Science/Technology

For years, Apple has enjoyed a reputation for creating products that are both beautiful and easy-to-use, no manual necessary. Now one of the company’s own alums, usability consultant Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, says that reputation might not be warranted anymore.

“Three or four years ago we began to see that that something was falling out from Apple,” says Tognazzina, who had founded the Apple Human Interface Group. 

If you’ve ever felt intimidated by math, or consider it a daunting labyrinth of numbers and equations in a textbook, open up Patterns of the Universe: A Coloring Adventure in Math and Beauty.

Flipping through this new coloring book is a mesmerizing journey. From perfect hexagonal tilings to luscious sine waves to nautilus shell spirals, every line illustration by mathematical artist Edmund Harriss (and a handful of others) brings a hypnotic sense of harmony.

A few weeks ago, researchers announced that a 5,300-year-old mummy — the Iceman dubbed Ötzi — contained a strain of a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.

A baby in the womb is protected from most microorganisms. But when that baby enters the outside world, it’s greeted by a welcoming committee of bacteria. Now researchers are trying to sort out what effect, factors like an infant’s delivery method and early diet have on its community of microorganisms.

NASA just got an extra $1.3 billion added to its budget for 2016. Part of this budget is set to be used to develop a deep space habitation module. The deep space dwelling would be a ship that a crew could live and work out of — perhaps even on a journey to Mars.

The deadline for the prototype is 2018, giving NASA just two years to develop the technology. 

Bruce Lieberman, a freelance science writer based in San Diego, California, says the habitation module will likely be something inflatable, made from a certain type of fabric. 

Once, there was the ordinary incandescent light bulb. It shone brightly, but wasted much of the energy put into it as heat. Then came the compact fluorescent. And as costs have dropped, consumers have increasingly been switching to light-emitting diode (LED) technology for many lighting applications, in an ongoing search for a more efficient bulb.

The old fashioned incandescent light bulb is more wasteful and inefficient than you may have realized. 

It used to be that there were nine planets in our solar system. Although some people claimed that somewhere, out there, was a mysterious tenth planet called “Planet X.” In 2006, the IAU reclassified Pluto, in a hotly contested move that left the solar system with only eight official planets.

But recently, researchers published an argument that there is in fact another large planet in our solar system that we haven’t yet seen.

Dr. David Ludwig, a practicing endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Health in Boston, says our conventional wisdom about losing weight may be completely incorrect. 

“Overeating doesn't make you fat. The process of getting fat makes you overeat,” Ludwig says. 

The health expert has just written a book called “Always Hungry” in which he lays out a series of new guidelines on dieting, healthy eating and weight maintenance. 

For more than 30 years, Steve Erenberg has collected early scientific and medical instruments. Victorian medical masks, surreal anatomical models, and futuristic test prostheses pack the display cases of his store/museum in Peekskill, New York.

There are giant eyeballs, a life-size paper mache model of a horse and disembodied faces. 

“I mean, there’s nothing sinister in this collection,” Erenberg says. “People look and they say, ‘Oh, what is that? Is that S&M?’ Or, ‘Is that a torture device?’ No. They’re medical devices or they’re life-saving devices.”

The Los Angeles River has once again come to life, supercharged with rainwater. Freeways have flooded. And California’s Sierra Nevada mountains — the so-called “snowy mountains” — are living up to their name.

This is all thanks to the huge ocean-atmosphere event Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert is calling a “Godzilla El Niño.”

Most people tend to think to think of gardening as a summer activity. Horticulturist Gerard Lordahl, however, says winter is the perfect time to pay attention to your garden. 

“In the wintertime, right now I mean, people are protecting their plants,” Lordahl says. “Soil mulching is really important, and lots of our community gardeners are composting, and these are all things that can be done now. Protecting your plants through the winter, giving as much water to them as possible on those mild days, and then mulching.”