Will Slug Live in Water

Using mathematical modeling, researchers suggest weather and warming created the "perfect storm" that drove the Zika outbreak in 2016. Carried by mosquitoes, Zika is a Flavivirus first identified in Uganda in 1947 by scientists conducting research on yellow fever. Zika forest ...more

Back in July, Oreo released their newest, limited-edition flavor, Choco Chip. These one-of-a-kind cookies are made up of golden, vanilla chocolate chip wafers with a chocolate chip creme filling. Don't Miss: Dunk Oreos Without Getting Your Fingers Messy With this new flavor ...more

The sprouts, they're alive! Alive, I tell you—aaaaaaliiiiiive! (Cue dramatic music.) It's true: sprouts are a living food, and they're packed with more nutritional benefits than some raw vegetables. It's easy and fun to grow your own sprouts from seeds, legumes, and grains. P ...more

Why, for the love of God, do people keep inventing ridiculous devices that make the simplest things more complicated in the name of convenience? This may be a rhetorical question that will forever go unanswered—because these crazy gadgets just keep rolling out, one after the o ...more

My Cuisinart ice cream maker was a wedding gift; it wasn't something on my list, but I jumped up and down with delight when I unwrapped it. I never would've purchased this appliance on my own because it didn't seem practical, yet I loved the idea of making homemade ice cream. ...more

Eggs are a staple food for most Americans, which is no surprise, considering how necessary they are in savory and sweet recipes alike. On their own, they're usually not too eggs-citing. However, these clever egg hacks will make your egg-making easier, more fun, and more intere ...more

Ask ten different people how they feel about boxed cake mixes, and you'll likely get ten different answers. Some baking purists will berate them and throw them in the same category as garlic presses and knife sets sold on infomercials. Many people will say that they prefer not ...more

As a lover of food, I'm often asked, “If you could only have one food the rest of your life, what would it be?” My answer is always the same: sourdough bread. (Okay, it's not always the same... I usually cheat and say sourdough, fancy cheese, and a good beer.) Admittedly, I'm ...more

A little cooking mistake can lead to tough meat, spoiled food, and even a bacterial explosion in your kitchen if you're not careful. These five simple, easy-to-fix kitchen mistakes are some of the most commonly made in households around the world. Luckily, you can correct thes ...more

Christmas trees, once decorated and brightly lit, are the penultimate holiday decoration, but authentic pines lose their brilliance fast without any nourishment. Plus, they are major fire hazards without regular hydration. But watering one requires a lot of sliding around on t ...more

Let's take a minute and talk about something you're doing wrong — using the restroom. Many view the subject as improper or even taboo, but why? Thanks to your upbringing, you've assumed you know the basics... But you don't. Avoiding discussion on the subject has led many of us ...more

Using fresh herbs can make a huge difference in almost any dish, but they're not always available everywhere. Depending on where you live, you can't always get them during the colder months. Personally, the problem I run into the most is not being able to use fresh herbs befor ...more

The big fireworks day is almost here, but most of you are limited in what you can do when it comes to celebrating the Fourth of July with a bang. Unless you live in a dry area prone to wildfires, one type of fireworks you can probably still legally buy are sparklers. But why ...more

This past weekend Berlin celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall with a visit from France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company. Royal de Luxe creates insanely amazing large scale, mechanical street marionettes. Founded in 1979 by Jean Luc Courcoult, t ...more

Norway-based production tools company Vizrt is putting the real into augmented reality with its broadcast AR solution that's designed to keep sports fans (and other audiences) watching. A couple of weeks ago, Chris Black, the head of content and communications at Vizrt, demoe ...more

While Google isn't ready to commit to a wide release of the AR walking navigation mode for Google Maps, the company has begun testing the feature with members of its Local Guides crowdsourcing community. As a result, I've had the opportunity to test an alpha build of the feat ...more

The app that Lego demoed at this year's iPhone launch event is now available in the App Store, and it showcases several new capabilities available in ARKit 2.0. The Playgrounds app enables players to access augmented reality multiplayer games with ARKit's new shared experienc ...more

It's tough to keep pace with Apple lately. As expected, only one day after the public release of iOS 11.2.5, the company released iOS 11.3 to developers. A day after that, Apple pushed it out to public beta testers, too. With new Animoji, more transparent battery information, ...more

The intestinal parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis has a dramatically increased infection rate this summer, and the source is still unknown, the CDC advised today. 2017 is a good year for Cyclospora looking for homes to start their families and a bad year for those of us who don' ...more

When Chan Mei Zhi Alcine chose her senior project, she thought outside the box by thinking inside the bottle. Along with a research team at her university, she found a way to combine health and enjoyment, while meeting a challenge not so definitively met before in alcoholic be ...more

Our canine best friends could spread our bacterial worst nightmare, according to a recent study. The problem with drug-resistant bacteria is well known. Overused, poorly used, and naturally adaptive bacteria clearly have us outnumbered. As science drives hard to find alternat ...more

Who pays for live TV anymore? Better question, who watches live TV anymore? With a ton of streaming services available, there's no room in our lives for things like schedules, commercials, or going weeks between episodes. (What is this, 2010?) But streaming services think peo ...more

In honor of Earth Day tomorrow (woo!), visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia has released a new augmented reality app that lets you experience climate change from wherever you're standing. The app, named "After Ice," finds your current position through geolocation and then put ...more

Tom Clancy games, like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon: Wildlands, are famous for their realistic and immersive gameplay that focuses on covert, low-intensity warfare. Ubisoft now appears to be testing the overcrowded waters of mobile gaming with the release of ShadowBreak, and ha ...more

Cinemagraphs are basically artistic photos that have been turned into a GIF to showcase a bit of subtle motion and give them life. Unlike regular GIFs, which can sometimes loop with a jarring cut at the end, cinemagraphs give the illusion of perpetual motion, like water drops ...more

When the "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" video was released last year, it was called a mind-blowing, stunning, and breathtaking take on mixed reality gaming. It was a great presentation of what the technology could be, but not for a second did I think it was any ...more

Chicken and waffles are so yesterday. Well... it's not that we won't always love them, but it's time to move on to bigger and better things, such as the pizza waffle. We've covered how you can make pizza crust in the waffle iron before, but that doesn't hold a candle to the n ...more

Several years ago, I moved to Brooklyn, New York, just outside a Spanish neighborhood. It was here that I was introduced to chayote. Fast-forward to present day: I live in Los Angeles and buy several chayote squash a week to cook with—yes, I said several. It's so versatile and ...more

A perfectly ripe avocado half is a lovely snack, and a creamy bowl of homemade guacamole can make a meal. But the following ten ideas take green-eating up a notch by stuffing avocado halves with your favorite salads and ingredients, turning them into a snack or side dish fit f ...more

Like most food lovers, I adore sushi. And like anyone who is a living, breathing human being, I'm a pretty big fan of sriracha sauce. I guess you can see where this is going. Yes, sriracha sushi, which I've decided is my new favorite thing. I discovered how to make sriracha s ...more

Here at Food Hacks, we're very fond of finding ways to regrow food. That means taking things like carrot tops and leftover bits from garlic, onions, chives, and other herbs and aromatics to create mini reusable herb gardens. Don't Miss: Vegetables & Herbs You Can Eat Once & R ...more

At any moment, you can open up Meerkat and start live-streaming a video from your smartphone, available for anyone to watch. Thanks to its popularity at SXSW and the backing of several big Hollywood players, the app just announced that it's receiving $14 million in funding. A ...more

Last week's tech roundup featured iPhone 6 clones, an all-in-one sleep tracker, Xbox One updates, and other cool gadgets. This week, there's a lot more to show off, and a bunch of stuff that I need to get my hands on! Everything from app updates to putting stickers on your fav ...more

When you think of nail polish, it's probably almost always in the context of a manicure. I mean, that's what it's made for, right? But there are plenty of other things you can use clear or colored nail polish for besides painting your nails. Even if you're a guy living on his ...more

An invaluable button on your iPhone can do hundreds, even thousands, of amazing things, but most iPhone users don't even know it exists. You can't push it. You can't click it. You can't press it. But it's the largest button on your iPhone, more powerful than the versatile Side ...more

The draw of wireless earbuds is convenience, and many still offer the same sound performance as their wired counterparts. The difficult part is finding a pair that will stay in your ear reliably, work when you need them, and give you the best audio quality. Bluetooth EarPods ...more

The iPhone doesn't stop at last year's excellent iPhone 12 lineup. Apple's been developing its iPhone 13 models for a while now, and there are a lot of rumors already with eight or nine months still to go until a release. This year, we're expecting four new models with similar ...more

Working from home is going to be a reality for more people than ever. With Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announcing that his employees will be working remotely for an extended period of time (and even permanently, in some cases), the workforce is rapidly changing. More companies are ...more

Augmented reality gaming pioneer and Pokémon GO mastermind Niantic is putting the pieces on the gameboard to prepare developers and gamers for the launch of its AR cloud platform. Announced in June 2018, the Niantic Real World Platform would enable multiplayer experiences, pe ...more

LG is really coming strong at the flagship smartphone market in 2018. They have already released three new flagship caliber smartphones this year: the V30S ThinQ, V35 ThinQ, and the G7 ThinQ. But LG isn't done with flagship phones yet — they've just announced the V40 ThinQ. T ...more

Null Byte users have often requested video content, but the question has always been what format would best serve our community. This week, we partnered with Null Space Labs, a hackerspace in Los Angeles, to test the waters by hosting a series of talks on ethical hacking for s ...more

This is a tale about microbes, a man who became a hermit, and the parchment that carries both of their stories. Sometime around 1190 AD in Italy, a man named Laurentius Loricatus was born. Trained to be a soldier, Loricatus killed someone by accident and was stricken with rem ...more

A deadly type of brain tumor and Zika-related brain damage in developing fetuses are devastating brain conditions that, at first glance, may seem unrelated. However, thanks to new research, their paths seem to cross in a way that could benefit patients. A new study has shown t ...more

When the climate changes, so do all the things that rely on the climate, including people, plants, and pathogens. A European study recently took a broad look at what kind of microorganisms are most likely to be affected as climate change heats, cools, dries, and wets the world ...more

For as long as 14,000 years, the First Nations people of the Heitsuk Nation have made their home along the Central Coast of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Among the territory's inlets, islands, rivers, and valleys lie a clay deposit on the north side of Kisameet Ba ...more

About a third of the methane released into the environment comes from the production and transport of natural gas. The gas leaks as it moves along the transport chain from gas wellheads to market. To trap methane and produce a useful product in the process, a group of scienti ...more

Windborne microbes shifting in the snows of the great ice sheet of Greenland may be able to neutralize some of the industrial contaminants oozing out of the melting ice. Greenland is a long way off, and we tend to dismiss what happens there as not impacting us here — out of s ...more

As summer heats up, new maps from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gives us our best guess at where Zika-carrying mosquitoes could be hanging out this year in the US. The Zika virus is a potentially serious virus carried by mosquitoes. As of June 2017, the ...more

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) issued a health alert for a Boston mumps outbreak, on Monday, June 5th, to healthcare providers and local boards of health. There have been 12 reported cases of mumps during the recent outbreak. The affected residents' sympto ...more

As headlines focus on melting glaciers and rising water levels caused by global warming, climate change is quietly taking its toll on the nearly invisible occupants of this planet, the microbes. In a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers fro ...more

Bioluminescence — the ability of an organism to produce and emit light — is nature's light show. Plants, insects, fish, and bacteria do it, and scientists understand how. Until now, though, we didn't know how fungi glow. Now, thanks to research led by Zinaida Kaskova in the I ...more

The noses of kids who live in areas of intense pig farming may harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria, presumably acquired from the animals, according to a new study by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health ...more

While at work, you notice your gloves changing color, and you know immediately that you've come in contact with dangerous chemicals. Bandages on a patient signal the presence of unseen, drug-resistant microbes. These are ideas that might have once seemed futuristic but are bec ...more

Colorado State University scientists have developed new tech that quickly identifies the presence of Zika virus in mosquito populations — and in human body fluid. For hard-hit nations like Brazil and Nicaragua, a field-ready test that not only identifies Zika, but also the st ...more

Growing populations and higher temperatures put pressure on world food supplies. Naturally occurring soil bacteria may save crops in drought-stressed areas, put more land into crop production, and produce more food. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra ...more

We may not fully appreciate all the important roles wheat plays in our lives until it's gone—or at least, when it's in very short supply. What would a world be like without bread, cakes, cereal, pasta, or wheat beer? If the dire warnings about an impending stem rust fungus com ...more

Even if your cat drives you a little nuts, don't worry, because a new study says that cats pose no risk to your mental health. Media reports in the last couple of years placed emphasis on the danger of your cat to your future mental health, and that of your children. No kiddi ...more

What's in a sneeze? Quite a lot—dirt, mucus, and infectious germs—it seems. And sneezing the right way can reduce the germs you share with neighbors. It's just a sneeze right? Everybody sneezes. So if you share a few germs when you are sick (or not sick), it's not such a terr ...more

Lighthouses and signal fires may have been the first social media. Without the ability to share language, a distant light meant "humans here." A new study from the University of California, San Diego, finds that bacteria can also send out a universal sign to attract the attent ...more

In the perpetual search for a renewable and convenient energy source, our bacterial friends have once again stolen the limelight. Since bacteria multiply so fast, they are the ultimate renewable resource. And since they are living organisms, their metabolism produces by-produ ...more