This Week in Science: Bad Gadgets, Short Walks, and Smart Dinosaurs
It’s time for “Nerd News,” covering the most important news for your brain.
Here’s a quick rundown of this week in science . . .
1. A study at Vanderbilt found some dinosaurs . . . including T-rex . . . may have been much smarter than we think. Possibly on par with modern day baboons.
2. In health news: All the sitting we do isn’t good for us, but a study found it’s pretty easy to offset. Just walk around for five minutes every half hour.
3. Microsoft has a new A.I. tool that can impersonate anyone’s voice after hearing them talk for just three seconds. They released samples, but you can’t try it yet.
4. In other tech news: Apple might be working on their first touchscreen MacBook, and could start selling them in 2025. Steve Jobs didn’t like the idea, so they’ve never done it. He thought vertical touchscreens just weren’t fun to use.
5. A lot of cool stuff debuted at last weekend’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. But CNET.com followed it up with a list of the worst gadgets they’ve seen there in the last 25 years. They include vacuum shoes . . . a robot to bring you toilet paper . . . and an oven-like contraption to dry out your wet dog.
6. The NASA satellite that spotted a hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s finally fell out of orbit and crashed into the Pacific on Sunday. It was only supposed to last two years, but stayed up there almost four decades.
In related news, the ozone layer has been repairing itself ever since 1987, when the world agreed to stop using Freon in things like aerosol cans. Now a new study found it should fully repair itself within the next 50 years.
