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Media Platforms Design TeamScientists have finally figured out how a pufferfish breathes while it’s all puffed up, and the answer isn’t what we’d thought—that they were more or less holding their breath the whole time.Georgia Evelyn McGee of James Cook University and Timothy Darren Clark of the Australian Institute of Marine Science discovered that pufferfish keep breathing even when they’re inflated. The scientists figured this out by capturing a few black-saddled pufferfish and giving them a little squeeze to simulate danger....

Media Platforms Design TeamLast Christmas, while on a flight to Detroit, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate an explosive device smuggled in his underwear. Scrutinizing the intelligence agencies after the incident, a bipartisan chorus of complaints rose from Capitol Hill, asking why a known radical like Abdulmutallab was absent from the federal no-fly list. (Read the Senate’s take .) The organization in charge of maintaining the list—part of its mandate to integrate and analyze all counterterrorism intelligence supplied by myriad government agencies—is the National Counterterrorism Center....

It’s easy to add extensions to your browser. You probably do it all the time. They’re fun and they make life easier, but they can also be incredibly dangerous, as Stanford Computer Science Ph.D. student Stefan Heule explains. The danger has to do with the way your browser extensions get access to the web in order to do their jobs. Some extensions, like AdBlock for example, need access to every website you browse and permission to change the way it displays....

Coldwater, Michigan’s newspaper, the Daily Reporter, has brought you the news that matters to Coldwater, Michigan for 120 years. The sleepy town of 10,000 should thank its newspaper of record for the scoop of the century: the Large Hadron Collider is a stargate (like the movie Stargate or the television series Stargate: SG1) that is on a collision course with world destruction in less than three weeks. Since we’re apparently going to all die on September 24, 2015, we may not have the time to roll out a Pulitzer Prize to Lonnie Robinson, the University of Phoenix certified journalist-at-large for the paper....

Media Platforms Design TeamWhen Verizon’s original Droid phone came out a few months ago, I was impressed. It had good sound call quality, a super-speedy processor, free turn-by-turn navigation and more bells and whistles than any previous Android phone. But over the months, my initial excitement over the device has slowly waned. As I put it through the paces of normal use, a number of small faults began to bug me....

Media Platforms Design TeamWowee, the company that famously manufactures the Robosapien and Roboraptor, has released a new, bigger Robosapien (called Robosapien V2), and is announcing the July/August release of two more Robos. Robosapien V2 is massive compared to its younger brother, with outstanding dance moves, a commanding robo-voice and burping noises. It’s great.Two more models, the Roboreptile and P.E.A. Bot, were displayed as prototypes. Roboreptile is a more aggressive beast than the Roboraptor, with a plastic falcon hood that you can stick on his head to induce sleep, or inactivity, or possibly both....

GRENADA, Spain —We don’t usually associate Spain with speed—after all, it’s a country where people are still eating dinner at midnight. Nevertheless, Mercedes-Benz is here in the sunny southern Andalucia to show off some screamers: the new CLS63 coupe and CLK63 coupe and convertible produced by its AMG high-performance division, as well as the ML63 SUV and the SL65 coupe with a turbocharged V12. Unveiled at the Geneva car show in February, the CLS, CLK and ML vehicles are powered by the first engine AMG has developed from scratch-a naturally aspirated 6....

Media Platforms Design TeamThe Atlanta Braves and Miami Marlins engage in a friendly debate, presumably about the finer points of net neutrality. Credit: Getty Images.Netflix isn’t the only content provider openly protesting the FCC’s proposed new rules against net neutrality. Major League Baseball sent a letter to the FCC last week calling the proposal a gamble and saying it would probably do more harm than good for users.Why does baseball care so much about net neutrality?...

Media Platforms Design TeamWhy build rockets when you can just press “up?” That’s the logic behindElevator 2010Centennial ChallengesNobody wonX Prize Cup, a consortium aiming to create an elevator to orbit by—you guessed it—2010. Last year, NASA held a competition to create “beam powered” vehicles (one of the two key technologies behind space elevators) as one of its . , and so the $100,000 prize has doubled this year, and according to announcements at the International Space Development Conference, the next round of competition will be held during the in October....

Media Platforms Design TeamIn some ways, the human brain isn’t much different from a computer. Both use electricity to process information, relay commands, and execute actions. At the Global Future 2045 conference in New York City this past weekend, several speakers explained how scientists are exploiting those electrical connections to blur the line between man and machine—and the accomplishments so far are incredible. Using electrode implants, deep-brain-stimulation therapies can zap neurons with tiny electrical pulses to treat Parkinson’s, depression, and epilepsy....

Media Platforms Design TeamMORE BREAKING NEWS ON GOOGLE CHROME• ANALYSIS: Top 10 Breakthroughs From Google’s First 10 Years• PLUS: How Google Chrome Could Steer Web’s Complex Future Okay, we don’t want to go and dump water on all the excitement over what Google Chrome means to the future of the Web. But we have to say this much after a couple hours tinkering around with the new browser on our PC in the test lab: Even if Google has taken a revolutionary approach to browser programming, it has been relatively conservative in its interface design....

Media Platforms Design TeamApple’s Predictive KeyboardApple’s new predictive keyboard, which learns from how you type and tries to suggest words you might want to write next, can be great for typing a long text message. But this week we heard that the feature’s memory might be a little too good; type your passwords too often and the predictive keyboard might suggest the rest of them, kind of defeating the whole secrecy thing....

Media Platforms Design TeamEverybody knows that carbon-fiber reinforced plastic is the material for cars of the future, right? Well, maybe. But Ferrari, for one, is not so sure.In its quest to make lighter cars by reducing the use of steel, the Prancing Horse is casting its lot with aluminum rather than carbon fiber. Despite the high-tech aura of the lightweight black plastic, Ferrari insists that aluminum is superior for most cars, a position that goes against the grain of recent announcements from McLaren and BMW committing to carbon-fiber use in their existing or future models....

Media Platforms Design TeamPublic health officials are routinely concerned about cross connections and back-flow connections—the links through which contaminating materials can enter a potable water supply—in plumbing systems. Public School 20, in Flushing, Queens, confirmed the worst fears of these officials when, earlier this week, its drinking water was contaminated with an air-conditioning chemical—most likely propylene glycol—that sent home 74 children who were vomiting or had stomachaches. First of all, let’s look at cross connections—a plumbing problem that can get seriously complex....

Media Platforms Design TeamThere’s a battery in your ear. No, really. And now scientists have figured out how to harvest its energy.The cochlea is a system of three coiled ducts in the inner ear. The central duct is filled with fluid called endolymph, contained in a thin layer of surface cells served by many blood vessels. These cells, called the stria vascularis, include the sensory hairs that pick up the vibrations of sound waves and transmit these signals to the brain where we decide what it is we just heard....

Update: As of Thursday, Nov. 1, the Coast Guard suspended the search for Capt. Walbridge.Media Platforms Design TeamThe HMS Bounty, a 180-foot sailboat, is shown submerged in the Atlantic Ocean during Hurricane Sandy approximately 90 miles southeast of Hatteras, N.C., Monday, Oct. 29, 2012. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Tim Kuklewski)The Coast Guard continues to scour the “Graveyard of the Pacific Atlantic” for signs of HMS Bounty captain Robin Walbridge, days after the 63-year-old mariner and his crew abandoned ship into the furor of Hurricane Sandy....

Media Platforms Design TeamReaching Earth orbit and only spending a thousand dollars per pound to get your spacecraft there—it’s long been the shining goal of the launch business. Tuesday, Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), made an announcement promising a new launch beast that could reach that mark in a couple of years—and shake up the space industry. He unveiled a new launch vehicle dubbed “Falcon Heavy.” It’s a derivative of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully delivered a pressurized capsule into orbit in December after a successful first flight last summer....

Elon Musk came up with the hyperloop concept then scattered it into the wind for others to build. But now he’s (probably) lending some of his sweet, sweet money to a competition for who can design the best Hyperloop car. You can read more about the competition here. Registration opens in September, with final plans due by December. The concepts will be put to the test in June 2016 at a test track at SpaceX’s headquarters....

After years of declining sales, empty stores, and failed attempts at reinvention, it looks as though the end is finally here for RadioShack: The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Thursday. According to the Wall Street Journal, RadioShack has a plan in place to sell 2,400 of its physical stores to a hedge fund that will partner with Sprint to operate them.The company started way back in 1921 with a single shop in Boston operated by two brothers....

A stroll through the North End of Boston might remind you of walking through an old European city, thanks to its winding streets and small blocks. And now, as part of an investigation into the “science of cities,” scientists are using the size and shape of urban blocks as part of a fingerprint to show how one city is related to others around the world.Scientists analyzed the road layouts of 131 cities spanning six continents using the OpenStreetMap database, an online project to create a free editable map of the world....