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Everyday police work in 2025 will be autonomous and remotely controlled. As in the defense sector, robotics potentially offer law enforcement agencies a force multiplier–something that allows fewer officers to be more productive at a lower cost–and this year’s Design Challenge entrants clearly understand that. Some of the proposals are pretty straightforward; Mercedes Benz offers up an advanced, fuel-efficient SUV for police forces trying to own the road with sheer size, while General Motors introduces the “Volt Squad,” a three-vehicle manned system based on the electric propulsion technology pioneered for the Chevy Volt....

In Lviv in western Ukraine, locals started assembling anti-tank metal barriers, Agence France-Presse reported. The form, which looks like a child’s toy jack made out of steel I-beams, is known as a “steel hedgehog.” Early versions of this obstacle date back to defensive fortifications built in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Some of these Czech fortifications may even have been repurposed by the occupying German forces as barriers on the Normandy beaches before D-Day....

The OPKIXOne portable camera system was designed for capturing live, social content without requiring you to have your phone in front of your face. According to the OPKIX, durability and weight were the two most important design factors. Since you don’t have to use your phone to capture footage, you can record without having to sacrifice being present at an event. The OPKIXOne comes with two AA-battery-sized cameras that you can attach a range of their accessories like a necklace or sunglasses....

Reports of anxiety and depression in adults increased by more than 25 percent in 2020, and some new research suggests that mental health and the neurological effects of the pandemic on adolescents could be even worse than in their adult counterparts. Scientists are beginning to look at how the past two and a half years of pandemic life is affecting the brains of teens. A new study published today in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, suggests that stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic have physically changed teen brains, causing their brain structures to appear multiple years older than the brains of comparable peers before the pandemic....

In January, President Donald Trump announced his approval of a 30 percent tariff on all imported solar modules and cells. As many predicted, the subsequent months have seen a seismic shift in the industry, with Reuters reporting in June that approximately $2.5 billion in solar installation projects have been cancelled since the tariffs were finalized. Looking at this news, you might feel (sun)burnt by the fallout over Trump’s decision—and left with quite a few questions about solar technology....

It’s tempting, but the fitness trackers are already learning how to outsmart you. In a study published in PLOS One, researchers looked at ways to train fitness trackers to detect cheating. The study was very small, involving only 14 people who tried to fool a smartphone-based fitness tracker. But as those 14 people tried different ways of simulating walking while sitting and vis-versa, the researchers retrained the app, telling it what was an actual walk and what was someone just jiggling their leg up and down....

So I was thrilled when, last summer, we realized that we were finally approaching the 50-column mark that we always said would trigger a book. And I was even more excited when Gray sold his publisher (Black Dog and Leventhal) on the idea of expanding and redesigning all the columns to better show off the stunning photography that too often gets crowded with words and shrunk to postage-stamp size in the issue....

PMMA Applications: Lucite, dentures, aquarium windows Developed in: 1877 Polymethylmethacrylate is a very versatile polymer. If you ever see a clear plastic block, it’s probably PMMA. It was first commercialized in the 1930s in Germany, and is now found anywhere one needs clear, strong material. This includes bulletproof “glass” at your favorite corner liquor store and the huge shark tanks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But my favorite use of PMMA is in so-called “frozen lightning” or Lichtenberg figure sculpture....

While it’s undoubtedly important for people to know what’s fact and what’s fiction in crime scene investigation, here’s a look into just what the present day facts of forensics science entail (we’ll leave the fiction to the experts… in TV production, that is). In 2005, Congress tasked the National Academy of Sciences to survey the landscape of forensic science. The result, this past February, was a 255-page report. Here are a few of the surprising facts they found....

That’s because the fish have a dynamic, ever-changing relationship with the vast and varied habitat of the Nushagak watershed, shifting where they hatch and grow year-to-year, according to a new study published today in Science. This makes it hard to declare where the best habitat is. “We show that these dynamics are shifting around, influencing how the entire landscape produces key resources and how that varies through time,” says Sean Brennan, lead author and fisheries ecologist at the University of Washington....

Fact: Monkeys know how to use money (and also how to trade it for sex) By Rachel Feltman The first thing you need to know is that monkeys—not apes, our super-close evolutionary cousins, but capuchins like Marcel from Friends—understand money. Several studies have demonstrated that they easily pick up the concept of trading specific tokens for different things they value (read: marshmallows and grapes). They can figure out how to seek out good deals and how to respond to supply and demand, and they’ll try their hands at gambling....

Fact: You can now (legally) compost a human By Eleanor Cummins For years, activists in Seattle, Washington lobbied for the right to compost humans. Instead of preserving your dead body with toxic chemicals or cremating it in one last giant poof of carbon, Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose argued we should instead turn ourselves into life-giving soil. Unfortunately, that wasn’t exactly legal—a lot of things you could potentially do with dead bodies aren’t....

Wait, what? Hippos may look like smiley, slimy 4,000-pound friends just waiting to be made. But they’re among the most ferocious creatures on Earth, attacking crocodiles, lions, humans, and anything else that gets in their way. Despite this ferocity, the common hippopotamus is mostly a herbivorous species. In addition to some light cannibalism, individuals munch on approximately 80 pounds of plants every day, most of which they defecate into the waterways they spend their day wading around in....

Ooni – Koda 12 in Gas-Powered Outdoor Pizza Oven $319 (was $399) We love Ooni for its elegant design and simple, gas-powered operation. Unfold the legs, fire up the flame, and it’ll quickly get all the way up over 500 degrees. That’s hot enough to cook a Neopolitan-style pizza in just 60 seconds. This model holds up to a 12-inch pizza, which is great for a single person. Or, just make a bunch of them....

“We know we needed higher energy density batteries to enable a longer life for devices like pacemakers,” says Haining Gao, an MIT postdoctoral fellow. “But there have been very few innovations in the past four decades. So we started there.” Typically these non-rechargeable options, also called primary batteries, already have a higher energy capacity than rechargeable ones do, meaning they make good candidates for products like medical implants, which can’t be easily recharged (yet)....

Scientists used a statistical tool originally developed for cosmology to investigate the region’s burial sites, which range from ancient structures to medieval and modern Islamic monuments. They found an intricate pattern created when people systematically built new tombs around earlier ones, offering a rare glimpse into the cultural history of the region’s Beja people, who settled the area more than 2,000 years ago and have preserved a semi-nomadic lifestyle. “Discovering a funerary pattern that very likely appears to be based on complex genealogic and group affiliations gives precious information on their society not only at the time in history when the medieval Islamic tombs were built, but even to previous eras due to their inherent traditionalism,” Stefano Costanzo, a PhD student in archaeology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Italy and coauthor of the new findings, said in an email....

The insects can be dated back to the Cretaceous period, which occurred 99 million years ago. The animals were all preserved in pieces of amber from a mine in northern Myanmar. The insects—a beetle, a fly, and a wasp—are so well-preserved in the amber that their true color could be identified. “The way that the color is preserved in these things is really remarkable,” says James Lamsdell, a University of West Virginia paleobiologist who was not involved in the research....

Scientists have observed very few coelacanths partially due to their mysterious behavior—they spend most of the day clustered together in volcanic caves. The creatures are classified as critically endangered, which means fishing them is prohibited, so very few ever make it up to the surface. However, a study published this month in Current Biology has begun to unravel some of these scaly critters’ secrets. The latest study, which was unfunded, found coelacanths live five times longer than once predicted....

In a paper published earlier this week, computer scientists from the University of Vermont and biophysicists at Tufts University describe using AI to design a totally new organism made of frog stem cells—and actually creating a tiny, living robot based on those designs. Their primary goal is to use the cutting-edge critters to better understand how cells of all sorts communicate with one another. These “xenobots” can’t eat, can’t reproduce, and only live for about a week—so Frankenfrog invasions should not be high on your list of concerns....

The CubeSats will be ferried up to a binary asteroid system (Didymos and the smaller Didymoon) about 6.8 million miles from Earth. Once they reach their destination about two years later, they’ll be working with ESA’s Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) craft and the NASA-led Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The idea is, as AIM and DART get to work analyzing and ultimately, ramming into Didymoon, respectively, the 10-centimeter CubeSats will be monitoring the asteroids as well....