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A curly hair can also be described according to its composition and structure. A research team based in Clichy, France, and working for the cosmetics firm L’Oréal, used electron microscopy to compare straight and curly hair fibers. The former were circular in cross section and symmetrical in structure. The latter, though, had an uneven distribution of a particular type of keratin. This protein—which, along with other varieties of keratin, serves as the primary component of hair—accumulated near the inside edge of a curled hair, beneath the curve....

I want to believe that my interpretation is more than a pathetic attempt to legitimize all those hours of passive TV-watching. Just as the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was able to expose central problems of specific Amerindian peoples by analyzing their myths, we can analyze our own tales in order to discern the contradictions and apparently unsolvable dilemmas that torment our subconscious. What Lévi-Strauss called “mythemes” are abstractions of central elements of stories—the basic themes which express their essential messages....

The Optoma HD28HDR projects a brightness of 3,600 lumens. That makes it bright enough for use outside—even when its not terribly dark. The projection size can go up to 120 inches depending on how far away the projector is placed from the screen. The 1080p projector comes with two HDMI ports, a 3.5mm audio output, and a bulb that lasts up to 15,000 hours. It has a higher contrast ratio at 50,000:1, which means that the lightest white is 50,000 times brighter than the darkest black....

Apple developed its spatial sound feature in an effort to create a surround sound effect from just two audio sources—one in your left ear and one in your right. And if you’re asking yourself, “What is spatial audio?”, the company describes it as “cinema-like sound that surrounds you from the film or video you’re watching” via your own headphones. And it’s quite clever too, able to recognize where your head is and where your mobile device is in 3D space, adjusting both the sound effects and the voice dialog of whatever you’re watching accordingly....

With all that hopping and bopping around from the in-laws’ place to your sister’s house, it can be hard to find an outlet to recharge. We can’t help on the emotional recharging part, but we can help make sure your cell phone battery doesn’t tank on the road. This Anker Magnetic Battery is a slim portable iPhone charger that uses MagSafe tech to attach to the back of your phone....

Not only will you save money on energy bills, but you’ll also have your PC or Mac booted up and waiting for you in the morning when you reach the office (or home office). You can also leave your computer working on a task (like a hefty download or a long video encoding process) knowing that it will switch off when it’s done. Or maybe you just want to fall asleep to some streaming video, without leaving your computer running all night—there are lots of ways to use this superpower....

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent. “Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle....

So your roommate can whittle a figurine to bring home for you while he gazes out into the night sky above Joshua Tree. $150 via James. Your best friend has a travel bucket list that will have her scrambling up rocky cliffs and slipping down snowy slopes. Get her a pair of pants that can handle any kind of activity or weather—without making her look like a dork. Patagonia’s Simul Alpine Pants go for $139 and are available for both men and women....

To try and close those gaps, Wang co-founded the Transitions Clinic Network to manage the specific needs of patients with chronic illnesses on their release from prison, help improve their health outcomes, and facilitate their reintegration to the community. The program links people released from prison who have chronic illnesses with community health workers who also have a history of incarceration. They also ensure that these patients have support on their release, both for their health needs and for social determinants of health, like housing, food, and employment....

Most interested Googlers encounter information on probiotics exclusively from commercial sources and news outlets, according to a recent Frontiers in Medicine study. These sites often fail to paint a complete picture, so when looking to buy the latest pill or kombucha drink, consumers may miss vital information on side effects and overall efficacy. “Many websites allude to benefits of probiotics in diseases for which there is not much high-level scientific evidence, other than in mice,” says Brighton and Sussex Medical School Professor Pietro Ghezzi....

The 9 inch by 12 inch dimensions of this classic 100-sheet sketchbook offer plenty of room, whether you want to take up a whole sheet with a figure study or do a series of quick drawings of people in the park on a Sunday afternoon. The 89 gsm (grams per square meter) acid-free paper works with dry media from graphite pencils to soft pastels and charcoal. If you find bound sketchbooks frustrating, the spiral binding makes it easier to get sheets to lie flat, and each sheet is also micro-perforated so you can tear out your work to crumple or frame, depending on the day....

These swings are a particularly striking pair of examples, but they’re just two small points in a rising wave of evidence that Greenland is in trouble. In the last two decades, the island has lost around five trillion tons of ice. Those losses are in line with the more serious projections for sea-level rise that the IPCC has outlined, and have contributed to nearly an inch of sea level rise....

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and Utrecht University in the Netherlands used decades of data on the melting of Greenland’s snowcap and glaciers to construct a 46-year history of change on the world’s largest island—and it wasn’t reassuring. They found that Greenland alone caused sea levels to rise by 13.7 milimeters since 1972, half of which occurred during the last 8 years. Scientists studying rising sea levels have been keeping an eye on Greenland for decades, as its 656,000 square miles of ice—three times the size of Texas—is land-based....

We’ve all just barely forgotten about the great American lettuce contamination of 2018, in which we were forced to forgo romaine over Thanksgiving, and another E. coli outbreak has already hit. The Centers for Disease Control released a notice of an ongoing outbreak centralized around Kentucky earlier this month, but at the time they weren’t sure what foods were to blame for the 72 illnesses and eight hospitalizations. Nearly half of those infections were in Kentucky, with the rest in Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia....

The target drone’s pilot directed the Phantom below the horizon line, with some landmass behind it. On the laptop in front of me, I placed a tracker marker just to the side of the drone, a push of the left joystick of an Xbox controller fixing the tracker to the target. With a slight nudge of the right joystick, I moved my crosshairs onto one of the quadcopter’s rotors, and then held the trigger....

By applying techniques and technology from materials science to a piece of biology, researchers were literally able to deconstruct an ant’s tooth. In doing so, they found zinc atoms that harden and sharpen the tooth, like diamond dust on a blade. The researchers published their work in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday. “As we reveal these nanoscale structures, I’m pretty sure we will uncover things that we didn’t know before about the natural world,” says Arun Devaraj, a materials scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, and one of the authors of the paper....

It is also the subject of the newest mystery in particle physics. The latest, most precise, and most informed measurement yet of the W boson’s mass, published in Science on April 7, reveals that the particle is heavier than anticipated. It’s a deviation that can’t easily be explained. If the measurement is confirmed—and that’s a very big if—it could be the strongest evidence yet that particle physics’ long-standing understanding of the universe at the tiniest scales, known as the Standard Model, is unfinished....

The variant set off alarm bells largely because of its unusual set of mutations: more than 30 on the virus’ crucial spike protein alone. Some of those mutations had helped previous variants escape the immune system. At first, it was unclear how much those mutations would affect its transmission, and ability to infect people with some immunity, in the real world. Researchers are still working to pin down exact numbers, but now, it’s clear that the variant is highly transmissible and able to infect people with some existing immunity....

Those cyber invasions, the Times reports, have taken both the form of “reconnaissance probes” as well as more destructive code that’s “potentially crippling.” While it’s unclear precisely what kind of cyber “incursions” the US has actually been carrying out—if any at all—the concept of a cyber attack disabling infrastructure in another country is not a hypothetical one. In fact, it has already happened in the Ukraine twice: in 2015 and 2016....

A team from the University of York and the British Museum analyzed the remnants of 1,226 pieces of pottery from 156 sites in Northern and Eastern Europe and found a correlation between the pottery’s age, physical features, and how the ceramics were used. According to the study, this is evidence that communities shared the techniques and families passed down to other generations. Their findings, published December 22 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, show that techniques for making pottery spread rapidly westwards from about 5,900 BCE onward through social traditions....