NormalTechnology

About four years ago, my father returned home from a business trip and showed me a picture he took of a person attached to some sort of futuristic jet pack. I’m pretty aware of new gadgets thanks to social media and websites like Popular Science, but I hadn’t seen or heard about anything like this before—I didn’t even know how to Google it! After several days, I gave up on my search. Then, a year later, I stumbled upon a video and learned that these jet packs are actually called Flyboards, and they're more like snowboards with pressurized streams of water that propel them into the air. The video made Flyboarding look not only fun, but beautiful! Multiple people were Flyboarding at the same time and doing coordinated tricks. I knew I had to try it for myself. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a local company that offered Flyboarding. Since then though, it's started to gain popularity. I even found a company that offered to let customers Flyboard near my parents’ home

Yaniv Erlich has a soft spot for genealogy. A data scientist at Columbia University and the chief science of officer of the DNA test company MyHeritage, he describes many things in the context of family. Columbia and MyHeritage are “mom and dad” and he’s “got to make both happy.” And his new study on a 13 million-member family tree is best measured in terms of his child’s development. “My son was born when I started the study,” Ehrlich says of the seven year project. “Now, he is in first grade.” The paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, looks at genetic data from millions of online genealogy profiles. Among other things, the researchers were able to determine at what point in history marrying your cousin went out of vogue, and the average degree of relation between married couples today. And hey, since we’re on the subject: just how bad is it to have kids with your cousin? While it’s taboo today, cousins used to get hitched all the time. Franklin Delano Roose

WE COULD BRAG. We could say our 30th annual list of the most transformative products and discoveries required trucks full of experts, hours of toil, and countless friendship-ending debates. That's true, but you just want the good stuff. So read on. A robot just made me french fries. Delicious, they cooked for four minutes less than the instructions dictated. One minute less, they'd've been soggy. A few more, burnt. An eagle-eyed artificially intelligent oven made the timing and temperature calls. My contributions: Arrange fries on tray, slide tray into oven, acquire ketchup. (Invent ketchup drone?) Health Cells that cure cancer—Kymriah Tumors are sly. To survive, the cells bypass our immune systems by retaining similarities to healthy cells. But they also have differences. Over the past decade, researchers have targeted these unique traits to re-enlist the body’s department of defense. Automotive Shock and awe—Alta Motors Redshift MX Derek Dorre

We know people default to bad passwords, whether for their computers or banking PINs. But, we have to stress this here, people are really bad at picking passwords. This infographic visualizes that idea by taking all of the possible combinations and mapping them based on frequency of use. A data set of 3.4 million pins was used. The first two digits are on the horizontal end; the second two on the vertical end. That perfectly diagonal yellow line streaking across it shows the frequency of 1111, 2222, etc. Data Genetics crunched the numbers (based on "released/exposed/discovered password tables and security breaches") used in the graphic, and came up with some fascinating finds: You can crack more than 10 percent of random PINs by dialing in 1234. Expanding a bit, 1234, 0000, and 1111, make up about 20 percent. 26.83 percent of passwords can be cracked using the top 20 combinations. That would be 0.2 percent of the passwords if they were randomly distributed.