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Solar technology is still confusing for the average person, but luckily, solar panel kits exist to make it more accessible. If you’re ready to start your solar journey, check out these kits that are on sale for a limited time: ACOPOWER PLK Portable Solar Panel Kit Lightweight and portable, this mono-crystalline 120W solar panel kit delivers an output of up to 600Wh per day, depending on sunlight availability, and comes with a preinstalled stand to allow for an easy and quick setup....

That’s why we’re excited that beyerdynamic’s DT 900 Pro X open-back studio headphones—which we think are pretty stellar—are on sale for $159, down from its $299 list price, as part of its B-stock promo event, happening today through August 9. That’s $140 leftover to spend on Beyoncé merch or this Bob Dylan record or your next USB microphone. Even better? You get free shipping when you buy. The DT 900 Pro X are balanced-response beauties that feature a proprietary Stellar....

See the winning pod design, and what’s next for the Hyperloop In front of Elon Musk, who surprised those in attendance by appearing late in the festivities, a team of graduate students from MIT ultimately bested the other 120-plus teams. Above are a handful of photos from the competition, including a few renderings of the MIT design, which now has the chance to test their pod and compete against 21 other teams this summer at the SpaceX’s one-mile Hyperloop test track near its headquarters in Hawthorne, California....

Typing speed varied across the identified approaches of the typists, with some touch-typers as fast as some untaught typists. Curiously, they also found that while touch typing doesn’t necessarily improve typing speed, people who learned to touch type looked down at the keyboard a lot less when typing, making it a useful skill nonetheless. Watch a short video on it below:

BBC

Here’s the key idea from Zittrain’s article: Through email, Popular Science spoke with Zittrain about how these proposed killswitches could work, and what they would mean for arming allies in the future. Popular Science: Cell phone kill switches work in a world filled with cellphone towers and internet connections–things that are rare on battlefields. I know you mention satellites, but what kinds of infrastructure do you think a kill switch would require?...

Trouble is, most Mars spacecraft aren’t allowed to “follow the water,” because they’re not clean enough to enter the warm, wet “Special Regions” where Martian life is most likely to have gained a foothold. (Special Regions are defined by the International Council for Science’s Committee on Space Research, under their planetary protection policies.) The logic is that if we send a dirty spacecraft into one of these Special Regions, Earth microbes could also thrive there, contaminating Mars and making it so that if we ever do discover microbial life on Mars, we won’t know whether it’s native to Mars or imported from Earth....

“Throughout my career I’ve been guided by a commitment to alternative futures – how do we do otherwise, and what are the barriers and opportunities that efforts working to counter the surveillance business model face?” Whittaker wrote in a company blog post, adding that her encryption and private communications advocacy work “has been consistent and unwavering.” While both Telegram and WhatsApp each have considerably larger user bases, many experts consider Signal to be the most privacy-oriented of the three....

Why the city became so popular is a mystery: Monte Albán isn’t a particularly inviting place to grow food. It’s far from the rivers and aquifers elsewhere in the valley that serve thirsty corn, so its residents would have had to rely on unpredictable rainfall. What Monte Albán lacked in agricultural opportunities, it might have made up for in cultural cachet. A high standard of living, and lack of despotic rulers, is the best explanation for the region’s explosive growth, as Nicholas and Feinman documented in research published this week in the journal Frontiers in Political Science....

It’s true, most viruses have a pathogenic relationship with their hosts—meaning they cause diseases ranging from a mild cold to serious conditions like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). They work by invading the host cell, taking over its cellular machinery and releasing new viral particles that go on to infect more cells and cause illness. But they’re not all bad. Some viruses can actually kill bacteria, while others can fight against more dangerous viruses....

On paper, the Sonos outdoor speaker doesn’t make a ton of sense. The Sonos Move is a portable Bluetooth speaker that weighs six pounds and promises just 10 hours of battery life—when some of its competition claims more than double that number. At 10 inches tall and six inches around, it’s too big to easily stuff into a typical day bag or backpack. And it costs $400, which is extremely high if you’re only comparing it to other Bluetooth speakers....

So far, our short Sony PS5 experience is limited to the Cooling Springs level of a game called Astro’s Playroom. In it, you’re an adorable robot tasked with jumping around a 3D world, collecting coins and whimsically bopping bad guys in tasks designed to familiarize players with the PS5 DualSense controller while showing off what it can do. From the moment the Sony PS5 DualSense controller starts vibrating, it’s obvious that the tech inside goes well beyond simple rumbling....

The Sony WH-1000XM4’s design The 1000XM4’s vibe can best be described as “functional.” A mix of plastic and pleather available in matte black, blue midnight, or a very (to me) beige-like silver, the Sony WH-1000XM4 is visually muted. The only bling is copper accents for the logo and around external microphone ports, which seriously could pass for USB-C sockets. At first glance, the headphones can’t match the cybernetic industrial design of the Apple AirPods Max, the opulent but not ostentatious language of the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay HX, or the sleek, C-suite minimalism of the Bose Headphones 700....

You came to the right place—we’ve collected a few no-shame, actionable ways that will help you lower your dependence on your devices and set reasonable boundaries for what you do with them. And yes, we know you’re likely reading this on a screen, so here’s something easy to start: Give yourself a quick break by closing your eyes, taking a deep breath, and counting to 10. Breakin’ it down: some data on screen time People spend an average of more than three hours daily on just their computers, tablets, or phones....

To figure this out, the researchers took a sample of 200 people, then broke them up into small groups and had them solve puzzles. The subjects then ranked each other based on who was the most dominant, prestigious, and influential in the group. After that, another group of 60 people was hooked up to eye-tracking technology and shown two minutes of the teams’ problem-solving attempts. The watchers, researchers found, focused in on the person ranked the most dominant....

OSTP head Alondra Nelson issued the memorandum to federal departments on August 25, offering guidance for government agencies to update their public access and embargo policies as soon as possible. This would be a change to the current publication embargo system, in which publishers can place a set date and time for studies to be made public by the media. “When research is widely available to other researchers and the public, it can save lives, provide policymakers with the tools to make critical decisions, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society,” Nelson said in a White House release....

PC gamers go to great lengths with their gear to eek out every last possible advantage they can manage during a session. Competition-grade keyboards and mice complement finely tuned graphics and control settings to such an extent that aspiring players seek out videos of pros talking about their inputs of choice. On consoles, however, the playing field is more level thanks to a relatively uniform controller. Some console players do look for little edges, however, and that’s where controllers like the Microsoft Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 come into play....

Several years ago Dmitriy Smirnov was sitting in an advanced college math class when he learned a principle that cried out to be shared with a wider audience. “If you have two polygons—two shapes—that are of an equal area, you can cut one up into a finite number of pieces and then paste them back together to make the other shape,” Smirnov, now a PhD candidate in computer science at MIT, explains....

But here’s the surprise: About 70 percent of that reference genome comes from a single man in Buffalo, New York, whose DNA was sequenced during the 1990 to 2003 Human Genome Project, the first attempt to record the full genome of a person. That raises obvious questions: Are variations from the reference genome actually abnormal? The man behind the reference genome, known as RP11, is likely of mixed African and European ancestry, but how much information can one genome give about variation among 7 billion of us?...

The challenge in finding the right TV for your living space is the availability of options. Many of today’s TV options offer much of the same, with differences based on personal preference. From included streaming options to a few inches in diagonal length, shopping for a new TV can be a bit pedantic. It’s those differences that make the final purchase more exciting, bringing a vibrant addition to your home entertainment system....