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“The Sims,” an animated computer game that debuted in 2000, has its own unique language called Simlish that I helped develop from scratch. Players create characters—called Sims—and direct their lives by responding to emotional cues for needs like hunger, fun, and hygiene. The sounds the characters make are entirely of my team’s design. The gameplay is freestyle, meaning no rules dictate how users direct their Sims’ lives. Players explore the world and create their own fictions....

I´m Army, Special Operations. My mission: to sneak up on a rebel training camp. If the intelligence is right-if the place is being operated by the enemy Tiger Brigade-then I´m supposed to plant a radio transmitter so that F-16 pilots can launch smart bombs directly to the target. I just need to make absolutely sure that the location is correct-that the rebels are indeed based here. And that won´t be easy....

“These technologies have the potential to revolutionise the future battlefield for our Armed Forces, enabling the prosecution of new targets in the land, sea and air domains and allowing commanders to meet mission objectives in new ways,” said Shima Fhima, director of strategic programmes for the Ministry of Defence, in a release. As a category, “directed energy weapons” includes a range of technologies, all of which utilize a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and bend it towards military ends for different effects....

A group of researchers at Stanford led by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has set out to prove that a 100 percent renewable energy grid by 2050 is not only feasible but can be done without any blackouts and at a lower cost than the existing grid. “One of the biggest concerns with renewables is that they’re intermittent, that wind doesn’t always blow or the sun doesn’t always shine” says Jacobson, who notes that people have claimed this unreliability caused blackouts in California, which relies heavily on renewables–and in Texas, which doesn’t....

This week’s episode is extra special: it’s the first half of our first-ever live show, which happened on September 14 at Caveat in NYC. We’re already cooking up plans for another one in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for more info! FACT: This cheese is so gnarly it’s literally illegal By Rachel Feltman on behalf of Sara Chodosh, who is on a well-deserved vacation! Consider how many disgusting, potentially dangerous foods are totally legal to eat: fermented, actively rotting shark meat, super-deadly pufferfish, and newly-severed, super-wiggly octopus legs capable of choking you on their way down....

The console can play all the latest cutting-edge games like Elden Ring or Halo Infinite at up to 1440p, which is better than HD but not quite 4K. It also supports features like HDR (high dynamic range) for better color accuracy. Critically, the Series S lacks a disk drive, which means you’ll have to download all of your games from the Xbox digital marketplace, and won’t be able to play physical copies of Xbox 360 and Xbox One games that are backward-compatible....

The dealer rotates quickly between player positions using a LEGO turntable placed inside a stabilizing base. Kee tackled the trickier card-flip problem by mounting two spinning wheels beneath a deck of heavy, wide casino cards. The slower back wheel slides a card from the bottom of the deck up to the front wheel, which then shoots it forward fast enough to prevent accidental flipping. He plans to upgrade future versions with a motorized platform in front of the exit slot to deal cards both face-up and -down and an ultrasonic sensor to detect the number of players present....

During our Refurbished Event, which lasts through Sept. 30, a collection of products is available at surprisingly low prices. No coupons are necessary to save. Continue reading for a review of these limited-time offers. Apple MacBook Air 11″ Core i5, 4GB RAM 128GB SSD – Silver (Refurbished) Equipped with Intel Turbo Boost Technology to ensure efficient energy usage. Explore high-quality movies and images with Intel HD Graphics 6000. Get the Apple MacBook Air 11″ Core i5, 4GB RAM 128GB SSD – Silver (Refurbished) for $265....

The fossilized line-ups “immediately reminded us of processionary caterpillars,” Vannier wrote. Numerous modern animals do things like line up or move in groups, including underwater. And so did ancient ones: evidence of collective behavior in ancient animals dates back to at least 525 million years ago. Researchers have hypothesized that for some trilobites, at least, forming a line may have reduced drag and made moving easier—like cyclists biking in formation....

Now, NASA has released a collection of images of the real-life settings in The Martian, from Acidalia Planitia to the Marth Crater. The images were acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a piece of equipment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRISE takes incredibly detailed images of the Martian surface, giving scientists here on Earth a closer view of the planet. Many of the images taken by HiRISE are taken in sets called stereo pairs....

Red-eyed treefrogs are adorable, and unlike other frogs, which can take hours to hatch, if a red-eyed treefrog egg is approached by a hungry predator like a snake, the tiny tadpoles can hatch in seconds, escaping from their jelly-like egg prison into the world. In a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology researchers from Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute found that the embryo escape artists used an enzyme in their disappearing act....

“For a number of years now, we’ve known that we could modify specific genes to control flowering and makes plants more compact,” says Zachary Lippman, a plant biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State. But it took some time to figure out how to combine those traits into a small, high-yield tomato. Lippman and his colleagues published their results Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology. “All flowering plants have a universal system of genes that encode hormones that tell the plant to stop making leaves and start making flowers,” Lippman says....

If a sign tells you to follow the purple skull to your destination, the answer seems simple: Veer left. But isolate the stripes that make up the skulls, and you’ll find neither skull has purple bones; in fact, all the bones are the same color. Slot them back into the banded setting, and they shift to purple and orange. The pigments morph because of the ­Munker-​White illusion, which shifts the perception of two identical color tones when they’re placed against different surrounding hues....

Hailey has been building things for most of her life, whether it’s helping out her mom, Miranda, with home projects, consulting with her grandfather, who’s a contractor, or tinkering on her own. (As I spoke to Miranda Fort on the phone, Hailey was outside building a boat out of scrap wood. Her little sister also asked for a screwdriver, though her request was denied.) But when it came to constructing Edward’s house, she did everything herself, although her parents did step in to give pointers and help lift heavy materials....

The rabbit-duck is a type of illusion called an ambiguous figure, and while we can’t know the ancient carver’s intent, this prehistoric knickknack is one too. According to Kyle Mathewson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Alberta, the flip-​­flopping happens because the mammoth and bison share the same basic outlines. Your brain’s visual cortex makes sense of this low-level information, and then hands it off to a set of high-level processing neurons, which parses features like fur or tusks....

The Pacific hurricane season covers all storms that form between the western coast of North America and 180°W, which is also known as the International Date Line. The eastern Pacific basin stretches from the western coast of North America to 140°W longitude. The central Pacific basin, which covers Hawaii, stretches from 140°W to 180°W. Meteorologists and climatologists often combine the two basins since most of the storms that cross through the central Pacific originated in the eastern Pacific....

So, like most folks in his position, Riti started shopping around online. But rather than heading right to the Cabela’s website, Riti, who calls himself a “DIY-er with an itch,” landed in the Popular Science Google Book archives. There, in the August 1948 issue, he found the instructions for a “Bicycle Boat Built For Two.” The design wasn’t perfect—he wanted a motorized vessel, not a pedal-assisted one, and he needed it to be heavy-duty enough to withstand ocean waters and winter temperatures....

In March 2020, a Nature paper stirred some controversy when scientists identified a skull encased in 99 million year old Myanmar amber as that of a tiny, bird-like dinosaur. The authors dubbed the specimen Oculudentavis khaungraae, and acknowledged the strangeness of the fossil—most notably, they found the shape of the bones, especially around the eye region, didn’t seem to follow other bird or dinosaur evolutionary patterns. Following publication, other paleontologists refuted the paper’s findings....

While most of us would opt to sit inside and stare at Netflix while waiting for warmer temperatures, Knapp has scientific chores to do. “We’re going out at least once per hour to do operations,” he tells me, without shivering. “We’re typically outside for about 15 minutes at a time to de-ice our equipment and check measurements like temperature and sky conditions. Every six hours we have to go get the precipitation can, which take up to a half hour....

Curators with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum are in the process of scanning the spacecraft for its digitization project with the goal of creating the most complete model possible. But they found something interesting in the process. At some point during the flight, one of the Apollo 11 astronauts drew a calendar on a section of wall below one of the storage lockers. As each day passed, someone crossed off another dated square on the wall....