A countrywide study of smartphone users who relocated between US cities found that moving to more walkable environments increased daily walking by 1,100 steps on average. Stanford University researchers analyzed 248,266 days of step data from 5,424 users of the Azumio Argus smartphone app who relocated 7,447 times among 1,609 cities between March 2013 and February 2016. Participants who moved from cities at the 25th percentile of walkability to those at the 75th percentile sustained the increased activity levels for at least three months after relocation.

The additional steps consisted predominantly of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, with large walkability increases of 49-80 points associated with about one hour per week more of such activity. The study found that 42.5% of participants met national physical activity guidelines for moderate-to-vigorous activity after moving to highly walkable locations, compared to 21.5% before relocation. Computer simulations based on the data suggest that increasing all US cities to the walkability level of Chicago or Philadelphia could result in 36 million more Americans meeting aerobic physical activity guidelines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalization. They found a build-up of amyloid-beta, a toxic protein and one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease. The discovery has been hailed as a "perfect natural model for Alzheimer's" by scientists who believe it will help them explore new treatments for humans.

Dr Robert McGeachan, study lead from the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, said: "Dementia is a devastating disease -- whether it affects humans, cats, or dogs. Our findings highlight the striking similarities between feline dementia and Alzheimer's disease in people. This opens the door to exploring whether promising new treatments for human Alzheimer's disease could also help our ageing pets." [...]

Previously, researchers have studied genetically-modified rodents, although the species does not naturally suffer from dementia. "Because cats naturally develop these brain changes, they may also offer a more accurate model of the disease than traditional laboratory animals, ultimately benefiting both species and their caregivers," Dr McGeachan said. [...] Prof Danielle Gunn-Moore, an expert in feline medicine at the vet school, said the discovery could also help to understand and manage feline dementia. The findings have been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That's the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group.

There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.

"Simple, everyday choices -- such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails -- also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife," Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Physicists have created a new type of radar that could help improve underground imaging, using a cloud of atoms in a glass cell to detect reflected radio waves. The radar is a type of quantum sensor, an emerging technology that uses the quantum-mechanical properties of objects as measurement devices. It's still a prototype, but its intended use is to image buried objects in situations such as constructing underground utilities, drilling wells for natural gas, and excavating archaeological sites. [...] The glass cell that serves as the radar's quantum component is full of cesium atoms kept at room temperature. The researchers use lasers to get each individual cesium atom to swell to nearly the size of a bacterium, about 10,000 times bigger than the usual size. Atoms in this bloated condition are called Rydberg atoms.

When incoming radio waves hit Rydberg atoms, they disturb the distribution of electrons around their nuclei. Researchers can detect the disturbance by shining lasers on the atoms, causing them to emit light; when the atoms are interacting with a radio wave, the color of their emitted light changes. Monitoring the color of this light thus makes it possible to use the atoms as a radio receiver. Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of radio frequencies without needing to change the physical setup... This means a single compact radar device could potentially work at the multiple frequency bands required for different applications.

[Matthew Simons, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who was a member of the research team] tested the radar by placing it in a specially designed room with foam spikes on the floor, ceiling, and walls like stalactites and stalagmites. The spikes absorb, rather than reflect, nearly all the radio waves that hit them. This simulates the effect of a large open space, allowing the group to test the radar's imaging capability without unwanted reflections off walls.The researchers placed a radio wave transmitter in the room, along with their Rydberg atom receiver, which was hooked up to an optical table outside the room. They aimed radio waves at a copper plate about the size of a sheet of paper, some pipes, and a steel rod in the room, each placed up to five meters away. The radar allowed them to locate the objects to within 4.7 centimeters. The team posted a paper on the research to the arXiv preprint server in late June.

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a solid-oxide fuel cell that operates at just 300C, less than half the usual operating temperature. The team was able to do this by engineering a "ScO6 highway" in the electrolyte, allowing protons to move quickly without losing performance. "The team expects that their new findings will lead to the development of low-cost, low-temperature SOFCs and greatly accelerate the practical application of these devices," said the researchers in a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: "While SOFCs are promising due to their high efficiency and long lifespan, one major drawback is that they require operation at high temperatures of around 700-800C (1292F-1472F)," added the researchers in a press release. Such heat requires costly, specialized heat-resistant materials, making the technology expensive for many applications. A lower operating temperature is expected to reduce these manufacturing costs.

The team's success comes from re-engineering the fuel cell's electrolyte, the ceramic layer that transports protons (hydrogen ions) to generate electricity. Previously, scientists faced a trade-off. Adding chemical dopants to an electrolyte increases the number of available protons but also tends to clog the material's crystal lattice, slowing proton movement and reducing performance. The Kyushu team worked to resolve this issue. "We looked for oxide crystals that could host many protons and let them move freely -- a balance that our new study finally struck," stated Yamazaki.

They found that by doping two compounds, barium stannate (BaSnO3) and barium titanate (BaTiO3), with high concentrations of scandium (Sc), they could create an efficient structure. Their analysis showed that the scandium atoms form what the researchers call a "ScO6 highway." This structure creates a wide and softly vibrating pathway through the material. "This pathway is both wide and softly vibrating, which prevents the proton-trapping that normally plagues heavily doped oxides," explained Yamazaki. The resulting material achieves a proton conductivity of more than 0.01 S/cm at 300C, a performance level comparable to conventional SOFC electrolytes that run at more than double the temperature. The research has been published in the journal Nature Materials.

Biochar produced from solid human excrement could supply up to 7% of global phosphorus fertilizer needs annually, according to a Cornell University study published in PNAS. When combined with nutrients extracted from urine, the process could provide 15% of phosphorus, 17% of nitrogen, and 25% of potassium used in agriculture worldwide.

The biochar production process reduces solid waste volume and weight by up to 90%, while allowing nutrient proportions to be adjusted for specific crop requirements.

Wedneday Beyond Meat "missed Wall Street estimates for second-quarter revenue," reports Reuters. "Consumers' growing concerns about processed foods are severely diminishing the appeal of Beyond Meat's product line, causing retailers and quick service restaurants to pull back sharply on orders," Rachel Wolff, analyst at Emarketer, said.

Retail sales of refrigerated plant-based meat alternative products in the U.S. have fallen 17.2% so far this year, and frozen plant-based meat alternatives have fallen 8.1%, according to data from SPINS... [Beyond's] revenue for the quarter ended June 28 fell nearly 20% to $75 million, compared with analysts' average estimate of $82 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.
While the company arguably invented a new market for plant-based meat substitutes, it also "owns no real intellectual property," argues The Street. "And every company in the meat and grocery business (more or less) now sells a take-off of a product that already had limited appeal..." Beyond Meat has admitted it's in trouble by hiring corporate restructuring expert John Boken from consultancy AlixPartners as interim chief transformation officer [with a focus that includes "operating expense reduction" and "broader operational efficiency"]. It has also let go of 44 employees in North America (6% of its global workforce) as it seeks to cut operating expenses amid disappointing sales... Beyond Meat also has a significant cash problem. As of June 28, 2025, Beyond Meat's cash and cash equivalents balance was $117.3 million, and total outstanding debt was $1.2 billion. The company does have time to fend off a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, but it also has limited, if any, prospects to meet its impending cash needs.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.

"This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis...

Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow."

Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before.
One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...

And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

"It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam," writes this report from ScienceDaily, "and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics."

"But to astrophysicist and black hole expert Cosimo Bambi, the idea is not so far-fetched." Reporting in the Cell Press journal iScience, Bambi outlines the blueprint for turning this interstellar voyage to a black hole into a reality... "We don't have the technology now," says author Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in China. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might." The mission hinges on two key challenges — finding a black hole close enough to target and developing probes capable of withstanding the journey.

Previous knowledge on how stars evolve suggests that there could be a black hole lurking just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, but finding it won't be easy, says Bambi. Because black holes don't emit or reflect light, they are virtually invisible to telescopes... "There have been new techniques to discover black holes," says Bambi. "I think it's reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade...."

Bambi points to nanocrafts — gram-scale probes consisting of a microchip and light sail — as a possible solution. Earth-based lasers would blast the sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light. At that pace, the craft could reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away in about 70 years. The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. But in 30 years, he says that costs may fall and technology may catch up to these bold ideas.
"If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..."

"However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."

The BBC reports: A meteorite that crashed into a home in the U.S. is older than planet Earth, scientists have said...

Researchers at the University of Georgia examined a fragment of the rock that pierced the roof of a home in the city of McDonough [30 miles south of Georgia, on June 26]. They found that, based on the type of meteorite, it is expected to have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it roughly 20 million years older than Earth... The rock quickly diminished in size and speed, but still travelled at least 1 km per second, going through a man's roof in Henry County...

Using optical and electron microscopy, Scott Harris [a Univeristy of Georgia geologist] and his team determined the rock was a chondrite — the most abundant type of stony meteorite, according to NASA — which meant that it was approximately 4.56 billion years old.
"The home's resident said he is still finding pieces of space dust around his home from the hit."

After five months on the International Space Station, four astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule named Endurance, reports Space.com.

It was NASA's 10th commercial crew rotation mission: The flight launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 14 and arrived at the orbiting lab two days later. Crew-10's four astronauts soon set to conducting science work, which consumed much of their time over the ensuing months... The wheels for Crew-10's departure began turning last Saturday (Aug. 2), when SpaceX's four-person Crew-11 mission arrived at the International Space Station. The Crew-10 astronauts spent a few days advising their replacements, then set their minds to gearing up for the return to Earth — and reflecting on their orbital experience.

"We got to accomplish a lot of really amazing operational things," Ayers said during a farewell ceremony on Tuesday (Aug. 5). "We got to see some amazing views, and we have had some really big belly laughs and a wonderful time together," she added. "I think that [we're] leaving with a heart full of gratitude, and [we're] excited to see where the International Space Station goes after we get home." The hatches between Endurance and the ISS closed on Friday (Aug. 8) at 4:20 p.m. EDT (2020 GMT), and the capsule undocked about two hours later, at 6:15 p.m. EDT (2205 GMT). Endurance then began maneuvering its way back to Earth, setting up its splashdown today.

It was the first Pacific Ocean return for a SpaceX CCP mission; all previous such flights have come down off the Florida coast. SpaceX recently shifted to West Coast reentries for all of its Dragon missions, both crewed and uncrewed, to minimize the chance that falling space debris could damage property or injure people.
"During their mission, crew members traveled nearly 62,795,205 million miles," NASA announced, "and completed 2,368 orbits around Earth..." Along the way, Crew-10 contributed hundreds of hours to scientific research, maintenance activities, and technology demonstrations. McClain, Ayers, and Onishi completed investigations on plant and microalgae growth, examined how space radiation affects DNA sequences in plants, observed how microgravity changes human eye structure and cells in the body, and more. The research conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory advances scientific knowledge and demonstrates new technologies that enable us to prepare for human exploration of the Moon and Mars.

McClain and Ayers also completed a spacewalk on May 1, relocating a communications antenna, beginning the installation of a mounting bracket for a future International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array, and other tasks.

They haven't built a spacecraft for travelling to our nearest star system. But "Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri," reports LiveScience: The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft. Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.

Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors....

This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don't yet exist.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article — and for sharing this observation...

"My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke's book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design!"

NASA's Crew-10 mission has departed the International Space Station after 146 days, with astronauts Nichole Ayers, Anne McClain, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov set to splash down off California's coast on Saturday morning. You can watch a recording of the SpaceX Crew-10 undocking and departure on X. Reuters reports: The four-person crew launched to the ISS on March 14 in a routine mission that replaced the Crew-9 crew, which included NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the astronaut pair left on the station by Boeing's Starliner capsule. Five months after the Starliner mission's conclusion, Wilmore this week retired from NASA after a 25-year career in which he flew four different spacecraft and logged a total of 464 days in space. Wilmore was a key technical adviser to Boeing's Starliner program along with Williams, who remains at the agency in its astronaut corps. [...] NASA said they are returning to Earth with "important and time-sensitive research" conducted in the microgravity environment of the ISS during the 146-day mission. The astronauts had over 200 science experiments on their to-do list.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They are supposed to monitor you throughout the working day and help make sure that life is not getting on top of you. But a study has concluded that smartwatches cannot accurately measure your stress levels -- and may think you are overworked when really you are just excited. Researchers found almost no relationship between the stress levels reported by the smartwatch and the levels that participants said they experienced. However, recorded fatigue levels had a very slight association with the smartwatch data, while sleep had a stronger correlation.

Eiko Fried, an author of the study, said the correlation between the smartwatch and self-reported stress scores was "basically zero." He added: "This is no surprise to us given that the watch measures heart rate and heart rate doesn't have that much to do with the emotion you're experiencing -- it also goes up for sexual arousal or joyful experiences." He noted that his Garmin had previously told him he was stressed when he was working out in the gym and when excitedly talking to a friend he had not seen for a while at a wedding. "The findings raise important questions about what wearable data can or can't tell us about mental states," said Fried. "Be careful and don't live by your smartwatch -- these are consumer devices, not medical devices." The research has been published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.

Jim Lovell, the legendary NASA astronaut who commanded the Apollo 13 "successful failure" mission, has died at age 97. From a report: Lovell was already well-known among NASA astronauts, having flown to space on the Gemini 7, Gemini 12 and Apollo 8 missions, before he was selected to command Apollo 13, which would have marked the third successful crewed moon landing for NASA. But during the ill-fated mission -- which carried Lovell as well as astronauts John Swigert Jr. and Fred Haise Jr. on board -- an oxygen tank located on the crew's service module exploded when they were about 200,000 miles (322,000 kilometers) away from Earth.

Lovell delivered the news to mission control, saying "Houston, we've had a problem." With the damage effectively taking out the crew's power source and other life support supplies, the Apollo 13 crew had to abruptly abandon their trek to the lunar surface and use several engine burns to swing around the far side of the moon and put themselves on a course back toward Earth. The three-person crew made a high-stakes splashdown return in the South Pacific Ocean about three days after the tank explosion, marking the conclusion of what has come to be known as the "successful failure" of the Apollo missions. The ordeal was fictionalized in Ron Howard's 1995 film "Apollo 13." [...]

Lovell was the first astronaut to make four spaceflights, totaling more than 715 hours in space. He was part of NASA's second-ever astronaut class, selected in September 1962 and nicknamed the "New Nine." And joining the Apollo 13 crew after having first served on Apollo 8, which intentionally circumnavigated the moon but did not land on its surface, made Lovell the first human ever to see the moon up close for a second time. Further reading: Acting NASA Administrator Reflects on Legacy of Astronaut Jim Lovell (Source: NASA)