Author: mehedihasan9992

While mass media like radio, movies, and television can all feed into parasocial relationships, the Internet and smartphone revolutions have supercharged the opportunities we all have to feel like an online stranger is a close, personal confidante. From YouTube and podcast personalities to Instagram influencers or even your favorite blogger/journalist (hi), it’s easy to feel like you have a close connection with the people who create the content you see online every day. After spending hours watching this TikTok personality, I trust her implicitly to sell me a purse. Credit: Getty Images After spending hours watching this TikTok personality, I…

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It may come as a surprise, but not all animals pee. While almost every living organism possesses an excretory system, most reptiles don’t eliminate excess nitrogen-containing waste in the form of liquid urine. Instead, they rid themselves of the chemicals by expelling them in the form of crystalline solids called urates. Biologists believe reptiles evolved this unique system as a way to conserve water, but have long wondered how the urates don’t ultimately end up harming the animals. For humans, crystalline buildups in the body manifest…

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently warned Meta and a dozen social media and technology companies that “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws, demands, or expected demands” may violate US law. Ferguson’s letters said the EU’s Digital Services Act and other laws “incentivize tech companies to censor worldwide speech.” Meta told media outlets that “we disagree with any suggestion that we have breached the DSA, and we continue to negotiate with the European Commission on these matters.” Meta also said it made changes to comply with the DSA. “In the European Union, we have introduced changes to our…

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It’s a really big deal when fossilized feces survive the ravages of time. These hardened pieces of excrement open up a window into what animals ate thousands of years ago and even what may have made them sick. Humans are not exempt from this, with dried human feces indicating we have always loved cheese and beer and that our microbiome has evolved over thousands of years. DNA recovered from 1,000-year-old dried feces indicates that intestinal infections from pinworm or Shingella may have plagued ancient people living…

Earlier this month, Tesla rolled out a new firmware update that added a pair of new driving modes for the controversial full self-driving (FSD) feature. One, called “Sloth,” relaxes acceleration and stays in its lane. The other, called “Mad Max,” does the opposite: It speeds and swerves through traffic to get you to your destination faster. And after multiple reports of FSD Teslas doing just that, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to know more. In fact, “Mad Max” mode is not entirely new—Tesla beta-tested the same feature in Autopilot in 2018, before deciding not to roll it out…

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The common coating known as Teflon can keep food from sticking to cookware, but it’s notoriously difficult to break down safely. Now, researchers in the United Kingdom have discovered a simple and cost-effective solution to the problem. The results aren’t simply eco-friendly—they can also be upcycled into helpful toothpaste and drinking water additives. According to their study published on October 22 in the journal Journal of the American Chemical Society, all you need is some sodium metal and heavy shaking. It’s been over 85 years since…

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced on social media that he had been planning to “surge” troops into San Francisco this weekend—but was dissuaded from doing so by several tech billionaires. “Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge,” Trump wrote. Who are these “friends”? Trump named “great people like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff, and others” who told him that “the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”…

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Size matters for a telescope’s image resolution. The bigger the viewing aperture, the more light it can collect. More light helps reveal fainter cosmic objects, as well as sharpen the images themselves.  For astronomers, the best results usually come from sharing images between telescopes around the world that are linked together. However, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have now demonstrated this networked approach isn’t always necessary. To obtain the sharpest-ever look at a distant star’s…

Softly talking about the Boox Palma 2 Pro For years, color E Ink was seen as a desirable feature, which would make it easier to read magazines and comics on low-power devices—Boox even has an E Ink monitor. However, the quality of the displays has been lacking. These screens do show colors, but they’re not as vibrant as what you get on an LCD or OLED. In the case of the Palma 2 Pro, the screen is also less sharp in color mode. The touchscreen display is 824 × 1648 in monochrome, but turning on color cuts that in half…

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Marc Eaton, a professor of sociology at Ripon College remembers talking to a paranormal investigator who had recently lost his father. “His dog would repeatedly bark at the stairs in his home and seemingly follow someone or something up the stairs,” Eaton said. “Given this behavior, the recent death of his father, and the fact that he was already inclined to believe in ghosts, he concluded that his dog was sensing the spirit of his father, and believed that his father was watching over him as…