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In a image taken on February 24, Curiosity used “the equivalent of the geologist’s hand lens” to document what looks like a water lily, piece of coral, or sprig of broccolini. The “Martian flower,” as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory referred to it in a mission update, likely stemmed eons ago from a flow of mineralized water. Mars researchers think that the surface of Gale Crater has been dry for 3 billions years now—but that it might contain groundwater under several layers of sediment....

Mobius Bionics LLC, a medical device company, will produce the Luke arm commercially, named for the lifelike replacement Luke Skywalker received at the end of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the arm and Dean Kamen’s DEKA company designed it, with the goal to “develop an advanced electromechanical prosthetic upper limb with near natural control that would dramatically enhance independence and improve quality of life for amputees,” according to the Mobius Bionics press release....

Six at a time: AeroGarden Elite The AeroGarden Elite will let you grow up to 6, 12-inch plants at a time. It comes with an herb seed kit that includes two kinds of basil, plus parsley, dill, thyme, and mint, along with a three-ounce bottle of plant nutrients to last you through a season of growth. The 20-watt LED growing light is designed to help your plants grow. A control panel will remind you when it’s time to add water or plant food, and automatically turns the lights on and off for your sprouting herbs....

But tempting as it may be to get someone a full-fledged gadget as a casual gift, it’s not the best move, unless you really know what you’re giving and who you’re giving it to. Here are some things to consider before you give the gift of a digital roommate who will never want to leave. It might be a repeat gift Some predictions say half of U.S. homes will have smart speakers by the end of 2018, so there’s a good chance the smart speaker you gift won’t be the receiver’s first....

It doesn’t have to be this way. By tweaking a device’s settings, you can make text easier to read, simplify the controls, and interact with the screen vocally instead of manually. Here’s how to make a smartphone much more accessible. Some people—especially those new to smartphones—find the interface confusing rather than intuitive, and things get more complicated when you account for visual impairment and limited mobility. Elderly users, for example, may have trouble seeing text and images, as well as pressing on-screen buttons....

“These brain changes were in the same direction as what you would see with aging, but they occurred at a faster speed,” says Rachael Seidler, a professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at the University of Florida, and a coauthor of the new JAMA paper. “They were greater with longer spaceflight mission durations, and larger brain changes were correlated with greater balance declines.” The study’s findings center around the movement of intracranial fluids within the skull, as well as—for the first time —an examination of how spaceflight affects the brain’s white matter....

“We end up with insect muscle and fat tissue, without insect legs, eyes and other crunchy bits,” she said. “Theoretically, we could produce a product that looks like steak, but is insect-based instead of cow-based.” If humans ate crickets instead of cows, it would go a long way to slowing climate change. Cows and sheep fart and burp planet-heating methane, a heat-trapping gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide....

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The study finds that the anti-viral medication Paxlovid, which is intended to treat and relieve the symptoms of COVID-19, may also reduce the risk of developing long COVID following the initial infection by 26 percent. The research is a preprint that was posted online over the weekend, so it still has to undergo peer review. For the study, long COVID was defined as developing one or more symptoms (including heart issues, blood disorders, fatigue, and trouble breathing) one to three months after testing positive....

The researchers had been studying squids’ ring teeth, which are uniquely strong and can change phase from liquid to solid in the presence of water. After testing ring teeth samples from several species of squid found all over the world, the researchers uncovered the genetic code for the proteins that allow the teeth to heal themselves when broken. They then engineered bacteria to produce the proteins so they could conduct more tests....

In 1957 (more than a decade before Neil Armstrong’s famous journey) Moore published “A Guide to the Moon,” a magically detailed travel manual to Earth’s natural satellite. The book is so descriptive that, according to the Popular Science reporter who reviewed it, “you may be unprepared for an outstanding impression of your first visit to the moon.” Here’s more: That’s the powder. A blanket of it covers everything, even steep slopes of jagged mountains....

The study examined how well Teens Against Tobacco Use, a program developed by the American Lung Association, the American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association, could reduce teen susceptibility to tobacco use. In the program, high school and middle school students deliver presentations on tobacco to slightly younger students. The talks incorporate factual information about tobacco’s health effects, but also include the adolescent presenters’ personal experiences with it. The study was published this week in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine....

The non-stick coating is made of a synthetic fluoropolymer called polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), more commonly known under the brand name Teflon. A 2022 report from the non-profit organization Ecology Center shows that 79 percent of non-stick cooking pans and 20 percent of non-stick baking pans were coated with PTFE. In a new Science of The Total Environment study, the authors simulated the cooking process with different non-stick pots and pans using turners made of different materials, like steel or wood....

Under the guidance of the company’s representative, I unpacked the drone, programmed it with a spy mission, and sent it aloft to survey the neighborhood. You can learn some very interesting stuff by observing from your own private low-altitude spyplane, it turns out. Check out the gallery. You can define a flight path for the drone, and it flies at 30 mph, navigating via GPS, and takes impressive aerial photographs with its onboard 12MP camera or any sort of sensor you want to send up....

Sure, we all knew somebody in middle school named Ernest Funkhauser and figured that, given his name, it made sense he’d be angry with the world. A new study concludes that boys with less common names are more likely to break the law than boys with names such as Michael or David. Now, I’ve spent a long while thinking about this, and it still doesn’t quite make sense in my mind....

Anthropologists estimated that H. erectus died off around 400,000 years ago, much before Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 100,000 years later. But that estimate has always been a bit fuzzy — did every last H. erectus really die off when they appeared to vanish from Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago? Nearly a century ago, Dutch researchers discovered twelve H. erectus skulls and two lower bones in Ngandong in the volcano-ridden Indonesian island of Java....

Snakes aren’t the only critters with poison potential. Insects also evolved to use venom as a weapon for warding off attackers or immobilizing prey. But instead of using their fangs as a delivery device, insects use a stinger. Originally called an ovipositor, stingers transformed over time from hardened drills that bore through plant tissues to deposit eggs to barbed syringes that pierce flesh and inject a toxic chemical cocktail. Since only female insects had ovipositors, only female insects now have stingers....

Many of the openings are for different types of engineers, but there’s room for everyone from a line cook to a space suit engineer. New college grads might be happy to know there are four types of positions explicitly aimed at them. The aerospace industry is a major employer in the U.S. (though prone to boom-bust cycles). Take heavyweights like Northrop Grumman, which employs about 70,000, and Boeing, which employs more than 170,000....