They might be the smallest falcon, but American kestrels still intimidate other birds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. No one wants poop on their cherries . Farmers in northern Michigan could get some help on this fecal matter from some feathered allies. Small falcons called the American kestrel help deter smaller birds that like to snack on the fruit when it is growing.

Environment Conservation Land Tiny prairie dogs' poop play a mighty role in grasslands Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Earth is made of cycles. If you think back to high school Earth science class, you might remember the water cycle, the rock cycle, and the oxygen cycle, to name just a few. These natural processes continuously recycle our planet's materials, maintaining the environment that hosts life as we know it. The nutrient cycle is another crucial example of our planet's constant churn.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The first-ever professional eating competition between goats, appropriately called The Great Goat Graze-Off, will take place on July 12 in New York City. The event will feature five invasive plant-eating fiends from the Riverside Park Conservancy--Kash, Rufus, Mallomar, Romeo, and Butterball. "Competitive eating events--whether human or goat--are quirky, high-energy spectacles that tap into our love for friendly competition and fun," Alison Ettinger-DeLong, communications manager at Riverside Park Conservancy, tells Popular Science on behalf of the conservancy team. "People enjoy watching the goats munch with gusto and cheer for their favorites, but the deeper enjoyment comes from seeing animals do what they naturally love (for goats, that's eat!) while learning about their role in environmental care."

Is it possible to really understand someone else's mind? Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. First, you must lie motionless within a fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks. If you do elect to endure claustrophobic hours in the scanner, the software will learn to generate a bespoke reconstruction of what you were seeing or listening to, just by analyzing how blood moves through your brain. More recently, researchers have deployed generative AI tools, like Stable Diffusion and GPT, to create far more realistic, if not entirely accurate, reconstructions of films and podcasts based on neural activity.

It's something we all do, yet is often seen as a taboo subject. Now, scientists are finally lifting the lid on our bowel movements, with the launch of a new camera for your toilet. Researchers from Throne Science have developed a bizarre device that clips onto the side of the bowl, and uses AI to analyse your stools. Thankfully, you won't be shown the photos themselves, and instead will receive a breakdown on the shape, size and structure of your waste. 'Monitoring bowel movements can provide valuable insights into digestive health and nutrient absorption, as well as serve as an early warning sign for various conditions like gastrointestinal bleeding,' Throne Science explains on its website.

I miss having clean floors. I've been using a variety of Roombas over the years to help out with vacuuming, but ever since my wife and I had our second child in 2022, mopping has become an afterthought. And really, vacuuming can only clean your floor so much. I missed the shimmer of a mopped hardwood floor and the smell of Murphy Oil cleaner lingering in the air. Instead, I've been living with even more toys, crumbs and an assortment of bodily waste (which three cats contribute to) on my flooring and carpets.

Now that I'm dealing with three cats, an 11-month old's diapers and potty time with my four-year old, I just needed some relief from mountains of excrement. Enter the Litter Robot 4, the latest iteration of Whisker's automated litter box (a product we initially covered in 2005!). It's a small, spaceship-looking device that automatically rotates after your cat does its business, separating waste into a storage bin and leaving the remaining clean litter behind. Instead of scooping a box daily (or several times a day for multi-cat households), you only need to yank out the Litter Robot's bin bag and replace it with a new liner once a week. Sounds like a dream, right?

Robots that are designed to act like dogs are becoming more common on Chinese social media, but it remains to be seen if they will catch on.

Over the past two decades, iRobot has steadily evolved its Roombas from being fairly dumb robotic dirt suckers to devices that are smart enough to unload their own bins. Now with the $849 Roomba j7, the company is ready to take on its greatest challenge yet: Pet poop. It's iRobot's first vacuum that can recognize and avoid obstacles, like cables or a pile of clothes, in real-time. And for pet owners, that could finally be reason to adopt a robot vacuum. After all, you can't exactly trust your bot to clean up while you're away if they could run into surprises from your furry friends.

Changing your diet to improve your health is nothing new--people with diabetes, obesity, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, food allergies, and a host of other conditions have long done so as part of their treatment. But new and sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, nutrition, and artificial intelligence has given people more tools to figure out what to eat for good health, leading to a boom in the field of personalized nutrition. Personalized nutrition, often used interchangeably with the terms "precision nutrition" or "individualized nutrition" is an emerging branch of science that uses machine learning and "omics" technologies (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to analyze what people eat and predict how they respond to it. Scientists, nutritionists, and health care professionals take the data, analyze it, and use it for a variety of purposes including identifying diet and lifestyle interventions to treat disease, promote health, and enhance performance in elite athletes. Increasingly, it's being adopted by businesses to sell products and services such as nutritional supplements, apps that use machine learning to provide a nutritional analysis of a meal based on a photograph, and stool-sample tests whose results are used to create customized dietary advice that promises to fight bloat, brain fog, and a myriad of other maladies.