As someone with a high risk of glaucoma, I end up going to the eye doctor's at least once a year. And as annoying as it is to sit around and wait, get my eyes dilated, and then wait for my vision to de-blur, I know many places exist in the world where people can't get proper vision care at all.

In outbreak news

Lightpaper looks like a tear in reality, or a handheld computer glitch. Rohinni, a technology company with roots in both Idaho and Austin, Texas, created a paper-thin light-emitting square. When a charge is sent through it, it glows like a gleaming portal.

Hurtling around the Earth at nearly five miles per second, some 205 miles above where you might be sitting right now, crewmembers aboard the International Space Station plan to celebrate Thanksgiving in many of traditional ways that you or I might—only the turkey won't be roasted, and the football may be floating.

Benjamin Franklin's famous kite-flying experiment, conducted in 1752, was not his first study with electricity. Before that, he tested electric shocks on some farmyard birds. As he wrote to botanist Peter Collinson in a letter dated 1749, "A Turky is to be killed for our Dinners by the Electrical Shock; and roasted by the electrical Jack, before a Fire kindled by the Electrified Bottle . . . ."

Despite my fondness for (and previous career in) computer troubleshooting, I find myself at sea when it comes to dealing with my car. But fortunately pretty much every car has a computer in it these days, and that onboard system can provide a first step to diagnosing a problem—all you need is the right tool.

They're cute and fat and take real engineering to get up into the air. I'm talking about the iconic balloons in the proud US tradition of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which starts at 9:00 a.m. ET Thursday.

This week, a grand jury elected not to indict a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.

Based at times in Area 51, the U-2 spyplane tested the very limits of human endurance and Cold War technology when it first flew in 1955. Pilots would fly the high-altitude spy craft at above 70,000 feet for hours at a time, taking photos of developments below. One such flight revealed the buildup of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, and sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the advent of drones, and specifically the long-endurance high-altitude Global Hawk, the U-2's days in service might be numbered. A plan by Lockheed wants convert the venerable spy plane of the past into a modern surveillance robot of the future.

Charles Darwin may be a household name now, but we haven't always had the theory of natural selection. On November 24, 2020, he published On the Origin of Species as a culmination of nearly three decades of research after his journey on the H.M.S. Beagle. Happy 155th anniversary of On the Origin of Species!

It's no accident that turkeys have more than doubled in size over the past 80 years—bigger is better, at least when it comes to the Thanksgiving table. But decades of farmers raising increasingly engorged turkeys isn't just bad for the birds, which may grow so large they can't even stand. Breeding focused on extreme muscle growth has led to an increasing number of turkeys falling victim to muscular and heart disease. The same practices lead many turkeys provide low-quality or otherwise unsavory meat. But a team of scientists believes they can reverse the unhealthy trend—with data they're collecting through genome sequencing.

What time is it? Time to get a smartwatch made entirely out of electronic paper. That's what Sony's rumored to launch sometime next year, according to Bloomberg, and it makes sense: There's intense and burgeoning interest in wearable technology.

It's getting cold out there. Are you keeping your giraffes warm?

On hot vents deep underneath the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, there lives something unusual: a gene that fights bacteria. The gene belongs to a microscopic organism, scientifically named Aciduliprofundum boonei, that lives in the extreme environments atop undersea thermal vents all over the world.

Robots are getting better all the time. They can mix drinks, explore other planets and even adapt to new situations. And they're not done yet. In a new paper published this week in Nature Geoscience, researchers describe using an autonomous underwater vehicle called SeaBED to map the underside of sea ice in Antarctica.