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Researchers at the University of Richmond in Virginia have taught a group of rats to drive a tiny car by incentivizing them with food.One of the findings indicates that self-sufficiency has an awesome side effect: stress relief.The self-driving rats had higher levels of dehydroepiandrosterone, a stress relieving hormone, compared to rats who were driven around in a remote controlled car that they had no control over.Researchers at the University of Richmond in Virginia have taught rats to drive....

Media Platforms Design TeamYou remember the claw crane. It’s that popular arcade game in which you try to grab a stuffed toy or other prize with a mechanical arm controlled via joystick. The game makes money because it’s so much harder than it looks; the second you think you’ve snared the stuffed bear for your sweetheart, it slips through your robotic remote fingertips.Raytheon’s newest creation makes mechanical handling easy and intuitive, and it could pick up a lot more than a stuffed animal....

Last weekend, the upstart space company Rocket Lab successfully launched three small commercial satellites from its launchpad in New Zealand, as well as a fourth, more surprising piece of cargo. Rocket Lab announced on Wednesday that a carbon fiber geodesic sphere measuring about 3 feet in diameter had secretly hitched a ride aboard the rocket. While the commercial satellites were build for tasks such as Earth imaging, weather monitoring, and ship tracking, the fourth satellite—evocatively named “Humanity Star”—serves a very different purpose....

UCLA’s Spinlab, which stands (awesomely) for Simulated Planetary Interiors Lab, recently put a small heating plate in a tank filled with water, injected some red dye onto the plate, and filmed it. While this may sound regrettably simplistic, it’s actually magical and even a little bit grand.As the video below makes clear, the thermal dynamics at work in the tank resemble those that cause cumulonimbus clouds and volcanic ash to spread out when they reach the top of the planet’s troposphere....

How many nuclear weapons does the United States have? That’s a secret, again, thanks to the Trump administration. The number, which has been declassified every year for nearly a decade, is once again classified and not for public knowledge. Exactly why that number will remain classified for 2018 is a good question. The Department of Energy, responding to a petition to declassify the number of U.S. nukes for Fiscal Year 2018, responded, “After careful consideration....

You can get a lot of mileage out of your gadgets by making sure you treat their batteries right, but the easiest way to extend your laptop’s battery life right this second is to reduce the amount of work it’s doing. Here’s a handy trick that makes that easy. If you’re doing a lot of web browsing—specifically with Google Chrome—you can save yourself some battery life by closing the tabs you don’t need....

Take cheap tools.That’s what Jim Losee told me on my first trip to the Pick Your Part junkyard in Sun Valley, California, back in 1990. He was the experienced editor and I was the new guy at Car Craft magazine. “You’re going to lose some, so they may as well be crappy.” It’s a car guy’s rite of passage: scrounging through metal hulks sinking into brown weeds on the outskirts of town, determined to find that one part that will have your hot rod roaring—or your beater lasting another month....

The drone hung up in a tree near the Ukrainian village of Gorbivtsi. When border patrol officers got the thing down, it was clear this was no small recreational aircraft. The quadcopter was so large it took two men to load it into the bed of a truck.The Ukrainian borders are a hotbed of drone activity as the country continues its ongoing struggle against the Russians. But even by the strange standards of the area, this machine was unique....

Think you’ve seen the last of handheld gaming systems? Then you haven’t met the Playdate.It’s a brand-new handheld video game system in line with the classic Game Boy or Game Gear, only it’s being manufactured by Panic, a developer and publisher that previously worked on iOS software and video games like Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. Borne of Panic’s desire to “do something new,” the Playdate is meant for those of us who agree with the company’s stance that “nothing’s surprising anymore....

Media Platforms Design TeamThis past weekend, two skydiving planes collided in midair over Wisconsin. of the crash shot from survivors’ helmet cams: A Cessna 185 is seen plowing into the wing of another skydive plane, which then plummets in flames. And yet no one involved—either the two pilots or the nine skydivers—was killed or even severely injured. The skydivers managed to dive safely to the ground. The pilot of the flaming plane landed via his emergency parachute....

Picture this: skiing, but with sand instead of snow. Sounds like it would look pretty cool, right? Whatever you were picturing, it’s nowhere near as cool as this GoPro footage of sand skiing in the deserts of Peru:View full post on YoutubeThe short film follows two skiers, Jesper Tjäder and Emma Dahlström, as they hike to the top of the highest sand dune in the world, Cerro Blanco. The sand dune sits in the Nazca region of Peru, almost 7 thousand feet above sea level....

Scientists found a complete human genome in a piece of chewed pitch from 5,700 years ago. Ancient DNA is usually found in short strands, so scientists must have a lot in order to identify a complete genome.Pitch never solidifies and is a rich potential source of more ancient human DNA.Scientists have extracted and fully sequenced the genome of a human girl from a piece of chewing gum that’s 5,700 years old....

Media Platforms Design TeamQuestion One: Which service is better?This is actually a more complex question than you might imagine, given the way customers routinely describe their experience with the two carriers. AT&T is largely reviled by its smartphone users, who have cataloged their disappointment with the company’s service on everything from dedicated Facebook groups to a thread on AT&T’s own community forum called “I think att SUCKS”. For the record, Verizon Wireless also has a “Verizon Wireless Sucks” Facebook page, but it has only 280 friends to AT&T Sucks’ 1218....

This morning Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, built to carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, suffered an anomaly after it launched from Florida. Media, satellite trackers, and space enthusiasts around the world were kept in early morning suspense as the picture perfect launch became a crisis high above Earth when the spacecraft was reported to have suffered an “off nominal insertion” into orbit.So what does this mean for Starliner and NASA’s crewed ambitions?...

For the first time, a study based in the United States will test the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR inside the human body. The goal of the test, officially called AGN-151587, is to treat Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), for one of the most common forms of inherited blindness. The companies behind the tests say they’re now open to patient enrollment.“We are very proud of our continued commitment to developing innovative treatments for unmet needs in eye care,” says David Nicholson, Ph....

Apple was granted a patent this week for “electronic devices with flexible displays and hinges,” according to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).If a device is ever manufactured as shown in the patent, it will include a screen that doesn’t crease when folded.The paper trail showing Apple’s interest in foldables even goes back to a foldable battery that the company has been seeking a patent for since 2017....

A new iguana-size fossil found in the mountains of Antarctica represents an extinct cousin of dinosaurs and crocodiles—and it likely once lived on forest floors in temperate climates. The fossil, dated to the early Triassic Period around 250 million years ago, represents a much different time in the history of Antarctica. Higher latitudes and warmer overall global temperatures meant that our frozen continent was a temperate forest many, many yesterdays ago....

Nowhere on earth is safe from the effects of climate change, but Greenland gets it particularly bad. Warmer temperatures disproportionately affect the Arctic, and ice-filled Greenland is especially vulnerable. New research finds that warming has caused Greenland to lose ice more quickly today than at any point over the last 350 years.Previous studies have measured just how much the island’s ice is melting, and even spotted melting in the typically robust northern sea ice....

Why don’t we just round up all our garbage and throw it into the sun? Well, the BBC has an answer to this particular question of our time: Because the cost would be absolutely enormous. A new post there breaks it down and explains why we can’t just adopt the Superman IV solution to our big trash problem. To make their calculations, Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry at BBC Future start with the ballpark figure that it costs $200 million to launch an Ariane V rocket and get its 15,432 pounds of payload into a stable point in Earth orbit....

You might have seen headlines yesterday that confirmed what we all already—the 2016 election was so onerous and divisive that it ruined Thanksgiving. It certainly sounds true, but how could science even study such a thing? The short answer is by tracking your cellphone.The findings, published in Science today by a group led by UCLA economics professor Keith Chen, looked at Thanksgiving 2016 to find out whether there was real data behind backing up claims that America’s broken political system was really ruining family gatherings....