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The first half of this week has been unprecedentedly hot in the Northwest region of the US and western Canada—this is the most intense heatwave to ever hit the region. After an already scorching and record-breaking weekend, with temperatures as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland and 108 in Seattle, thermometers crept even higher Monday and Tuesday, sometimes exceeding 30 degrees above the normal daily temperature. Thankfully, most of the heat had passed by Wednesday, as temperatures settle towards the weekend....

The 7,500-acre facility, which is roughly six times the size of the Navy’s largest shipyard and sits partially on an island in the San Pedro Bay, is almost incomprehensible in scale until you’re above it, says photographer Justin Fantl. Though the scene can feel frantic, his images focus on the “organized design” of the terminals, where goods are lugged to and from boats. In 2021, the ship, train, and truck hub processed 10....

“There are so many different things in baseball that lend itself to science because it’s not so much of a physical game as it is a technical game,” says Trevor Bauer, starting pitcher for the Cleveland Indians. Bauer is unusual for his knowledge of the physics of baseball. He studied engineering at UCLA during college, but cites his dad, a chemical engineer who taught him the scientific method, for his love of science....

Caleb Kim made sure to follow his nurse’s orders. After catching the seasonal flu in late January, he stayed home—only leaving when his fever had broken for 24 hours without medication. Feeling better and faced with school work, Kim, a Korean American undergraduate student at Yale University, wore a medical mask to help stop the virus from spreading. But when Kim entered a campus dining hall, he noticed students exchanging wary glances....

But it wasn’t until the close of the 1950s that anyone proposed a credible way to look for these distant, hypothetical neighbors. The space age had dawned, and science was anxious to know what lay in wait beyond the confines of our thin, insulating atmosphere. The Russians had, in 1957 and 1958, launched the first three Sputnik satellites into Earth orbit; the United States was poised to launch in 1960 the successful Pioneer 5 interplanetary probe out toward Venus....

And check out PopSci‘s complete coverage of the future of the environment at popsci.com/futurecity.

Communication, global logistics and mobility were among the themes to emerge in the winning group. Our favorite: a “personal captioning” app for the hearing impaired. Runner-up: a touch-free computer interface that looks like you’re caressing an invisible sphere. Here are the 13 award winners: Delta Award sponsored by Delta Airlines: Cosmos Labs, for an app that makes mobile Internet more accessible to low-income persons. The app lets you buy unlimited access to other apps for mere pennies, compared to the tens of dollars needed to buy into a data plan....

Both Fitbit and Tinder cofounder, Sean Rad, are offering new products billed as tools to better keep track and improve users’ mental health. The former’s newest item, the Sense 2, is a wearable akin to the Apple Watch that attempts to monitor your stress levels in realtime, then react accordingly. Aside from already ubiquitous datapoints like heart rate and skin temperature, Fitbit’s Sense 2 constantly measures electrodermal activity, aka sweat levels....

“No big deal, it’s a shrew that weighs like 80 grams, and a 160-pound dude standing on it, and it’s totally fine,” says Stephanie Smith, a postdoc fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History. While that story might be more of a slightly upsetting tall tale than a science experiment, the strength of these wee beasts is no joke. Their spines are stronger than anything seen in another creature, including other shrews....

That’s exactly what happened to a seismic station monitored by the Alaska Earthquake Center on October 21. Seismic stations are places where instruments are set up to monitor how much the ground shakes during an earthquake. But they can also pick up other ground-shaking events that are more localized, like thousands of fans jumping and screaming during a football game, or a bear deciding that it doesn’t like the look of that seismic station and needs to take it out....

According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It’s big but not immense — maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who’s there to indicate scale....

It’s hard to resolve a swirly, complex disk when you’re stuck inside, looking horizontally either in toward the center or out toward the edge. To make matters worse, bright stars far away resemble dimmer ones up close, blinding astronomers to any sense of depth. That the universe lacks obvious mile-markers is one of the central curses of astronomy. But researchers love a challenge, and after years of toil a Polish team has released the most complete map of our galaxy to date....

Often, it’s not interesting to learn the basics of CPR—certification workshops seem to go on forever and require practicing mouth-to-mouth on weird dummies. But Italian developer Studio Evil recently released a videogame called Relive that packs CPR training into a high-octane sci-fi narrative. The game designers collaborated with members of the Italian Resuscitation Council. The organization works to raise awareness on the importance of CPR—many of the hundreds of thousands of deaths that occur each year due to sudden cardiac arrest are preventable, and most of those occur at home....

Whether you’re just getting started on Reddit or you’ve been using it for years, there are lesser-known tricks and handy tips you can use to get more out of the site—whether that’s finding stuff you’re interested in more quickly, changing how you appear on Reddit, or tweaking how subreddits are displayed. What you see next will depend on the communities you’re already part of as well as where you’ve been spending your time on Reddit....

The blocks and cruise stage landed 50 miles away from where Curiosity itself landed. The Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter has captured images of these impacts. Mars has plenty of impact scars, but usually scientists don’t have access to details about the objects that hit the surface. Knowing information about the initial size, velocity, density, strength, or impact angle of the objects–the tungsten blocks and the cruise stage– will help NASA scientists understand impact processes and the properties of both the atmosphere and surface of Mars, which will be helpful, especially if we ever move there....

Typically, Fortnite is a battle royale-style game in which players drop simultaneously onto an island, compete to find weapons, and build structures that they then use to eliminate one another until the last person or team is left standing. In 2017, when the game launched, this was a relatively novel concept with just a few other competitors like Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds. But now it’s a cornerstone in gaming—even the latest Call of Duty title uses this format....

Filling the pack is simple, through a rather large twist-on cap that’s easily accessible from the back of the shirt. Putting the shirt on after filling is probably not the recommended order of operations, but I accomplished the feat with minimal effort. Be careful putting freezing cold water in the bag, unless you want to cool down your trapezius muscles while riding. In the crouched position, the bag felt surprisingly comfortable, and I really only noticed it when a slight slosh would occur after hitting potholes....

The good news is that the poor kids haven’t suffered brain damage; they simply haven’t received the same mental stimulation as their wealthier peers. To combat poor brain development at an early age, neuroscientists are creating video games that specifically develop prefrontal cortex functions in school age kids. I have to admit, I’m curious what kind of games will result from this effort. My generation had The (original) Oregon Trail and Carmen San Diego....

Millions of years ago, a vast amount of lava erupted onto what is now India, spewing 12,275 cubic miles of lava onto the Earth’s surface over the course of about 500,000 years. New analysis of this ancient volcanic eruption (whose remains are now known as the Deccan Traps) shows that the eruption really accelerated within 50,000 years of the Chicxulub impact–a vast amount of time to humans, but a geological blink of an eye....

Driving on Germany’s Autobahn is a bucket-list experience for many an automotive enthusiast. But what about pedaling a two-wheeler on it? Hennigsdorf, Germany-based eRockit put the idea to the test recently, with German extreme stunt athlete Sebastian “Satu” Kopke piloting the company’s pedal-controlled electric motorcycle on the famed highway system. “The eRockit is probably the most extraordinary electric motorcycle of today,” the company states not so humbly in a release....