 4, then transferred them to an unnamed US port for further analysis and cataloging. The US Coast Guard also confirmed “additional presumed human remains” were “carefully recovered” from inside the debris, and have been sent for medical professional analysis.

[Related: OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’.]

OceanGate’s surface vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible approximately 105 minutes into its nearly 2.5 mile descent to the Titanic on June 18. Frantic, internationally coordinated search and rescue efforts scoured over 10,000 square surface miles of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the North Atlantic ocean floor. On June 22, OceanGate and US Coast Guard representatives confirmed its teams located remains indicative of a “catastrophic implosion” not far from the voyage’s intended destination.

Submersible experts had warned of such “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design for years, and repeatedly raised concerns about OceanGate’s disregard of standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to the company obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry experts, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the submersible’s “experimental” approach they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

“Your [safety standard] representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” reads a portion of the 2018 letter.

Although salvage efforts have concluded, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) plans to continue conducting evidence analysis alongside witness interviews “ahead of a public hearing regarding this tragedy.” A date for the hearing has not yet been announced, although as The Washington Post notes, the Coast Guard could recommend new deep-sea submersible regulations, as well as criminal charges to pursue.

OceanGate announced it suspended “all commercial and expedition operations” on July 6.

The post What the US Coast Guard found on their last OceanGate Titan salvage mission appeared first on Popular Science.

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Most modern homes have quite a few WiFi-connected gadgets trying to access the web at the same time. This usually results in strained broadband connections, especially when it comes to demanding activities like online gaming or video streaming. 

To help you manage the load, some routers (like those manufactured by Google, Netgear, Eero, and many others) offer a feature called Quality of Service (QoS). In simple terms, it lets you prioritize certain devices and types of traffic on your WiFi network, so they’re first in line for a high-speed connection whenever bandwidth becomes limited. 

Your router manufacturer may give it a different name, but a quick dig into the manual or an online search should tell you whether or not your particular device offers QoS. If it does, it’s worth getting familiar with the feature and what it can do, as prioritizing devices on your WiFi network can help reduce buffering times and avoid dropped connections when it’s most important.

What is Quality of Service, and how does it work?

The term “quality of service” has been around for decades, and it applies to all kinds of networks. When used in relation to your home’s WiFi, it means marking certain devices or types of activity as being more important than others. Whenever your router is chopping up your WiFi into individual slices, these marked gadgets and apps get first dibs.

Imagining pie slices is one way to think about QoS. Without it, everything connected to your router gets a similarly sized slice: Your PlayStation 5, the laptop the kids are using, the smart TV in the living room, and so on. When you enable QoS, you can give out bigger slices to that important Zoom call. Consequently, less important tasks, like those Windows updates downloading in the background, get smaller slices.

That said, using QoS to prioritize devices on your WiFi network doesn’t necessarily guarantee that those gadgets will always get a healthy, robust internet connection. It also doesn’t mean that the less important hardware on your network will slow to a crawl. A lot of what actually happens depends on the internet speed in your home.

[Related: 6 router settings you should change right now]

Video calls, online gaming, and streaming video tend to be first in line when you enable QoS. Other online tasks, from checking email to downloading updates, usually get reduced priority. 

Ultimately, how you use QoS is up to you, but your router will determine what type of control you get and how much. Some routers let you prioritize certain devices, such as gaming consoles, while others let you prioritize types of internet traffic, such as video calls. Some let you do both. If you’re shopping for a router upgrade, this is definitely a spec you should look out for.

If you have a Google Nest Wi-Fi mesh networking setup at home, for example, you can open up the Google Home app on your phone, tap Favorites, then Wifi, and choose Devices to see a list of the gadgets using your network. Select the device you want to prioritize, tap Prioritize device, decide how long you want it to receive VIP treatment, and hit Save to finish. Keep in mind that you can only give priority to one device at a time.

You can also use the Google Home app to choose the types of activity you want the network to put first. First, tap Wi-Fi, hit the cog icon to open Settings, and choose Preferred activities to tell the network what to prioritize. Your choices will include Video conferencing and Gaming, and the router will continue to give your picks bigger slices of the WiFi pie until you turn them off again.

[Related: What to do when your device won’t connect to WiFi]

If you’ve got a Netgear router, on the other hand, you’ll need to open a web browser, head to routerlogin.com, and log in using your router’s admin credentials (check the documentation that came with the router if you’re not sure what these are). From there, head to Advanced, Setup, and QoS setup to start making some changes.

Pick Upstream QoS, then Setup QoS rule, and finally Add Priority Rule. You can choose Online Gaming to make sure your games stay as lag-free as possible, Applications to prioritize a particular web app, Ethernet LAN port to specify a device connected to a router port, or MAC Address to single out a device hooked up to the network via WiFi.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2021.

The post How to give more WiFi to the devices that need it the most appeared first on Popular Science.

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On the second floor of the Walter E. Washington convention center in the District of Columbia sits a robot tanklet, designed to hunt drones. The uncrewed vehicle is the TRX SHORAD, and it is part of the display from defense giant General Dynamics Land Systems, assembled alongside the wares of over 650 other exhibitors for the annual Association of the United States Army meeting and exhibition. The TRX SHORAD suggests a future of robot-assisted combat, where attacks by drones are met with the automated speed and power of a companion robot built to destroy quadcopters.

TRX SHORAD is a composite name. TRX is the category name for General Dynamics 10-ton tracked robots, a platform that can accommodate a range of payloads including cargo and weapons. SHORAD is a military acronym for “Short Range Air Defense,” a category that is somewhat vague but broadly includes finding and destroying threats such as drones, helicopters, low-flying planes, and more.

“The TRX SHORAD is designed to bring a new dimension of combat power in SHORAD battalions and provides autonomy within a tiered, layered air defense,” reads the description from a General Dynamics video of the vehicle. 

[Related: The Army’s new 42-ton assault vehicle has a compelling backstory]

In the video, a blurred-out quadcopter with the rough contours of a DJI Phantom is spotted moving over a field. The TRX SHORAD tracks the drone across the sky, then pivots its turret, aiming what appears to be rockets and a large caliber gun at the drone. With a powerful “ka-thunk,” the robot’s turret fires on the quadcopter, and the still-blurred drone falls after a cloud of smoke. In a second demonstration, a similarly blurred-out quadcopter erupts into a smoke cloud and plummets. Unblurred, in the background of the video, is a drone that appears to be patterned like a DJI Inspire, which was likely used to capture much of the mid-air footage.

This is a kind of aerial warfare, but it takes place in the low sky, the space immediately above the heads of soldiers and vehicles. It’s a space previously occupied largely by projectiles, rockets and mortars and missiles. Drones, which offer greater scouting possibilities while also carrying weapons and facilitating attacks, change the fundamental dynamic of aerial threats to armies.

What is most crucial about the range of threats these weapons are designed to stop is that they exist at a cost, operational profile, and likely even altitude that is hard for the jet fighters of the Air Force to intercept and destroy in a timely way. In other words, a quadcopter can launch, scout, and return before a jet can be launched to respond. The Army used to maintain dedicated units called Air Defense Artillery to protect against aerial threats, but, as a report from the Congressional Research Service notes, “in the early 2000s, these ADA units were divested from the Army to meet force demands deemed more critical at that time. Decisionmakers accepted the increased risk that threat aircraft might pose to ground forces and other critical assets because they believed the U.S. Air Force could maintain air superiority.”

What has changed since the early 2000s is the preponderance of drones used by militaries. “Since 2005, potential threats from air and missile platforms that could threaten U.S. ground forces have significantly increased. The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) has increased, and UASs have been used successfully by both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” the CRS report notes.

These drones come in a range of sizes and variable threats. Small, hobbyist or commercial drones, like the DJI Phantom models used for anti-drone target practice, can carry cameras and be flown by anyone in minutes. In the summer of 2022, Russian infantry reported that moving in battle without quadcopters was like “fighting as ‘blind kittens.’” These drones can also be adapted to carry small bombs, the size of grenades or so. With a first-person view, or cameras allowing remote pilots to steer the drone as though they are on board, cheap drone bombers have been used to devastating effect in battle.

While commercial drones are commonly used in battle, drone scouts the size of small planes can fulfill a role once taken on by human-piloted aircraft, carrying weapons and intelligence missions at a greater distance than the short-range drones flown by infantry squads. Self-detonating drones, used as cheaper alternatives to cruise missiles, are abundant and deadly enough to constitute yet another new threat on the battlefield.

All of these threats pose a risk that is hard for an air force to directly address. This is the layer of layered defense that vehicles like the TRX SHORAD, or other SHORAD vehicles, are designed to fill. With bullets for small drones, larger projectiles for bigger and faster threats, and sensors to detect and track the movements of aircraft, TRX SHORAD could accompany soldiers, trucks, and tanks on maneuver, offering another line of defense against the crowded low skies of modern warfare.

Watch a video of TRX SHORAD below:

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Some robots are cuter than others—but Disney may have just revealed a contender for the most adorable yet. Last week at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Detroit, a team of researchers from Disney Research Studios in Zurich revealed a charismatic, child-sized bipedal bot that looks like a cross between a cleaned-up WALL-E and a baby chick. With stubby legs, a box-like head, and wiggly antennae, it doesn’t need to do much to look loveable.

But, this little robot packs a powerful amount of personality in the ways it moves—that little boxy head has four degrees of freedom, according to IEEE Spectrum, meaning it can look up, down, around, and tilt in a perplexed manner. Its five-degree-of-freedom legs and hips allow it to balance and waddle around indoors or out, and even catch itself when given a playful shove. 

“Most roboticists are focused on getting their bipedal robots to reliably walk,” Disney research scientist Morgan Pope tells IEEE Spectrum. “At Disney, that might not be enough—our robots may have to strut, prance, sneak, trot, or meander to convey the emotion that we need them to.”

[Related: Why humans feel bad for awkward robots.]

While Disney has long been one of the biggest names in animation, creating real-world characters that have the same magnetism as our favorite movie characters is complicated—after all, animation tools don’t always play fair with the laws of physics, team lead and research scientist Mortiz Bächer added. 

Enter a reinforcement learning-based pipeline that helps bring together animation magic and real-world physicality. The system is highly tunable, and apparently can train a robot new behavior on a single PC. These behaviors can be tweaked, and essentially allow the mostly 3D-printed robot to handle itself in public and stay in character. Additionally, this process opens up a whole new world of possibilities when it comes to making new robotic characters with different personalities, legs, arms, or other components.

[Related: Robotic ‘Super Monster Wolves’ are guarding Japanese towns against bears.]

These kinds of developments are not only fun, but could one day be useful since humans and robots may one day find themselves in closer quarters. Amazon has been playing around with automation for over a decade, and robots are finding their way into healthcare, conservation, and even into our burrito bowls. The team at Disney argues that having a robot that can show you a little bit of emotion or intent can go a long way in bridging the gap between people and potential new robot friends.

The post Disney’s new bipedal robot could have waddled out of a cartoon appeared first on Popular Science.

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Gaming might not be the primary reason you bought your Apple TV 4K box, but it’s a nice extra benefit—there’s a huge selection of games you can play on the device.

The main advantage of doing this is that the connected TV screen is much larger than the one on your iPhone or iPad, and if you’ve already bought games on these mobile devices, you won’t have to pay again to play them on the Apple TV 4K.

For more advanced and involved gameplay, you can even hook up a Bluetooth controller, giving you a true console-like experience, even if the selection of games doesn’t quite match the top-tier titles on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Getting started

For starters, you need a physical Apple TV 4K device to play games on a connected television. That means this article doesn’t apply to the Apple TV app you might have on your smart TV, or on a streaming dongle you’ve connected to it. The Apple TV app is for movies and shows only, while the Apple TV 4K box is for movies, shows, music, photos, and games.

Your Apple TV 4K box is already set up and ready to play games—though it’s always worth checking that you’re running the very latest tvOS software, which you can do through Settings > System > Software Updates > Update Software. When up to date, you’ll have the latest bug fixes and performance optimizations installed, so the games you pick should run as smoothly as possible.

It’s also worth checking that the Apple TV 4K is outputting video at the best possible quality: 4K resolution, with HDR, at a 60 hertz refresh rate. You can do this via Settings > Video and Audio > Format, though the available formats you see will depend on the TV you’ve connected your Apple box to.

How to find games for the Apple TV 4K

You shouldn’t have any trouble finding games to play: Open the App Store (the icon showing a white “A” on a blue background) from the home screen, then scroll across to Games to see what’s available. The store will only show you games that will work on the Apple TV 4K, so there’s no danger of installing something that’s incompatible. Scroll across to Purchased to see games you’ve bought and installed on other Apple devices.

If you subscribe to Apple Arcade for $4.99 a month, you get access to an additional pool of more than 200 games. To find them, you can switch to the Arcade tab in the App Store or use the Apple Arcade shortcut on the home screen (an icon showing a white joystick on a red background). Select any game to see details about it, including the category it’s in and the age rating attached to it.

[Related: 14 tips for your Apple TV 4K]

Because your Apple TV 4K box is connected to a display far bigger than the one on your smartphone or tablet, the games that work best will be those that make full use of that extra screen space. If you need inspiration, the games we’ve enjoyed on the Apple TV 4K include the endless scroller Alto’s Odyssey ($4.99), the addictive puzzler Donut County ($4.99), and the classic car-dodging adventure Crossy Road (free with in-app purchases).

How to add a game controller to the Apple TV 4K

As you make your way around the App Store and Apple Arcade portal, you’ll notice certain games say a controller is required, others say a controller is optional, and some don’t say anything at all. For simple single-tap games like the aforementioned Alto’s Odyssey, for example, you can play using just the Apple TV 4K remote.

For more advanced titles, you’ll need to connect a controller like the one you might use on your PS5 or Xbox Series X. Just about any standard gamepad will do, as long as it supports Bluetooth—including the ones that came with your PlayStation or Xbox. If you’re going to buy one, though, make sure it supports the Apple TV 4K.

To connect the controller, you’ll need to make sure your controller is in pairing mode (its instructions or a quick web search will tell you how to do this if you’re not sure), then go to Settings > Remotes and Devices > Bluetooth. The controller should appear on this list, but if not, follow the How to Pair Game Controllers link for extra help.

Play Apple TV 4K games from an iPhone, iPad, or Mac

If you prefer playing a game on your iPhone or iPad, but still want to take advantage of the larger screen your Apple TV 4K is connected to, you can beam them over from your mobile device—as long as everything’s on the same WiFi network. This uses Apple’s AirPlay protocol for streaming video and audio, which is supported by most Apple devices—it’s not quick enough for super-fast gameplay, but it works fine for slower-paced games.

On the iPhone or iPad you’re using, swipe down from the top right corner of the screen to bring up the Control Center, then tap the Screen Mirroring icon (two overlapping rectangles). Choose your Apple TV 4K from the list, and the display will be duplicated on your TV. This is a good way to play games that aren’t officially supported by the Apple TV 4K, and you can always add a controller to your iPhone or iPad too.

[Related: 24 iPhone settings that feel like secrets]

If you’re on a Mac, click the Control Center icon on the menu bar (it looks like two toggle switches), choose Screen Mirroring, and select the Apple TV 4K box you want to connect to. Click Screen Mirroring again and choose Use As Separate Display to have the Apple TV 4K act as a second monitor, where you can display any games that can run on your Mac, while still controlling them with your computer. Click Screen Mirroring and the name of the Apple TV 4K to break the connection.

The post Your Apple TV 4K is secretly good for video games appeared first on Popular Science.

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HANDMADE ART can be an enchanting expression of the world, whether it’s displayed above a roaring fireplace, hung inside a chic gallery, or seen by millions in a museum. But new works don’t always require a human touch. Computer-generated art has been around since British painter Harold Cohen engineered a system, named AARON, to automatically sketch freehand-like drawings in the early 1970s. But in the past 50 years, and especially in the past decade, artificial intelligence programs have used neural networks and machine learning to accomplish much more than pencil lines. Here are some of the numbers behind the automated art boom. 

Six-figure bid

In 2018, a portrait of a blurred man created by Paris-based art collective Obvious sold for a little more than $400,000, which is about the average sale price of a home in Connecticut. Christie’s auctioned off Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy, at nearly 45 times the estimated value—making it the most expensive work of AI art to date.

A giant database 

While an artist’s inspiration can come from anything in the world, AI draws from databases that collect digitized works of human creativity. LAION-5B, an online set of nearly 6 billion pictures, has enabled computer models like Stable Diffusion to make derivative images, such as the headshot avatars remixed into superheroic or anime styles that went viral on Twitter in 2022.

Mass production

A caricaturist on the sidewalk of a busy city can whip up a cheeky portrait within a few minutes and a couple dozen drawings a day. Compare that to popular image generators like DALL-E, which can make millions of unique images daily. But all that churn comes at a cost. By some estimates, a single generative AI prompt has a carbon footprint four to five times higher than that of a search engine query.

The new impressionism

Polish painter Greg Rutkowski is known for using his classical technique and style to depict fantastical landscapes and characters such as dragons. Now AI is imitating it—much to Rutkowski’s displeasure. Stable Diffusion users have submitted his name as a prompt tens of thousands of times, according to Lexica, a database of generated art. The painter has joined other artists in a lawsuit against Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Stability AI, arguing that those companies violated human creators’ copyrights.

Art critics 

Only about one-third of Americans consider AI generators able to produce “visual images from keywords” a major advance, and fewer than half think it’s even a minor one, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. More people say the technology is better suited to boost biology, medicine, and other fields. But there was one skill that AI rated even worse in: writing informative news articles like this one.

Read more about life in the age of AI:

• Will we ever be able to trust health advice from an AI?
• Why AI could be a big problem for the 2024 presidential election
• This AI program could teach you to be better at chess
• The first AI started a 70-year debate
• The logic behind AI chatbots like ChatGPT is surprisingly basic

Or check out all of our PopSci+ stories.

The post 5 surprising stats about AI-generated art’s takeover appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Black Friday has long reigned as the champion of cheap TVs. But Amazon’s October Prime Day is no slouch when it comes to big-screen bargains. A huge new TV will serve you well whether you want to play video games, enjoy sporting events, or binge-watch the latest seasons of your favorite shows. Jumping up to a bigger, brighter, higher resolution set can get expensive—especially if you’re interested in the latest screen technologies like OLED and MiniLED—but Prime Day deals make the upgrade a lot more palatable. You’ll appreciate the investment, no matter how big or how small, each time you feel like channel surfing.

Note: You’ll have to be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of most of these deals, so be sure you’re signed up before making a purchase.

Samsung LS03B $1,597.99 (Was $1,997.99)

SEE IT

Samsung’s LS03B (colloquially referred to as the “Frame TV”) has a double purpose. On one hand, it’s an ultra-thin 65-inch 4K TV that supports HDR (high dynamic range) for better color reproduction, has Amazon’s Alexa built-in, which allows for voice control, and an anti-reflective matte display. All of these features make it a great set for streaming your favorite TV shows or movies and playing the latest video games.

On the other hand, you can engage this TV’s “art mode,” and it’ll cycle through high-resolution digital images from a library of over 2,100 new and classic works of art. Art mode is initiated each time you turn the TV off and costs either $5 per month or $50 per year. Individual pieces of art can be purchased a la carte for different prices. The Frame’s matte display is essential for “art mode” to work because it won’t reflect natural or artificial light like a typical screen would.

The best Samsung TV deals

• Samsung 65-inch QLED 4K Q80C, $1,297.99 (Was $1,497.99)
• Samsung 77-inch OLED 4K S95C, $3,797 (Was $4,797)
• Samsung M70B, $299.99 (Was $399.99)
• Samsung CU7000, $667.99 (Was $747.99)
• Samsung UN43CU8000FXZA, $389 (Was $439.99)

The best Sony TV deals

• Sony X80K, $648 (Was $699.99)
• Sony X85K, $698 (Was $849.99)
• Sony XR65X90L, $1,098 (Was $1,499.99)
• Sony XR A80L, $1,798 (Was $1,998)
• Sony X93L, $1,698 (Was $1898)
• Sony KD43X77L, $398 (Was $449.99)
• Sony X93L, $3,798 (Was $4,499.99)

The best Hisense TV deals

• Hisense 65U6K, $548 (Was $799.99)
• Hisense 55U8K, $748 (Was $1,099.99)
• Hisense U6HF, $199.99 (Was $499.99)
• Hisense 43A4H, $178 (Was $239.99)
• Hisense 50U6G, $429.99 (Was $534)
• Hisense 75U7K, $997 (Was $1,499)
• Hisense 85U8K, $1,799 (Was $2,699)

The best TCL deals

• TCL QM8, $1,498 (Was $2,299.99)
• TCL S3, $179.99 (Was $229.99)
• TCL 65S450F, $379.99 (Was $529.99)
• TCL 50S450R, $279.99 (Was $349.99)

The best XGIMI projector deals

• XGIMI MoGo 2 Pro 1080P Portable Projector with WiFi and Bluetooth, $500 w/ clickable coupon (was $599)
• XGIMI MoGo 2 Portable Projector with WiFi and Bluetooth, $299 (Was $399)
• XGIMI Horizon Pro 4K Projector, $1,179 (Was $1,699)
• XGIMI Halo+ 1080P Portable Projector, $649 (Was $849)
• XGIMI Aura 4K UHD Ultra Short Throw Laser Projector, $1,599 (Was $1,999)

The best Roku streamer deals

• Roku Express 4K+, $29 (Was $39)
• Roku Streaming Stick 4K, $37.99 (Was $49)
• Roku Express 4K with Voice Remote Pro, $49.99 (Was $59)
• Roku Streambar 4K HDR Streaming Device & Premium Roku Soundbar, $99 (Was $129)

Accessorizing other activities? Take a look at our ongoing list of Big Deal Days discounts.

Want more deals delivered to your inbox weekly? Sign up for PopSci’s Deals newsletter and save money on stuff you’ll really use.

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Amazon hosts Prime Day, but it’s also an active participant. The company has slashed the prices of its Kindles, Fire TV streaming devices, Ring cameras, eero WiFi routers, and more. These gadgets can help you finish your work efficiently and then kick back once the day is over to enjoy your favorite TV shows and movies. Whether you’re treating yourself or want to get a jumpstart on holiday shopping, there’s a little something for everybody in these deals.

Note: You’ll have to be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of most of these deals, so be sure you’re signed up before making a purchase.

Ring Video Doorbell $54.99 (was $99.99)

SEE IT

Ring’s Video Doorbell is among the best-known smart home security gadgets and is down to its lowest price ever for Prime Day. The doorbell’s camera can record 1080P video, has a night vision to capture clear images in low-light situations, and a motion sensor to alert you when someone has approached your home. You’ll need to connect this doorbell to a home with preexisting wiring, but battery-powered models are also on sale—see more on that below.

Once the doorbell is installed, you can set it up and manage it using the Ring app. You also have the option to subscribe to the Ring Protect Plan, which comes with cloud storage for your video clips and costs $3.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Nobody likes to think about what to do if a burglary happens, but the Ring Video Doorbell can act as a deterrent and leave you with valuable evidence if someone does happen to get inside.

The best Echo deals

• Echo Pop, $17.99 (Was $39.99)
• Amazon Echo Dot, $22.99 (Was $49.99)
• Echo (4th Gen), $54.99 (Was $99.99)
• Echo Show 5, $39.99 (Was $89.99)
• Echo Studio, $154.99 (Was $199.99)
• Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen), $159.99 (Was $249.99)

The best Fire TV deals

• Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, $19.99 (Was $39.99)
• Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, $22.99 (Was $49.99)
• Amazon Fire TV Cube, $109.99 (Was $139.99)
• Insignia F30 Series LED 4K TV, $169.99 (Was $269.99)
• Amazon Omni Series 4K TV, $389.99 (Was $549.99)
• Amazon Omni QLED Series 4K TV, $439.99 (Was $599.99)

The best Fire Tablet deals

• Amazon Fire 7 tablet, $39.99 (Was $59.99)
• Amazon Fire HD 8, $59.99 (Was $99.99)
• Amazon Fire HD 10, $74.99 (Was $149.99)
• Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Pro Tablet, $74.99 (Was $149.99)
• Amazon Fire Max 11, $149.99 (Was $229.99)

The best Kindle deals

• Kindle Kids, $79.99 (Was $119.99)
• Kindle Paperwhite Kids, $109.99 (Was $169.99)
• Amazon Kindle Scribe, $289.99 (Was $369.99

The best Ring deals

• Ring Indoor Cam (2nd Gen), $29.99 (Was $59.99)
• Ring Video Doorbell, $54.99 (Was $99.99)
• Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Plus, $119.99 (Was $199.99)
• Ring Video Doorbell Wired, $34.99 (Was $64.99)
• Ring Spotlight Cam Plus, $119.99 (Was $169.99)
• Ring Alarm 14-Piece Kit, $197.99 (Was $329.99)
• Ring Video Doorbell Pro, $99.99 (Was $169.99)
• Ring Battery Doorbell Plus, $129.99 (Was $179.99)
• Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, $199.99 (Was $249.99)
• Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2, $149.99 (Was $249.99)
• Ring Stick Up Cam, $59.99 (Was $99.99)

The best Blink camera deals

• Blink Outdoor (3rd Generation) camera, $99.99 (Was $249.99)
• Blink Outdoor (3rd Generation) camera [2 pack], $99.99 (Was $249.99)
• Blink Outdoor (3rd Generation) camera [3 pack], $99.99 (Was $249.99)
• Blink Outdoor (3rd Generation) camera [5 pack], $189.99 (Was $379.99)
• Blink Outdoor (3rd Generation) camera [6 pack], $239.99 (Was $479.98)

The best Eero router deals

• eero mesh WiFi router, $44.99 (Was $69.99)
• eero 6 mesh WiFi system, $159.99 (Was $199.99)
• eero Pro 6 mesh WiFi 6 system, $239.99 (Was $399.99)
• eero 6+ mesh WiFi system, $194.99 (Was $299.99)
• eero Pro 6E mesh WiFi System, $399.99 (Was $549.99)

Accessorizing other activities? Take a look at our ongoing list of Big Deal Days discounts.

Want more deals delivered to your inbox weekly? Sign up for PopSci’s Deals newsletter and save money on stuff you’ll really use.

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Lamborghini, the brand that started making supercars to compete with Ferrari 60 years ago, is starting a new era. Steeped in a history of loud and powerful V8, V10, and V12 engines, the Raging Bull has launched its first “high performance electrified vehicle,” a hybrid called Revuelto. 

While watered-down performance may be a possibility for some mass-produced cars, that’s not going to fly for Lamborghini. Instead of backing down to a smaller engine and tacking on an electric motor, the brand opted to attach two motors to the front and one to the back and matched them to a new V12, the lightest one the automaker has ever built. Then Lamborghini whipped up a recipe for a battery that regenerates so quickly that it never gets all the way down to zero, and added a plug-in port for good measure.

All in, the system adds up to an astonishing total of 1,001 horsepower and more than 800 pound-feet of torque. That officially makes it the most powerful plug-in hybrid on the market. Lamborghini started from the ground up for this car, fashioning a new carbon fiber structure (picture a Lego base plate upon which brick houses are built) made to be as light as possible. And then it went to work making sure the Revuelto was as technologically advanced as it could be with its electronics.

To top it off, the Revuelto is also registering a significant emissions reduction, which Lamborghini says tops 30 percent over its predecessor, the Aventador. For a supercar, this is a big deal. The Revuelto is capable of about 6 miles in all-electric range, which loud-engine-averse neighbors will appreciate as the car pulls away in silence. 

Can the Revuelto still carry the brand’s name with pride, even as a hybrid? Here’s what we think after driving it on the Autodromo Vallelunga track in Rome, Italy.  

Melding design and engineering

Hybrids are hot right now, as are EVs. But Lamborghini has not gone soft and bent to the market, says the brand’s chief technical officer, Rouven Mohr. The small-batch automaker has created a hybrid that harnesses electric power without diluting the car’s core power, and that’s no small feat.

“To us, hybrid doesn’t mean sacrificing performance,” Mohr says.

Mohr, along with his team and the stylings of head of design Mitja Borkert, started with the V12 engine as a centerpiece. Lamborghini fans equate the sound of its iconic powerplant with the full experience, and erasing that part of the brand’s DNA wasn’t an option, Mohr emphasizes. 

Borkert also went to work creating a body shape that evokes ghosts of models past. After commissioning 17 exploratory models that filled up his studio, Borkert took inspiration from Lamborghini’s Countach and Diablo, along with elements from fighter jets and Ducati superbikes. He raised the roof and added more legroom than the Avendator, the Revuelto’s predecessor, making it easier to get in and out.

[Related: The new Lamborghini Revuelto is a powerful hybrid beast]

Along with a riot of Y-shaped designs repeated throughout the car on the headlamps and on the dash, Borkert suggested an opening that leaves the engine bay exposed. Not only does it look cool, he says, it serves an important purpose: natural engine cooling. Lamborghini also opted to implement a long, skinny battery that is easily cooled from the outside to the center; heat management is a key factor for performance.

Tire-maker Bridgestone contributed to the Revuelto by creating bespoke performance Potenza Sport tires with wide footprints and grippy tread, especially the top-level option that is equally capable on the road as they are on the track.

“It’s not an easy car to fit tires,” Mohr says. “It weighs more [than the Aventador] and the power profile is huge.”

Lamborghini zooms in on technology

Lamborghini may have been seen more for its muscle and brawn than its brains in the past, but that’s changing, as well. The new Revuelto features intelligent torque distribution that balances the weight precisely from side to side and front to back so that cornering feels planted.

Aventador enthusiasts may say the Revuelto loses the raw edge of its older sibling, but after a day on the track, I say the new setup polishes the diamond. Even hurling the car toward the corner after a breathtaking straightaway, I never felt as though I could lose control. The massive carbon ceramic brakes gave the hybrid the stopping power it needed and gave me the confidence to push it. 

Plus, the infotainment system upgrade is the best I’ve seen in a Lamborghini, equipped with Alexa connectivity and a set of widgets on the modest screen that can be rearranged and shared with the passenger on their own screen.

The real test is on the road and the track. While Lamborghini says it isn’t pursuing the crown for the fastest car on the planet (Mohr wryly says the race for best lap times in the supercar world is a “little bit crowdy” at the moment), it’s still lightning quick. But the best part is the feel of the drivetrain, which is completely seamless between the V12 and its electric helpers. Pressing the accelerator down in Corsa (track) mode and getting to 150 miles per hour on a straightaway is ridiculously smooth and quick. Top speed in the new supercar is 350 kilometers per hour (about 218 miles per hour).

Lamborghini is looking toward the future with the Revuelto, and it’s looking very good. The brand has been logging record sales, and with an all-electric concept—the Lanzador—on the table and a plug-in Urus SUV confirmed, it’s not looking back.

The post Lamborghini’s new supercar is the most powerful plug-in hybrid on the market appeared first on Popular Science.

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“Are you drinking enough water?”

The question is so ubiquitous that it’s become meme canon in recent years. But what may be an annoying reminder to one person is often a logistical challenge for people dealing with mobility issues like cerebral palsy (CP). After learning about the potential physical hurdles involved in staying hydrated, two undergraduate engineering students at Rice University set out to design a robotic tool to help disabled users easily access their drinks as needed. The result, appropriately dubbed “RoboCup,” is not only a simple, relatively easy-to-construct device—it’s one whose plans are already available to anyone online for free.

According to a recent university profile, Thomas Kutcher and Rafe Neathery began work on their invention after being approached by Gary Lynn, a local Houstonian living with CP who oversees a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness for the condition. According to Kutcher, a bioengineering major, their RoboCup will hopefully remove the need for additional caregiver aid and thus “grant users greater freedom.”

[Related: How much water should you drink in a day?]

RoboCup was by no means perfect from the outset, and the undergraduates reportedly went through numerous iterations before settling on their current design. In order to optimize their tool to help as many people as possible, Kutcher and Rafe spoke to numerous caregiving and research professionals about how to best improve their schematics.

“They really liked our project and confirmed its potential, but they also pointed out that in order to reach as many people as possible, we needed to incorporate more options for building the device, such as different types of sensors, valves and mechanisms for mounting the device on different wheelchair types,” Kutcher said in their October 6 profile.

The biggest challenge, according to the duo, was balancing simplification alongside functionality and durability. In the end, the pair swapped out an early camelback version for a mounted cup-and-straw design, which reportedly is both aesthetically more pleasing to users, as well as less intrusive.

In a demonstration video, Lynn is shown activating a small sensor near his left hand, which automatically pivots an adjustable straw towards his mouth. He can then drink as much as he wants, then alert the sensor again to swivel the straw back to a neutral position.

Lynn, who tested the various versions of RoboCup, endorsed the RoboCup’s ability to offer disabled users more independence in their daily lives, and believes that “getting to do this little task by themselves will enhance the confidence of the person using the device.”

Initially intended to just be a single semester project, Kutcher and Neathery now intend to continue refining their RoboCup, including investigating ways it could be adapted to people dealing with other forms of mobility issues. In the meantime, the RoboCup is entered in World Cerebral Palsy Day’s “Remarkable Designa-thon,” which promotes new products and services meant to help those with CP. And, as it just so happens, voting is open to the public from October 6-13.

The post College students invented an easy device for cerebral palsy patients to drink on their own appeared first on Popular Science.

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Despite being the central hub for most of our work, email can be a real productivity killer. Everyone is vying for your attention at all hours of the day, and that little unread icon taunts you until you give in and re-open your inbox to see what’s happening. This, of course, interrupts the flow of your actual job.

I’m a slave to the notification icon as much as anyone. In an ideal world, I’d learn to keep pushing forward and deal with email when I actually have time between other tasks. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. So instead of changing my own behavior, I’ve learned some Gmail tricks that will help me spend less time emailing and more time working.

Pause your Gmail inbox to stop the barrage of notifications

Yes, you could just close your email tab, but chances are you actually need access to some messages for work. In that case, you need a Gmail add-on called Inbox Pause. Install the extension in your browser, and you’ll see a big Pause button on Gmail’s left sidebar—click it whenever you need to stop incoming messages. Don’t worry, you won’t miss anything, and you can choose to let certain senders through if you’re expecting something urgent.

[Related: 9 advanced Gmail searches that will dig up stuff you never knew you missed]

If you’d rather not install a third-party extension for this job, there are some other workarounds that may help. If you only need access to old messages and would like to prevent any online distractions, you can use Gmail offline, for example. Just click the cog icon in the top right corner of your screen, hit See all settings, and select the Offline tab. There, check the box next to Enable offline mail and finish with Save Changes. This feature will let you view your email even when you’re completely disconnected from the web. (Of course, this only works if you don’t need the rest of the internet for your work).

You could also set up your Gmail account using a third-party email client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail. This will allow you to open the app and put it in offline mode whenever you want some peace, so you can keep using the web while your email stays frozen. Just head to Gmail’s Settings, go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, find IMAP access, and check the box next to Enable IMAP. This will allow those desktop programs to access your email. 

Snooze unimportant emails for later

Despite the advice of productivity experts, my inbox doubles as a to-do list. (Hey, I’m not the only one.) It just works for me: unread emails act as a constant reminder that something requires action.

Not all of these tasks require an immediate response, though, and having them sit unread in my inbox nags at me. Plus, they make it harder to see the urgent stuff that’s mixed in. For that, Gmail’s Snooze button has become my new best friend: on desktop, hover over the message in question and click the little clock icon that appears to the right, or right-click on an email and select Snooze. On mobile, slide an unopened message to the left or right, depending on your personal configuration.

Snoozing banishes an email from your inbox until a time you specify—say, tomorrow morning when you have free time to schedule an appointment with the mechanic. That way, you can keep things clean and anxiety-free while you take care of what’s really important at the moment.

Schedule emails to send at the most opportune time

Dealing with email as it comes in is rarely a productive use of your time. It’s better to batch a few email sessions—say, once every couple of hours—and knock everything out in a single chunk. That way, you aren’t constantly interrupting your momentum with an unrelated task.

The problem is, it’s hard to time those inbox sessions perfectly for every email. Gmail’s Schedule button lets you write the email when you want and schedule it to send later—so it arrives precisely when you mean it to.

Once you’ve written your email and chosen its recipient, click the downward arrow to the right of the Send button, then hit Schedule send. Gmail will suggest three predetermined times for you, including tomorrow afternoon and Monday morning. If none of those work, you can click Pick a time & date, and use the emerging calendar to pick the exact moment you want your message to hit its destination. Finish by clicking Schedule send. On the Gmail app, the process is similar: just tap the three dots in the top right corner of your screen and select Schedule send. 

Your scheduled messages will sit and wait in the main Gmail sidebar within the Scheduled folder. If you need to make changes or unschedule any of them, you can find them all there. 

Stop wasting your time on typing

It may seem silly to say that “writing email is a waste of time,” but in the age of automation, it’s true. Gmail has a number of features that can help you draft messages more quickly, so you can get back to doing actual work.

Templates have been around for ages, though they used to be known as “canned responses.” These allow you to save certain blocks of text that you use often and insert them into any email with a few clicks. For example, you could use them to enter your address, or ship off a form response to a question you get asked every day.

If you have a Google Workspace account (through your employer or education institution, for example), you can create a template by opening a new message, typing the text you want to save, and clicking the three dots in the bottom right corner of your message. On the emerging menu, hover over Templates and choose Save draft as template. Then, when crafting a reply to an email, you can go to that same menu to insert text from any template—you’ll be able to recognize them by the subject line.

Smart Compose on Gmail is another useful feature, and it’s available for all users. This tool will predict what it thinks you’re about to type and shows the rest of the sentence in gray text. You can press Tab to complete the prediction, and keep on typing. If you disabled this feature—I get it, it’s distracting—you should give it another shot. Once you get used to it, it’s amazing how quickly you can breeze through some messages. If you want to skip the typing altogether, you can choose one of Gmail’s response chips, which you may see when replying to an email. These AI-generated options might be all you need, so you can choose one of three mostly innocuous phrases like “That sounds good!” or “Have a great weekend too!” and hit Send.  

Google recently integrated its AI platform, Bard, into the web version of Gmail. If you signed up for Google Workspace Labs, you can enable Duet AI—an experimental AI-email composer that will write your message for you after you give it a prompt. To sign up, you can visit the Google Labs website and choose to join the Workspace Lab. 

Once you do, a multicolor navigation bar will appear when you compose new Gmail messages —click Help me write to get started, and then write a prompt. You can try anything, like “compose a happy holidays message for a potential client,” or “an email apologizing to my kid’s teacher after they bit the classroom pet.” Hit Create to see the results. You can also ask Duet AI to give you a second draft by clicking Recreate, or request changes—click Refine and then choose to Formalize, Elaborate, or Shorten. When you see something you like, click Insert to add the message to the body text. Remember that AI takes a lot of creative and factual liberties, so you’ll need to make sure everything looks good and accurate before you hit Send. 

Finally, you can use Gmail’s multiple signatures feature to switch between different sign-offs based on who you’re emailing. Just go to Settings, and under General, scroll down to Signature and click Create new. Once you have everything you need, click the pen icon in a Compose window to switch between them.

Mute distracting email threads

I have friends and family that like to start long, multi-person email threads sharing silly jokes, political debates, or other time-wasting nonsense. Unfortunately, there’s no way to leave a thread completely without nagging someone to move you to BCC. But Gmail offers the next-best thing: the Mute feature, which prevents the thread from showing up in your inbox when new messages arrive.

[Related: Gmail’s new email layouts will give a newsletter vibe to all your messages]

To mute a thread in Gmail, right-click on it and choose Mute—that’s it. Further messages will still be marked as unread, but they’ll skip the inbox altogether and enter the bowels of your All Mail tab, never to be seen unless you search for them. That way, you can catch up on those threads later, if you want—and you can even unmute them if they become relevant.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2020. 

The post 9 Gmail features to get you out of your inbox and back to work appeared first on Popular Science.

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The F-35 is built for a war fought with missiles. The United States’ newest stealth fighter comes in three flavors: F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy. All variants are built around a shared architecture and mission: to destroy enemy targets, while evading detection long enough to return and fly another day. These missions are, thanks to the specific nature of stealth, at cross-purposes: weapons carried externally by a plane make it more visible to radar, undermining stealth, while only storing weapons internally limits what a fighter can bring to battle. 

On September 25, the Air Force publicly stated it had earlier that month awarded a contract to defense giant Northrop Grumman Defense Systems to start work on the Stand-in Attack Weapon, or “SiAW.” The contract, with a value of up to $705 million, is for “an advanced air-to-surface missile providing stand-in platforms the ability to rapidly strike a wide variety of targets.”

“Air-to-surface” encompasses virtually everything not in the sky or orbit as a potential target, and given that the F-35 is designed to fight at sea as well as over land, it includes ships, tanks, buildings, and anything else below. Northrop Grumman, in a September 25 release, emphasized that the SiAW will “provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets as part of an enemy’s anti-access/area denial environment.”

“Anti-access/area denial” is modern military jargon for an old concept. The terms essentially mean weapons that will attack and threaten to destroy planes, boats, and other enemies that move too close to the defenses. Because weapon technologies adapt, the military uses a catch-all term, though some specific examples are useful for understanding these techniques. On land and in the sea, mines are a kind of denial technology, as they threaten anyone attempting passage with an abrupt and explosive end. For aircraft, anti-air missiles can deny aircraft safe flight, as can jammers that interfere with sensors like radar or GPS. For marines advancing up a beach, or soldiers fighting through a forest, artillery fire is an attempt to deny access. Anti-ship missiles, like their anti-air counterparts, threaten any ship that advances within range, promising a watery death should they hit a vulnerable enough spot.

In peacetime, these defenses serve as a warning, as an ominous threat of what a country could threaten should hostilities break out. Should the United States go to war against a country with such defenses, it will want to destroy as many of them as it can, while allowing its own forces to get close enough. This is where a weapon like the SiAW comes into play. 

The SiAW is designed to be carried internally by the F-35, Janes reports. That means the stealth fighters can use the weapon without compromising their stealth, as weapons carried externally make the planes more visible on radar. Stealth is largely a material and structural technology, where the specific shape and texture of a plane are used to minimize how few radio waves are reflected back towards the radar that emitted them. Earlier in September, the efficacy of this stealth was clearly on display, after an F-35B pilot ejected and the Marine Corps turned to the public for help tracking down the missing plane.

Stealth ensures that the F-35s can get closer to their targets than they would without it. Air and Space Forces Magazine reports that the Air Force is setting the targets for the SiAW as air defense radars, command posts, ballistic and cruise missile launchers, GPS jamming systems, anti-satellite systems, and “other high-value or fleeting targets.”  Destroying any and all of those targets make it easier for other parts of the military to advance and survive, including jets with more weapons that aren’t stealthy. 

The Air Force has declined to give the range for the new SiAW weapon, though the operating assumption is that it will be longer range than the High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) air-to-surface missiles in use today. Those missiles have a stated range of over 30 miles. The Air Force aims to have the SiAW at an initial operational capability by 2026; it expects to buy 400 of the missiles by 2028, with up to 3,000 eventually.

Should the missile deliver as promised, it will allow F-35s to launch attacks on targets at useful ranges, giving the military more options than just long-range cruise missiles to destroy important targets in advance of an assault. Unlike cruise missiles, SiAWs fired from F-35s or other planes will be able to catch more mobile vehicles, ensuring that if there’s a weapon that can be relocated, the missile is a tool to destroy it before it disappears.

The post The F-35 fighter jet is getting a stealthier air-to-surface missile appeared first on Popular Science.

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Four-legged robots can pull off a lot of complex tasks, but there’s a reason you don’t often see them navigating “busy” environments like forests or vine-laden overgrowth. Despite all their abilities, most on-board AI systems remain pretty bad at responding to all those physical variables in real-time. It might feel like second nature to us, but it only takes the slightest misstep in such situations to send a quadrupedal robot tumbling.

After subjecting their own dog bot to a barrage of obstacle course runs, however, a team at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering is now offering a solid step forward, so to speak, for robots deployed in the wild. According to researchers, teaching a quadrupedal robot to reactively retract its legs while walking provides the best gait for both navigating and untangling out of obstacles in its way.

[Related: How researchers trained a budget robot dog to do tricks.]

“Real-world obstacles might be stiff like a rock or soft like a vine, and we want robots to have strategies that prevent tripping on either,” Justin Yim, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign engineering professor and project collaborator, said in CMU’s recent highlight.

The engineers compared multiple stride strategies on a quadrupedal robot while it tried to walk across a short distance interrupted by multiple, low-hanging ropes. The robot quickly entangled itself while high-stepping, or walking with its knees angled forward, but retracting its limbs immediately after detecting an obstacle allowed it to smoothly cross the stretch of floor.

“When you take robots outdoors, the entire problem of interacting with the environment becomes exponentially more difficult because you have to be more deliberate in everything that you do,” David Ologan, a mechanical engineering master’s student, told CMU. “Your system has to be robust enough to handle any unforeseen circumstances or obstructions that you might encounter. It’s interesting to tackle that problem that hasn’t necessarily been solved yet.”

[Related: This robot dog learned a new trick—balancing like a cat.]

Although wheeled robots may still prove more suited for urban environments, where the ground is generally flatter and infrastructures such as ramps are more common, walking bots could hypothetically prove much more useful in outdoor settings. Researchers believe integrating their reactive retraction response into existing AI navigation systems could help robots during outdoor search-and-rescue missions. The newly designed daintiness might also help quadrupedal robots conduct environmental surveying without damaging their surroundings.

“The potential for legged robots in outdoor, vegetation-based environments is interesting to see,” said Ologan. “If you live in a city, a wheeled platform is probably a better option… There is a trade-off between being able to do more complex actions and being efficient with your movements.”

The post Watch robot dogs train on obstacle courses to avoid tripping appeared first on Popular Science.

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is getting a new supercomputer, Aurora, which its scientists will use to study optimal nuclear reactor designs. As of now, the lab is using a system called Polaris, a 44-petaflops machine that can perform about 44 quadrillion calculations per second. 

Aurora, which is currently being installed, will have more than 2 exaflops of computing power, giving it the capacity to do 2 quintillion calculations per second—almost 50 times as many as the old system. Once the unprecedented machine comes online, it’s expected to lead the TOP500 list that ranks the most powerful computers in the world. It was expected to start running earlier, but has had delays due to manufacturing issues. 

A more powerful supercomputer means that nuclear scientists can simulate the fundamental physics underlying the reactions with as much detail as possible, which will allow them to make better assessments of overall safety and efficiency of new reactor designs. Reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Here, a process called fission happens, leading to a series of nuclear chain reactions that produce incredible levels of heat, which is used to turn water into steam to spin a turbine that then creates electricity.

“Anyone out there that’s actively designing a reactor is going to use what we call ‘faster running tools’ that will look at things on a system-level scale and make approximations for the reactor core itself,” Dillon Shaver, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, tells Popsci. “[At Argonne] we are doing as close to the fundamental physical calculations as possible, which requires a huge amount of resolution and a huge amount of unknowns. It translates into a huge amount of computation power.”

Shaver’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the math that prevents reactors from melting down. That involves a deep understanding of how different types of coolant liquids behave, how fluid flows around the different reactor components, and what kind of heat transfer occurs. 

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

According to the Department of Energy, “all commercial nuclear reactors in the US are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.” And most active light-water reactors have a fuel pin geometry design, where large arrays of fuel pins (large tubes that contain the fuel, usually uranium, needed for fission reactions) are arranged in a rectangular lattice.

The next generation of reactor designs that Shaver and his team are investigating include wire-wrapped liquid metal fast reactors. The reactors are placed in a triangular lattice instead of a rectangular one, and are also layered with a thin wire that forms a kind of helix around the fuel pin. “This leads to some really complicated flow behavior because the [liquid metals like sodium] has to move around that wire and usually causes a spiral pattern to develop. That has some interesting implications on heat transfer,” Shaver explains. “A lot of time it enhances it, which is a very desirable thing” because it’s able to get more power out of a limited amount of fuel.  

However, with the advanced designs like the wire wrap, “it’s a little bit more complicated to pump the fluid around these wires compared to just an open model,” he adds, which means that it could take more input energy too.  

Another popular option is called a pebble bed reactor, which involves a series of graphite pebbles about the size of a tennis ball being embedded with the nuclear fuel. “You just randomly pat them into an open container and let fluid flow around them,” Shaver says. “That is a very different scenario compared to what we’re used to with light-water reactors because now all of the fluid can move through these random spaces between the pebbles.” Such a system has many benefits for low-energy cooling. 

With the newly proposed designs, the goal is to ultimately generate more power while putting less in. “You’re trying to enhance the heat transfer you get from it, and the price you pay is how much energy it takes to pump it,” says Shaver. “There’s an interesting cost-benefit there.” Some of the tradeoffs can be significant, and these supercomputer simulations promise to give more accurate numbers than ever, allowing upcoming nuclear power plants to work with reactors that are as efficient and safe as possible. 

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While bipedal human-like androids are a staple of sci-fi movies, for many potential real world tasks, like rescuing people from burning buildings, flooded streets, or the freezing wilds, four-legged “robodogs” are better. In a new paper due to be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) next month in Atlanta, researchers at Stanford University and Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute have proposed a novel, simplified machine learning technique that allows them to train a vision-based algorithm that enables (relatively) cheap, off-the-shelf robots to climb, leap, crawl, and run around the real world. As the researchers claim, they can do “parkour” all by themselves.

Traditionally, teaching robots to navigate the world has been an expensive challenge. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots can dance, throw things, and parkour their way around complex environments, but they are the result of more than a decade of DARPA-funded research. As the researchers explain in the paper, “the massive engineering efforts needed for modeling the robot and its surrounding environments for predictive control and the high hardware cost prevent people from reproducing parkour behaviors given a reasonable budget.” However, recent advances in artificial intelligence have demonstrated that training an algorithm in a computer simulation and then installing it in a robot can be cost effective way to train them to walk, climb stairs, and mimic animals, so the researchers set out to do the same for parkour in low-cost hardware. 

The researchers used two-stage reinforcement learning to train the parkour algorithm. In the first “soft dynamics” step, the virtual robots were allowed to penetrate and collide with the simulated objects but were encouraged—using a simple reward mechanism—to minimize penetrations as well as the mechanical energy necessary to clear each obstacle and move forward. The virtual robots weren’t given any instructions—they had to puzzle out how best to move forward for themselves, which is how the algorithm learns what does and doesn’t work.

In the second “hard dynamics” fine-tuning stage, the same reward mechanism was used but the robots were no longer allowed to collide with obstacles. Again, the virtual robots had to figure out what techniques worked best to proceed forward while minimizing energy expenditure. All this training allowed the researchers to develop a “single vision-based parkour policy” for each skill that could be deployed in real robots.

And the results were incredibly effective. Although the team was working with small robots that stand just over 10-inches tall, their relative performance was pretty impressive—especially given the simple reward system and virtual training program. The off-the-shelf robots were able to scale objects up to 15.75-inches high (1.53x their height), leap over gaps 23.6-inches wide (1.5x their length), crawl beneath barriers as low as 7.9-inches (0.76x their height), and tilt so they could squeeze through gaps a fraction of an inch narrower than their width. 

According to an interview with the researchers in Stanford News, the biggest advance is that the new training technique enables the robodogs to act autonomously using just their onboard computer and camera. In other words, there’s no human with a remote control. The robots are assessing the obstacle they have to clear, selecting the most appropriate approach from their repertoire of skills, and executing it—and if they fail, they try again.

The researchers noted that the biggest limitation with their training method is that the simulated environments have to be manually designed. So, going forward, the team hopes to explore “advances in 3D-vision and graphics to construct diverse simulation environments automatically from large-scale real-world data.” That could enable them to train even more adventurous robodogs.

Of course, this Stanford team isn’t the only research group exploring robodogs. In the past year or two, we’ve seen quadrupedal robots of varying shapes and sizes that can paw open doors, climb walls and ceilings, sprint on sand, and balance along beams. But for all that, we’re still a while away from seeing rescue robodogs out in the wild. It seems labradors aren’t out of a job just yet.

See them in action, below:

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Wearable sensors can already monitor a variety of important health characteristics. But they are still far short when it comes to detecting hormonal levels, particularly for women. A new device designed by researchers at Caltech, however, is specifically tailored to measure one of women’s most vital and influential hormones. According to the team’s study, recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, their new wearable sensor can detect and assess users’ estradiol levels by just analyzing sweat droplets.

Estradiol, the most potent form of estrogen, is a crucial component in women’s health. Not only is it necessary in regulating reproductive cycles and ovulation, but this hormone’s levels are directly correlated to issues ranging from depression, to osteoporosis, to even heart disease. Currently, estradiol monitoring requires blood or urine samples collected either in-clinic or at-home. In contrast, Caltech’s new sensor, created by assistant professor of medical engineering Wei Gao, only needs miniscule amounts of sweat collected via extremely small automatic valves within its microfluidic system.

[Related: This organ-failure detector is thinner than a human hair.]

The sensor’s reliance on sweat to measure estradiol isn’t only impressive due to its non-invasive nature; according to Caltech’s announcement, the hormone is about 50 times less concentrated in sweat than in blood.

The wearable’s monitoring system utilizes aptamers—short, single-strand DNA capable of binding to target molecules like artificial antibodies. Gao’s team first attached aptamers to a surface imbued with inkjet-printed gold nanoparticles. The aptamers then could bind with targeted molecules—in this case, estradiol. Once binded, the molecule gets recaptured by other titanium carbide-coated gold nanoparticles known as “MXenes.” The resultant electrical signal can be wirelessly measured and correlated to estradiol levels via a simple-to-use smartphone app.

To actually collect the sweat samples, the sensor uses tiny channels controlled by automatic valves to allow only fixed amounts of fluid into the sensor. To take patients’ sweat composition differences into consideration, the device also consistently calibrates via information collected on salt levels, skin temperature, and sweat pH.

This isn’t Gao’s first sweat sensor, either—previous variants also could detect the stress hormone cortisol, COVID-19, as well as a biomarker that indicates inflammation.

“People often ask[ed] me if I could make the same kind of sweat sensor for female hormones, because we know how much those hormones impact women’s health,” Gao said via Caltech’s announcement. With further optimization, the new estradiol sensor could help users attempting to naturally or in vitro conceive children, as well as aid those necessitating hormone replacement therapies. According to Gao, the team also intends to expand the range of female hormones they can detect, including another ovulation-related variant, progesterone.

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It took eight years and the collaborative efforts of over 600 interdisciplinary undergraduate students, but Estonia’s second satellite is finally on track to launch later this week. Once in orbit thanks to a lift aboard one of the European Space Agency’s Vega VV23 rockets, the tiny  8.5 lb ESTCube-2 will test an elegant method to potentially help clear the skies’ increasingly worrisome space junk issue using a novel “plasma brake.”

Designed by Finnish Meteorological Institute physicist Pekka Janhunen, the electric sail (E-sail) technology harnesses the physics underlying Earth’s ionosphere—the atmosphere’s electrically charged outer layer. Once in orbit, Estonia’s ESTCube-2 will deploy a nearly 165-foot-long tether composed of hair-thin aluminum wires that, once charged via solar power, will repel the almost motionless plasma within the ionosphere.

[Related: The FCC just dished out their first space junk fine.]

“​​Historically, tethers have been prone to snap in space due to micrometeorites or other hazards,” Janhunen explained in an October 3 statement ahead of the mission launch. “So ESTCube-2’s net-like microtether design brings added redundancy with two parallel and two zig-zagging bonded wires.”

If successful, the drag should slow down the tiny cubesat enough to shorten its orbital decay time to just a two-year lifespan. Not only that, but it would do so without any physical propellant source, thus offering a lightweight, low-cost alternative to existing satellite decommissioning options.

“It is exciting to see if the plasma break is going to work as planned… and if the tether itself is as robust as it needs to be,” Carolin Frueh, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, tells PopSci via email. “The longer a dead or decommissioned satellite is out there, the higher the risk that it runs into other objects, which leads to fragmentation and the creation of even more debris objects.”

According to Frueh, although drag sails have been explored to help with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites’ end-of-life maneuvers in the past, “the plasma brake technology has the potential to be more robust and more easily deployable at the end of life compared to a classical large solar sail.”

After just seven decades’ worth of space travel, junk is already a huge issue for ongoing private- and government-funded missions. Literally millions of tiny trash pieces now orbit the Earth as fast as 17,500 mph, each one a potential mission-ender. Such debris could also prove fatal to unfortunate astronauts in their path. 

Although multiple international efforts are underway to help mitigate the amount of space junk, even the process of planning such operations can be difficult. Earlier this year, for example, an ESA space debris cleanup pilot project grew more complicated after its orbital trash target reportedly unexpectedly collided with other debris. On October 2, the Federal Communications Commission issued its first-ever orbital littering fine after satellite television provider Dish Network failed to properly deorbit a decommissioned, direct broadcast EchoStar-7 satellite last year.

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be certain that operators comply with their commitments,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal said at the time.

Estonia’s second-ever satellite is scheduled to launch on October 7 from the ESA’s spaceport in French Guiana.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

IF A BUILDING COLLAPSES or a bomb goes off, there are often more people who need medical treatment than there are people who can help them. That mismatch is what defines a mass casualty incident. The military’s most famous R&D agency, DARPA, wants to figure out how to better handle those situations, so more people come out of them alive.

That’s the goal of what the agency is calling the DARPA Triage Challenge, a three-year program that kicks off November 6 and will bring together medical knowledge, autonomous vehicles, noninvasive sensors, and algorithms to prioritize and plan patient care when there are too many patients and not enough care—a process typically called triage. Teams, yet to be named, will compete to see if their systems can categorize injured people in large, complex situations and determine their need for treatment.

A sorting hat for disasters

Triage is no simple task, even for people who make it part of their profession, says Stacy Shackelford, the trauma medical director for the Defense Health Agency’s Colorado Springs region. Part of the agency’s mandate is to manage military hospitals and clinics. “Even in the trauma community, the idea of triage is somewhat of a mysterious topic,” she says. 

The word triage comes from the French, and it means, essentially, “sorting casualties.” When a host of humans get injured at the same time, first responders can’t give them all equal, simultaneous attention. So they sort them into categories: minimal, minorly injured; delayed, seriously injured but not in an immediately life-threatening way; immediate, severely injured in such a way that prompt treatment would likely be lifesaving; and expectant, dead or soon likely to be. “It really is a way to decide who needs lifesaving interventions and who can wait,” says Shackelford, “so that you can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

The question of whom to treat when and how has always been important, but it’s come to the fore for the Defense Department as the nature of global tensions changes, and as disasters that primarily affect civilians do too. “A lot of the military threat currently revolves around what would happen if we went towards China or we went to war with Russia, and there’s these types of near-peer conflicts,” says Shackelford. The frightening implication is that there would be more injuries and deaths than in other recent conflicts. “Just the sheer number of possible casualties that could occur.” Look, too, at the war in Ukraine. 

The severity, frequency, and unpredictability of some nonmilitary disasters—floods, wildfires, and more—is also shifting as the climate changes. Meanwhile, mass shootings occur far too often; a damaged nuclear power plant could pose a radioactive risk; earthquakes topple buildings; poorly maintained buildings topple themselves. Even the pandemic, says Jeffrey Freeman, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, has been a kind of slow-moving or rolling disaster. It’s not typically thought of as a mass casualty incident. But, says Freeman, “The effects are similar in some ways, in that you have large numbers of critically ill patients in need of care, but dissimilar in that those in need are not limited to a geographic area.” In either sort of scenario, he continues, “Triage is critical.”

Freeman’s organization is currently managing an assessment, mandated by Congress, of the National Medical Disaster System, which was set up in the 1980s to manage how the Department of Defense, military treatment facilities, Veterans Affairs medical centers, and civilian hospitals under the Department of Health and Human Services respond to large-scale catastrophes, including combat operations overseas. He sees the DARPA Triage Challenge as highly relevant to dealing with incidents that overwhelm the existing system—a good goal now and always. “Disasters or wars themselves are sort of unpredictable, seemingly infrequent events. They’re almost random in their occurrence,” he says. “The state of disaster or the state of catastrophe is actually consistent. There are always disasters occurring, there are always conflicts occurring.” 

He describes the global state of disaster as “continuous,” which makes the Triage Challenge, he says, “timeless.”

What’s more, the concept of triage, Shackelford says, hasn’t really evolved much in decades, which means the potential fruits of the DARPA Triage Challenge—if it pans out—could make a big difference in what the “greatest good, greatest number” approach can look like. With DARPA, though, research is always a gamble: The agency takes aim at tough scientific and technological goals, and often misses, a model called “high-risk, high-reward” research.

Jean-Paul Chretien, the Triage Challenge program manager at DARPA, does have some specific hopes for what will emerge from this risk—like the ability to identify victims who are more seriously injured than they seem. “It’s hard to tell by looking at them that they have these internal injuries,” he says. The typical biosignatures people check to determine a patient’s status are normal vital signs: pulse, blood pressure, respiration. “What we now know is that those are really lagging indicators of serious injury, because the body’s able to compensate,” Chretien says. But when it can’t anymore? “They really fall off a cliff,” he says. In other words, a patient’s pulse or blood pressure may seem OK, but a major injury may still be present, lurking beneath that seemingly good news. He hopes the Triage Challenge will uncover more timely physiological indicators of such injuries—indicators that can be detected before a patient is on the precipice.

Assessment from afar

The DARPA Triage Challenge could yield that result, as it tasks competitors—some of whom DARPA is paying to participate in the competition, and some of whom will fund themselves—with two separate goals. The first addresses the primary stage of triage (the sorting of people in the field) while the second deals with what to do once they’re in treatment. 

For the first stage, Triage Challenge competitors have to develop sensor systems that can assess victims at a distance, gathering data on physiological signatures of injury. Doing this from afar could keep responders from encountering hazards, like radioactivity or unstable buildings, during that process. The aim is to have the systems move autonomously by the end of the competition.

The signatures such systems seek may include, according to DARPA’s announcement of the project, things like “ability to move, severe hemorrhage, respiratory distress, and alertness.” Competitors could equip robots or drones with computer-vision or motion-tracking systems, instruments that use light to measure changes in blood volume, lasers that analyze breathing or heart activity, or speech recognition capabilities. Or all of the above. Algorithms the teams develop must then extract meaningful conclusions from the data collected—like who needs lifesaving treatment right now. 

The second focus of the DARPA Triage Challenge is the period after the most urgent casualties have received treatment—the secondary stage of triage. For this part, competitors will develop technology to dig deeper into patients’ statuses and watch for changes that are whispering for help. The real innovations for this stage will come from the algorithmic side: software that, for instance, parses the details of an electrocardiogram—perhaps using a noninvasive electrode in contact with the skin—looking at the whole waveform of the heart’s activity and not just the beep-beep of a beat, or software that does a similar stare into a pulse oximeter’s output to monitor the oxygen carried in red blood cells. 

For her part, Shackelford is interested in seeing teams incorporate a sense of time into triage—which sounds obvious but has been difficult in practice, in the chaos of a tragedy. Certain conditions are extremely chronologically limiting. Something fell on you and you can’t breathe? Responders have three minutes to fix that problem. Hemorrhaging? Five to 10 minutes to stop the bleeding, 30 minutes to get a blood transfusion, an hour for surgical intervention. “All of those factors really factor into what is going to help a person at any given time,” she says. And they also reveal what won’t help, and who can’t be helped anymore.

Simulating disasters

DARPA hasn’t announced the teams it plans to fund yet, and self-funded teams also haven’t revealed themselves. But whoever they are, over the coming three years, they will face a trio of competitions—one at the end of each year, each of which will address both the primary and secondary aspects of triage.

The primary triage stage competitions will be pretty active. “We’re going to mock up mass-casualty scenes,” says Chretien. There won’t be people with actual open wounds or third-degree burns, of course, but actors pretending to have been part of a disaster. Mannequins, too, will be strewn about. The teams will bring their sensor-laden drones and robots. “Those systems will have to, on their own, find the casualties,” he says. 

These competitions will feature three scenarios teams will cycle through, like a very stressful obstacle course. “We’ll score them based on how quickly they complete the test,” Chretien says, “how good they are at actually finding the casualties, and then how accurately they assess their medical status.” 

But it won’t be easy: The agency’s description of the scenarios says they might involve both tight spaces and big fields, full light and total darkness, “dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds.” Victims may be buried under debris, or overlapping with each other, challenging sensors to detect and individuate them.

DARPA is also building a virtual world that mimics the on-the-ground scenarios, for a virtual version of the challenge. “This will be like a video-game-type environment but [with the] same idea,” he says. Teams that plan to do the concrete version can practice digitally, and Chretien also hopes that teams without all the hardware they need to patrol the physical world will still try their hands digitally. “It should be easier in terms of actually having the resources to participate,” he says. 

The secondary stage’s competitions will be a little less dramatic. “There’s no robotic system, no physical simulation going on there,” says Chretien. Teams will instead get real clinical trauma data, from patients hospitalized in the past, gathered from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center and the University of Pittsburgh. Their task is to use that anonymized patient data to determine each person’s status and whether and what interventions would have been called for when. 

At stake is $7 million in total prize money over three years, and for the first two years, only teams that DARPA didn’t already pay to participate are eligible to collect. 

Also at stake: a lot of lives. “What can we do, technologically, that can make us more efficient, more effective,” says Freeman, “with the limited amount of people that we have?” 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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AI programs can already respond to sensory stimulations like touch, sight, smell, and sound—so why not taste? Engineering researchers at Penn State hope to one day accomplish just that, in the process designing an “electronic tongue” capable of detecting gas and chemical molecules with components that are only a few atoms thick. Although not capable of “craving” a late-night snack just yet, the team is hopeful their new design could one day pair with robots to help create AI-influenced diets, curate restaurant menus, and even train people to broaden their own palates.

Unfortunately, human eating habits aren’t based solely on what we nutritionally require; they are also determined by flavor preferences. This comes in handy when our taste buds tell our brains to avoid foul-tasting, potentially poisonous foods, but it also is the reason you sometimes can’t stop yourself from grabbing that extra donut or slice of cake. This push-and-pull requires a certain amount of psychological cognition and development—something robots currently lack.

[Related: A new artificial skin could be more sensitive than the real thing]

“Human behavior is easy to observe but difficult to measure. and that makes it difficult to replicate in a robot and make it emotionally intelligent. There is no real way right now to do that,” 

Saptarshi Das, an associate professor of engineering science and mechanics, said in an October 4 statement. Das is a corresponding author of the team’s findings, which were published last month in the journal Nature Communications, and helped design the robotic system capable of “tasting” molecules.

To create their flat, square “electronic gustatory complex,” the team combined chemitransistors—graphene-based sensors that detect gas and chemical molecules—with molybdenum disulfide memtransistors capable of simulating neurons. The two components worked in tandem, capitalizing on their respective strengths to simulate the ability to “taste” molecular inputs.

“Graphene is an excellent chemical sensor, [but] it is not great for circuitry and logic, which is needed to mimic the brain circuit,” said Andrew Pannone, an engineering science and mechanics grad student and study co-author, in a press release this week. “For that reason, we used molybdenum disulfide… By combining these nanomaterials, we have taken the strengths from each of them to create the circuit that mimics the gustatory system.”

When analyzing salt, for example, the electronic tongue detected the presence of sodium ions, thereby “tasting” the sodium chloride input. The design is reportedly flexible enough to apply to all five major taste profiles: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and umami. Hypothetically, researchers could arrange similar graphene device arrays that mirror the approximately 10,000 different taste receptors located on a human tongue.

[Related: How to enhance your senses of smell and taste]

“The example I think of is people who train their tongue and become a wine taster. Perhaps in the future we can have an AI system that you can train to be an even better wine taster,” Das said in the statement.

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Reacting to something online is way more fun if there’s an animation involved. Apple seems to understand this, as it included hand gesture reactions in macOS Sonoma. They work on FaceTime, of course, but also on some other video call platforms, including Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. 

Now, if you have a compatible Mac, you’ll be able to celebrate your colleague’s promotion with a dramatic firework effect, or send digital hearts to your significant other without clicking or tapping anything. 

Check if your computer is compatible 

There are two system requirements you’ll need to play around with macOS’s new hand gesture reactions, and you can use one menu to confirm you have both. 

Animated hand gestures are possible thanks to the processing power of Apple’s silicon chips, so you’ll need to start by seeing if you have the right hardware. Click the Apple icon in the top left corner of your screen, then About this Mac, and a small window will pop up. The first item is Chip—if your machine is sporting an M1 or M2, you’re good to go. 

You can use the same window to check your macOS version. If it’s Sonoma, you’re good to go. Otherwise, click More info, which will take you to Settings. There, go to General, then Software Update to have your machine scan for, download, and install newer versions of the operating system. Your computer should automatically tell you if you can upgrade to the latest version of the OS, but you can also check Apple’s official list of compatible devices. 

[Related: 6 new features in macOS Sonoma you have to try]

If your machine cannot handle macOS Sonoma and is not equipped with Apple Silicon, we’re happy to tell you that there’s still a way to enable hand gestures on your video calls: using the Continuity Camera feature. This capability is available on devices running software as old as macOS 13, and it’ll let you use your iPhone as a webcam for video calls on your computer. You will need an iPhone running at least iOS 16 and signed into the same Apple ID as your Mac machine. 

2. Activate your camera and you’ll see the Video menu button appear on the main macOS navigation bar—it’s a bright green button with a white camera. Click it and make sure Reactions is selected. This will activate the feature.

3. Back on your video call, you’ll be able to make predetermined hand gestures to trigger animated reactions. For example, give a thumbs up or a thumbs down and you’ll see a gray bubble with the relevant emoji. 

You can also use both hands to make a love gesture, and small red hearts will bubble up on top of your camera feed. 

Or generate a cool laser effect by making a rad rock ‘n’ roll gesture. Just keep in mind that this might be an offensive gesture in some cultures, so be mindful of your audience. 

Maybe release some celebratory balloons by making a peace sign. 

Beyond these, Apple has a full list of gestures you can make—it’s not long but we would not be surprised if they add more over time. 

Make marked gestures

We got the best results when making very neat gestures. For that, how you angle your hands is extremely important. For example, the rock ‘n’ roll gesture triggered the laser animation more consistently if the back or front of our wrist was facing the camera—aiming our indexes and pinkies at the camera resulted in absolutely no reaction. 

Skip the hand gestures altogether

If you like the animated reactions but are not willing to try (and fail) to trigger an effect in front of your colleagues, just skip the gestures. When on a video call, open the Video menu on the main macOS navigation bar. On the emerging menu, click the arrow next to Reactions and you’ll see a quick menu of emojis you can select—these are the same ones you can trigger with hand gestures.   

Deactivate visual effects and virtual backdrops to better showcase animated reactions

If you use a virtual backdrop or any kind of built-in visual effect on your video calls, it’ll affect how your animated hand gestures show on your camera feed. For example, if you use a blur effect to protect your privacy (or hide whatever mess is sitting behind you) the hearts, balloons or bubbles that emerge when you make a hand gesture might get caught behind the effect and look blurry or low quality. If you use a virtual backdrop, then your machine will only show the animation behind the effect’s overlay, which may not show the reaction at all or make you look, well, interesting.   

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Even though we can’t tell a flock of birds apart without examining them closely, the birds in the group know who’s who. And that’s because they have certain physical marks that help distinguish them. 

Just like how individual humans might have distinct moles, or other unique physical characteristics, Greylag geese have unique grooves on their beaks. To prove that Greylag geese do indeed have distinctive facial features, a team of scientists from Flinders University in Australia and University of Vienna in Austria developed facial recognition software that can assign a goose face to a goose ID within a database with around 97 percent accuracy. 

“Results from the facial recognition software showed that identification of individual geese using images of their bill was possible and validated the idea that geese are visually unique,” the researchers wrote in a paper they published last month in the Journal of Ornithology.

[Related: What’s life like for a fruit fly? AI offers a peek.]

But of course a computer accuracy test can only prove so much. To test if geese can recognize each other by their faces (and not by some other feature such as smell or sound), scientists took photos of individuals within a group of Greylag geese and tested how other members of the flock reacted to the 2D-printed images. 

As part of their experiment, the researchers blew up these photos into life-size portrayals that they then put in front of the real geese. When presented with a photo of themselves, their partner, and a flock mate, these geese gravitated towards the photos of their partner, and actually hissed at photos of themselves. (Because geese don’t own mirrors, they don’t know what they look like, and therefore when they see themselves for the first time, they register it as an unfamiliar goose.) 

[Related: Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages]

Facial recognition is a complicated technology in the human world. It doesn’t help that it’s getting more commonplace. While it can be more convenient than typing in a passcode on your phone, or keeping track of a key, mistakes happen, privacy problems arise, and the technology itself is still fairly unreliable.

But in the animal world, it has the potential to help. Petco, for example, is using facial recognition for pets as the backbone of its lost pets database. Owners can upload photos, and the software will scan for image matches at nearby shelters. 

For natural scientists and conservationists, this type of software can help them keep track of individual animals by seeing who’s passing by what trail cams or camera traps. Different animals have different tells. For tigers, the differentiator is their stripes. For other animals like bears or pumas, researchers may have to rely more on body markings. And for farm animals like sheep, cows, and pigs, scientists want to use the technology to monitor their daily behaviors and overall well-being. But in that case, questions remain on who the data is really for: the animals or the humans?

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New quadrupedal robots, based on years of research alongside some amphibian inspiration, could one day crawl and shimmy their way into search-and-rescue operations. As detailed in a new paper recently published in Nature Communications, the robotic trio developed by a team at Colorado State University can swim, walk, and crawl depending on their environments’ obstacles—thanks in large part to lightweight artificial muscles that don’t require heavy onboard power sources.

[Related: Four-legged dog robots could one day explore the moon.]

The new systems, which have been in development since 2017, were designed by a team led by CSU Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Jianguo Zhao, and rely on materials that change rigidity depending on temperature.

“Our embedded morphing scheme uses a lightweight artificial muscle similar to a human muscle, and it contracts when electricity is applied,” Zhao explained in the project’s October 2 announcement. “By embedding these artificial muscles in the spine of the robot or in its skin, we can achieve a variety of shape-types. Altogether, this approach offers a promising path towards developing robots that can navigate and work in difficult environments.”

Aside from the electrical properties, the robots owe their movements in large part to frogs—or, rather, frogs’ multiple life stages. “They start as tadpoles with tails for swimming before developing legs that let them jump, crawl or swim,” Zhao continued. “We take inspiration from those transformations, but achieving animal-like embedded shape morphing in robots remains challenging and is something we hope this work will continue to address.”

Judging from the video montage, it’s easy to see the frog analogy. Depending on its surroundings and terrain, the robots can curve their limbs to “swim,” then adjust them accordingly to scale a rocky hurdle that mimics a shoreline. On dry land, Zhao’s robots can “hop” along by repeatedly rotating their limbs 360 degrees to push forward. A third version of the robot can flatten itself to skitter through small openings, as well as hang onto a ledge to help transition across gaps.

For now, however, the robots require remote control, but future iterations could rely on sensor- and camera-based analysis of their environments for navigation, and even morph as needed to handle their surroundings.

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The 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry was jointly awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and developments of quantum dots. These nanoparticles are so small that their size determines their properties. Quantum dots can be found in modern computers, televisions, and LED lights, among numerous other applications.

[Related: In photos: Journey to the center of a quantum computer.]

Bawendi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brus is a professor emeritus at Columbia University, and Ekimov works for a company called Nanocrystals Technology in New York State.

“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles,” Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during a news conference. “But this year’s laureates succeeded.”

Size matters in the nanoscale

Quantum dots are among the smallest components of nanotechnology. Typically, an element’s properties are governed by how many electrons it has. When that matter shrinks down  to nano-dimensions quantum phenomena arise. This means the element’s properties are now governed by the size of the matter instead of the number of electrons it has. 

Quantum dots are made of only a thousand atoms. By comparison, one quantum dot is to a soccer ball as a soccer ball is to the planet Earth.

The quantum dots that Bawendi, Brus, and Ekimov produced are particles small enough for their properties to be determined by quantum phenomena. They are among the smallest, but most important particles, nanotechnology.

“Quantum dots have many fascinating and unusual properties. Importantly, they have different [colors] depending on their size,” Åqvist said in a statement. 

The movement of electrons in quantum dots is highly constrained. This then affects how they absorb and release visible light, allowing for very bright colors. The quantum dots themselves are nanoparticles that glow red, blue, or green and the color depends on the size of the particles. Larger dots shine red and smaller dots shine blue. The change in color depends on how electrons act differently in more confined or less confined spaces. 

Big discoveries, super small particles

In 1937, physicists theorized that size-dependent quantum effects could arise in nanoparticles. However, it was almost impossible to sculpt in nano dimensions, so few believed that it was possible.

During the early 1980s, Ekimov created size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass. The color of the glass came from the nanoparticles of copper chloride. With this colorful experiment, Ekimov demonstrated that the particle size affected the color of the glass via quantum effects.

[Related: Quantum computers are starting to become more useful.]

A few years later, Brus became the first scientist in the world to prove that size-dependent quantum effects in particles were floating freely in a fluid. Brus and Ekimov were actually working independently from one another when they made their initial discoveries. 

In 1993, Bawendi revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots. His techniques resulted in almost perfect particles, which was necessary for using the quantum dots in a wide range of applications. 

Quantum dots can now be found in computer monitors and television screens and even help biochemists and surgeons map tissues and remove tumors. 

Last year’s chemistry prize was also awarded to a trio of chemists: Carolyn R. Bertozzi for her work in bioorthogonal chemistry alongside K. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal for laying the foundation for click chemistry. 

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A crewed submarine is, at its most elemental level, a machine designed to preserve a bubble of air underwater and keep the rest of the ocean out. The complexities of submarine design— everything from propulsion to sensors to controls—have to be designed with this overriding purpose in mind. Because the whole of the submarine needs to maintain this careful containment at all times, what might otherwise be a nothing part, like a deck drain assembly, is crucial to the longer-term viability of the submarine. On September 25, shipbuilders General Dynamics Electric Boat, along with Huntington Ingalls Industries, announced that they had successfully used additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to create a part for the Virginia-class submarine Oklahoma.

The part printed is a deck-drain, and it was manufactured on land out of copper-nickel. The part still needs some machining to refine it before it is installed, but the printing of a replacement piece is a big step forward towards easier, on-demand parts for submarine repair in the future.

“This collaborative project leverages authorizations made by the Navy that streamline requirements for low-risk additive manufacturing parts. It is possible due to the foresight and longer-term development efforts by our engineers to deploy additive manufacturing marine alloys for shipbuilding,” said Dave Bolcar in a release. Bolcar is the vice president of engineering and design at the Newport News Shipyard, the Huntington Ingalls Industries division that worked on the 3D printed part.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

Additive manufacturing has appeal and utility across the hobbyist, commercial, and industrial spaces for a host of reasons. The ability to rapidly prototype parts, and then produce physical approximations to refine, is useful. It’s still a major step to go from exploring a part through a printed design to a printed part being up to the task required of a completed piece.

Printing parts on land for repair allows naval suppliers to prove the technology is workable, and apply it to immediate needs.

On a ship, and on a submarine more than most other kinds of ships, every part needs to fit precisely, within set parameters so that the vessel can continue to remain watertight and airtight where it needs to be. Ships are also deeply constrained in space on board, so the availability of spare parts stockpiled for emergency or even just routine repair is finite and based on estimates before vessels embark. Onboard printers would allow repair underway, while printers at ports can ensure new parts are ready for docked vessels.

Just print it out

The Navy operates in confined spaces and on a global stage. With bases and ports scattered across the globe, managing the resupply of ships and planes means overseeing supply chains in places as far apart as Spain and Guam, and ports in-between. For the past decade, the US Navy has explored 3D printing as a way to ease that logistical load.

The premise of 3D printing is straightforward. If the raw material for many parts can be stored in undifferentiated form, and then produced as needed for repairs, that raw material and printer becomes far more flexible than having already assembled pieces stockpiled. Printers can produce errors in manufacturing, so the Navy has spent years working on how to create stuff with a minimum of error.

“We’re at the front end of this. There are parts that require airworthiness for approval and the non-air worthiness, the non-airworthiness are easier to do,” Lieutenant General Steven Rudder of the Marine Corps told USNI News in 2018. “You’re going to see additive manufacturing, both in industry and in our FRC’s [Fleet Readiness Center]. The Air Force is ahead of us on metal printing; you’re going to see that really take off. That’s just at the beginning of stages.”

The Navy also explored not just having 3D printers at ports of call, but also having printers onboard ships, ready to print spare parts while under way. 

In 2021, the Navy tested a large, almost room-sized, 3D printer from Xerox, which could create parts in aluminum at a base on land. In 2022, the Navy also installed an identical printer on board the USS Essex, a ship that in any other navy would count as a full-sized aircraft carrier, but for the US is classified as a Landing Helicopter Dock. The parallel trials of printers at sea and on land was to see if the conditions of being on the ocean, with the humidity and rocking waves, would produce different results than the same parts made on land. (Xerox ultimately sold its 3D printing division to another company in the additive manufacturing space.)

When it comes to printing parts for the submarine, space is already at a premium, even more so than on a surface vessel. Making the drain parts by additive manufacturing shows that, while submarines may not be able to print their own parts, the small, mundane yet vital pieces needed for ship operation can still be made to order. Every part of a ship seems mundane until it doesn’t work and needs to be replaced, and then suddenly it becomes crucial.

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Stories about solar-powered robotic wolves first surfaced back in 2017 after Japanese researchers began testing prototypes to combat wild boars’ devastating encroachment into farmlands. Since then, a company called Wolf Kamuy expanded sales of its sentry products featuring menacing fangs, fur, flashing red LED “eyes,” and a head capable of shaking side-to-side while emitting a 90 decibel howl. But boars aren’t the only problem plaguing rural Japanese communities. According to recent reports, Wolf Kamuy is now offering many of its faux-wolves as bear deterrence.

[Related: How to watch Alaska’s fat bears.]

It turns out the “Super Monster Wolf” isn’t just effective at protecting farmers’ crops—it’s also pretty good at protecting the farmers themselves. As reported October 1 via the BBC, bears are an increasingly difficult, sometimes even deadly nuisance in many areas of Japan thanks to a combination of serious factors, including climate change, deforestation,and urban expansion. What’s more, bear populations in regions such as Hokkaido appear to be actually increasing as Japan faces an aging population and declining birth rates. According to the BBC, some researchers estimate a total of over 22,000 bears located around Hokkaido. Because of all this, the region recorded at least 150 bear attacks over the past six decades—with four fatalities in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, bears continue to wander into more crowded towns and cities bordering wildlife areas.

Enter: the Super Monster Wolf. By installing the guard bots in urban locales, experts hope to deter bears from wandering into populated areas to potentially harm both humans and themselves. Researchers previously estimated that a robo-wolf’s howls effectively deterred bears from encroaching within approximately 1-square-km (about 0.38 square mi) of its installation—arguably better than many electric fence perimeters. With strategic placement, Super Monster Wolves could help elderly communities, and protect the bears.

Of course, humanity cannot solely rely on an army of robot wolves to protect us from bear attacks. Bears (not to mention countless other species) face immense existential threats in the face of ongoing climate change calamities, and it’s not the bears’ fault they are increasingly desperate to find food sources. The best remedy, therefore, is to continue focusing on climate solutions like conservation, renewable energy, and sustainable urban planning, rather than stopgaps like the (admittedly rad) Super Monster Wolf.

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The Federal Communications Commission is officially doling out fines for space polluters, and the popular satellite television provider Dish Network earned the dubious honor of receiving the first ticket. On October 2, the FCC announced it slapped the telecommunications company with a $150,000 penalty after failing to properly deorbit its decommissioned, direct broadcast EchoStar-7 satellite last year. According to the FCC, the fine comes with an admission of liability, as well as an agreement to follow a “compliance plan” to help make way for the thousands of orbital projects in the works around the world.

[Related: FCC slaps voter suppression robocall scammers with a record-breaking fine.]

Space junk is already a huge concern for any industry requiring operations high above the planet, with literal millions of trash bits orbiting Earth at any given moment. In July, NASA director Bill Nelson told the BBC space junk poses a “major problem,” explaining that even something like a small paint chip striking an astronaut during a spacewalk at orbital speed (17,500 mph) “can be fatal.” Experts also worry about humans accidentally initiating a “Kessler cascade” or “Kessler syndrome.” In such situations, orbital space becomes so polluted that debris collisions are impossible to avoid, thus producing an exponentially increasing cycle of more collisions that create more debris. Were this to occur, the future of space exploration and travel could remain stymied until governments and companies begin complicated, costly cleanup efforts. 

Dish Network’s EchoStar-7 satellite launched and achieved geostationary orbit in 2002, and received FCC approval for an eventual orbital mitigation plan in 2012. According to the agreement, the telecoms company committed to eventually boost the satellite roughly 300 km above its operational arc. In February 2022, however, Dish Network revealed the satellite did not have enough remaining propellant to adhere to the original agreement’s altitude. In the end, the EchoStar-7 satellite only retired about 122 km above its geostationary arc—far lower than planned. Last year, the FCC also announced plans to finally begin tighter restrictions on satellites’ lifespans and decommissioning protocols.

[Related: Some space junk just got smacked by more space junk, complicating cleanup.]

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be certain that operators comply with their commitments,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal said via Monday’s announcement. “This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules.”

In August, a space debris cleanup pilot project overseen by the European Space Agency quickly turned into a logistical headache after its orbital trash target appeared to collide with another piece of debris. Luckily, the ESA and its partners at Swiss startup ClearSpace-1 stated at the time that their project appears able to progress as planned.

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If you’re got smart lights set up at home, then you’ve probably played around with turning them on and off with your phone, and cycling through millions of colors. But if you have Philips Hue bulbs, you can also get them to sync with what’s on your TV screen or monitor.

So, you could have a wash of greens and blues behind your TV when watching Avatar, for example. Or your journeys through the vast world of Red Dead Redemption 2 could be accompanied by shifting colors as you move through deserts, forests, swamps, and snowy mountain ranges.

We’re assuming that you’ve already got your Philips Hue smart lights up and running at home. Then, depending on your setup and what you want, you can either use a desktop app or the Play HDMI Sync Box to have your smart lights react to your favorite content in real time.

Using the Hue Sync app

The easiest and cheapest way to sync your smart lights to your screen is to install the free Hue Sync desktop app for Windows and macOS. A caveat, though: this approach will only sync your lights to what’s on your computer, so it won’t work with your TV. Your laptop or desktop will need to be on the same WiFi network as your smart lights, so the program can see your Hue Bridge and the devices attached to it.

[Related: Find the best smart light for your home]

Download the desktop app and launch it. You’ll have two options: Help me set everything up and Search for bridge. Pick the first one if you’ve just bought your Hue lights and you’re installing them from scratch. The app will then take you step-by-step through the process of getting all the hardware connected. If your lights are already set up, select the second option.

Within a few seconds, the app should easily find the Hue Bridge and connect to it. If you haven’t already done it, turn to the Philips Hue app on your phone to set up what’s called an “entertainment area”: This is just a way of telling your Hue system which lights should be grouped together for syncing with screen content.

In the app, open the Settings tab, then go to Entertainment areas and Create area. Choose For my monitor, give the area a name, and then select the lights to include in it. The app will then prompt you to show the location of the lights within the room, so it knows how to sync them together with what’s on screen.

Once all that is done, head back to the desktop app—the entertainment area that you just created should be selected. Click on the name of the area to bring up the main syncing console: You can choose Start light sync to have the effect enabled on the selected bulbs.

There are also a few options to play around with on the app console. At the top you can choose one of four modes to determine the brightness of the lights: The ones we’re interested in here are Games (optimized for games) and Movies (optimized for video), but you can also pick Scenes to select a fixed Hue scene for your lights, or Music to have the lights sync along with the audio that’s being played.

If you pick Games or Movies, you can then control the strength of the effect: Pick from Subtle, Moderate, High, or Extreme. If the lights are changing color too often and it’s becoming distracting, choose Subtle or Moderate. The last option, Use audio for effect, means the Hue Sync desktop app will take into consideration the sounds in games and movies when choosing colors for the lights.

Based on our testing, the results are usually pretty good, though games and movies with more gradual color changes work best. You can always go back to the Hue app on your phone to tweak the entertainment area settings, as well as adjusting the options in the desktop app, to try and improve the results.

Finally in the desktop app, you can choose Settings to configure different aspects of the program, including which display is used for syncing (if you’ve got more than one), and whether or not the app starts up with your computer. It’s also possible to configure keyboard shortcuts for the desktop app from here.

Using an app can also work when syncing your smart lights to what’s on your TV—but that will only work if you have a Samsung TV from 2022 or newer. Philips Hue makes a Hue Sync TV app for these devices which you can find in the Apps section. The downside is it costs $130, but you might consider the functionality worth it for the seamless integration. The setup process is similar, but you’ll need to choose For my TV when setting up an entertainment area in the mobile app.

Using the Play HDMI Sync Box

If you have another type of TV, then you’ll need a hardware option to sync your smart lights with what’s on it. The Play HDMI Sync Box from Philips Hue is $250 and it comes with accompanying Hue Sync apps for Android and iOS. You can use this little gadget to connect up to four different HDMI sources—just keep in mind that if you’re playing on your console, you’ll need to connect the Sync Box both to your gaming device and your TV.

[Related: Best smart lights of 2023]

There’s support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and 4K resolutions, and the box is clever enough to recognize which source is playing and automatically switch to it. The information from the HDMI feed is beamed to your Hue Bridge at the same time as it’s showing up on screen, so your lights have a detailed map of colors to work from.

Setup is similar to the desktop app in that you need to create an entertainment area in the mobile app first. From the original Hue app on your phone go to Settings > Entertainment areas > Create area, and choose For my TV. The platform will ask you which smart lights are in the same room as your TV and where they’re positioned.

Then, from the Hue Sync app, you can turn effects on and off, switch between Video, Music, and Game modes, and adjust the strength of the effect and the brightness level in the same way as you can on the desktop app for computers. The apps also let you link the Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri for the box, so you can use voice commands to enable or disable sync and switch between modes.

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IN THE SUMMER of 1956, a small group of computer science pioneers convened at Dartmouth College to discuss a new concept: artificial intelligence. The vision, in the meeting’s proposal, was that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Ultimately, they presented just one operational program, stored on computer punch cards: the Logic Theorist.

Many have called the Logic Theorist the first AI program, though that description was debated then—and still is today. The Logic Theorist was designed to mimic human skills, but there’s disagreement about whether the invention actually mirrored the human mind and whether a machine really can replicate the insightfulness of our intelligence. But science historians view the Logic Theorist as the first program to simulate how humans use reason to solve complex problems and was among the first made for a digital processor. It was created in a new system, the Information Processing Language, and coding it meant strategically pricking holes in pieces of paper to be fed into a computer. In just a few hours, the Logic Theorist proved 38 of 52 theorems in Principia Mathematica, a foundational text of mathematical reasoning. 

The Logic Theorist’s design reflects its historical context and the mind of one of its creators, Herbert Simon, who was not a mathematician but a political scientist, explains Ekaterina Babintseva, a historian of science and technology at Purdue University. Simon was interested in how organizations could enhance rational decision-making. Artificial systems, he believed, could help people make more sensible choices. 

“The type of intelligence the Logic Theorist really emulated was the intelligence of an institution,” Babintseva says. “It’s bureaucratic intelligence.” 

But Simon also thought there was something fundamentally similar between human minds and computers, in that he viewed them both as information-processing systems, says Stephanie Dick, a historian and assistant professor at Simon Fraser University. While consulting at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute, Simon encountered computer scientist and psychologist Allen Newell, who became his closest collaborator. Inspired by the heuristic teachings of mathematician George Pólya, who taught problem-solving, they aimed to replicate Pólya’s approach to logical, discovery-oriented decision-making with more intelligent machines.

This stab at human reasoning was written into a program for JOHNNIAC, an early computer built by RAND. The Logic Theorist proved Principia’s mathematical theorems through what its creators claimed was heuristic deductive methodology: It worked backward, making minor substitutions to possible answers until it reached a conclusion equivalent to what had already been proven. Before this, computer programs mainly solved problems by following linear step-by-step instructions. 

The Logic Theorist was a breakthrough, says Babintseva, because it was the first program in symbolic AI, which uses symbols or concepts, rather than data, to train AI to think like a person. It was the predominant approach to artificial intelligence until the 1990s, she explains. More recently, researchers have revived another approach considered at the 1950s Dartmouth conference: mimicking our physical brains through machine-learning algorithms and neural networks, rather than simulating how we reason. Combining both methods is viewed by some engineers as the next phase of AI development.  

The Logic Machine’s contemporary critics argued that it didn’t actually channel heuristic thinking, which includes guesswork and shortcuts, and instead showed precise trial-and-error problem-solving. In other words, it could approximate the workings of the human mind but not the spontaneity of its thoughts. The debate over whether this kind of program can ever match our brainpower continues. “Artificial intelligence is really a moving target,” Babintseva says, “and many computer scientists would tell you that artificial intelligence doesn’t exist.”

Read more about life in the age of AI: 

• The logic behind AI chatbots is surprisingly basic
• Will we ever be able to trust health advice from an AI?
• This AI program could teach you to be better at chess
• Why AI could be a big problem for the 2024 presidential election

Or check out all of our PopSci+ stories.

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Back in July, Chipotle revealed the “Autocado”—an AI-guided avocado-pitting robot prototype meant to help handle America’s insatiable guacamole habit while simultaneously reducing food waste. Today, the fast casual chain announced its next automated endeavor—a prep station capable of assembling entrees on its own.

[Related: Chipotle is testing an avocado-pitting, -cutting, and -scooping robot.]

According to the company’s official reveal this morning, its newest robotic prototype—a collaboration with the food service automation startup, Hyphen—creates virtually any combination of available base ingredients for Chipotle’s burrito bowls and salads underneath human employees’ workspace. Meanwhile, staff are reportedly allowed to focus on making other, presumably more structurally complex and involved dishes such as burritos, quesadillas, tacos, and kid’s meals. Watch the robot prototype plop food into little piles in the bowl under the workspace here: 

As orders arrive via Chipotle’s website, app, or another third-party service like UberEats, burrito bowls and salads are automatically routed within the makeline, where an assembly system passes dishes beneath the various ingredient containers. Precise portions are then doled out accordingly, after which the customer’s order surfaces via a small elevator system on the machine’s left side. Chipotle employees can then add any additional chips, salsas, and guacamole, as well as an entree lid before sending off the orders for delivery.

[Related: What robots can and can’t do for a restaurant.]

Chipotle estimates around 65 percent of all its digital orders are salads and burrito bowls, so their so-called “cobot” (“collaborative” plus “robot”) could hypothetically handle a huge portion of existing kitchen prep. The automated process may also potentially offer more accurate orders, the company states. 

Advocates frequently voice concern about automation and its effect on human jobs. And Chipotle isn’t the only chain in question—companies like Wendy’s and Panera continue to experiment with their own automation plans. Curt Garner, Chipotle’s Chief Customer and Technology Officer described the company’s long-term goal of having the automated digital makeline “be the centerpiece of all our restaurants’ digital kitchens.”

For now, however, the new burrito bowl bot can only be found at the Chipotle Cultivate Center in Irvine, California—presumably alongside the Autocado.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

This investigation was co-produced with New Lines Magazine and supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. 

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. 

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB. 

Before the airstrike, Qudrat Wali and other residents of Asad Khel followed as Afghan soldiers and U.S. special forces were evacuated from the area. Eight months after the massive explosion, they were finally allowed to return to their homes. Soon after, Wali says, many of the residents began to notice strange ailments and skin rashes.

“All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped,” says Wali, a 27-year-old farmer, pulling up the leg of his shalwar kameez to show me the red bumps stretched across his calves. “I have it all over my body.” He says he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found that their land did not produce crops like it had before. It was devastated, he says, by the bomb’s blast radius, that reached as far as the settlement of Shaddle Bazar over a mile and a half away.

“We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick, and so are we.” 

The bomb residue plaguing the village is but one example of the war’s toxic environmental legacy. For two decades, Afghans raised children, went to work and gave birth next to America’s vast military bases and burn pits, and the long-term effects of this exposure remain unclear. Dealing with the consequences of the contamination will take generations.

“Devastated by toxic exposures”

America’s 20-year military occupation devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens and genotoxins—toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA—into the environment without accountability. 

Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits—some reported to be the size of three football fields—inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.

Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.

From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases—and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them—say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden was unequivocal about such causality, but only as it related to U.S. veterans. He described “toxic smoke, thick with poisons, spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops.” He called on Congress to pass a law to “make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care they deserve.”

A few months later, Congress passed a bill known as the Pact Act, adding 23 toxic burn pit and exposure-related health conditions for which veterans could receive benefits, including bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and nine newly eligible types of respiratory cancers, at a cost of more than $270 billion over the next decade. The law represented the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in generations. 

But neither Biden nor Congress said anything, or promised any assistance, to the Afghans who lived near those U.S. military bases or worked on them and still suffer from many of the same illnesses and cancers. 

Under Section 120 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Department of Defense is required—for U.S. sites on home turf—to take responsibility for all remedial action necessary to protect human health and the environment caused by its activities in the past. However, a DOD regulation prohibits environmental cleanups at overseas military bases that are no longer in use, unless required by a binding international agreement or a cleanup plan negotiated with the host country before the transfer. 

In 2011, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan reached a peak of about 110,000 personnel—NATO forces contributed an additional 20,000—generating roughly 900,000 pounds of waste each day, the bulk of which was burned without any pollution controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. watchdog agency. Afghan laws forbidding burn pits were not applicable to U.S. and other international forces, and according to soldiers and residents, the U.S. military persisted in its use of burn pits until its withdrawal in August 2021, despite efforts to limit their use that began in 2009 and a 2018 prohibition on burn pits “except in circumstances in which no alternative disposal method is feasible.”

What America left behind 

My father came from Nangarhar, and I have wanted to tell this story for years. Although I was adopted and grew up overseas, when I returned to the country as a journalist, in 2019, I began to understand the true scale of the damage that America’s military inflicted on Afghanistan. Some bases were like small cities, belching round-the-clock smoke that tainted the skyline while processions of waste-filled trucks flooded out of them. 

When I learned about the millions of pounds of hazardous waste that the bases produced, I filed a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to SIGAR to obtain photographs of active burn pits. Using GPS coordinates embedded in the photo’s metadata, I mapped and measured the sizes of the burn pits at bases across the country. I saw the rusting hulks of Soviet-era planes and American military vehicles piled up on the bases. A 2011 photograph of the scrap in Shindand base in the western province of Herat looks exactly the same on satellite today. According to satellite imagery designed to monitor active fires and thermal anomalies, several burn pit locations at Bagram were last active in mid-June of 2021.

In the summer of 2022, I visited the sites of three of the largest former U.S bases in Afghanistan—in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kandahar and Parwan—to document what was left on the ground by America.

A year earlier, I spent months traveling across Iraq to report on the effects of pollution and military contamination on Iraqis and the environment. I knew that the American military’s effect on Afghanistan and its people mirrored problems in Iraq but was far less documented. 

It was only after the Taliban moved back into power, ending the American war in August 2021, that I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issue. On my fourth journey back to the country since the takeover, I landed on the airstrip at Kabul airport and spotted a stub of cement “T-wall” with “Clean up your fucking trash” graffitied in English, presumably by a member of the international forces during their chaotic evacuation. But the Americans had left more than just garbage: They had filled the air with toxic pollutants and dumped their raw sewage in fields and waterways across Afghanistan.

No longer facing the same threat, the enormous former U.S. bases still hold an array of poisonous detritus and sit silently against the majestic landscape, with one or two Taliban guards lazing in watchtowers on their phones. 

The skies, too, have changed since the Taliban takeover. The burn pits’ noxious black plumes, the surveillance blimps and the buzz of helicopters are all but a memory now. New faces occupied the driver’s seats of the police and military vehicles. And for many, particularly in rural areas of the country, the end of the airstrikes and night raids was long overdue and a welcome relief. There were, however, new problems to contend with under the Taliban government, including an extreme clampdown on women’s rights and a severely weakened economy. 

Over the course of six months, I traveled across the country and spoke with 26 medical practitioners and 52 Afghan residents living near those bases about their health problems, which they believe are a direct result of waste from the bases.

Farmers told me that they witnessed U.S. military contractors dump sewage and waste into their fields. Residents described how, for years, they had bathed in sewage-clogged streams that flowed from inside the base walls and breathed in the billowing clouds of poisonous pollutants from the open-air burn pits. I saw young children making a living scavenging scrap metal from the bases who are now suffering from eye infections and persistent skin diseases, according to the doctors treating them. 

I also spoke with Afghan and American soldiers who believe their health problems and diseases are directly related to their work on the American military bases in Afghanistan. One former Afghan soldier I spoke with, who didn’t give his name for fear of repercussions from the Taliban, trained new recruits at the Kandahar airfield for 13 years. He said he was close to the burn pits for the entirety of his service and had respiratory problems as a result. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Medical professionals with years of experience treating those affected, including military doctors who worked on U.S. bases caring for both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, told me that there was, categorically, no way that the burning and dumping of waste did not affect the health of everyone in the surrounding areas—and still does.

The “mother of all bombs”

In Achin in Nangarhar, Wali hides his rash and leans over the counter in the small shop where he sells snacks and drinks, on a bridge near Momand Dara village. Below him, a stream burbles quietly. 

“I know my skin disease is from the bomb because there were no such diseases before it,” he says pointedly. 

He looks out at the silent Mohmand Valley ahead of him. Fields thick with shrubs and trees fill the valley floor. As it narrows, the hills on either side merge into mountains. In the distance, the magnificent Spin Ghar, or White Mountains, mark the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby is the Tora Bora cave complex, built with CIA assistance for the mujahedeen, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, it became an al-Qaida stronghold. It was also the site of the U.S. government’s failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the start of America’s war in Afghanistan. 

The MOAB was dropped about 550 yards from Wali’s home—a seven-minute walk from his shop, he says, as he hops from stone to stone across a narrow brook leading the way. 

Containing nearly 19,000 pounds of Composition H6, a powerful mix of TNT, RDX, aluminum, and nitrocellulose explosives, the MOAB’s destructive force is roughly equivalent to the smallest of the Cold War-era tactical nuclear devices in the American arsenal. It was pushed from the rear of an MC-130 cargo plane and dropped on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said at the time. President Donald Trump, who had promised during his 2016 campaign to go after the Islamic State and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” called the strike “another very, very successful mission.” Afghan defense officials claimed that 36 Islamic State fighters were killed in the attack.

When Wali returned home months later, the bomb’s destruction was hard to see. There was no obvious massive crater; only some scorched stones and a few burned trees marked the site of the bombing. 

His home still stands, though not all dwellings in Asad Khel survived, the rubble now inhabited by straying goats. Ten families are living in the village in rebuilt homes, Wali says. His neighbors have the same itchy red rash.

“All but two or three people in each home have the skin rash,” he says, “and everyone thinks that their skin diseases are from the bomb.”

His mother, Wali Jana, 60; his wife, Nafisa, 20; and their two children, Mir Hatam, 3, and Qasim, 2, all have the same skin condition. 

“Whatever medicine the doctors are giving us is not making us better,” Wali says. 

The rashes don’t heal. They itch constantly and continue to leak a pus-like liquid, he tells me. After dozens of trips to the doctor and many tests, he has yet to find any relief or explanation for the rash. 

“All we can do is try to take measures to stay away from this disease,” he says. “I wash twice a day and change my clothes daily.”

This was not the first bomb to hit this area, he says. “But this one was different.”

In Nangarhar, “everything is poisoned” 

The Jalalabad airfield sits southeast of the city. For 20 years, it was home to Afghan and U.S. soldiers. Its eastern and southern walls are surrounded by agricultural land and mechanic and scrap metal shops packed with everything from gas masks to tools with the American flag printed on them, medical equipment, treadmills and a framed poster of the film “The Terminator.” Just down the road, there are warehouses with busted Humvees waiting to be dismantled into parts for sale. To the north is the Jalalabad-Torkham highway leading to the Pakistani border. The streams that run out of the base and under the highway flood through a cluster of villages whose residents use the water to drink from and wash in.

“The water was very clean before the Americans came,” says 36-year-old Mohammed Ajmal, pointing to a milky gray stream flowing from a hole in the high wall surrounding the base. Casting a broad shadow over the murky water, he adds, “Some people in this area have kidney problems. Others have breathing problems and skin diseases. I am not sure if these diseases came from the chemicals in the missiles from the base or from the polluted waste they put in the stream.”

“Everything is poisoned,” he says. 

Dr. Mohammad Nasim Shinwari, who has worked from his small clinic near the base for the past 17 years, says that pollution from the base is responsible for the most common health problems he sees. Only a small dried-up field separates his clinic from the burn pits that were blazing at least once a week, he says. “Now imagine breathing that for your whole life.” 

Residents filed complaints that U.S.-hired contractors from the base were unloading the tankers of waste in front of their houses and in their fields, Sadullah Kakar, a former employee of the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, told me weeks earlier. Shinwari says that up until the Americans’ exit from the base, the contractors were dumping waste “secretly” in some locations. “Other times, they were just dumping it in the fields right here, by the base. No one could stop them.”

As patients crouch on the curb outside the two-room clinic, grasping plastic folders of medical documents in their hands, Shinwari scribbles down the location where tanker trucks from the base would dump raw sewage in farmers’ fields. 

Like Ajmal, Shinwari also attributes many of the illnesses he has seen to the chemicals from the bombs, missiles and other munitions that fell on fields and villages. The doctor described how, in his home district of Shinwar and neighboring Achin, few plants have grown on the land in the five years since the MOAB was dropped. 

“People thought that the Americans had sprayed chemicals in the air or added something to the source of water,” Shinwari says. “But it was the MOAB bomb.”

For Ajmal, the polluted waterway flowing from the base is a lingering reminder of America’s longest war. 

“The wells in our homes are also contaminated,” he says, his brow furrowed. “Every week they would bring the sewage tankers from the base and empty them in the stream and in the land around. The water would get very dark and would have a very bad smell. Many people here have kidney problems, and if you look at the trees growing in the river, they are also damaged,” he says, pointing to a row of trees along the bank, half-submerged in the murky water. 

Then there were the missiles and rockets, Ajmal says, pointing toward the heavily fortified concrete walls of the Jalalabad airfield, looming over the low-rise homes. 

“You could smell the chemicals. We were breathing them.” He wipes the tip of his nose at the memory. The U.S. military deployed its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, both guided surface-to-surface weapons, in Afghanistan. 

A wide range of rockets and missiles contain propellants with hazardous components, including perchlorate, the main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel, which can affect thyroid function, may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment. U.S. forces have also been accused of using potentially toxic depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, although they have denied the claim. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says exposure to DU from friendly fire has had no effect on the kidneys of American soldiers but that there is a possible link to lower bone density. 

One of the weapons misfired and struck a relative’s home next to his, Ajmal tells me, destroying both homes. His wife was pregnant with their son, Mohammed Taha, at the time. The boy, now 10, has been ill since birth and has a rash on his scalp that leaves bald itchy patches. 

Ajmal, his three brothers and their families live just 160 yards from the airfield, in an area called Qala-e-Guljan. Nine members of Ajmal’s extended family have serious health issues. His two sons have suffered from heart problems since birth—medical records show that one has a hole in his heart. His 15-year-old daughter, Soma, also has a chronic skin rash that stretches across her back, chest and thighs. 

Similar accounts of rampant, unusual health issues afflicting entire families are commonplace in the villages around the base. 

Wali Ur Rahman, 26, takes a rest from the sweltering 108 degrees Fahrenheit June heat under a concrete gazebo in the center of his field, which sits next to Ajmal’s home. Rahman and his father, brother, sister-in-law, uncle and nephew, have lived here for the past 22 years. All have kidney problems, according to doctors’ reports that I reviewed, from kidney calcification and kidney stones to renal failure. His son and his nephew also have respiratory problems. 

Doctors told Rahman that without treatment he will need a kidney transplant, which he cannot afford. 

The family eats the food they grow in their field, which is irrigated by the stream—there are no other options. He suspected that the sewage-infested stream by their home was the cause of his family’s health problems, so he dug a well inside their home for drinking water. Now, he thinks the well is supplying dirty water; shortly after his young nieces and nephews began using it, they also became sick.

Groundwater wells are the main source of drinking water in Afghanistan. A report from 2017 in the scientific journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment mapped water quality for half of the country, finding a range of potentially toxic substances, including boron, as well as high levels of arsenic and fluoride in several areas. Although some of these substances can be naturally occurring, they are also associated with industrial use. Other water quality studies conducted at select locations in Afghanistan found nickel, mercury, chromium, uranium and lead—heavy metals that can cause serious harm to the body, from impairing children’s mental and physical development to kidney damage. 

Dumped in Jalalabad’s fields, “Tankers full of American toilet waste”

A few minutes’ drive from Rahman’s field is a wide dirt road that runs parallel to the Jalalabad-Torkham highway. On the other side are open fields. Here, I meet Khan Mohammad as he navigates his way through a carefully landscaped field in District 9 of Jalalabad, about 100 yards from the base. Mohammad stops under the shade of a small almond tree and sits down, folding his legs beneath him. He has been working in these fields for 20 years and remembers how the contractors’ trucks from the base would carry two types of waste and dump them where he was planting crops.

“One was colored green-blue, which would destroy the plants. The other was a white-gray milky substance, which had a very bad smell, like acid. Sometimes they would dump a mix of both,” he tells me. 

A group of six farmers from neighboring fields joined us under the tree. “These were tankers full of American toilet waste. At one time, the tankers were dumping twice a day, in the morning and evening,” says 30-year-old Omar Hiaran, recalling how this continued until the Americans left the base in 2021. “It was white soapy water and had toilet paper in it.” 

Hiaran’s father, also a farmer, has had health problems for the past nine years. 

“After he became ill, he told me to wear gloves when I was working in the field so that I didn’t touch the sewage like he had,” Hiaran says.

While waste from local residents is also dumped into the city’s canals and smaller landfills along the roads, it cannot compete with the sheer amount of hazardous waste that came from the airfield. 

The blue liquid Mohammad saw was a dye used in the portable toilets at the base. The chemicals used in these toilets can be toxic to human health in high doses. According to an article by Matthew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who advised on environmental cleanups, the washroom facilities at the American bases generated both gray and black water. The gray wastewater came from sinks and showers, carrying soap residue that contains phosphates and other chemicals. Black water pollution came from the toilets. While the American military has to adhere to strict rules regarding the disposal of toilet waste on home turf, he said that it faced no restrictions in Afghanistan.

When Mohammad and other villagers confronted the contractors driving the tankers, they were told that the sewage would “benefit the crops and would bring a good harvest, and they reminded us that using the sewage was cheaper than buying fertilizer and was good to use as water also,” he says.

A 2021 report by the Sierra Club and Ecology Center found that even the sewage sludge found in American fertilizers can contain a harmful array of chemicals, including dioxins, microplastics, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alarming levels of toxic PFAS—also known as “forever chemicals”—that can take decades or even centuries to break down naturally. PFAS are also present in several substances that were used by the U.S. military, including foams used to combat petroleum-based fires. 

By mid-2022, the U.S. military had reportedly still not begun cleanups at any of the hundreds of DOD sites across the United States identified as highly contaminated with PFAS.

Studies have linked higher levels of PFAS exposure to an array of health problems, including liver damage, cardiovascular diseases, increased risk of kidney cancer, increased risk of thyroid disease and immune system dysfunction. A federal study published in July established, for the first time, a direct link between PFAS and testicular cancer in thousands of U.S. service members. Pregnant women exposed to PFAS have an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Babies in the womb and infants are also vulnerable, as studies have found that PFAS can affect placental function and be present in breast milk. PFAS exposure has also been linked to decreased infant birth weight, developmental dysfunction among infants and increased disease risk later in life.

Even if such sewage goes through a treatment process, research has shown that PFAS and other toxic chemicals cannot be removed. 

In 2017, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, or NEPA, said that 70 percent of the underground water in Kabul was contaminated with harmful bacteria, microbes and chemicals and was not safe for human consumption. Other major cities, including Jalalabad, faced the same problem, the agency said. 

Afghanistan’s capital had one public facility for sewage treatment, the Makroyan Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processed at least 21,000 gallons of raw sewage each month from portable toilets at the U.S. Embassy and 12,000 gallons from those used by U.S. and coalition troops. All of this was piped into the Kabul River, according to Afghan officials and Malika and Refa Environmental Solutions, the company that serviced the NATO headquarters in Kabul and at Bagram airfield. The plant stopped working in 2018, and the untreated wastewater was dumped into the river before flowing into the city drains, endangering the health of thousands of residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey notes that pollutants found in wastewater include phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, which promote excessive plant growth—something that Mohammad and the other farmers saw in their fields. The sewage dumped in the fields around Jalalabad airfield did not go through treatment processes on the base, according to an Afghan engineer named Faridun (he gave only his first name) who had worked on the base for 12 years. 

“They have infected every part of Afghanistan”

At his home on the edge of the field he farms, Mohammad explains that his two youngest sons are suffering from serious kidney issues. “But we do not know about the exact cause of their diseases, whether it’s pollution or something else,” he says. He suspects the sewage dumping.

His eldest son Farooq, who has issues with his bladder, emerges from the home with a thick stack of papers and folders cradled in his slim arms. Mohammad combs through the mountain of documents—there are 44 doctor reports alone for his 7-year-old son, Umar, who sits crouched at his feet. 

Umar has had kidney problems since he was 1 year old, Mohammad says. I look through the reports: Doctors in Afghanistan and Pakistan had diagnosed him with a pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs), moderate ascites (fluid in the abdomen) and chronic kidney and liver disease. His 5-year-old brother, Ameen, has kidney damage, and his blood tests show he is also anemic. Both boys help their father work the land every day along with Mohammad’s mother, Bibi Haro, 60, who shows me her skin condition, which she has had for eight years. At first, it was red and leaking pus, but it has now settled into a permanent itch. 

Umar has been going to the doctor for four years, his grandmother says. “He is still in pain now. Every day he is suffering. Last year he went to a kidney center hospital in Pakistan. And just a week ago, we returned to the doctor with him,” she says. 

His cousins Bibi Ameena and Hamidullah, who also work the fields by the home, have both had kidney problems for the past five years.

Mohammad looks down at Umar, nestled under his arm. “When he coughs, there is blood,” he says. “The only thing I owned was a tractor, and I sold it for his treatment. Now, the doctors in Peshawar say they need 5 million Pakistani rupees [about $16,000] to replace his kidneys, but I don’t have that much money.”

As tears of anger stream down her face, Bibi Haro tells me how her brother is deaf as a result of an American drone crash in the field by the home. “They would fly low every night and scare us while we slept,” she says. “They bombed Nangarhar for years, and their smoke filled our sky. They have infected every part of Afghanistan.” 

Jalalabad doctors: Diagnosing the contaminants of war 

Doctors at the public hospital in Jalalabad attribute many of the health problems their patients face to water, air and soil pollution from the American base. I meet one of them, Dr. Latif Zeer, in a deserted restaurant in the city center. As soon as we sit down at a long table, the power cuts out. The ornate gold fans above us slow to a stop, letting the hum of the city outside flood into the room.

He explains how heavy metal poisoning in “all the water” may be related to contamination from chemicals used on military installations or chemical residue from weapons and ammunition. In his view, this has led to the hospital’s many cases of kidney problems and gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract including the stomach and intestine, usually caused by viruses, bacteria or other microbes. Gastroenteritis can also be caused by food or water contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium. “Anywhere they dropped bombs or the airstrikes were conducted, definitely, the water would be contaminated,” he adds. 

Over the years, the DOD has faced a string of lawsuits over contaminated water on its bases at home and abroad, including claims of contamination from jet fuel and depleted uranium. In response to my emailed questions, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM denied that the U.S. military had dumped wastewater, black or gray, in waterways in Afghanistan, saying that specially designed “lagoons/settling ponds and leach fields” were used instead that “did not directly discharge onto the land.” Wastewater was “gathered and hauled off” by contractors to a host nation’s treatment and disposal facility, it added. 

CENTCOM also said it last operated an open-air burn pit in Afghanistan on December 28, 2020, refuting what dozens of residents told me.

Zeer, who has spent two decades at the hospital in Jalalabad, tells me the gastroenteritis cases he saw were unusual. At one point, the national Ministry of Public Health sent a team from Kabul to observe patients and test the water, he says. The infectious disease specialists could only explain the cause as “chemical substances.” 

Patients usually got better after a few days or with antibiotics, he says, “but we were seeing patients with AGE [acute gastroenteritis] symptoms and respiratory problems [who were] dying, and so I thought this was some kind of chemical poisoning of the water caused by chemicals used in the fighting.” 

But it is difficult to definitively diagnose chemical poisoning as the cause of gastroenteritis, he says. Doctors in Afghanistan lack the resources and equipment to deduce the primary causes of many of the illnesses they see daily. Adding to their woes is a record-keeping system that is largely analog and often does not include basic details, such as home district and age. 

“People don’t know their family medical history, and we often cannot do follow-ups with patients because they are moving due to fighting or they cannot afford to come back,” Shinwari told me. 

In the last four years of the war, Zeer treated a flood of patients from Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar, mostly suffering from acute gastroenteritis. Most of these cases came from districts that had seen prolonged fighting over the years, including Achin, Khogyani and Shirzad in Nangarhar.

The head of the Jalalabad hospital’s pulmonary department for 14 years, Dr. Sabahuddin Saba, cites multiple causes for an array of respiratory illnesses suffered across the region. He says that the air pollution can come from working with materials like silicon or coal, for example: “Some farmers have what we call ‘farmer’s lung’ because they work in the dust.”

But he also notes that Afghanistan has been devastated by bombs and airstrikes that “left chemicals that would spread to the surrounding areas and would be breathed by people all around.”

“We see many patients with chronic coughs, and when we took chest CT scans, we found lung cancer,” Saba says. “Many other patients have bronchial asthma, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], bronchiolitis and emphysema.” 

He believes that some of these patients were exposed to “irritating or chemical dust”  residue from the bombs. In 2018, patients traveling from Kunar arrived at his hospital in Jalalabad suffering from shortness of breath and coughing up blood. Some died. The hospital had no comprehensive system for managing patients’ records or advanced toxicology equipment that would have enabled doctors to identify what chemicals were responsible for the apparent poisoning; they only had drug test kits provided by the United Nations Population Fund. Other patients, Saba says, arrived at the hospital with mysterious eye infections and nosebleeds, both of which he believes were caused by a chemical substance. 

An Afghan oncologist who has worked in Nangarhar for more than 20 years tells me that he and other doctors in the province see many cancer cases, mostly lung and pancreatic, followed by breast cancer. He says that the majority of patients go to Pakistan and India for treatment because Afghanistan does not have chemotherapy and other medicines readily available. The patients mostly have stage 3 or 4 cancer “because they are not getting regular checkups, we do not catch the cancer sooner. I have treated many soldiers who have lung cancer,” he says.

“If we have good facilities and a good system in place, we would do lots of research but we don’t have technical people here now,” he adds. “This is Afghanistan, if people die from cancer, who will record it? There is no one counting how many have died. This is the first time that someone came here and asked such things.”

In Kandahar, “deadly” burn pits and contaminated water

A badly beaten 300-mile stretch of road links Kabul with Kandahar, passing south through the provinces of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul. Post-apocalyptic dust storms blur the pockmarked road ahead. The drive takes 12 hours, and the route is choked with overloaded trucks trudging along with little attempt to avoid the potholes. Strewn along the sides of the highway are bullet-riddled police cars and Humvees, the remnants of the Taliban’s triumphant storm across the country toward the capital in 2021. 

At the regional NEPA office in Kandahar city, staff member Matiullah Zahen describes his struggles with waste burning and sewage dumping by contractors at the giant 3,633-acre Kandahar airfield used by American and Afghan forces. 

“One and a half years ago, we went to the base and told them what they can and can’t burn and where—that it had to be a specific place, not just dumping and burning everywhere,” he says. 

But waste disposal was not high on the list of priorities for the commanders at the base, he says, and nothing changed. 

“The kind of thinking of the base commanders was: ‘It’s the contractor’s job to handle the waste, I don’t care how he does it, just get it out of my face. I got other problems, I’m fighting a war,’” Zahen says. 

Zahen accompanies me to the airfield and we drive out, my letters of permission from several ministries and the governor in hand. We wait for the base commander to show us where one of the burn pits was, behind a now-padlocked gate that leads to the international side of the airfield. Two hours later, we are told to leave. 

After we leave the maze of high blast walls winding out of the base, we turn off the main road into the Khoshab area, just to its west, home to about 15,000 people who earn a living from the surrounding agricultural land. Khoshab is the closest village to the airfield.

Here, I find 22-year-old Laal Mohammed working his land in the shadow of the airfield’s walls. Despite the brutal hazy midday heat, he doesn’t break a sweat. His wheat and vegetable fields are less than 100 yards from the base’s perimeter. 

His family’s home is surrounded by a carefully kept garden with rows of vegetables and a burst of blossoming flowers. Inside is a 60-foot-deep well dug 15 years ago where they get their drinking water. They moved here eight years ago from neighboring Zabul province. 

Five years ago, both he and his sister Nazaka, 21, started having kidney problems. “The doctors found kidney stones many times,” he tells me. “The doctors we went to see told us to stop drinking the water here,” he says, adding that they can’t use their neighbors’ water as they have the same wells. “And we cannot afford to buy bottled water.” 

He takes me to a site across from the base that locals call Qazi Qarez, where he says the tankers used to dump sewage and trash once or twice a week. From 2014 until the Americans left, they would burn the waste in five locations here, he says, pointing to the spots. Today, it’s an open, empty stretch of land, but just a year and a half ago, he says, plumes of thin smoke could be seen trailing upward to the sky.

“Indefensible” burn pits

Although U.S. military waste management guidance from as far back as 1978 specifies that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, burn pits persisted in Afghanistan. DOD officials stated that the management of solid waste is not always a high priority during wartime, according to the Government Accountability Office. 

CENTCOM regulations specified that when an installation exceeds 100 U.S. personnel for 90 days, it must develop a plan for installing alternatives to open-air burn pits for waste disposal. CENTCOM officials told SIGAR that “no U.S. installation in Afghanistan has ever complied with the regulations.”

The U.S. military used open-air burn pits almost exclusively to dispose of its solid waste during its first four years in Afghanistan. Only in 2004 did the DOD begin introducing new disposal methods, including landfills and incineration, a year after soldiers returning from deployment complained of shortness of breath and asthma. 

And while CENTCOM attempted to limit the use of burn pits beginning in 2009, reliance on them continued: In April 2010, the Pentagon reported to Congress that open-air burning was the safest, most effective and expedient manner of solid waste reduction during military operations until research and development efforts could produce better alternatives. Shortly afterward, CENTCOM estimated that there were 251 active burn pits in Afghanistan, a 36.4 percent increase from just four months earlier. That same year, health studies raised concerns that the burn pits’ smoke, contaminated with lead, mercury and dioxins, could harm the adrenal glands, lungs, liver and stomach. In 2011, guidance finally stated that burn pits should be placed far away from areas near troops. 

The DOD hired contractors such as KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, to manage the burn pits. Over the years, KBR has faced numerous lawsuits related to the burn pits and the water treatment plants it operated in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The waste burned in the open-air pits, according to multiple reports, including one in 2010 by Nasuti, the former U.S. Air Force captain, included petroleum and lubricants; paints, asbestos, solvents, grease, cleaning solutions and building materials that contain formaldehyde, copper, arsenic and hydrogen cyanide; hydraulic fluids, aircraft de-icing fluids, antifreeze, munitions and other unexploded ordnance; metal containers, furniture and rubber, Humvee parts and tires; and discarded food, plastics, Styrofoam, wood, lithium-ion batteries, electrical equipment, paint, chemicals, uniforms, pesticides and medical and human waste. Animal and human carcasses, including body parts, were also thrown in. 

Though CENTCOM regulation prohibits a host of materials and hazardous chemicals from being burned, these and other discarded items were set on fire using JP-8 jet fuel, which released benzene, a known carcinogen. Plumes of the burnt waste hovered over the base and seeped into soldiers’ sleeping, working and dining quarters, often less than a mile away. The smoke included heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons and hydrochloric acid, among numerous other toxic substances. 

Kandahar airfield generated more than 100 tons of solid waste per day in 2012 and more than 5 million gallons of sewage water from 30,000 portable toilets. The DOD first brought 23 incinerators to Kandahar that year at a cost of almost $82 million, but the machines proved extremely unreliable and costly to operate. One incinerator was delivered two years late and required $1 million of repairs before it could even be turned on. An inspection by SIGAR from 2012 to 2014 found serious mechanical problems and a reliance on burn pits instead. In 2015, SIGAR’s inspector general called the use of open-air burn pits “indefensible.” 

A few weeks before I headed to Kandahar, I spoke with an American official familiar with burn pits who had witnessed all manner of toxic waste being burned in the massive pits on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

The official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, told me that the trash at the base in Kandahar “was all over the place” and that no one was paying attention to the specifications on what could be burned in the pit and when. The contractors “would just burn everything,” the official said. “I expected to see a big pile of ash, but all you saw was things that were blackened. It didn’t effectively burn everything down to nothing. I was like, why bother?”

They said the enormous burn pits would be dug deep enough to be used many times and “when it got to a level where they couldn’t burn anymore, they would just shovel dirt over it and dig another one in another spot. They smelled horrible.” 

Most of the incinerators did not work properly or at all and wouldn’t be fixed, the official told me. At other times, personnel weren’t trained properly on how to use them, “so what all the bases did was go back to what they did before,” which was to either use burn pits or dump waste. 

The military doctors

Abdul Sami, 32, and Zabiullah Amarkhil, 31, Afghan doctors, know well the damage from the burn pits. The pair studied medicine together before working as trauma surgeons in military hospitals inside bases in Kunduz, Nangarhar, Kabul and Balkh as well as Kandahar, where they still work today. 

“I have seen patients with skin problems and eye infections. Others had kidney problems because of the contaminated water, American soldiers also. We also had patients with acute gastroenteritis,” says Amarkhil as we bundle into the back of a beat-up taxi. I had collected the doctors from the airfield after they finished their shift.

On all the bases, they treated soldiers and civilians with the same array of pulmonary and respiratory problems witnessed by the doctors in Jalalabad. Most of their patients were those who were working close to the burn pit, they say.

In Jalalabad, Sami recalls at one point registering up to 200 patients a day with respiratory isssues, skin diseases and stomach problems. 

“Most of these patients were from the military base,” he says. The military quarters, he adds, were just 650 yards west from one of the pits.

Amarkhil says the waste at Kandahar airfield was dumped and burned both inside and outside the base. He drew a map marking the base’s biggest burn pit, between the American and Afghan sides of the airfield, and another location where trash and other refuse were dumped in a landfill. Up until 2016, he said, “they were doing burn pits once a week, always on Wednesday. The flames were about 4 meters high.”

The burn pit was very close to the military training center that housed new trainee soldiers, who were not used to the heavy air pollution, Amarkhil tells me. In 2016, he would see as many as 10 trainee soldiers a day with respiratory problems. An additional 10 to 15 had skin issues, he says. He adds that waste from Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman province near Jalalabad, was dumped at the Darunta Dam to the west of the city, where it polluted the water. But in Kandahar everything would go to the burn pits, Amarkhil says, including a specific container used for medical waste and equipment. 

“When it was full, the container would be burnt also,” he says.

Momand Khosti, a military doctor, called the burn pits “deadly.” Khosti worked in senior positions in both the Afghan and American hospitals at Kandahar airfield and five other airfields since 2007, and as the deputy director for health affairs in the Ministry of Defense until the Taliban takeover. 

When we met weeks earlier in Kabul, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, he marked the location of a Kandahar burn pit on a napkin, about a mile from the hospital on the Afghan side of the base. 

“We also burned medical waste and equipment in a smaller burn pit, 100 meters from the hospital,” he says.

The last time he saw active burn pits was in June 2021, he says.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions and kidney problems that patients at Kandahar airfield were suffering, Khosti believes that “many” of the cases were directly linked to military activities and the bases themselves. 

“One night, 30 soldiers came into the hospital with diarrhea and vomiting,” he says. “In the days following, more came in.” Staff members at the hospital then found that the water on the base had been contaminated.

Khosti, who specializes in cancers of the liver, gallbladder and bile duct, described how a soldier with late-stage lung cancer had come to see him just two days earlier. “I asked him about his lifestyle and work background. He told me he worked on the bases or on the battlefield. He was coughing up a black-colored mucus. Because he worked as a soldier for so many years, I believe his cancer is because of the pollution from the burn pits.” 

U.S. service members exposed to burn pit pollution in Afghanistan also coughed up black mucus they called “plume crud” or “black goop,” studies later revealed. They reported suffering from severe chronic respiratory disease, including constrictive bronchiolitis, a rare and often fatal lung disorder for which there is no cure. Other symptoms included unexplained diarrhea, severe headaches, weeping lesions, chronic skin infections and rashes, severe abdominal pain, leukemia, lung cancer, nosebleeds, severe heart conditions, sleep apnea, anemia, ulcers, unexpected weight loss and vomiting.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insisted until 2021 that there was conflicting and insufficient research to show that long-term health problems have resulted from burn pit exposure, and denied most benefit claims related to toxic exposure. The VA estimates that more than 3.5 million veterans and service members were exposed to the toxic fumes from burn pits during overseas deployments since 1990, according to a 2015 VA report.

The Khoshab clinic

In Kandahar, Afghan doctors allege that toxic substances from the burn pits harmed the development of fetuses. At a small clinic in Khoshab about 100 yards from the Kandahar airfield, Dr. Suhela Muhammadi, 40, bustles through a crowd of mothers and children in the clinic’s small waiting room. She tells me about heart anomalies, genetic disorders and other birth defects in babies whose mothers lived near the base, saying these were not seen at such high levels 20 years ago. 

“I think that most of them were caused by the war, when their mothers were pregnant,” she says.

The number of congenital birth defects in Afghanistan per 1,000 people is more than twice as high as that in the U.S., according to 2017 research published by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. The paper also notes that increased maternal exposure to certain chemicals may affect development of the fetus and contribute to congenital anomalies. Increased risk of congenital anomalies was reported in Afghan women working in agriculture sectors and those living near hazardous waste sites. 

While the environmental toxicologist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani was working at the University of Michigan, she published several studies on Iraq, where birth defects have been better studied than in Afghanistan. She found infants and children had been exposed to potentially toxic metals such as tungsten, titanium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, thorium and uranium that are heavily used in weaponry and military hardware. 

“The most common resulting anomalies are heart defects and neural tube defects,” she told me.

Abdul Wali Abid, the Khoshab clinic’s manager for more than a decade, tells me that in the weeks before the Americans left the base, the staff saw smoke billowing from burn pits every week. An engineer working inside the Kandahar airfield for the past eight years said that right before the U.S. military left the base, they burned a lot of things, “even cars.” There was a river at the back side of the base coming out the wall “where they were dumping sewage until the end.” 

As I leave the clinic, I meet 35-year-old Abdul Raziq, a clinic guard who has lived in the area all his life. He knows the “river” that the engineer had told me about, he says, leading me out of the clinic to show me the three places where the water was coming out of the airfield walls. 

We head out and drive around the southern side of the base, bumping over dry agricultural land. A metal grate covered the outflow to one of the pipes, which emptied into a 26-foot-wide trench carved out in front of it. Not long ago, water would flow out of the base, flooding into smaller streams, which fed nearby agricultural lands, Raziq tells me. 

“It was dirty, soapy water, with rubbish in it,” he says. “But when the Americans left the base, it stopped.” 

Kandahar airfield’s scrap metal collectors

Along the road on the northeast side of the base is a string of makeshift shops stuffed with a random assortment of scrap, from Humvee seats to car engines and ammunition boxes. I had seen the same in Nangarhar, where shop owners had once built a bustling economy on the waste from the base. 

Here, I find Fida Mohammad, 17, and Esanullah, 15, hiding from the midday sun inside their ramshackle hut, surrounded by piles of metal. They are originally from Ghazni province, but after their father died of a heart attack seven years ago, they moved to Kandahar with their mother and three younger brothers, hoping to make a living from scrap metal trading. 

When the U.S. soldiers were still at the base, the boys could earn as much as 15,000 to 20,000 afghanis ($185 to $250) a month from collecting scrap that came from the base, they say. 

“Some things were burned by the people at the base, like TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones and all sorts of electronics, but we would go through it and collect the metal that survived the fire,” Fida Mohammad tells me. 

For the past five years, Esanullah has suffered from breathing problems, and his hands are riddled with a rash that started two years ago. 

“Our younger brother got sick also. He was small, so my mother told me to bring him with us to our work. He was playing with all the things and then he got the same skin problems as Esanullah,” says Fida Mohammad.

Two years ago, Esanullah traveled to Quetta in Pakistan to see a doctor with his mother. “I couldn’t talk properly or stand,” he says. “The real problem was my chest. I was there for two and a half months. But even now, I have problems with my breathing.”

The doctors in Pakistan didn’t give a diagnosis for the cause, but the boys believe that the source of Esanullah’s health problems is the airfield. 

The two would collect everything from plastic bottles to vehicle engines to “the bad things” like live grenades, as well as ammunition and shell casings, says Fida Mohammad. 

He leads me outside and points to these deadly remnants of the American occupation: unexploded artillery shells and a box filled with 40 mm grenades.

Khosti had told me that around Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, people suffered from eye infections. There were even cases of children, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, developing eye tumors, he said. “They were collecting scrap metal from the base, and areas around where the U.S. military was conducting weapons testing, and sometimes they would take the explosive materials, so I believe their eye tumors were related to this.”

Bagram, “Everyone is sick here” 

Anyone who lives near Bagram airfield knew the burn pits by the smell of the raging barbecue of trash, usually overseen by Afghan employees, few of whom bothered to wear masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash spewing from the pits.

“When you are doing this kind of work for 10 years, 15 … there is nothing that can keep you safe,” one of the former base employees tells me. 

The enormous U.S. stronghold, about 15 miles north of Kabul, was home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at its peak, with airplanes and helicopters taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. There were underground bars, a private airstrip, a Burger King and other fast-food joints, an Oakley sunglasses store and, until 2014, a secret detention facility. A giant diesel generator farm powered the base 24 hours a day, emitting a constant stream of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulfur. 

A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the base’s new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called “the shit pit” and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles’ corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwan’s new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagon’s largest military base in Afghanistan. 

“When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday,” the governor tells me coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound “and that smell” that the military was conducting controlled detonations of military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. “We knew what day of week it was by the detonations,” he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and I’m eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations. The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told — the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. 

Almost all of the waste “was still going to the burn pit”

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the base’s burn pit. Blasch’s team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the military’s burn pits in Afghanistan. 

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per day—enough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the base’s checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower. 

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didn’t matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually breathing. Blasch’s team outfitted members of the security forces with personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help. 

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPA’s air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50. 

“Right now, we have a lot of question marks,” said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagram’s air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines.

 “Everyone breathed the same air” 

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base. 

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind. 

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me. 

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. “When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years,” he says.

“We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem,” he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. “They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.” 

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. “I have all the letters.” 

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. “Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.”

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the district’s representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and “two international military people from the base” came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

“After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples,” he says. “They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.” 

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says. 

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadi’s home. One man, Ajab Gul, says he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove recurrent kidney stones. “In our area, we do not have clean water,” he says. “Maybe this is the cause.” 

“Everyone is sick here,” Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. “When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started.” He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

“When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell,” Salim adds. “It was a big problem for us.”

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019. 

“The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I can’t breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. I’m coughing a mucus that stings my throat.”

“Lots of farmers from this area are sick,” Salim says. They call it ‘Bagram Lung.’ Just knock on any door and you will find it. … The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air.” Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, “Kabul cough,” to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin. 

 While the cause of Salim’s problem has not been determined, his description of “Bagram Lung” brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. 

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungs—an irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel, in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base “were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there,” says Salim, the farmer.

“I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak,” says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. “I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored,” he says. “I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.”

Every other house outside Bagram’s walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village. 

“The people don’t drink the canal water now; it’s too dirty,” he says. 

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all  and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldn’t make use of them. 

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. “Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month,” but “we could see the clouds of smoke rising,” he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. “We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in there where it was set alight,” he told me. “On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopko”—the American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

The post America’s war in Afghanistan devastated the country’s environment in ways that may never be cleaned up appeared first on Popular Science.

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It has been more than two years since former Audi CEO Markus Duesmann announced that after 2026, the automaker will develop only battery-powered models. Audi’s plan is to have more than 20 fully electric models in its portfolio by 2025. The carmaker has already started down this road by investing about 18 billion euros ($19 billion and change) in electrification and hybridization.

In the process, Audi is pursuing battery technology that optimizes energy efficiency. Its primary focus for innovation is solid state batteries, which use solid electrolytes instead of liquid. The brand designs, develops, and checks battery cells and battery components on its own at its battery testing center in Gaimersheim, Germany. It recently transitioned its battery packs from winding to a stacking configuration, where the cells are stacked neatly, like a layer cake, to increase the overall capacity. 

More capacity means greater range. And better range makes these vehicles more marketable in a competitive, burgeoning market. Any advantage between today and the sometime-in-the-future implementation of solid state batteries is a coveted position. 

Here’s how it works.

Stacking adds density, thus energy

The German brand is known for agile, sleek vehicles that consistently earn high marks for performance and handling. As part of the Volkswagen group along with Porsche and even Lamborghini, Audi is in good company. Audi (along with the other brands in the group) has ratcheted up its EV goals, seeking the best ways to leap ahead of its competitors, and battery stacking is the latest mark of progress.

[Related: Why solid state batteries are the next frontier for EV makers]

In new EVs like the Q8 e-tron, electrodes in lithium-ion cells are thin foils which are traditionally wound into a structure called a jelly roll, Audi explained to PopSci. These jelly rolls can be either round for cylindrical cells or flat for prismatic cells. In prismatic cells, the utilization of the inner volume is limited due to the rounded edges.

By stacking single electrode sheets into larger stacks, more of the cell’s inner volume can be used, increasing the cell’s capacity. This allows Audi’s EVs to make better use of the physical space per cell, as was previously the case with winding technology.

Imagine it this way: in winding, the cell material is wrapped around a roll and squeezed together into a rectangular shell. During stacking, the electrode layers are superimposed to completely fill the rectangular space so that the cell has about 20 percent more active material, which increases the capacity. Cramming more electrons into the space equals overall improved range. A total of 12 battery cells form a module and 36 modules make up a battery system, protected by cube-shaped aluminum housing.

For the Q8 e-tron SUV and Sportback, Audi engineers created a battery pack that delivers about 20 kilowatt hours more gross capacity over 2023 models. Now, the battery offers 114 kWh instead of the 95 kWh on the previous battery tech. And incredibly, it doesn’t take up any more space than the old battery pack. As a result, 2024 Q8 e-tron owners can get 30 percent more range. The Q8 Sportback S-Line e-tron with the ultra package gets 300-plus miles. Even the standard Q8 e-tron SUV is good for 285 miles (296 for the Sportback) so it’s pretty close. 

The 2023 model served up a 222-mile EPA-estimated range for the standard SUV and 218 miles in Sportback form. For the 2024 Q8 e-tron, the EPA estimates it’s good for 285 miles for the SUV and 296 miles for the Sportback model. An optional Ultra package, available only with the Sportback, features a smaller wheel and tire package with low-rolling-resistance rubber and retuned suspension that gives it a lower ride height for added efficiency, and this setup delivers the magical 300-mile EPA estimate.

Pros and cons to stacking 

Like most new technologies, there are advantages and disadvantages to consider, Audi says. The advantage of this new stacking method allows for more active material to be implemented into lithium-ion cells, resulting in greater capacity, energy, and power. The disadvantage is a slower production process, resulting in higher cost.

Ultimately, Audi opted to prioritize the advantages over the disadvantages, a brand representative shared with PopSci.

Audi cell technicians had a dual goal of packing as much energy as possible into the stack while still having the ability to recharge it as quickly as possible. However, more density requires more time to charge compared to previous, less-dense batteries. This latest achievement also comes with a side of improved battery chemistry that Audi says has a better charge curve, which allows it to hold higher charging rates for longer.

At its battery testing site in Gaimersheim, Audi also runs a construction facility for prototype batteries. Here, employees build the high-voltage batteries from the ground up all the way to pre-series production. The goal for the next iteration will involve greater integration of the cells into the battery pack, reducing overhead, optimizing the battery’s design, and increasing the overall vehicle’s efficiency with the newest cell technologies.

The post How Audi designed its densest EV battery yet appeared first on Popular Science.

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Going incognito in your browser and favorite apps has its benefits, even though it may not be as private as you think. Also known as private mode, this feature temporarily pauses tracking of your browsing or viewing history and doesn’t save data you input, such as login credentials and personal details.

We don’t need to know your reasons, but if you need to go about your business without leaving any tracks, we can show you how to go incognito on apps like YouTube, Instagram, and Google Maps, whenever necessary.

Turn on YouTube’s incognito mode

There are good reasons you might want YouTube to remember what you’re watching. Logging the videos you’ve watched improves your recommendations and makes sure you can easily get back to that hilarious sketch clip you enjoyed several weeks ago. However, if you share your device with someone else, activating incognito mode on Google’s video platform might help you keep your watch history private. 

[Related: Why YouTube is hiding dislikes on videos]

To temporarily go incognito on YouTube’s mobile app, tap your profile picture (top right), then choose Turn on Incognito. You’ll then start browsing on a clean slate, with fresh recommendations and no viewing history. To go back to normal, tap the incognito button (top right) and select Turn off Incognito.

You won’t find an incognito mode available for YouTube on the web, but you can get the same result by simply opening the video platform in a private browsing tab. Note that if you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, the ads will return when you’re in incognito mode.

How to go incognito on Google Maps

Going incognito on Google Maps is useful if you need to research places or plan journeys without leaving any trace, or if you don’t want your searches to affect the recommendations the app gives you about where to go.

If you’re using the mobile app, tap your profile picture (top right), then choose Turn on Incognito mode. Your personalized recommendations and quick links to places like your home address will disappear, and the app won’t save anything you do in this mode. To exit, tap the incognito mode button (top right) and hit Turn off Incognito mode.

As with YouTube, you won’t find this option built into Google Maps online, but you can just open the site inside a browser set to incognito mode instead. You can still look up information about places and get directions, but you can’t leave reviews, save places, or see your location history.

Start a private session on Spotify

Your listening history shows up in a few places on Spotify. The app shares it with friends you’ve connected with on the platform, and your recently played artists show up on your public Spotify profile.

To listen to songs without this automatic sharing and tracking, you can start a private session—Spotify’s version of going incognito. On mobile, tap Home, the cog icon, and under Privacy turn the Private Session toggle switch on. From the desktop app, click the drop-down arrow (top right) to find the switch. To end a private session, just retrace your steps and flick the switch the other way.

If you don’t turn your private session off manually, it will automatically end after 6 hours or when you restart the Spotify app.

Going incognito on Instagram

While Instagram doesn’t have an incognito mode as such, you can stop your friends from seeing when you’re actively online. Tap your profile picture (bottom right), then the menu button (top right), followed by Settings and Privacy. Select Messages and story replies, then Show activity status, and turn off the toggle switch on the next screen. On the web, click the three-line menu in the bottom left corner of the screen, then Settings, and How others can interact with you. On the next menu, toggle on the switch beside Show activity status.

[Related: Why the web version of Instagram is better than the app]

This also means that you won’t be able to see other people’s Instagram activity status in places like the direct message conversation list, so keep that in mind. Retrace your steps and switch Show activity status back to on to go back to normal.

There’s not much you can do on Instagram without logging in, so opening your account in an incognito browser window won’t prevent the platform from tracking what you’re seeing. But if you use one to open direct links to profile pictures and individual posts, your browsing will stay private. 

Clean your viewing history on video streaming apps

Unfortunately, no video streaming service offers an incognito mode, as profiles are only meant for individual use. However, you can edit your viewing history and remove items if necessary. 

On Netflix on the web click your profile picture (top right), then Account. Choose your profile, open Profile & Parental Controls, and then Viewing Activity. Click the hide button (on the right) to remove something from your record—you can hide individual episodes or entire shows. If you want to absolutely hide your viewing history, just select Hide all. Whatever items you remove won’t show up as recently viewed or affect your future recommendations.

[Related: The government won’t protect your internet privacy, so here’s how to do it yourself]

If you’re using Hulu on the web, scroll down the Home page to find the Continue watching section and click View all. You’ll see a tiled view of all the shows and movies you’ve played on the platform—click the three-dot menu next to an item you want out of your viewing history and choose Remove. When it comes to shows, you won’t be able to remove specific episodes, and if you’ve watched every episode of a series, it won’t appear on the list because Hulu doesn’t save a history of the movies and shows you’ve completed. 

Other video streaming apps have similar options if you delve into your viewing history in the settings. They all support profiles, so your viewing record doesn’t have to get mixed up with the habits or preferences of the rest of your family or the people you share a place with.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2021.

The post How to go incognito on these 6 popular apps appeared first on Popular Science.

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Take it from Tom Hanks—he is not interested in peddling dental plans.

“BEWARE!! [sic] There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it,” the actor wrote via an Instagram post to his account over the weekend.

Hanks’ warning was superimposed over a screenshot of the deepfaked dental imposter in question, and subsequently highlighted by Variety on Sunday afternoon. According to Gizmodo, the simulated celebrity appears to be based on an image owned by the Los Angeles Times from at least 2014.

The latest example of generative AI’s continued foray into uncharted legal and ethical territories seems to confirm the Oscar-winning actor’s fears first voiced barely five months ago. During an interview while on The Adam Buxton Podcast, Hanks explained his concerns about AI tech’s implications for actors, especially after their deaths.

[Related: This fictitious news show is entirely produced by AI and deepfakes.]

“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deepfake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said in May. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge, but it’s also a legal one.”

Hanks’ warnings come as certain corners of the global entertainment industry are already openly embracing the technology, with or without performers’ consent. In China, for example, AI companies are now offering deepfake services to clone popular online influencers to hawk products ostensibly 24/7 using their own “livestreams.”

According to a report last month from MIT Technology Review, Chinese startups only require a few minutes’ worth of source video alongside roughly $1,000 to replicate human influencers for as long as a client wants. Those fees alongside an AI clone’s complexity and abilities, but often are significantly cheaper than employing human livestream labor. A report from Chinese analytics firm iiMedia Research, for example, estimates companies could cut costs by as much as 70 percent by switching to AI talking heads. Combined with other economic and labor challenges, earnings for human livestream hosts in the country have dropped as much as 20 percent since 2022.

[Related: Deepfake videos may be convincing enough to create false memories.]

Apart from the financial concerns, deepfaking celebrities poses ethical issues, especially for the families of deceased entertainers. Also posting to Instagram over the weekend, Zelda Williams—daughter of the late Robin Williams—offered her thoughts after encountering deepfaked audio of her father’s voice.

“I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing, the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings,” wrote Williams, as reported via Rolling Stone on October 2. “These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.”

AI is currently a major focal point for ongoing labor negotiations within Hollywood. Last week, the Writers Guild of America reached an agreement with industry executives following a five-month strike, settling on a contract that offers specific guidelines protecting writers’ livelihoods and art against AI outsourcing. Meanwhile, members of the Screen Actors Guild remain on strike while seeking their own guarantees against AI in situations such as background actor generation and posthumous usages of their likeness.

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Fictional murderous barbers and real life serial killers are woven into London’s spooky history with legendary tales of their dastardly deeds. However, Sweeney Todd or Jack the Ripper may have paled in comparison to students from Oxford in the 14th century. A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases found that Oxford’s student population was the most lethal of all social or professional groups, committing about 75 percent of all homicides.

[Related: How DNA evidence could help put the Long Island serial killer behind bars.]

First launched in 2018, Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Maps plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ reports. These documents were recorded in Latinand are catalogs of sudden or suspicious deaths that were deduced by a jury of local residents. They also included names, events, locations, and even the value of murder weapons. The project recently added the cities of York and Oxford to its street plan of slayings during the 14th century. 

The team used these rolls and maps to construct the street atlas of 354 homicides across the three cities. It has also been updated to include accidents, sudden deaths, deaths in prison, and sanctuary church cases. 

They estimate that  the per capita homicide rate in Oxford was potentially 4 to 5 times higher than late medieval London or York. It also put the homicide rate at about 60 to 75 per 100,000—about 50 times higher than the murder rates in today’s English cities. The maps, however, don’t factor in the major advances in medicine, policing, and emergency response in the centuries since.

York’s murderous mayhem was likely driven by inter- knife fights among tannery workers (Tanners) to fatal violence between glove makers (Glovers) during the rare 14th century period of prosperity driven by trade and textile manufacturing as the Black Death subsided. But Oxford’s rambunctious youth made for a dangerous scene.

By the early 14th century, Oxford had a population of roughly 7,000 inhabitants, with about 1,500 students. Among perpetrators from Oxford, coroners referred to 75 percent of them as “clericus.” The term most likely refers to a student or a member of the early university. Additionally, 72 percent of all Oxford’s homicide victims also have the designation clericus in the coroner inquests.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” lead murder map investigator and University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner said in a statement. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Many of the students also belonged to regional fraternities known as “nations,” which could have added more tension within the student body.

One Thursday night in 1298, an argument among students in an Oxford High Street tavern resulted in a mass street fight complete with battle-axes and swords. According to the coroner’s report, a student named John Burel had, “a mortal wound on the crown of his head, six inches long and in depth reaching to the brain.”

Interactions with sex workers also could end tragically. One unknown scholar got away with murdering Margery de Hereford in the parish of St. Aldate in 1299. He fled the scene after stabbing her to death instead of paying what he owed. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

Many of the cases in all three cities also involved intervention of bystanders, who were obligated to announce if a crime was being committed, or raise a “hue and cry.” Some of the bystanders summoned by hue ended up as victims or perpetrators.

“Before modern policing, victims or witnesses had a legal responsibility to alert the community to a crime by shouting and making noise. This was known as raising a hue and cry,” co-researchers and Cambridge crime historian Stephanie Brown said in a statement. “It was mostly women who raised hue and cry, usually reporting conflicts between men in order to keep the peace.”

Medieval street justice was also coupled with plentiful weapons in everyday life, which could  make even minor infractions lethal. London’s cases include altercations that started over littering and urination that led to homicide. 

“Knives were omnipresent in medieval society,” said Brown. “A thwytel was a small knife, often valued at one penny, and used as cutlery or for everyday tasks. Axes were commonplace in homes for cutting wood, and many men carried a staff.”

The team told The Guardian that they hope this project encourages people to reflect on the possible notices behind historic homicide and explore the parallels between these incidents and the altercations in the present. 

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Five mech suits capable of morphing between robotic and vehicular modes are now available for pre-order from a Japanese startup overseen by 25-year-old inventor Ryo Yoshida. At nearly 15-feet-tall and weighing in around 3.5 tons, one of Tsubame Industries’  “Archax” joyrides can be all yours—if you happen to have an extra $3 million burning a hole in your pocket.

News of the production update came courtesy of Reuters on Monday, who spoke with Yoshida about their thought process behind constructing the futuristic colossus, which gets its name from the famous winged dinosaur archaeopteryx. 

[Related: Robotic exoskeletons are storming out of sci-fi and onto your squishy human body.]

“Japan is very good at animation, games, robots and automobiles so I thought it would be great if I could create a product that compressed all these elements into one,” he said at the time. “I wanted to create something that says, ‘This is Japan.’”

To pilot the steel and iron-framed Archax, individuals must first climb a small ladder and enter a cockpit situated within the robot’s chest. Once sealed inside, a system of nine cameras connected to four view screens allows riders to see the world around them alongside information such as battery life, speed, tilt angle, and positioning. Depending on a user’s desire, Archax can travel upwards of 6 mph from one of two setups—a four-wheeled upright robotic mode, and a more streamlined vehicle mode in which the cockpit reclines 17 degrees as the chair remains upright. Meanwhile, a set of joysticks alongside two floor pedals control the mech suit’s movement, as well as its controllable arms and hands

Unlike countless other robotic creations on the market, however, Archax currently isn’t designed for rigorous real world encounters. It’s currently meant to be, per the company’s own description, “cool.” 

But that doesn’t mean Yoshida and his team at Tsubame aren’t hopeful to build future Archax models better equipped for real world uses. According to the inventor, he hopes such pilotable robotic suits could find applications within search-and-rescue operations, disaster relief, and even the space industry. For now, however, Tsubame sounds perfectly satisfied with its luxury toy status.

“Arcax is not just a big robot that you can ride inside. A person can climb into the cockpit and control the vehicle at will. Each part moves with sufficient speed, rigidity, and power,” reads the product’s description.

“And it’s cool,” Tsubame Industries reiterates.

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Recording an audiobook is no easy task, even for experienced voice actors. But demand for audiobooks is on the rise, and major streaming platforms like Spotify are making dedicated spaces for them to grow into. To fuse innovation with frenzy, MIT and Microsoft researchers are using AI to create audiobooks from online texts. In an ambitious new project, they are collaborating with Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest and probably largest online repository of open-license ebooks, to make 5,000 AI-narrated audiobooks. This collection includes classic titles in literature like Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Call of the Wild, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The trio published an arXiv preprint on their efforts in September. 

“What we wanted to do was create a massive amount of free audiobooks and give them back to the community,” Mark Hamilton, a PhD student at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a lead researcher on the project, tells PopSci. “Lately, there’s been a lot of advances in neural text to speech, which are these algorithms that can read text, and they sound quite human-like.”

The magic ingredient that makes this possible is a neural text-to-speech algorithm which is trained on millions of examples of human speech, and then it’s tasked to mimic it. It can generate different voices with different accents in different languages, and can create custom voices with only five seconds of audio. “They can read any text you give them and they can read them incredibly fast,” Hamilton says. “You can give it eight hours of text and it will be done in a few minutes.”

Importantly, this algorithm can pick up on the subtleties like tones and the modifications humans add when reading words, like how a phone number or a website is read, what gets grouped together, and where the pauses are. The algorithm is based off previous work from some of the paper’s co-authors at Microsoft. 

Like large language models, this algorithm relies heavily on machine learning and neural networks. “It’s the same core guts, but different inputs and outputs,” Hamilton explains. Large language models take in text and fill in gaps. They use that basic functionality to build chat applications. Neural text-to-speech algorithms, on the other hand, take in text, pump them through the same kinds of algorithms, but now instead of spitting out text, they’re spitting out sound, Hamilton says.

[Related: Internet Archive just lost a federal lawsuit against big book publishers]

“They’re trying to generate sounds that are faithful to the text that you put in. That also gives them a little bit of leeway,” he adds. “They can spit out the kind of sound they feel is necessary to solve the task well. They can change, group, or alter the pronunciation to make it sound more humanlike.” 

A tool called a loss function can then be used to evaluate whether a model did a good job, a bad job. Implementing AI in this way can speed up the efforts of projects like Librivox, which currently uses human volunteers to make audiobooks of public domain works.

The work is far from done. The next steps are to improve the quality. Since Project Gutenberg ebooks are created by human volunteers, every single person who makes the ebook does it slightly differently. They may include random text in unexpected places, and where ebook makers place page numbers, the table of contents, or illustrations might change from book to book. 

“All these different things just result in strange artifacts for an audiobook and stuff that you wouldn’t want to listen to at all,” Hamilton says. “The north star is to develop more and more flexible solutions that can use good human intuition to figure out what to read and what not to read in these books.” Once they get that down, their hope is to use that, along with the most recent advances in AI language technology to scale the audiobook collection to all the 60,000 on Project Gutenberg, and maybe even translate them.

For now, all the AI-voiced audiobooks can be streamed for free on platforms such as Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and the Internet Archive.

There are a variety of applications for this type of algorithm. It can read plays, and assign distinct voices to each character. It can mock up a whole audiobook in your voice, which could make for a nifty gift. However, even though there are many fairly innocuous ways to use this tech, experts have previously voiced their concerns about the drawbacks of artificially generated audio, and its potential for abuse. 

Listen to Call of the Wild, below.

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This week we learned that Google is killing off Gmail’s Basic HTML view. As reported by TechCrunch, starting in January, 2024, Google will disable the stripped down HTML version of the Gmail web app and mobile web app. Ah, another Google feature bites the dust. 

Gmail users who regularly use the Basic HTML view are seemingly receiving an email notification, and one poster on Hacker News reports that Google says: “We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024. The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality.” 

This news is confirmed by Gmail’s support doc, which now has a note that reads, “Important: You can display Gmail on your browser in Basic HTML view until January 2024. After this date, Gmail automatically changes to Standard view.”

It’s sad to see Google kill off the HTML option. Not only is it a great throwback to the early days of Gmail, but its stripped down and functional interface was perfect for slow connections. Sure, cellular data speeds are getting better everywhere, but there are still plenty of remote locations around the world where a lightweight email client is much nicer to use than the regular, fully-featured Gmail monstrosity. 

But that fully-featured monstrosity is what Google wants people to rely on. Some of the features that the Basic HTML view lacks, for example, are: Chat, spell check, keyboard shortcuts, contact management, search filters, automatic filtering into Primary, Promotions, and Social inboxes, and rich text formatting—to say nothing of the latest AI features. We get that HTML is stripped down, but that is exactly the point. Sometimes you just want to send and receive emails—no bells and whistles necessary. 

Unfortunately, unless Google announces some kind of replacement low-speed connectivity feature, the best way to check your Gmail account over a slow connection will be to use the IMAP protocol and a dedicated email app. Your smartphone definitely comes with a solid email app, but if you want to set things up on a computer, Thunderbird suits the old-school tech vibe. Since IMAP is an almost 40-year-old email protocol, this setup will also lack almost every modern Gmail feature, but at least you’ll be able to check your emails when you only have a single bar of bad signal. 

News like this is why Google has a well-deserved reputation for killing off products and features. 

Just this year, Google has axed domain registrar Google Domains, web analytics tool Google Optimize, Google Cloud IoT Core, Google Album Archive, YouTube Stories, Grasshopper, Google Assistant’s Conversational Actions, Google Currents, the standalone Street View app, smart clothing tag Jacquard, Google Code Competitions, Google Stadia, and the Google OnHub line of routers. Sometimes it seems like no Google product is safe.

So, if you love the Gmail Basic HTML view, you’ve got a few short months to keep using it. After that, it’s off to the tech graveyard in the clouds. It seems unlikely that there will be enough user uproar to spare it. After all, it was replaced more than a decade ago.

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Coordinating locations with friends and family can be a real hassle. “I’m by a big tree,” “I’m standing on the corner,” and “My car broke down but there are no signs so just drive along I-95 for a while” simply aren’t helpful when there are multiple corners, dozens of trees, and 1,908 miles of Interstate 95.

It’s a lot easier if you use an app that lets you share your location safely and privately—without broadcasting it to the world. Apple has put tools inside iOS for sharing your location from an iPhone, and Google has done the same in Google Maps, but there are also several third-party apps that can do the job well.

At first it might seem unsettling to let other people know exactly where you are, but you’re in full control of who has this information and how long they have it for—and the next time you’re trying to meet up with someone, this can save you a whole lot of time and a whole lot of messages.

Glympse

Among the apps specifically built for location sharing, Glympse is one of the most comprehensive and competent. It’s great for quick, customized location sharing with people who might not all be using the same brand of phone or the same apps, and there are mapping tools inside the app that will help you find friends and family.

You can send location shares—called, appropriately enough, glympses—over email, text, or through other apps as well as Glympse. If the recipient is on a computer, or using a phone without Glympse, the glympse shows up in that person’s web browser instead, and only for the allotted time. You don’t even need a Glympse account to share your location.

You get full control over who you share your location with and for how long, and you can set up private groups where everyone can see where everyone else is. Another handy feature is the option to add public tags to your glympses: They work a bit like social media hashtags, and you can use them to let the wider world know that you’re at a music festival or a sports event.

Glympse is free for Android and iOS.

Life360

Life360 is aimed specifically at families, so you can keep tabs on where your kids are and make sure they’re safe. You can get alerts when they turn up at home or school, see where they are on a map, and even get alerts if they may have been involved in a crash on the road. With Tile tracker support, you can track your possessions in the app too.

The map view is the center of the Life360 app. It lets you check up on where family members are in real time, and for peace of mind there’s an SOS feature that lets anyone discreetly and quietly send an alert to their family. If your kids want a bit more privacy, they can share their general location rather than a precise spot on the map.

[Related: These smartphone settings could save your life]

You and your family can use Life360 free of charge, but you’ll get access to more features if you sign up for one of the premium accounts, which start at $15 a month. Paying for the service means 30 days rather than two days of location history, alerts for an unlimited number of locations instead of just two, and a road crash detection feature.

Life360 is free for Android and iOS, with a premium version starting at $15.

Messaging apps

Beyond standalone apps dedicated to location sharing, you’ll also find the feature built into several messaging and social media apps. If you want to temporarily share your location with a specific group of people—like when you’re on a family vacation—you might find that these apps are a better fit for you.

How to share your location on WhatsApp

In WhatsApp, tap the paperclip icon at the bottom of any one-to-one conversation or group chat, then choose Location. You can choose between sending a single message showing where you currently are, or broadcasting your live location in real time for 15 minutes, an hour, or eight hours (with the option to cancel the sharing at any time).

It’s perfect for quick and easy location sharing that you don’t want to go on indefinitely, especially as you probably already have the necessary group conversations set up inside the app for your friends, family, colleagues, and special events. Don’t worry: Your location will stay private within these group chats, or within the one-to-one conversation you’ve selected.

WhatsApp is free for Android and iOS.

How to use Snapchat’s location settings

Snapchat has a feature called Snap Map, which you can use to let your friends know where you are. No one who isn’t your friend will be able to see your location, and you can limit it to certain friends if necessary. The Snap Map will also show you public snaps posted to the Snapchat network—usually showing off a particular place or event to the world at large.

Tap the map pin (bottom left) on Snapchat’s camera screen to find the map and see where your friends are. Touch the cog icon (top right), and you can choose which friends can see where you are, or turn on ghost mode to temporarily hide your location. Your location only updates when Snapchat is open, and is removed from the map after 24 hours.

[Related: Make a Memoji that actually looks like you]

On this same screen, there’s also a Share live option: This grants specific friends the privilege of seeing where you are in real time, and you can enable it for one hour, eight hours, or until you turn it off. It’s a useful extra layer of location sharing you can enable for the people you trust the most, like your partner or your kids.

Snapchat is free or $4 a month for Android and iOS.

Share your location in Signal

The primary reason to get yourself and your friends on Signal is the security and privacy it offers: There’s end-to-end encryption, the option to use disappearing messages, and (perhaps most importantly) it’s run by a developer that isn’t interested in advertising to you or trying to keep you locked inside its own ecosystem.

While it’s not worth switching to Signal for its location-sharing features alone, it does have them, so you won’t miss out on being able to let other people know where you are at specific times. Like everything else in Signal, location sharing is handled simply and securely, and can be done within one-to-one conversations or inside group chats.

At the bottom of the relevant conversation, tap the plus button in the bottom right corner, then choose Location from the menu that pops up. You’ll then be able to confirm where you are before sharing your location—it’s shared in a one-off message with the people inside the selected chat, so your location won’t be updated in real time.

Signal is free for Android and iOS.

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Aerospace companies that create a new stealth aircraft as their signature achievement face a conundrum. They put years if not decades of work into its aerodynamic and industrial design and its state-of-the-art technology, creating a machine that carries terrible destructive power. And after all that, the contours of the design can be public but the details must remain somewhat obscured. This is true especially when it comes to the physical shape of the plane itself, as the exterior form of a stealth plane is part of what makes stealth possible. All of these concerns made it an unexpected surprise, and a planespotter’s delight, when the United States Air Force released two new photos of the stealthy B-21 Raider on September 12.

On the military media repository platform DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service), the new photos are dated July 31. One shows the Raider, head-on, in the hangar. The other has the Raider outside the hangar, at sunset.

The details revealed in the photographs are remarkable, but it is important to start with what is left out of these images. The rear of the bomber, and especially the exhaust ports, are not visible. Stealth, as a family of technologies, is primarily designed to hide aircraft from detection by refracted radar waves. Jet engines, full of spinning blades at a sharp angle to the world, are refractive, so in stealth design the turbines are tucked away behind inlets. Exhaust ports, while not as radar-revelatory, will show up on sensors that look for infrared and heat. Missiles that seek heat are decades old, and looking for exhaust is one tried and true way to see what a low-visibility design on radar obscures.

The available angles on the B-21, including these new photographs as well as photos from the initial flashy December roll-out, all largely serve to obscure the control surfaces on the Raider’s flying wing body. One photo taken March 7 offers an angle somewhat from above, but that photo is at a much lower resolution than the others.

But while it’s easy to focus on what the new photos of the Raider don’t show, what’s at least as compelling is the new evidence contained in these latest releases. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone focused in part on the “ejection hatch panels.” He observed: “They sit far back and are another indicator of just how limited the pilots’ visibility will likely be in this aircraft. They also speak to the challenge that is judging the proportions on the alien-like B-21. The cockpit is either very small or very tall. We are leaning toward the former. We also see the aerial refueling markings peeking out from atop the aircraft’s bulged spine.” (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

Other hidden gems abound, and Rogoway’s analysis offers insight. One that is pertinent to future observations of the bomber is that the B-21 on display, serial number 0001, has a large probe affixed to it. This will collect data in-flight for testing purposes, whenever the Raider makes its first test flight later this year.

In addition to the two photos released by the Air Force on September 12, Northrop Grumman, makers of the B-21, released a photo of the bomber on the same day. This photo was paired with an announcement that the Raider is undergoing engine runs, part of the testing to ensure that the plane’s power plant works as intended in the aircraft. 

“Engine testing is an essential milestone for the program as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft continues on the path to flight test,” reads the Northrop Grumman announcement. “The B-21’s first flight will remain a data driven event that is monitored by Northrop Grumman and the United States Air Force.”

Airplane generations vary depending on the exact counting, but it is important to note that the B-21 is not just a stealth flying wing, but a successor stealth flying wing to the B-2 Spirit. In more than most senses, this means the plane represents an era shift in design, even as it draws from similar lessons about form.

Rogoway notes that the quarter view of the Raider reveals “Just how deeply ‘buried’ the Raider’s [engine] inlets — one of the most exotic and challenging low-observable features of the design — truly are.” He added: “This is a good reminder of just how the Raider will conceal its engine inlets from adversary radars, especially those emitting from any aspect below the aircraft.”

Until the Air Force flies the B-21 for the first time, analysis and understanding of the plane will come in bits and pieces as new filtered images trickle out. That is, unless details about the bomber end up leaked to the War Thunder forums, as has already happened with classified documents about two different military aircraft this month.

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This week, Google announced a new transatlantic subsea cable that will connect the United States to Portugal via Bermuda. Dubbed “Nuvem,” after the Portuguese word for “cloud,” the new cable is expected to enter operation in 2026 and Google says it is intended to help “meet growing demand for digital services” and “improve network resiliency across the Atlantic.”

Despite all the talk of data being stored “in the cloud,” the internet mostly runs underwater—at least, internationally. Around 95 percent of international data transmission—and 99 percent of transcontinental data transmission—is sent through one of the subsea fiber optic cables that crisscross the planet. Whenever you visit a website hosted in another country or send an email to a friend who’s overseas, that data is almost certainly sent via one of these underwater cables. 

According to TeleGeography, a site that tracks subsea cables, there are more than 550 active or planned subsea cables. The number is constantly changing as old cables are replaced and new cables—like Nuvem—enter service. In total, they believe there are nearly 870,000 miles of underwater cabling connecting North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. Some, like the CeltixConnect cable between Ireland and the United Kingdom, are less than 100 miles long, while others extend for more than thousands of miles. The Asia-America Gateway, for example, is more than 12,000 miles long and crosses the Pacific connecting Thailand, China, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii to the United States. Only the smallest, most isolated islands and Antarctica are out of the loop—anyone at the South Pole is stuck using slow satellite internet. If you want to see them all, TeleGeography has a fascinating map that shows just how many cables cross major oceans like the Atlantic and Pacific.

Understandably, these cables have incredible bandwidth. More than 5 billion people use the internet, and there are just a few hundred cables to transmit data between continents. For example, the MAREA cable, owned by Meta, Microsoft, and telecommunications company Telxius, transmits data in speeds measured in terabits between Virginia Beach in the United States and Bilbao in Spain and even set a speed record back in 2019.

Google has already invested in a number of subsea cables, including Dunant, which connects Virginia to France; Firmina, which will connect South Carolina to Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay; and Equiano, which connects Portugal, Nigeria, and South Africa. Nuvem will “add capacity, increase reliability, and decrease latency for Google users and Google Cloud customers around the world.” It’s all part of the search giant’s plan to “create important new data corridors connecting North America, South America, Europe, and Africa” that will allow it to transmit ever growing amounts of data. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nuvem is that it passes through Bermuda. According to Google’s announcement, over the past number of years the Atlantic island’s government has “undertaken significant efforts to attract investment in subsea cable infrastructure and create a digital Atlantic hub.” These efforts included passing new laws and streamlining permitting to make things easier for tech companies. As a result, Nuvem will be the first subsea cable to connect Bermuda directly to Europe. 

In the announcement, Walter Roban, Bermuda’s deputy premier and minister of home affairs, said, “Bermuda has long been committed to the submarine cable market, and we welcome the Nuvem cable to our fast-growing digital Atlantic hub.” 

So, come 2026 when the cable is due to go live, your Google data might be passing through Bermuda on its route between the United States and Europe. That, or it will pass through one of the other 12 cables that cross the Atlantic.

Correction (October 2, 2023): The story previously stated that there are nearly 870 million miles of underwater cabling. It should be 870,000 miles.

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The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“​​A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

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Solar sails that leverage the sun’s photonic rays for “wind” are no longer the stuff of science fiction—in fact, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 practical demonstration was deemed a Grand Award Winner for PopSci’s Best of What’s New in 2019. And while countless projects continue to explore what solar sails could hold for the future of space travel, a new study demonstrates just how promising the technology could be for excursions to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, and beyond.

According to a paper recently submitted to the journal Acta Astronautica, detailed computer simulations show tiny, incredibly lightweight solar sails made with aerographite could travel to Mars in just 26 days—compare that to conventional rocketry time estimates of between 7-to-9 months. Meanwhile, a journey to the heliopause (the demarcation line for interstellar space where the sun’s magnetic forces cease to influence objects) could take between 4.2 and 5.3 years. For comparison, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes took a respective 35 and 41 years to reach the same boundary.

[Related: This novel solar sail could make it easier for NASA to stare into the sun.]

The key to such speedy trips is the 1 kg solar sails’ 720g of aerographite—an ultra-lightweight material with four times less density than most solar sail designs’ Mylar components. The major caveat to these simulations is that they involved an extremely miniscule payload weight, something that will most often not be the case for major interplanetary and interstellar journeys.

“Solar sail propulsion has the potential for rapid delivery of small payloads (sub-kilogram) throughout the solar system,” René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and study co-author, explained to Universe Today earlier this month. “Compared to conventional chemical propulsion, which can bring hundreds of tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and deliver a large fraction of that to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this sounds ridiculously small. But the key value of solar sail technology is speed.”

Another issue still that still needs addressing is deceleration methods needed upon actually reaching a destination. Although aerocapture—using a planet’s atmosphere to reduce velocity—is a possible option, researchers concede more investigation will be needed to determine the best, most efficient way to actually stop at a solar sail-equipped spacecraft’s intended endpoint. Regardless, the study only adds even more wind in the sails (so to speak) for the impressive interstellar travel method.

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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A white-hulled MQ-4C Triton accelerated down a runway in Guam before lifting off into dark clouds. The video, captured August 18 by the US Navy, was recorded to mark a modest milestone in the drone program. The Navy’s Tritons have now reached “initial operating capability,” meaning that enough aircraft, spare parts, and crew are available to use the vehicles as intended. The Triton, the Navy’s version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk flown by the Air Force since 2001, is an eye in the sky, tasked with watching the ocean.

Located over 3,700 miles west from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and just over 1,800 miles east from the coast of China, Guam is a centerpiece literally and figuratively in the plans and ability of the United States to operate in the Pacific Ocean. The Triton is a flying sensor platform, built for long endurance and maritime domain awareness, or watching and tracking action on the sea below. The Navy’s P-8 Poseidon, a crewed maritime surveillance plane based on the Boeing 737 airline airframe, flies with a nine-person team on board. Being able to have drones perform some of this type of observation, with fresh human crews on the ground swapping out multiple times mid-flight, means that the Navy can maintain surveillance for an extended time.

It takes a team of five to operate the Triton. That means someone to manage the drone’s flight, two people to manage its different sets of sensors, one person in charge of the signals it sends and collects, and a coordinator in charge of the whole operation. The Triton has a wingspan of 130 feet, meaning that its wings stretch wider than those on a 737. It flies at a cruising cruising speed of about 368 mph.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“We have been successfully operating Triton in Guam for several years, and now we have expanded this platform’s capabilities far beyond those it started with,” said Josh Guerre, MQ-4C Triton program manager, in a release.

Two Tritons were first deployed to Guam, as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Patrol Squad 19 (shortened to VUP-19), in January 2020 through October 2022. That time allowed for significant observations to be made in how the drones operated, and meant that when the Navy redeployed them this summer to Guam, the drones’ sensors had received a major upgrade. 

Those sensors are likely the signals intelligence (SIGINT) sensor upgrades boasted about earlier by Triton maker Northrop Grumman: “Triton Multi-INT gets its name from the addition of two new SIGINT sensors: one that gathers electronic intelligence and one that gathers communications intelligence. We’ve also removed an older electronic support measures sensor and installed a new, more capable version of the electro-optical infrared sensor flying on Triton today, said Rob Zmarzlak, chief engineer for Northrop Grumman’s Autonomous ISR and Targeting Programs, in a release.

One of the distinct challenges of watching for activity on the ocean, as compared to scanning for action on the ground, is that the vast and largely uniform expanse of the sea can be especially devoid of human activity, outside of major sea lanes. By listening for the signals given off from boats and ships, the Triton can more reliably find useful activity onto which it can train its cameras.

Northrop Grumman boasts that the Triton can, from an altitude of 50,000 feet and on a mission lasting 24 hours, survey four million nautical miles. That’s a major delivery on the promise of the Triton, which first flew in 2013. As Popular Science said at the time, its high altitude flights will allow it to take in “a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction” and then “it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine–from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton’s strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.”

Even as the Navy prepares for Tritons to become a regular part of operations, USNI News reports that the Navy is looking to halt the production of Tritons at just 27 total units, down from the original plan of 70. The Triton is useful for extensive watching of the sea, especially in conjunction with other tools, but it comes with a serious price tag. For 2022, the unit cost of each Triton was roughly $141 million.  Even as the US Navy scales down the number of Tritons it is looking to buy and maintain, Australia is looking to expand the number of Tritons it will use and operate from three to four.

Watch the Triton’s ascent in Guam below:

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The Central Intelligence Agency confirmed it is building a ChatGPT-style AI for use across the US intelligence community. Speaking with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise, described the project as a logical technological step forward for a vast 18-agency network that includes the CIA, NSA, FBI, and various military offices. The large language model (LLM) chatbot will reportedly provide summations of open-source materials alongside citations, as well as chat with users, according to Bloomberg. 

“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced. Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost,” Nixon said.

“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Nixon continued, adding, “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

[Related: ChatGPT can now see, hear, and talk to some users.]

The announcement comes as China’s make their ambitions to become the global leader in AI technology by the decade’s end known. In August, new Chinese government regulations went into effect requiring makers of publicly available AI services submit regular security assessments. As Reuters noted in July, the oversight will likely restrict at least some technological advancements in favor of ongoing national security crackdowns. The laws are also far more stringent than those currently within the US, as regulators struggle to adapt to the industry’s rapid advancements and societal consequences.

Nixon has yet to discuss  the overall scope and capabilities of the proposed system, and would not confirm what AI model forms the basis of its LLM assistant. For years, however, US intelligence communities have explored how to best leverage AI’s vast data analysis capabilities alongside private partnerships. The CIA even hosted a “Spies Supercharged” panel during this year’s SXSW in the hopes of recruiting tech workers across sectors such as quantum computing, biotech, and AI. During the event, CIA deputy director David Cohen reiterated concerns regarding AI’s unpredictable effects for the intelligence community.

“To defeat that ubiquitous technology, if you have any good ideas, we’d be happy to hear about them afterwards,” Cohen said at the time.

[Related: The CIA hit up SXSW this year—to recruit tech workers.]

Similar criticisms arrived barely two weeks ago via the CIA’s first-ever chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani. Speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, Mulchandani contended that while some AI-based systems are “absolutely fantastic” for tasks such as vast data trove pattern analysis, “in areas where it requires precision, we’re going to be incredibly challenged.” 

Mulchandani also conceded that AI’s often seemingly “hallucinatory” offerings could still be helpful to users.

“AI can give you something so far outside of your range, that it really then opens up the vista in terms of where you’re going to go,” he said at the time. “[It’s] what I call the ‘crazy drunk friend.’” 

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The natural circles that pop up on the soil in the planet’s arid regions are an enduring scientific debate and mystery. These “fairy circles” are circular patterns of bare soil surrounded by plants and vegetation. Until very recently, the unique phenomena have only been described in the vast Namib desert and the Australian outback. While their origins and distribution are hotly debated, a study with satellite imagery published on September 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that fairy circles may be more common than once realized. They are potentially found in 15 countries across three continents and in 263 different sites. 

[Related: A new study explains the origin of mysterious ‘fairy circles’ in the desert.]

These soil shapes occur in arid areas of the Earth, where nutrients and water are generally scarce. Their signature circular pattern and hexagonal shape is believed to be the best way that the plants have found to survive in that landscape. Ecologist Ken Tinsly observed the circles in Namibia in 1971, and the story goes that he borrowed the name fairy circles from a naturally occurring ring of mushrooms that are generally found in Europe.

By 2017, Australian researchers found the debated western desert fairy circles, and proposed that the mechanisms of biological self-organization and pattern formation proposed by mathematician Alan Turing were behind them. In the same year, Aboriginal knowledge linked those fairy circles to a species of termites. This “termite theory” of fairy circle origin continues to be a focus of research—a team from the University of Hamburg in Germany published a study seeming to confirm that termites are behind these circles in July.

In this new study, a team of researchers from Spain used artificial intelligence-based models to look at the fairy circles from Australia and Namibia and directed it to look for similar patterns. The AI scoured the images for months and expanded the areas where these fairy circles could exist. These locations include the circles in Namibia, Western Australia, the western Sahara Desert, the Sahel region that separates the African savanna from the Sahara Desert, the Horn of Africa to the East, the island of Madagascar, southwestern Asia, and Central Australia.

The team then crossed-checked the results of the AI system with a different AI program trained to study the environments and ecology of arid areas to find out what factors govern the appearance of these circular patterns. 

“Our study provides evidence that fairy-circle[s] are far more common than previously thought, which has allowed us, for the first time, to globally understand the factors affecting their distribution,” study co-author and Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville soil ecologist Manuel Delgado Baquerizo said in a statement. 

[Related: The scientific explanation behind underwater ‘Fairy Circles.’]

According to the team, these circles generally appear in arid regions where the soil is mainly sandy, there is water scarcity, annual rainfall is between 4 to 12 inches, and low nutrient continent in the soil.

“Analyzing their effects on the functioning of ecosystems and discovering the environmental factors that determine their distribution is essential to better understand the causes of the formation of these vegetation patterns and their ecological importance,” study co-author and  University of Alicante data scientist Emilio Guirado said in a statement. 

More research is needed to determine the role of insects like termites in fairy circle formation, but Guirado told El País that “their global importance is low,” and that they may play an important role in local cases like those in Namibia, “but there are other factors that are even more important.”

The images are now included in a global atlas of fairy circles and a database that could help determine if these patterns demonstrate resilience to climate change. 

“We hope that the unpublished data will be useful for those interested in comparing the dynamic behavior of these patterns with others present in arid areas around the world,” said Guirado.

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