It’s a balancing act between portability and sound quality. But the Sodapop seems to promise the best of both worlds: a portable speaker that’s only about six-inches long that sounds much larger when you upgrade it with an empty plastic soda bottle. The bottle apparently triples the internal volume of the Sodapop speaker, allowing it…

Next stop: space.Photo: Chad Kainz (Flickr) A Japanese team is testing a small prototype space elevator, according to news reports. It’s certainly not the fantastical, many-kilometer-long cable of science fiction, but it demonstrates that at least someone is serious about this tech. The Mainichi newspaper reports: In the experiment, two ultra-small cubic satellites, which were…

Image: Samsung In another IFA first, both Samsung and LG debuted their first consumer-ready 8K TVs this year in Berlin. Set to arrive in September, Samsung’s Q900R will come in four sizes (65,75,82, and 85-inches) and feature super bright 4000-nit QLED displays with HDR10+ support and improved upscaling for lower-res content. Meanwhile, LG’s offering bests…

Photo: Zebra The company doesn’t go into the details of how the chemistry behind its new highlighter works—that’s most likely a closely guarded trade secret now. But it apparently involves negatively charged ions in the pen ink binding with newly added positively-charged ions in the highlighter ink to help the ballpoint pen’s markings clump and…

DAFNE Beam-Test FacilityPhoto: Paola Gianotti (Wikimedia Commons) This month, Italian physicists will turn on an experiment hunting for a fifth, dark force of nature, the Guardian reports. You may be familiar with the hunt for dark matter. Measurements of the universe imply that there should be five to six times more mass than experiments can…

Photo: GoFundMe Last year, a New Jersey couple raised $400,000 on GoFundMe to help a kind homeless man get his life back together. Now, the man’s attorney says all the money is gone and his client received only a fraction of the donations. Last October, Bobbitt came across Kate McClure while she sat in her…

A bonnethead shark. Image: D. Ross Robertson/Wikimedia Sharks are virtually synonymous with carnivorousness, but the bonnethead shark, as new research suggests, is a true flexitarian, capable of switching between meat and plant-based diets. Researchers from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine have shown that bonnethead sharks, previously thought…