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That isn’t meant to be my new homestead, though. I’m headed for Europa, a smaller sphere. Its exterior is sheathed in a miles-thick layer of ice. But underneath, enwombed like I am in this lander, there might be an ocean. Scientists say that with its water and its chemistry, it could be the place in the solar system (besides Earth) most likely to have life. Other spacecraft carrying other instruments have floated past it: ­Pioneer, ­Voyager, Galileo (great names, right?...

For all these reasons, physicians and researchers who work with celiac patients know that staying on a gluten-free diet isn’t the simple fix that it appears to be. That’s why a company called ImmusanT has been developing an alternative: a vaccine. We usually think of vaccines as useful for battling viruses, not autoimmune diseases, but the theory behind ImmusanT’s Nexvax2 seems sound so far. Like a normal shot, Nexvax2 exposes a patient’s immune system to a small quantity of what would otherwise be a dangerous substance....

The More Chocolate A Nation Eats, The More Nobel Prizes It GetsDaily Infographic: What Is The Real Status Of The Polar Bears?Meet Polaris, The First Ice-Drilling Lunar Prospector-BotWith Basic Physics, You Can Beat the House At Roulette And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: Should Satellite Map Data Be Uncensored For All To Enjoy?5 Secrets Of A Successful Space DiveRemember When The Nobels Used To Be Inspiring?...

These super sleek and impeccably crafted boards can climb an incline, and go up to a hair-blowing 20 miles per hour. There are a variety of ride modes, too. The mini board has an accompanying app and can travel up to 14 miles on a single charge. This electric skateboard climbs hills and goes up to 27 mph. The deck is made out of eight layers of high-density maple wood and can load up to 280 pounds....

The cautionary words weren’t personal: Many farriers retire or move on to other jobs after about 20 years due to injuries, fatigue, and burnout from constantly working in a stooped position beneath 1,000-pound, sometimes fractious animals. Back, shoulder, and elbow injuries are occupational hazards. “I’d always thought about a backup plan. I’d considered real estate and journalism, but when I stumbled into blacksmithing, it was the perfect fit,” Horn says....

In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers found 97 drainage basins that depend on snow melt for their annual allotment of water. A drainage basin is any area of land where water drains to a certain point, like a river or reservoir. The researchers examined 421 basins, but focused on these 97 basins because they not only supply fresh water to 2 billion people, but there is also a 66 percent chance that the snow available to those basins would decline in the coming years....

Fifteen years ago, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) launched Toxmap, a free, interactive online application that combines pollution data from at least a dozen U.S. government sources. A Toxmap user could pan and zoom across a map of the United States sprinkled with thousands of blue and red dots, with each blue dot representing a factory, coal-fired power plant, or other facility that has released certain toxic chemicals into the environment, and each red dot marking a Superfund program site—“some of the nation’s most contaminated land,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)....

Unmanned aerial vehicles—drones, as we all like to call them—have dramatically affected the world over the last decade with their ability to handle tasks considered either too dangerous or too mundane for humans. Public safety drones, for instance, are capable of heading into the teeth of a brush fire to gather critical intelligence, a place where sending a human firefighter is simply impossible. Drones are so easy to operate that nearly anyone can fly one with minimal training, one reason millions have been sold around the world....

However, not everyone was satisfied with the requirements in the potential data-transfer agreement, and skeptics aren’t convinced by TikTok’s process for handling users’ personal information. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), the Intelligence Committee’s top Republican, stated to The New York Times earlier this year that unless the tie between TikTok and ByteDance (the Chinese company that currently owns the app) is completely severed, “significant national security issues regarding operations, data, and algorithms [will still be] unresolved....

In the 1800s, the rise of mass print was both blamed for an increase in eye problems and was responsible for dramatizing the fallibility of vision too. As the number of known eye problems increased, the Victorians predicted that without appropriate care and attention Britain’s population would become blind. In 1884, an article in The Morning Post newspaper proposed that: The 19th century was the time when opthamology became a more prominent field of healthcare....

A study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes the case that, if phosphine is hanging around Venus’s atmosphere, explosive volcanism could be responsible. Researchers calculated that eruptions on the scale of Krakatau’s 1883 outburst on Earth—a cataclysmic eruption in the Indonesian islands—would be necessary to launch volcanic dust high into the Venusian atmosphere, where it would react with sulfuric acid to form phosphine. “Venus is a body that’s not really that much smaller than the Earth…but its geology is so different,” says Jonathan Lunine, chair of the department of astronomy at Cornell University and a coauthor of the findings....

NASA data has long supported the idea that a seasonal, briny water may be flowing on the Red Planet. In 2011, scientists noted that landscape formations showing up in the planet’s warmer months were caused by flowing water–or, at least, that was the “best explanation for these observations so far.” Now, the Mars Reconnoissance Orbiter has spotted more of those “dark, finger-like features” near the Martian equator, offering tantalizing evidence of briny water–or some other liquid substance–that appears in the winter but evaporates in the warm season....

Techathlon is a collection of games and segments designed to test our knowledge of the tech world. Fun and games aside, there’s a ton of information packed into every episode, so you can play along while you listen and build up your own tech smarts along the way. For our first episode, we’re recapping the week’s biggest tech stories, channeling debate came to figure out which video game console reigns supreme, proposing solutions to the tweet-editing conundrum, and taking out biggest swing at some tricky tech trivia....

The name is a giveaway for how the tech works. InfraredTags uses infrared light-based barcodes and QR codes that are embedded permanently into the bodies of 3D printed objects. A corresponding phone attachment with infrared cameras can be used to detect the code. There are many applications for object tagging. It’s been popularly used in packaging, tracking logistic, robotics, shopping, and recently, in augmented and virtual reality. Think of a grocery store checkout, where cashiers scan the barcode on a box of cereal to get its price, or when you use your phone at a restaurant to scan a QR code for a menu....

The glowing lily is one of Sareen’s botanical “cyborgs”—vegetation he biohacks to serve as environmental watchdogs. Plants, he explains, are natural sentinels. When they absorb nutrients through their roots, they also sop up low concentrations of pollutants. “They are automatic absorbers or scrubbers of [contaminants] in the environment,” he says. Sareen—a biodesigner and director of the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab at Parsons School of Design, where he’s also an assistant professor—hopes to harness those qualities to sound the alarm on factory spills, tainted soil, and bacteria-​infested water....

Doctors in Estonia were monitoring the brain of a 87-year-old patient to detect and treat his newly developed epileptic seizures. During these readings, the patient suddenly had a heart attack and passed away. But that left the team with a unique new set of data: the first electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of a dying human brain. The team looped in international collaborators to analyze the recordings of the patient’s brain 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped beating....

Earlier this past week, President Biden announced that his administration would support waiving intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines, as countries across the world like India and Brazil face new infection spikes. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has granted emergency approval for one of China’s COVID-19 vaccines, which crucially does not require special freezer storage. Here’s what else unfolded over the past week. CDC says virus can be transmitted through airborne droplets On Friday, the CDC revised their official coronavirus guidance to acknowledge that COVID-19 infections can occur through airborne transmission, which infectious disease experts had long thought was being downplayed....

That’s the same problem that researchers recently presented to carnivorous mammals at nine United States zoos. The results of their study were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the animals with a larger brain in proportion to their body size were able to solve the problem faster than other animals. Researchers tested 140 different animals of 39 species to see how long it would take for each of them to get food out of a latched metal cage....

The “stared at” paranoia could arise from several factors, one of which is confirmation bias. You remember those moments you turned around and saw someone staring at you, but you’ll forget the times when this was not the case. Or someone might be watching—just not with the intention you think: A sudden movement could have triggered an unintended glance from a stranger. And never discount the role of an overactive imagination....

There’s certainly something compelling about what seems to be an avian black mass afoot. But what’s really going on, according to a 2017 blog post from the National Wild Turkey Federation’s Mark Hatfield, has more in common with an Instagram influencer’s half-hearted attempt at a full moon ritual than any true witchery. In Hatfield’s words, “turkeys are very basic.” The birds, Hatfield explained are just keeping their distance while deciding whether or not the extremely dead cat in question might be a threat....