Oustide feeds

If you’ve developed World Cup fever over the past few days, then researchers at Bielefeld University want to hear about it. The team is inviting football/soccer fans to share the data collected from their smartwatches for a study on how supporters around the world physically experience their team’s thrilling victories and heartbreaking defeats.

“We are interested in whether fans of different national teams react with differing intensity to the same match event, for example, whether a goal is measurably different for German fans than for Turkish or Brazilian supporters,” Dr. Christian Deutscher, co-project leader and sports scientist, said in a statement. “The World Cup provides an ideal research setting because it places fans from all over the world in comparable emotional situations at the same time.”

In time for the World Cup, they are calling on football fans to provide their vital data via smartwatch (from left): Professor Dr. Timo Adam, Professor Dr. Christian Deutscher, Professor Dr. Roland Langrock, Professor Dr. Christiane Fuchs, and Sophie Kammerer, press spokesperson for Bielefeld’s Wissenswerkstadt. Image: © Alejandro Arditi www.alejandroarditi.com

Those interested can register online, providing their country of residence, gender, and nationality, preferred team, and how intensely they identify as a supporter. When a sufficient number of fans of a particular national team has registered, the researchers will send invitations to connect their smartwatch. Throughout the rest of the World Cup, participants will also be asked which matches they watched live, if they wanted on TV, via a live ticker, or at a public viewing event. 

The project can use smartwatches or fitness trackers from 13 brands, including Garmin, Apple, Google, and Samsung. Using a data-protection-compliant interface, the team will then have access to anonymized data from fans who have voluntarily registered for the study. 

“The long battery life enables us to obtain uninterrupted data series over several days,” added Dr. Christiane Fuchs, a co-project leader and a data scientist.

This new study builds on research that the same team conducted during the 2025 German Football Association (DFB Cup) final between first-division club VfB Stuttgart and third-division club Arminia Bielefeld. Over 12 weeks, the team collected data from 229 Arminia Bielefeld supporters wearing smartwatches. The fans attending the match in the stadium reached an average heart rate of 94 beats per minute. By comparison, those watching on TV averaged 79 beats per minute. After goals, the heart rates recorded in the stadium measured up to 36 percent higher than those watching elsewhere. Stress levels also began to rise in fans as early as 14 hours before kick-off. The results of that study were published in February in the journal Scientific Reports. 

The post Got World Cup Fever? Send scientists your smartwatch data. appeared first on Popular Science.

Meet Brötchen. The pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) was born on May 9th at Germany’s Zoo Berlin, weighing in at 13 pounds. “Brötchen” means “breadroll,” in German, and the zoo’s new member is rapidly becoming everyone’s favorite carb. The baby girl is making headlines and gracing the zoo’s Facebook cover photo. What’s more, its name was revealed in a social media post on June 10 that has now accumulated over 6,000 likes.

A number of Brötchen’s internet appearances involve water. In fact, “water plays an incredibly important role for pygmy hippos,” the zoo explains. “Bathing helps care for their sensitive skin while also allowing the little one to slowly and comfortably get used to the water.”

According to the zoo, pygmy hippo skin secretes a substance that keeps the hippos from drying out. It features antibacterial qualities and also acts as a sunscreen. And for those who think the keeper in the video is washing Brötchen with soap, think again—water makes this secretion foam. 

Brötchen with her mother Debbie. Image: Berlin Zoo. Hendrik Gergen

These mammals stand at 2.5 to 3 feet at the shoulder, are 4.5 to 6 feet long, and weigh 400 to 600 pounds once fully grown. Brötchen’s birth is also welcome news from a conservation standpoint. The IUCN Red List classifies Pygmy hippos as endangered, with a decreasing population and only 2,000 to 2,499 adult individuals left. The species is nocturnal and lives in areas of West Africa, and is impacted by mining, deforestation, and habitat destruction. 

“While Brötchen is now exploring her outdoor enclosure every day with her mother Debbie, her endangered relatives in West Africa are fighting for survival: fewer than 2,500 adult pygmy hippos remain in their natural habitat,” the zoo wrote when announcing Brötchen’s name. “Protecting them is therefore more important than ever.” 

The post Hallo Brötchen! Berlin Zoo welcomes baby pygmy hippo appeared first on Popular Science.

Las Vegas, USA / Nevada, 16th June 2026, CyberNewswire

A team from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) untangled a young humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) off the coast of Massachusetts. The whale was caught in fishing gear in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary east of Boston between Cape Ann and Cape Cod. Stellwagen Bank is a hotspot for humpbacks and other whales, who feed on the plentiful plankton and fish in the bank’s rich waters during the spring and summer.

The whale was freed by CCS’ Marine Animal Entanglement Response (MAER) team, who is trained to safely disentangle whales. CCS has freed over 200 large whales and other marine life from entanglements since 1984.

Recreational boaters in the area reported a relatively small whale struggling in the gear’s buoy line. Once the MAER team was on the scene, they found the humpback with ropes wrapped around the base of its tale. The ropes were essentially keeping the whale anchored in place and the whale spent most of its time at the surface.

The process was further complicated by the weather. With winds forecasted to significantly increase, the team had to work quickly and assess the animal’s conditions and attempt disentanglement. 

“Approaching from behind, the team used a hook-shaped knife at the end of a 30-foot pole to make a series of cuts to the wraps of rope at its tail, eventually freeing the whale,” CCS wrote in a statement. 

Once freed, the whale stayed fairly still at the surface, and the team remained with the humpback until it began to move again. The whale sustained some injuries due to the entanglement, but the team believes that it will recover. The CCS Humpback Whale Studies Program is working to identify the whale using their database. 

According to the CCS, this rescue is an example of what can happen when several organizations work together. The boaters reported the sighting to the United States Coast Guard, who then contacted the NOAA Fisheries and CCS hotlines. The Massachusetts Environmental Police also responded, as they were in the area when the call came in and stayed with the whale until the MAER rescue team arrived. TowBoatUS also overheard the report and offered to stand by and assist as needed

“It was really great that so many people and institutions helped out in this case. The whale has a much better prognosis due to that,” MAER Assistant Director Bob Lynch said in a statement.

A whale first responder from over 5,000 miles away also assisted. Maria Harvey from the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary happened to be working with the CCS team as part of an ongoing partnership. “It was an honor to help this whale and great to continue the collaboration between our teams,” Harvey added.

Over the past month, this particular whale has been spotted several times by whale watchers in the area. It has several deep but healing wounds from prior entanglements. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) estimates that over 300,000 whales and dolphins die every year due to bycatch and entanglement in fishing gear. 

According to CCS, their disentanglement work is supported in part by grants from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (MA-DMF), the Massachusetts Environmental Trust, and private foundations and donors. All disentanglement activities are conducted under a federal permit authorized by NOAA.

The post Young humpback whale freed from fishing line near Cape Cod appeared first on Popular Science.

Food and medicine have always been deeply intertwined. In tracing the origins of a food product, it can be hard to separate its supposed health benefits from all the other reasons we choose to eat something.

Take meat extract, for example. As far back as the 18th century, people were cooking with dried bouillon powder and cubes made from meat stock that we would find pretty recognizable today. Dehydrating and salting a meat broth proved an effective way of lengthening its shelf life, especially for soldiers or sailors who needed to carry light, long-lasting rations. 

But by the middle of the 19th century, doctors were prescribing concentrated extracts with names like “beef tea” for every imaginable ailment: from stomach problems and fever to depression and dementia. Medical records from the time show that liquid beef was a major component of hospital diets. At the London Hospital in 1851, adult patients were fed 12 ounces of bread, two pints of milk, and one pint of beef tea (made from eight ounces of beef) per day. 

As Canadian museum curator Melissa Cole wrote in 2017,  “If you open a book about 19th century dietary remedies, it would be hard to find one that does not mention beef tea.”

As chicken farming did not become industrialized until the late 20th century, long after cattle farming, early medicinal meat broths were typically beef-based. However, we can see an echo of the practice in the modern association of chicken soup with recovery from illness.

The medical fad for meat extracts, though widespread, was fairly short-lived. By the 20th century, meat extracts were seen less and less as medicine, largely ending up back in the kitchen pantry where they came from. So how did this obsession with drinking meat for health emerge in the first place? 

The German scientist behind meat extracts 

Considered one of the founders of organic chemistry, German scientist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) made extensive studies of nutrition and metabolism. One of Liebig’s most influential ideas was that the liquid in meat and other foods, not just the solids, carries the most important nutrients. It was Liebig who first suggested searing meat before cooking to prevent its juices from leaking out. (This belief remains widespread, despite evidence that it isn’t really true.)

German scientist Justus von Liebig is considered one of the founders of organic chemistry. He also developed some of the first beef extract cubes. Image: Public Domain

Liebig was a major contributor to what was then called the “rational” approach to diet, where people sought to apply the principles of modern science to cooking. Combined with prevailing beliefs in the general healthfulness of meat, and an increasing urban population who could not afford it, 19th-century nutritionists identified a major social problem: Not enough people were eating enough meat.

In 1847, Liebig proposed a solution. Inspired by earlier culinary bouillon, he developed a procedure for boiling down beef into a concentrated paste or solid. In theory, those who could not afford fresh meat could reconstitute this extract into a nutritious broth. 

Today, we know that Liebig’s method doesn’t actually preserve much of the original nutrients in the beef, although it’s full of flavor thanks to compounds like MSG. But for Liebig, the main flaw in his plan was that the ratio of meat to extract was about thirty to one by weight, making it far more expensive to produce than fresh beef. 

Years later, engineer George Christian Giebert approached Liebig with the suggestion of industrializing production in South America, where beef was cheap as a byproduct of the leather industry. The two men went into business together, creating Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (LEMCO) in 1865. 

LEMCO’s products, such as their UK-based Oxo line of beef extract cubes, became widely popular and soon spawned imitators. Liebig’s research laid the groundwork for other beef extracts such as Bovril and Valentine’s Meat Juice, as well as extracts derived from chicken or even yeast, such as Marmite and Vegemite.

Meat tea for the sick

While Liebig and others were figuring out how to mass-market beef extract, home recipes for “beef tea” proliferated. Based on the concept of liquid nutrients as essential, the intention was not to replace meat for those who could not afford it, but to provide nutrients for the sick, especially patients with delicate stomachs. Some medical texts even promoted beef tea enemas, such as an 1867 treatment plan for delirium tremens (alcohol withdrawal).

Even in the 19th century, there was debate about the actual health benefits of meat juice. Some disagreed with Liebig’s assertion that the solids in meat were less nutritionally important than the juices. 

“Almost the whole of this enormous mass of nutritious matter,” one British doctor wrote scornfully in 1879, “was simply wasted” in producing beef tea. However, he did praise an enterprising London saleswoman for making meat pies from the dregs.

How beef tea was made

Isn’t beef tea the same thing as beef broth? Well, not exactly. 

While beef broth was (and still is) made by simmering meat in water for long periods, many recipes for beef tea called for pressure-cooking meat in jars. This technique was an early form of the method we now call sous vide (French for “under the vacuum”), often done using a submerged plastic bag today.

Chefs would heat sealed jars full of raw meat in a pot of boiling water. This created a pressurized vacuum seal, preventing water from escaping as the meat cooked and broke down inside. The resulting liquid would have a richer, more intense flavor than regular beef broth, as well as, it was believed, more nutrients. 

Modern research suggests that pressure-cooking really does preserve more nutrients than many other cooking methods, especially boiling. While it isn’t the cure-all that it was once promoted as, beef tea may have benefited some patients. The concoction could provide a boost of iron for people suffering from iron-deficiency anemia or recovering from major blood loss, such as after surgery.

Fresh-squeezed beef

Another related remedy was the liquid squeezed from half-cooked meat. This could be prepared using a metal “meat juice press” designed for the purpose. Some recipes for beef tea even combined pressure-cooking and pressing to get as much juice out as possible. 

In a recipe recorded by London’s Royal College of Physicians, beef is pressure-cooked in jars, then squeezed in a press, and the liquid from the press is mixed with the liquid from the jars.

In 2019, food YouTuber EmmyMade prepared both beef tea and fresh-squeezed beef juice according to 19th-century recipes. Emmy noted that the press produced a smaller amount of bloodier-looking liquid than the jar method. She found both tasty (although they needed salt), describing the flavor as “very, very heme-y.” Heme is the part of the hemoglobin compound found in blood that contains iron. In other words, beef juice has some of the same metallic tang as organ meats like liver (and blood, of course).

YouTuber EmmyMade made both beef tea and fresh-squeezed beef juice using out an old cast iron Columbia meat juice press from the late 1800s. She found the results pretty dang tasty. Video: BEEF EXTRACT Recipe for the INFIRM — 1800s Meat Juice Extractor Antique Gadget Test | HARD TIMES, emmymade The end of meat juice

With the establishment of national standards for the production of medicines and commercial medicines supplanting home remedies, beef tea started to decline. However, companies that produced extracts for health realized that their products were still being appreciated for their flavor and convenience. By the early 20th century, many of them had shifted fully into the culinary market.

Valentine’s Meat Juice, once a widely popular medicinal remedy, rebranded as a cooking ingredient in 1906 and managed to stay in business until 1986. LEMCO’s Oxo brand is still going strong, though it’s primarily associated with cooking today. Similarly, the dehydration technology used in producing modern chicken bouillon was developed for soldiers and refined for NASA astronauts before landing in our supermarkets and kitchens. 

People initially invented meat extracts to add concentrated flavor to their food and preserve it for longer. For a time, doctors and scientists touted its health benefits, but flavor seems to have won out in the end. Maybe it’s just too delicious to resist.

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

Related That Time When Stories

4 times drinking coffee was illegal—or even punishable by death

In medieval France, murderous pigs faced trial and execution

The radioactive ‘miracle water’ that killed its believers

Andrew Jackson’s White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy

During WWII, a dress-wearing squirrel sold war bonds alongside FDR

Idaho once dropped 76 beavers from airplanes—on purpose

The post Beef tea was all the rage in the 1800s appeared first on Popular Science.

Food and medicine have always been deeply intertwined. In tracing the origins of a food product, it can be hard to separate its supposed health benefits from all the other reasons we choose to eat something.

Take meat extract, for example. As far back as the 18th century, people were cooking with dried bouillon powder and cubes made from meat stock that we would find pretty recognizable today. Dehydrating and salting a meat broth proved an effective way of lengthening its shelf life, especially for soldiers or sailors who needed to carry light, long-lasting rations. 

But by the middle of the 19th century, doctors were prescribing concentrated extracts with names like “beef tea” for every imaginable ailment: from stomach problems and fever to depression and dementia. Medical records from the time show that liquid beef was a major component of hospital diets. At the London Hospital in 1851, adult patients were fed 12 ounces of bread, two pints of milk, and one pint of beef tea (made from eight ounces of beef) per day. 

As Canadian museum curator Melissa Cole wrote in 2017,  “If you open a book about 19th century dietary remedies, it would be hard to find one that does not mention beef tea.”

As chicken farming did not become industrialized until the late 20th century, long after cattle farming, early medicinal meat broths were typically beef-based. However, we can see an echo of the practice in the modern association of chicken soup with recovery from illness.

The medical fad for meat extracts, though widespread, was fairly short-lived. By the 20th century, meat extracts were seen less and less as medicine, largely ending up back in the kitchen pantry where they came from. So how did this obsession with drinking meat for health emerge in the first place? 

The German scientist behind meat extracts 

Considered one of the founders of organic chemistry, German scientist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) made extensive studies of nutrition and metabolism. One of Liebig’s most influential ideas was that the liquid in meat and other foods, not just the solids, carries the most important nutrients. It was Liebig who first suggested searing meat before cooking to prevent its juices from leaking out. (This belief remains widespread, despite evidence that it isn’t really true.)

German scientist Justus von Liebig is considered one of the founders of organic chemistry. He also developed some of the first beef extract cubes. Image: Public Domain

Liebig was a major contributor to what was then called the “rational” approach to diet, where people sought to apply the principles of modern science to cooking. Combined with prevailing beliefs in the general healthfulness of meat, and an increasing urban population who could not afford it, 19th-century nutritionists identified a major social problem: Not enough people were eating enough meat.

In 1847, Liebig proposed a solution. Inspired by earlier culinary bouillon, he developed a procedure for boiling down beef into a concentrated paste or solid. In theory, those who could not afford fresh meat could reconstitute this extract into a nutritious broth. 

Today, we know that Liebig’s method doesn’t actually preserve much of the original nutrients in the beef, although it’s full of flavor thanks to compounds like MSG. But for Liebig, the main flaw in his plan was that the ratio of meat to extract was about thirty to one by weight, making it far more expensive to produce than fresh beef. 

Years later, engineer George Christian Giebert approached Liebig with the suggestion of industrializing production in South America, where beef was cheap as a byproduct of the leather industry. The two men went into business together, creating Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (LEMCO) in 1865. 

LEMCO’s products, such as their UK-based Oxo line of beef extract cubes, became widely popular and soon spawned imitators. Liebig’s research laid the groundwork for other beef extracts such as Bovril and Valentine’s Meat Juice, as well as extracts derived from chicken or even yeast, such as Marmite and Vegemite.

Meat tea for the sick

While Liebig and others were figuring out how to mass-market beef extract, home recipes for “beef tea” proliferated. Based on the concept of liquid nutrients as essential, the intention was not to replace meat for those who could not afford it, but to provide nutrients for the sick, especially patients with delicate stomachs. Some medical texts even promoted beef tea enemas, such as an 1867 treatment plan for delirium tremens (alcohol withdrawal).

Even in the 19th century, there was debate about the actual health benefits of meat juice. Some disagreed with Liebig’s assertion that the solids in meat were less nutritionally important than the juices. 

“Almost the whole of this enormous mass of nutritious matter,” one British doctor wrote scornfully in 1879, “was simply wasted” in producing beef tea. However, he did praise an enterprising London saleswoman for making meat pies from the dregs.

How beef tea was made

Isn’t beef tea the same thing as beef broth? Well, not exactly. 

While beef broth was (and still is) made by simmering meat in water for long periods, many recipes for beef tea called for pressure-cooking meat in jars. This technique was an early form of the method we now call sous vide (French for “under the vacuum”), often done using a submerged plastic bag today.

Chefs would heat sealed jars full of raw meat in a pot of boiling water. This created a pressurized vacuum seal, preventing water from escaping as the meat cooked and broke down inside. The resulting liquid would have a richer, more intense flavor than regular beef broth, as well as, it was believed, more nutrients. 

Modern research suggests that pressure-cooking really does preserve more nutrients than many other cooking methods, especially boiling. While it isn’t the cure-all that it was once promoted as, beef tea may have benefited some patients. The concoction could provide a boost of iron for people suffering from iron-deficiency anemia or recovering from major blood loss, such as after surgery.

Fresh-squeezed beef

Another related remedy was the liquid squeezed from half-cooked meat. This could be prepared using a metal “meat juice press” designed for the purpose. Some recipes for beef tea even combined pressure-cooking and pressing to get as much juice out as possible. 

In a recipe recorded by London’s Royal College of Physicians, beef is pressure-cooked in jars, then squeezed in a press, and the liquid from the press is mixed with the liquid from the jars.

In 2019, food YouTuber EmmyMade prepared both beef tea and fresh-squeezed beef juice according to 19th-century recipes. Emmy noted that the press produced a smaller amount of bloodier-looking liquid than the jar method. She found both tasty (although they needed salt), describing the flavor as “very, very heme-y.” Heme is the part of the hemoglobin compound found in blood that contains iron. In other words, beef juice has some of the same metallic tang as organ meats like liver (and blood, of course).

YouTuber EmmyMade made both beef tea and fresh-squeezed beef juice using out an old cast iron Columbia meat juice press from the late 1800s. She found the results pretty dang tasty. Video: BEEF EXTRACT Recipe for the INFIRM — 1800s Meat Juice Extractor Antique Gadget Test | HARD TIMES, emmymade The end of meat juice

With the establishment of national standards for the production of medicines and commercial medicines supplanting home remedies, beef tea started to decline. However, companies that produced extracts for health realized that their products were still being appreciated for their flavor and convenience. By the early 20th century, many of them had shifted fully into the culinary market.

Valentine’s Meat Juice, once a widely popular medicinal remedy, rebranded as a cooking ingredient in 1906 and managed to stay in business until 1986. LEMCO’s Oxo brand is still going strong, though it’s primarily associated with cooking today. Similarly, the dehydration technology used in producing modern chicken bouillon was developed for soldiers and refined for NASA astronauts before landing in our supermarkets and kitchens. 

People initially invented meat extracts to add concentrated flavor to their food and preserve it for longer. For a time, doctors and scientists touted its health benefits, but flavor seems to have won out in the end. Maybe it’s just too delicious to resist.

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

Related That Time When Stories

4 times drinking coffee was illegal—or even punishable by death

In medieval France, murderous pigs faced trial and execution

The radioactive ‘miracle water’ that killed its believers

Andrew Jackson’s White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy

During WWII, a dress-wearing squirrel sold war bonds alongside FDR

Idaho once dropped 76 beavers from airplanes—on purpose

The post Beef tea was all the rage in the 1800s appeared first on Popular Science.

New York, United States of America, 16th June 2026, CyberNewswire

New York, New York, 16th June 2026, CyberNewswire

The AI race is shifting from who has the best model to who can actually deploy and access the most reliable gigawatts of compute at scale. In a recent All-In podcast episode, Chamath stated that a full 1 GW AI data center now costs around $100 billion to build. The Milk Road AI post you ...

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To prevent dominators from taking over bands, early human foragers used language and weapons to empower a talky collective to coordinate to watch for and then punish moves toward such takeovers. This capacity was then also used to enforce other norms. However, once this power center existed, it created incentives for alliances to form to grab this power, to suppress rivals and control others. Though such powers had to be used and justified via the appearance of helping the band, and enforcing norms.

Over eons this incentive induced the evolution of abilities to join and control this talky collective, and to use it toward desired ends. In particular, it induced the evolution of abilities of alliance speakers to convince listeners that they understood the nature, plans, and motives of particular band members even better than such folks understood themselves, or their associates understood them. Which could then convince listeners that speaker policy recommendations would be best for such folks, their associates, or the band. It also wouldn’t hurt if such persuasion efforts impressed and flattered listeners in the process. Though actually listeners wouldn’t have to be so much convinced as cowed into not overtly doubting or opposing such stories, out of fear of retaliation.

This induced the evolution of abilities of talky collective alliances to work together to tell vivid compelling memorable stories, both fictional and reality-based, especially about people and their nature, plans, and motives. Especially stories that made it easy to judge if such people intended to violate key norms, or to act in ways to help or hurt the band. So easy in fact that story listeners might feel that they and story tellers could actually judge such things better than could the people who were the target of the stories, or their associates. Such stories didn’t need to be that realistic, except about key connections between characters and their norm-related inclinations. Realism can reasonably be compromised in order to make stories vivid, compelling, and memorable.

This theory predicts that our media, policy, and fiction stories will tend to make characters very legible, especially re norm violations. Such stories will tend to neglect complexities like the reactions of other parties, at least when such complexities obscure key relations between character features, motives, and norm violations. It also predicts that fiction will often reveal things to readers that characters and their associates can’t tell about themselves. And it predicts paternalistic policies which assume that the policy analysts better understand people’s problems than they themselves do. All of which seems roughly right.

Forbes Real-Time Billionaires and Bloomberg listed Elon Musk at ~$1.3 / $1.27 trillion, with Larry Page (second) at ~$314 billion → ratio ≈ 4.04X richer. Bill Gates never reached 4X. He dominated the top spot for many years (roughly 13 consecutive years from ~1995–2007 per Forbes). The gap was smaller. In 1999, the ratio over ...

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SpaceX is more valuable than TSMC, Meta and is almost as valuable as Amazon. Tesla is the tenth most valuable company. The key for SpaceX to scale near term revenues and profits is with Artificial intelligence, Cursor AI compute revenue and AI data center rentals.

The valuation conversion from SpaceX to Echostar is being suppressed with the $5 billion short position and the fears from missing the June 1, 2026 debt payment of $183 million. This missed payment triggered a 30 day grace period. A few days ago, I had said that SpaceX was going to over $200 per share. ...

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If you missed the chance to get your name in space during Artemis II’s historic mission in April, you don’t have to wait until Artemis III in 2027 for another opportunity. Today, NASA opened up submissions to have your name put aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. 

Currently scheduled to launch on August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA’s next space observatory. According to NASA, it will pair a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to scan vast, deep swaths of sky. Roman’s field of view is at least 100 times larger than the still-chugging Hubble Space Telescope and could measure light from one billion galaxies. The observatory will also be able to block starlight, allowing it to directly see exoplanets and planet-forming disks. Engineers plan to use Roman to take a complete statistical census of all the planetary systems in our galaxy, and settle some of the essential pressing questions about dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.

Roman is named in honor of the late Dr. Nancy Grace Roman. She was NASA’s first chief astronomer and paved the way for the space telescopes focused on the broader universe that we know and love today. Dr. Roman is considered the “mother” of the Hubble Space Telescope, and she tirelessly advocated for space-based platforms that help us understand the broader universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere. 

“Despite facing adversity, she persisted in finding new ways to explore the universe, including advocating for the development of a space-based telescope,” NASA writes. “Dr. Roman’s zealous leadership made Hubble, and all of the other space telescopes that followed, a reality.”

The submitted names will be uploaded to an SD card attached to the observatory, as it travels over one million miles in space. You will also receive a digital boarding pass to commemorate your name’s journey. 

The post Put your name aboard NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope appeared first on Popular Science.

Body temperature is considered a crucial vital sign of general health, but getting a reading with an oral or forehead thermometer does not always tell the whole story. And getting an internal by  putting a thermometer up the rectum is not exactly the most pleasant experience.

Those rectal reading days could be numbered. A new ingestible sensor developed at MIT can send doctors continuous body temperature readings right from the GI tract, and could be heading to clinical trials in only a few years. Continuous monitoring like this could make it easier to determine whether a patient is sick and if they’re at risk of developing a dangerously high fever. It can also help for people tracking their fertility or those under anesthesia. 

The sensor is shaped like a small berry, only four millimeters high and six millimeters around and is smaller than existing ingestible temperature sensors. The sensor is detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature Electronics.

“A sensor like this gives us the ability to monitor infections and identify them early,” said Giovanni Traverso, a study co-author, engineering professor at MIT, and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said in a statement. “That’s very relevant, particularly for at-risk populations like people who are immunosuppressed from chemotherapy treatments or immunosuppressive drugs.”

The wild world of ingestible electronics

Several ingestible temperature sensors are currently on the market. However, most of them are the size of a multivitamin or slightly larger. The size makes these sensors more challenging for patients to swallow and can also increase the risk that they obstruct the GI tract. 

The sensors’ large size comes from the complex internal circuits inside of them, which require a lot of power. The power comes from on-board batteries that take up the bulk of the capsule’s real estate.

The MIT team’s goal was to design smaller ingestible sensors that can measure temperature accurately.

“The reason for them to be small is safety,” said Traverso. “We want something that is so small that the risk of any blockage or obstruction is highly mitigated, and also so that it can be easily ingested.”

The first step towards a smaller device was reducing the size of the three main components—the temperature-sensing circuit, the antenna that relays temperature data, and the battery.

To shrink the circuit, the team built one of their own that can fit onto a 1-square-millimeter silicon chip. They also designed an oscillator based on leakage current to reduce power consumption. Leakage current is a small current that flows through a circuit when it’s switched off. The temperature of the chip’s surroundings affects the current’s frequency.

The circuit can detect temperature with an accuracy of 0.01 degrees Celsius and only requires about 10 nanowatts of power. It can be powered with a small 1.55-volt coin cell battery, that is only 4.8 millimeters around. In one of the trials, the sensor was deployed endoscopically into a sedated pig’s stomach, and then traveled through the GI tract until it was excreted with the pig’s feces.

The new sensor design also used a communication strategy called backscattering to cut energy consumption even further. Backscattering allows most of the sensor’s power requirements to be outsourced to an external antenna located outside the body, generally within a foot or two of the sensor. That external antenna emits an ultra-high-frequency radio wave. The radio wave is then modulated by a tiny antenna within the sensor and sent back to the antenna outside of the body. That external antenna then can calculate the temperature value by interpreting the changes to the radio wave. 

“We combined all of these different pieces together—the silicon chip, the battery, and the antenna—and we made it into an ingestible capsule, which is the smallest ingestible capsule that we have seen for temperature-sensing paradigms,” added study lead author and MIT postdoctoral researcher Saransh Sharma.

The internal antenna then sends out a temperature reading once per second, so temperature can be continuously monitored.

Wide applications

According to this team, this type of sensor could be used in several scenarios. Anesthesia often disrupts the body’s normal temperature regulation mechanisms, which can put patients at risk of hypothermia. These sensors could monitor for infection and observe patients both during and after anesthesia. It also could be used at home, monitoring children’s fevers, reading the core body temperature that signals ovulation for couples trying to conceive, and could monitor athletes, soldiers, or anyone else who risks being exposed to extreme temperatures.

The researchers tested the sensors in a pig under anesthesia and also when the animal was awake and moving. The sensors could accurately detect and transmit temperature information in both scenarios. 

The team is now working on combining the temperature sensor with different sensors that could measure other vital signs such as heart rate. They hope to begin testing their sensors in clinical trials within a few years.

Traverso believes that sensors like these could become widely used by anyone who needs to monitor their temperature, as long as they are effective for people in high-risk situations.

“I think this could replace all thermometers, because it’s the most accurate way of taking temperature,” he said. “If we have miniature systems that can be easily swallowed and give very accurate data that’s superior to the current data, I think it can be helpful in so many ways.”

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America’s Time Capsule has officially been sealed. The custom-made, “zombie-proof” box includes letters, artifacts, records, and objects selected to help tell the story of the United States at its Semiquincentennial. The contents represent all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories. 

The contributions range from handwritten letters and civic records to cultural artifacts, scientific innovations, and even sports memorabilia. Some of the highlights include:

• A fusion semiconductor (California). It was made in San Diego by General Atomics and reflects some of the most innovative research on clean energy across the globe.
• A 1914 Belgian Relief Coin (Iowa). The coin was used to feed a child in Belgium for one month. President Herbert Hoover led an unprecedented international food relief effort that saved millions of people in Europe from starvation post-World War I. 
• A North Atlantic right whale bone (Maine). The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critically endangered large whale species in the world. Roughly 380 individual whales, including fewer than 70 reproductively active females, are alive today. 

A North Atlantic right whale bone. Image: America250.

• A float copper (Michigan). Indigenous people began mining copper in Michigan’s Western Upper Peninsula over 8,000 years ago. Copper, or miskwaabik, has cultural and ceremonial meaning for the Anishinaabeg, as well as practical uses. The 1843 copper boom was the first mineral boom in the U.S. Michigan native copper also accounted for 95 percent of all copper mined in the U.S. at one point.
• A beaded vignette (Montana). The beaded artwork created by a Crow / Hidatsa / Arikara artist represents Montana’s landscapes and cultural heritage.

A beaded celebration of Montana’s natural beauty. Image: America250.

• Gambling chips and tokens (Nevada). During the Great Depression, Nevada legalized gambling to generate critical revenue. This launched the modern era of casino gaming, which remains the state’s leading industry. 
• Fabric from the Wright Brother’s flight (Ohio). The fabric is an authentic artifact from the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It connects the Buckeye State with the birth of aviation. 
• A rosary (Puerto Rico). The stainless steel rosary represents the importance of faith and spirituality in the daily life of Puerto Rico.

The rosary is made of stainless steel. Image: America250.

• Prayer medal (Utah). George Washington Lord’s Prayer gold medal given out at the Wedding of the Rails. The event marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869.
• Eagle feather and photo (Wisconsin). Old Abe was an icon in Wisconsin Civil War history. The American bald eagle served with the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Old Abe participated in over 30 battles, narrowly avoiding wounds on several occasions.

One of Old Abe’s feathers. Image: America250.

America250’s partner organizations also donated items, including an Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max, an Olympic Gold Medal from the International Olympic Committee & NBC Today Show, and a pocket constitution from the Supreme Court of the United States. 

“Now that America’s Time Capsule has been sealed, it carries with it a remarkable record of this moment in our nation’s history,” America250 Chair Rosie Rios said in a press release. “This moment is as much about the future as it is the past. When it is opened in 2276, future generations will see the care, pride, and optimism with which Americans marked our 250th anniversary.”

The America250 time capsule, shown here in the machine shop where it was created at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Image: Rich Press/NIST

The time capsule was a collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), preservation experts at the Library of Congress, and in coordination with the National Park Service. It features a 900-pound, precision-milled stainless steel cylinder with a water- and airtight compression seal made of indium. This soft metal deforms when compressed to fill any microscopic imperfections in the sealing groove. 

It will be buried on July 4 at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Once underground, it will be covered with a 1,100-pound stainless steel bell jar. The jar will create a protective air pocket around the vessel, ensuring that it remains dry. It will remain sealed underground until July 4, 2276.

The post America’s Time Capsule includes fabric from the Wright Brother’s plane, whale bone, poker chips, and more appeared first on Popular Science.

The Echostar spectrum continues to go fine adding about $130 million six times per day. SPCX becomes marginable on July 13th. Does that become a catalyst date for SATS as people unwind their short position (to short SPCX directly if they are trying to hedge their SPCX exposure)? SpaceX price updated from $160.95 → $173.7 ...

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Anything can happen out in the ocean. A group of students exploring the shores of Nest Key in the northwest Florida Keys recently learned this firsthand when they watched a male seahorse give birth. 

The students from Marine Lab, an organization that promotes environmental stewardship through education programs, were seining in Florida Bay during a routine outing. A technique used by students and marine biologists alike, seining is skimming the water with a large net to collect various smaller marine animals and plants from the seagrass for study. 

When they investigated their catch, the students spotted two tiny seahorses. They took a closer look at the seahorses and spotted a clutch of eggs on one of the seahorses’ tails. The male seahorse then gave birth right there in the net.  

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“Seahorses can be found in seagrass habitats throughout Florida Bay, including areas like Nest Key, but we would not describe them as something students see on every trip,” Kristen Prado, a representative from Marine Lab, tells Popular Science. “Nest Key has shallow seagrass habitats that support many small marine animals, and seahorses are one of the species students may encounter during our seining activity. That said, witnessing a male seahorse giving birth during the activity was very rare and exciting for both our students and instructors.”

Seahorses are small predators that play an important role in the ecosystem. They eat tiny crustaceans and other small animals and link the smaller parts of the food web to larger marine life like sharks and marine mammals. They live in seagrass habitats near the shore, where they use their tails to latch onto seagrass and can camouflage within the brown colored grass. 

Following an elaborate courtship dance, the female seahorse uses an organ called an ovipositor to deposit eggs into a special brood pouch on the male’s tail. The eggs are then fertilized within the pouch. Depending on the seahorse species, the eggs will stay there for 10 days up to six weeks. When it’s time for the babies or “fry” to hatch, the seahorse’s body convulses to expel them. From there, the new seahorses are 100 percent independent, and will not need any other care from either parent. 

The students observed the birth before carefully returning the seahorses and other critters back into the sea. According to Pardo, seining can help students observe Florida Bay’s animals in their natural habitat and learn why these ecosystems deserve protection. 

“Witnessing a male seahorse give birth was a rare and exciting moment, but it also speaks to the heart of MarineLab’s work,” says Prado. “Experiences like this help students understand that healthy seagrass habitats are full of life and that even a routine field activity can become a powerful connection to the natural world.”

The post Florida students watch male seahorse give birth in the wild appeared first on Popular Science.

There could be a deal between the USA and Iran. This would restore oil traffic over the next 30-60 days. The US has a southern route through Hormuz that has about 3-7 million barrels per day which is two to four large oil supertankers per day. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said vessels under US ...

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Technological advancements sometimes feel like a perpetual fight against nature itself, with scientists working out how to do things faster, more powerfully, and more efficiently. In short, trying to make objects better than we were meant to be. But sometimes the best solutions are directly inspired by the very nature we’re trying to best. 

Take jumping spiders, for instance. The arachnids need very strong vision to avoid predators, hunt prey, and move around. However, with brains the size of poppy-seeds, they don’t have a lot of brain power at their disposal. So their distance calculations have to be very efficient to make up for it. This efficiency is possible thanks to their eye structure. Their eyes feature multiple layers of retinas, (humans only have one retina per eye) that each capture what the spider sees with a slightly different focus. One retinal layer might perceive an object sharply, at the same time as another sees it a bit blurred.

“They see multiple levels of focus at all times,” Emma Alexander, a computer scientist at Northwestern University, explained in a statement. “So, they are always collecting pairs of images. Then, their brains could compare these differences in sharpness to judge distance.”

SpiderCam prototype in the lab. Image: Emma Alexander/Northwestern University.

This ability has inspired Alexander and her colleagues to create SpiderCam, an extremely energy-efficient 3D camera. The team presented their research on June 7at the Computer Vision Foundation’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Denver, Colorado.

“We wanted to understand whether we could borrow some of the same principles to create an extremely energy efficient depth sensor that could be used in resource-constrained situations where users don’t have unlimited access to power,” added Alexander, who is also a bio-inspired computer vision expert. 

SpiderCam perceives depth the same way that jumping spiders gauge distances before jumping. It captures two versions of the same image, each with subtly different focus settings. Then, a custom algorithm analyses the difference in blurriness between the images, and translates the differences into measurements of depth, in real time. Ultimately, SpiderCam uses less than a watt of power to create real-time 3D maps. By comparison, a standard nightlight uses more energy than one watt.

The algorithm lives in a customizable computer chip enhanced for energy-efficient processing, and this prototype creates depth maps at 32.5 frames per second, consuming just 624 milliwatts of power. 

“I’m very interested in settings where you’re very resource constrained and can’t just plug a camera into a wall,” Alexander said. “For example, it could be deployed in field settings with limited power. Separately, I also think it’s particularly exciting for applications like augmented reality where you’re interfacing with the physical world and need to know the locations of objects around you.”

A majority of 3D cameras estimate depth with methods that are good, but can necessitate significant computational power, additional energy, and expensive hardware. 

This spider-inspired invention could open the door to a new kind of battery-powered gadgets—such as assistive devices, wearable technologies, robots, and drones—that need to assess their environments. In the future, the team plans to improve the technology and incorporate it into small robots and wearable devices. 

The post Jumping spiders inspire wildly efficient 3D camera appeared first on Popular Science.