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Bell Nexus The “belle” of the electronics ball was this full-sized version of Bell’s six-rotor air taxi. The company says it could be carrying passengers as soon as 2020, so let’s hope Bane doesn’t show up to take over our city before then. Samsung Wall TV It first debuted at last year’s CES, and now Samsung’s MicroLED-based Wall TV will be available for custom installation in homes this year. It’s made of smaller, modular panels that interlock to create a huge screen with no bezel, and is one of the most beautiful things on the show floor this year....

Sometimes, a maintenance crew can throw new paint on top of a plane after smoothing out what’s on there already. But unlike houses and other objects that don’t fly, weight on a plane matters, and if those layers get too thick and heavy, they need to come off before the new paint goes on. Stripping that old stuff off has been a time-intensive process that produces around a ton of hazardous waste per jet—debris that includes hexavalent chromium, which causes cancer....

Set up Bedtime Mode on your Android phone On Android 9.0 Pie, Google introduced a special mode for getting you ready for bed called Wind Down. The feature has since changed its name to Bedtime Mode and now includes even more options to disconnect. You can turn it on by opening Settings, tapping Digital Wellbeing & parental controls, then Bedtime Mode. From reducing the distractions and eye strain linked to your phone, to setting up a pocket light projector that will have you nodding off in minutes, these apps and gadgets promise to get you a one-way ticket to Snoozeville....

The Chiron seemed destined to be the world’s first production car to top 300 mph when it was introduced as the replacement for the Veyron. After all, that car held the record of 267.8 mph, and the Chiron is more powerful. Especially after Swedish rival Koenigsegg wrested the record away in 2017 with a run of 284 mph in that company’s Agera RS. The record-setting car drew its power from an 8....

Dodge chose to take a different approach when reviving the Challenger nameplate, shortening and widening their existing LX full-size sedan architecture to give the car the right physical proportions as well as a significantly larger footprint. The strategy contributed to the Challenger’s additional poundage versus its rivals, which negatively affected its performance potential, but it also endowed it with more usable storage and interior space as well as greater overall presence—factors that helped the Challenger become the top seller in its segment for the first time in history last year....

According to CNN, the airline said: “The cause of the plane crash is still under investigation. The company expresses its sorrowful condolences to the passengers and crew members who died in this plane crash.” The flight, number MU5737, was cruising at an altitude of 29,100 feet, according to a playback from Flightradar24, but suddenly descended at a rate that at moments hit around 31,000 feet per minute. A data visualization of the aircraft’s altitude depicts a rapid downwards trajectory, with a brief climb and leveling off below 10,000 feet, and then another final descent....

What these foods share is that a hater’s dislike is rooted in texture. “What I noticed and also learned by talking to chefs is that most complaints about food are about texture,” says Ole Mouritsen, a professor of gastrophysics at the University of Copenhagen. People may grumble that a dish has too little or too much salt, he notes, but that’s generally where discussions of taste end. It’s more typical for diners to bemoan that a piece of meat isn’t as tender as they’d hoped, or that their fries are soggy instead of crisp....

An astronaut can die many ways, but decompression is one of the more gruesome. A punctured space suit means a race to sanctuary, before the envelope of pure oxygen surrounding the body bleeds away and hypoxia causes the person to black out. Rapid pressure loss isn’t explosive, but it’s ugly: Water in the body begins to vaporize and tries to escape, the lungs collapse, and circulation shuts down. No one’s dying today, though, at least not on Phobos....

These systems, and their limitations, contribute to confusion over the terminology employed to describe driver-assistance systems and the functions they perform. Fortunately, the Society of Automotive Engineers (the same SAE that also defines the weight of motor oil used in cars) has created specific definitions describing advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) functions by naming them Level 0 through Level 5 (under its J3016 standard). Understanding these different levels is clouded by driver expectations of this scale, and drivers might wonder if there are increments along the way....

Unlike most toy drones, however, the Mavic Mini packs some surprisingly advanced features and tech inside. The camera resembles what you’ll find on the company’s Osmo Pocket camera rig. It shoots 2.7k footage at 25 or 30 frames per second, but it goes up to 60 fps if you’re willing to settle for 1080p HD resolution. It’s not on-par with more professional rigs in that regard, but it also checks in at less than half the cost....

The Merge, in this case, refers to a long-gestating effort to change the fundamentals of how the cryptocurrency, Ethereum, is mined, minted, and traded on the blockchain. This years-in-the-making project primarily seeks to address the longstanding critique regarding crypto that the whole enterprise is simply too energy inefficient to justify widespread adoption, especially in the face of our current climate crisis. And things just started emerging. What’s actually changing within Ethereum’s mechanics is somewhat complex (here’s a deeper rundown on that front), but suffice to say, the cryptocurrency is genuinely becoming a lot more eco-friendly....

The world is in the middle of the third global coral bleaching event, and almost 4,633 square miles of reef could be dead by the time it’s over. Bleaching causes the symbiotic algae that live on corals to flee, leaving the corals a pale white color. Coral bleaching is tied to warmer ocean temperatures, caused by climate change or cyclic environmental changes like El Nino. And, as if coral reefs didn’t have enough to worry about already, a new study published in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests those same factors could also usher in an explosion of viral activity on the reef....

Sound like a scare story? It happens to more than 300,000 computers each day-PCs connected to the Internet without security precautions such as a firewall, anti-virus software or an up-to-date operating system. According to the FBI, $67.2 billion was lost last year to online crime. Sure, there are ways to fight back [see “Five Things You Can Do Today to Protect Yourself”], shutting down “zombies” (PCs surreptitiously controlled by hackers) and prosecuting the handful of Ivans the police have managed to catch....

“At first we didn’t really believe it,” says H. Jay Melosh, a geophysicist at Purdue University and a co-author of the new study. “Some other lunar basins have been known to have mass anomalies,” like the ones first discovered in 1968 by the lunar orbiter missions that preceded the Apollo program. “But the South Pole-Aitken Basin was never known to have a mass anomaly of that kind.” The South Pole-Aitken Basin is home to the largest known crater in the solar system....

Because we rely on home products for the intimate and urgent matters of our everyday lives, we need these staples to serve us well. A true innovation for the house should either work better than its predecessor (Post-it’s super-strong sticky notes or Milwaukee’s cordless saw that outperforms the wireless kind) or fulfill a need we didn’t realize we had (keeping our coffee at the perfect temperature or instantly detecting plumbing leaks)....

From The Guardian: This doesn’t necessarily mean that China’s project will become the dominant source of information about the particle. CERN, the group responsible for the Large Hadron Collider, today announced progress on improvements to their collider, with a project 2025 date for project completion. Currently, the LHC smashes particles with 13 Tera electron volts, but by the end of the upgrades in 2025 it will have 100 TeV. China has not yet released expected energy levels....

It’s worth noting that the deal specifically applies to the standard Nintendo Switch with red and blue joy-cons, not the Nintendo Switch OLED. As we noted in our review, the Switch OLED has some nice advantages, especially if you plan to use it primarily as a portable, handheld console. The deal also doesn’t apply to versions of the consoles with special Joy-Con colors, like the mint and light blue Animal Crossing: New Horizons edition....

Now, are they hamming it up a little for the video feed? Maybe. But this is also a genuinely exciting find. Dumbo octopuses live multiple miles beneath the ocean surface, which makes them exceedingly difficult to study, and this was a rare glimpse at a living specimen. Plus, come on, it’s so cute! Those fins flapping like elephant ears, that rippling mantle, those twisting, turning suckers. Any scientist would be thrilled to witness a creature like that, much less a scientist who has prepared for this mission for months—probably more like years—and is now finally getting to see what life is like at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean....

Improving motor skills, resolving conflict, social development, and even learning the physics of our world can all happen on the playground, says Brussoni. But many of these spaces don’t actually provide a good environment for facilitating meaningful play. For the ultimate playground experience, science tells us to consider these six critical components. Start with the basics The first thing any good playground needs probably isn’t what you think, says Talarowski....

Let’s examine the physics of this particular aspect of surfing — the takeoff or the “drop-in”. How do you catch the wave? Waves coming in to shore from the open ocean have speeds that can vary from 8 to 10 miles per hour for smaller waves to up to 35 miles per hour for a tow-in-sized wave. In order to catch the wave, you must paddle in front of it with sufficient speed that the wave does not pass right under you....