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Here’s a list of our favorite monitor controllers currently on the market. The Mackie Big Knob line of monitor controllers has been through a few incarnations over its life, and this passive version is the most recent and stripped-down version yet. Its rugged metal construction and super-simple functionality make it a great choice for small studios where users need to switch between no more than two sources and two sets of speakers, and the included mute, dim, and mono buttons add up to make the Big Knob a no-brainer at this price point....

Back on Earth for the first time in nearly a year, the crew was met with a crowd of international agency officials. With the astronauts adjusting their space legs to Earth’s gravity, they were carried out of the spacecraft into medical tents. Vande Hei was whisked back to Houston, and cosmonauts Dubrov and Shkaplerov went to a training base in Star City Russia. The Soyuz’s landing was a bit of a rougher ride than expected, Vande Hei had said....

NASA has announced that there will be a ‘major announcement’ about cargo transport to the International Space Station today. What will they be announcing? We can’t say for sure, but we thought of a few possibilities. There’s a strong chance that it will be about awarding contracts for new companies to resupply the space station. In 2014, NASA put out a call for new commercial contract proposals, and we could be seeing the results today....

As this conference is attended mostly by Apple software developers, Jobs is currently running through a laundry list of new applications that will be possible by the iPhone’s official SDK—we’ve seen an eBay auction tracker, a location-aware social network, and a crowd-sourcing-friendly news app from the AP that allows you to read local news according to your current location as well as submit photos and reports directly for a little citizen reporting....

Martin Wikelski, head of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology near Konstanz, Germany, hopes to change that. This summer he started distributing tags weighing just 5 grams, or 0.17 ounce, to researchers ready to place the trackers on thousands of birds, baby sea turtles, and even eels. Dubbed ICARUS, for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, the project could also create what Wikelski calls “an internet of animals.” In the same way that signals from thousands of cellphones yield traffic patterns, so the data swarm from critter tags might help us understand and halt the decline of migratory species, map how pathogens like bird flu spread, and perhaps even prove certain species as an early-warning system for natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions....

By releasing its own titles for iPhone and Android (developed with the help of third-party mobile software firm DeNA), Nintendo could serve the mobile market at low cost to its own operations, while staying focused on games for its dedicated (and more expensive) consoles. The Japanese gaming company offered a bit more insight into the next gaming app Nintendo fans could expect. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal today, while Nintendo saw a drop in quarterly profit, it cleverly distracted by mentioning that we can expect a mobile app starring one of its “best-known characters....

Air bubbles forming in the joint spaces are the most common cause of popping noises. This noise occurs at joints where there is a layer of fluid separating the two bones. Joints can be forced apart through natural everyday movements, or deliberately, such as at the hands of an osteopath. When this happens, the low pressure in the joint space causes gases within the synovial fluid (a natural lubricant in the joint) to form a gas cavity, which comprises oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide....

Part of the appeal of a Fitbit device is how simple it is: just strap it on your wrist, download a companion app (available for Android and iOS) and get going. But if you take the time to dig into the different options and settings, you can make your Fitbit smarter than it already is. Wear it right… or left Fitbit’s algorithms for counting steps and tracking activities work more accurately if you tell the device whether you’re wearing it on your dominant hand’s wrist—the one you write with—or not....

With many experiencing a decrease in purchasing power, more and more people are choosing to be smarter with where they spend their hard-earned cash. Some are forgoing luxuries, and some even try to find alternatives for things that they actually need, like new electronics for work. Retailers have even started coming up with ways to respond to this change in purchasing decisions, with Walmart introducing a program called Walmart Restored, which offers refurbished appliances and consumer electronics....

The nasal vaccine only produced an antibody response in the respiratory mucous membranes in minority of trial participants, according to the published findings. Additionally, the immune response measured in the blood was weaker than that from a shot (intramuscular) vaccination. The trial enrolled 30 previously unvaccinated participants and 12 volunteers who had previously received a standard two-dose vaccine course by injection. “The nasal spray did not perform as well in this study as we had hoped,” Sandy Douglas, chief investigator on the trial at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, said in a statement....

Eighteen years later, scientists have announced that, with an implanted array of electrodes and the help of artificial intelligence, this man has regained a partial ability to speak again. In a three-hour-long surgery, scientists opened up the man’s skull and laid an array of 128 electrodes on top of his sensorimotor cortex, which houses the neural regions implicated in speech processing. Before closing him up, they connected those electrodes to a port which extends out from the participant’s head and sends those electrode signals to a computer via a detachable cable....

As of May 5, Peloton has issued recall notices for both its $4,295 Tread Plus and its $2,495 Tread machines in the US and Canada. The notices come with a statement of apology from company CEO John Foley. He wrote: “I want to be clear, Peloton made a mistake in our initial response to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s request that we recall the Tread+.” The notice also includes a statement from Robert S....

Just four months after launching, Snap (the company formerly known as Snapchat) has grounded its Pixy selfie drone. The diminutive $230 drone got middling reviews and suffered from low presales. Somewhat understandably, given the current economic climate, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told staff that future development was being halted as “part of broader reprioritization of company resources.” But the Pixy’s swift crash from grace got us all thinking here at PopPhoto about other products that were announced with great fanfare and then—just didn’t do much....

Scanning the darkness, astronomers have managed to catch a few glimmers of what might fill the nether regions far beyond Neptune. And what they see doesn’t make sense. Where researchers predicted chaos—strewn flotsam leftover from the solar system’s tumultuous formation—they see unexpected order. Orbits of distant objects cluster together. Their points of closest approach stop short of a certain line for no apparent reason. In a handful of such patterns, many scientists see the work of some invisible entity....

The scientists, who hail from the University of Pittsburgh and Brown University, conducted the study on 232 smokers between 18 and 55 years of age (all of whom used cigarettes, not vaping or other methods of nicotine consumption). They asked the participants to come prepared to smoke, with their preferred brand of cigarettes and a lighter in hand, but not to smoke in the eight hours before they participated in the study....

Powertrain: 9 Road Manners: 8 Safety: 7 Electronics: 8 Design: 7 If you want to push the 2002 Porsche 911 Carrera 4 — and this car begs to be pushed — I suggest taking it home. Not your home; its home: Bavaria, where the original Porsche was conceived and hundreds of miles of wide open, speed-limit-free autobahn now lie. Simply point toward the Alps, slide into the left lane, and go....

Have you had any “Eureka!” moments during your work? If I were to choose only one, it would be when I made a color composite mosaic of Saturn’s satellite Enceladus. This, to my knowledge, is the first color view of the entire moon in which you can see the geysers of water shooting into space. I sat back, looked at it, and realized with kind of a jolt that I was probably the first person to see Enceladus the way it might look if we could actually go there....

Right now the RoboCup Rescue competition is divided into real and virtual leagues. In the real league, the robots can be controlled by a human or be fully autonomous and have to map as well as find “victims” or dummies, which have body heat, can breathe C02 and can even wave their hands and cry. The virtual league is similar to the real one, except as the name implies, everything is simulated....

British sports psychologist Dr. Costas Karageorghis helped pick the individual tempo, genre and location of each band to best benefit the runners. “Music is like is a legal drug for athletes,” Dr Costas Karageorghis, of the School of Sport and Education at Brunel University in London, told Reuters in an interview. “It can reduce the perception of effort significantly and increase endurance by as much as 15 percent. Karageorghis has spent 20 years in the field and recently published literature in the Journal of Sports and Exercise Psychology showing that runners listening to the like of Madonna, Queen and Red Hot Chili Peppers ran farther and enjoyed their workouts more....

The researchers identified people in three different families who have vibratory urticarial and took samples of their DNA, along with samples from their unaffected family members. When the researchers sequenced and compared the DNA, they found that the individuals with the allergy had a mutation on a gene called ADGRE2. Unaffected family members didn’t have that mutation, nor did any of the 1,000 other entries in the researchers’ genetic database....