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While no such technology is commercially available yet, the platform Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is in the early stages of creating haptic gloves to bring the virtual world to our fingertips. These gloves have been in the works for the past seven years, the company recently said, and there’s still a few more to go. These gloves would allow the wearer to not only interact with and control the virtual world, but experience it in a way similar to how one experiences the physical world....

On top of rockets, large projects like internet satellite constellations are just now ramping up, so the current drizzle of falling space debris is likely to keep intensifying. Now, a team of researchers believes they have the ideal prototype for tracking the brewing celestial storm: dozens of cameras that keep unwavering watch over Spain’s sky. Designed to spot natural fireballs, in February the Spanish Meteor and Fireball Network (SPMN) picked up a Falcon 9 rocket stage burning up over the Mediterranean Sea....

That’s why scientists are watching for both natural and human-caused methane leaks, which could have a big impact on climate. One of the most recent areas of concern was a huge leak in Aliso Canyon, an area of Los Angeles, where a well at a methane storage facility blew out in October of last year. The leak wasn’t plugged until just a few weeks ago, spewing massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere in the interim, and eventually forcing 11,000 people from their homes....

Other tech companies, like Dell, HP and Motorola, have already begun making their devices more repairable, getting ahead of Right to Repair legislations that may be on the cusp of passing. In the past, Microsoft has actively lobbied against Right to Repair bills, but surprisingly, in October, as first reported by Grist, Microsoft agreed to expand its repair options, supplying access to parts and information needed for repairs. Microsoft even committed to conducting a study evaluating the environmental impact of device repairability....

The official NASA Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon lists 796 items, 765 of which are from American missions. Some as small as a pair of nail clippers, others consist of entire lunar rovers and probes that long ago crashed into the surface. We’re not totally sure where all these items are, but they’re definitely up there, cluttering the otherwise barren lunar landscape. Yet somehow maps of the artifacts left on the moon never look that cluttered....

The Jerusalem Post published an article last week that highlighted the Israeli biotech start-up Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi) and the cancer research the company has been conducting. A flurry of international headlines followed, reporting that a team of Israeli scientists will have a cure for cancer within the year, a far cry from what the researchers had actually done. Pharmaceutical research and development is particularly grueling, requiring years of testing before a drug can even get to the first stages of human testing....

A staggered signup waitlist is set to go live tomorrow morning at 9AM EST and close at 11:59PM EST the following Monday for MoviePass’ beta relaunch. Those selected for the beta will receive a set number of ticket credits, along with 10 email invites for their friends. Returning MoviePass true believers will also apparently be gifted additional account credits for their unwavering loyalty. To say that it’s a risky time to return to the movie theater industry is somewhat of an understatement....

We could spend a few pages listing the reasons why you should have a compact folding shovel in your truck. This tool takes that handiness to the next level, with interchangeable heads that make it really like 23 survival tools in one. The high-carbon steel device is a tactical knife, an axe, a shovel, an emergency whistle, and more. It can break up ice and soil as well as help you cut, scale, hammer, and climb....

If life exists in our solar system outside of Earth, it’s probably on a wet moon such as these two. But while Europa tempts us with a subsurface ocean—perhaps not so different from our deepest Antarctic reservoirs, which we know harbor microbial life—it’s an icy world with a habitat quite unlike our own. Titan, with the thickest atmosphere of any moon studied, is one of the most Earth-like bodies we know of....

Designers have long dreamt of the intricate telescopes and roomy hotels they could construct with the equivalent of space-cranes and space-bricks, but—with the exception of the International Space Station (ISS) and the Hubble Space Telescope—every piece of hardware in orbit was built on Earth and crammed whole into a rocket for transport. Now, NASA is encouraging companies to take the first steps toward assembling more complex machines while zipping around the planet in orbit....

The leasing, which covered over 80 million acres of open waters in the Gulf of Mexico, could have released more than 600 million tons of greenhouse gases if fully developed within four years, according to the Guardian. Luckily, only about 1.7 million acres were actually bid on by oil and gas companies, but the sale still brought in more than $190 million from companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. “This administration went to Scotland and told the world that America’s climate leadership is back, and now it’s about to hand over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies,” Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M....

At a White House summit on July 26, called “The Future of COVID-19 vaccines,” the Biden administration brought together pharmaceutical leaders, disease researchers, and federal public health officials to figure out next steps. The aim of the summit, top White House advisors said, was to chart a roadmap to vaccines that could resist variants and halt, rather than blunt, coronavirus transmission. “That’s the holy grail,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the White House Chief Medical Advisor....

Even though we generally think of footprints as ephemeral, in the right conditions, footprints can be preserved for an extraordinarily long time, even millions of years. Preserved footprints give paleontologists details that fossils alone can’t. By looking at the sediments or rocks where the footprints are located, researchers can get an idea of what kind of environment the dinosaurs were living in. By looking at their size and depth, they can get a better idea of how big or small the dinosaur was, even without any remaining flesh....

The Columbia team, who published this work in Neuron today, successfuly used the drug to prevent neural damage in mice with the mutation. “With this paper and our previous work we can trace a pathway that leads from gene to behavior, and that’s really a first,” said Joshua Gordon, an author of the paper. In afflicted individuals, this mutation thwarts the development of neurons that connect two parts of the brain together, the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, while the brain is forming....

“It’s about going places no one has ever seen,” mission biologist Stephanie Farrington told Popular Science. Last week, we published 10 GIFs of some of our favorites of the sea creatures who found themselves in front of the ROV’s cameras. This week, we spoke with expedition leader Kelley Elliott and mission specialist Kasey Cantwell, who reviewed some highlights from the mission and explained exactly what everything was, just in case there was any beast you didn’t recognize during the livestream....

Additional fossils were uncovered between 2017 and 2021, including skeletal fragments of a rib and toe bone and parts of a fossilized skull. Those bits were enough to determine this was a new species, as detailed in a paper published on November 25 in the journal Paleontology and Evolutionary Science. The remains date back to 76.5 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, millions of years before T. rex stomped through the Late Cretaceous....

When we perceive sensations from the world around us—like the hot sun, a chilly ice cube, or even the pressure of a hug—our nervous system interprets these sensations, sending signals to the brain which then determines what we are experiencing. Julius and Patapoutian discovered receptors that play a key role in identifying these sensations. Their work has helped researchers around the world identify novel targets for drugs that could help treat both acute and chronic pain....

CNN further confirmed that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has come out against the project: President Obama will address the nation on the decision at 11:45 a.m. ET today (Friday, November 6) according to Climate Central. The move follows on the heels of the announcement earlier this week that the principal company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, that it was requesting a pause in the U.S. State Department’s review of the project, citing ongoing legal disputes over it in the state of Nebraska....

Scientists believe that, like humans, octopuses may favor a certain arm, and are not octidextrous (not a real word, according to Webster). The Cube is one of a handful of toys the researchers will drop in the tank while monitoring which tentacle is preferred for play time. By feeding the animals on their preferred side, researchers hope to make life in captivity a bit easier for the animals (imagine if you had to eat left-handed your entire life)....

One of the most commonly used techniques is the application of chemical dispersants. These solvents and detergents are supposed to break down slicks of oil into smaller droplets making them easier for biodegradation by oil-eating microbes. The theory is that together, chemicals and bacteria can improve the situation more quickly than manual collection and restore the environment to its original state. However, the use of dispersants has been controversial. The chemicals themselves may be toxic to aquatic life....