Awe-inspiring science reporting, technology news, and DIY projects. Skunks to space robots, primates

[ad_1] When the students of Stoneman Douglas High School started class on February 14, it seemed to be a Valentine’s Day like any other. But by 2:30 p.m., it was clear it was a day that would live in infamy. Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old who was expelled from Stoneman Douglas last year, killed 17 students and injured 14 more, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. In the two short weeks since, many of the teenaged survivors have spoken out against gun violence to national papers and TV news networks, and organized protests and legislative meetings to fight for stricter gun control in the United States. While many have spoken out in support of their efforts, from political figures to celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, others have taken issue not just with the survivors’ message—but with the notion they have the right to say anything at all. Stoneman Douglas High School students have been called immature, disrespectful, and overly emotional; th...

[ad_1] Jennifer Fee remembers well the day the 100 millionth observation rolled in on eBird. It was the summer of 2012, and the birding app had been in use for a decade. In that time, citizen scientists from around the world had submitted 99,999,999 photos, sound clips, and geographic tags for the birds they saw in real life. Those observations had been used by the app’s creators, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (ornithology means “study of birds”) and the Audubon Society, to guide conservation and inform new research. When the 100 millionth observation finally arrived, Fee says, everyone thought it would be a big-time birder or well-known scientist making the numerically-noteworthy contribution. “It ended up [being] a 12-year-old boy,” she says. Liron Gertsman of Vancouver, Canada had identified 24 species on a hike that day. His photo of an American Robin made eBird app history. “It was a great day to be in K-12 education,” says Fee, who works ...

[ad_1] This short story was originally published on Flying Magazine. It has been edited slightly to add more information. California-based Stratolaunch Systems Corp has released a video showing good progress in the extensive taxi testing that precedes the upcoming first flight of the largest aircraft in the world by wingspan. The dual-fuselage, six-engine jet reached speeds up to 40 knots while cruising down Mojave Air and Space Port’s runway 30. “The team verified control responses, building on the first taxi tests conducted in December,” said Stratolaunch’s founder Paul Allen in a tweet on Monday. The runway is 12,503 feet long, providing plenty of space for the plane to accelerate and decelerate during the testing. However, the wings of the Stratolaunch span way beyond the 200-foot wide runway. The Stratolaunch measures 385 feet wide and 238 feet long. That wingspan is nearly twice the width of the runway. The ultimate goal: use its six Boeing 747 engines to l...

[ad_1] H ow many times have you been told that something great will happen as long as you believe it is possible? From pop psychology books to self-improvement seminars and blogs, there’s a lot of hype surrounding the advantages of positive thinking. And there’s certainly some evidence behind it—a large body of work suggests that being optimistic reaps a number of positive rewards, including better health and wellbeing. But what about the people who tend to see the glass as half empty rather than half full? Is being pessimistic always such a bad thing? Actually, the latest research suggests that some forms of pessimism may have benefits. Pessimism isn’t just about negative thinking. Personality science has revealed it also includes a focus on outcomes—what you expect will happen in the future. While optimists expect positive outcomes will happen more often than not, pessimists expect negative outcomes are more likely. There is a particular type of pessimist...

[ad_1] Smartphones may cause neck and eye strain, but they can also improve your health—it's all a question of how you use them. Even if you don't invest in a fitness tracker to wrap around your wrist, your phone still has apps to keep you active and well. Many of these apps have premium tiers, but you can start trying the majority of them for free, reviewing how they suit you before you invest. Track your steps You don't need a fitness tracker to count the steps you take—your phone has enough sensors to measure your motion on its own. We've previously covered how Android's Google Fit and iOS's Apple Health apps can tap into this data, but they're not the only apps that will do the job. Feature-rich Strava (for Android and iOS) will track your runs, walks, and bike rides. The app makes it simple to track your efforts over time, set goals for what you want to achieve, and compare your progress to your friends'. You can download the app for free but for e...

[ad_1] There’s a planet just over 4 light-years away orbiting a star at just the right distance—not too close, not too far—that it could support liquid water on its surface. We don’t know much about its atmosphere, if it even has one, and we’re trying to figure out more about its interior. There’s a lot more to uncover, but it sure sounds like it could be a promising place to find some alien neighbors, right? If only we could figure out how to deal with the massive stellar flares. A study published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters found that instead of a nice warm ring of dust around the star—which could indicate a cozy nursery of planets, as a study last fall reported—there was actually a huge stellar flare. (That’s the same as a solar flare, but on a star other than our own Sun). It was the dust study that originally intrigued Meredith MacGregor, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institute who studies debris discs ar...

[ad_1] Google’s new camera, called Clips, is a small, intriguing device that feels experimental. It’s a camera, but it has no screen to compose or view images. It comes with a case that has a clip, but it’s not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own. Google intends this roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera to be used by specific audiences—parents or pet-owners—who are interested in capturing a certain kind of scene: the candid moments when a child (or dog) does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smartphone and open an app. Another reason for parents to use it is to avoid gathering more shots that feel posed. It's meant for candids. If you don’t meet that criteria—if you’re a person with no kids, and no pets, who loves taking pictures with the smartphone in your pocket—this $249 came...

[ad_1] The camera is one of the most important pieces of any modern smartphone. We use it to shoot photos and videos at important (and sometimes stupid-but-entertaining) moments, but they’re also integral to the burgeoning wave of augmented reality apps that mix the digital and real worlds. Because these imaging devices are so important to users, manufacturers have latched onto them as a point of differentiation to try and make one phone stand out in a sea of otherwise similar devices. The truth, however, is that pretty much any current-generation smartphone packs a high-quality camera that meets, or probably even exceeds, your overall needs as a typical user. Here, I’ll break down a few of the technical terms you’ll hear thrown around in advertisements to help sort the bells and whistles from the meaningful features. Resolution Take a look at the current lineup of flagship smartphones and you’ll find that most of them have stuck around the 12-megapixel resolutio...

[ad_1] There has never been an easier time to record and release music to the world—or a small group of your most non-judgmental friends. Tech has really democratized the process, and musicians can now easily record an entire band from their bedroom. That's thanks in large part to portable and relatively inexpensive recording studios that a songwriter can carry with one hand. You can auto-tune imperfect performances and cut up and re-arrange songs from your laptop, and companies are touting new and improved recording devices every year. For musicians and songwriters, the possibilities are endless. To prove the point, I'm going to take the next few months to write and arrange a song using new pieces of music tech. I'm starting with drum recording. I’ve personally pushed back against programmed, electronic percussion, mostly because it takes hours to lay down a performance that can be done in a couple minutes with a few microphones—plus I'm a drummer and it's a pride ...

[ad_1] You probably realize that inhaling coal dust would be bad for you. But for the people who spend long shifts working in mines to extract the stuff, it’s a tangible occupational hazard. Even with protective gear and federal regulations on dust exposures, tiny particles of dust can enter miners' lungs, causing a plethora of respiratory diseases. For the last few decades, it looked like mining conditions were improving, along with the health outcomes among most miners. In 1970, the federal government implemented the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which created the first national standard for safety regulations, including limits for the amounts of dust that coal miners could be exposed to. The Act mandated annual inspections at all underground coal mines, and introduced steep penalties for violations. It also provided health benefits and compensations for miners afflicted with fatal lung diseases like Progressive Massive Fibrosis, or black lung. The Coal Workers’...

[ad_1] T here’s still a lot we don’t know about how, and where, horses were first domesticated. Experts long thought that all modern horses were probably descended from a group of animals that belonged to the Botai culture, which flourished in Kazakhstan around 5,500 years ago. But now, a new study published in Science suggests that the Botai horses were not the ancestors of our modern equine companions—and challenges what we thought we knew about one of the only “wild” horse species left today: the Przewalski’s horse. There are now very few, if any, genuinely wild species of horse, which have never been domesticated. Scientists have known that Przewalski’s horse is not an ancestor of modern domestic horses, since studies were carried out on equine mitochondrial DNA in 2002. But now it seems that far from being the last remnants of a truly wild horse species, the Przewalski’s horse is the feral descendant of the domesticated Botai horses....

[ad_1] Your smartphone is supposed to make life easier. Good news: You can step up its convenience by automating some of the ways you use it. With these seven automated commands, you get to spend less time fussing with your device and more time on the stuff that really matters. 1. Receive reminders at certain locations Timed reminders can be handy, but they really come into their own when they pop up in the right place. Because your phone knows your location, it can nudge you to buy milk when you're near the grocery store or to clean the attic when you get home. Here's how to set up this type of reminder on iOS and Android devices. On an iPhone, launch the Reminders app, tap the Plus icon, and type in the text you want to see later. Tap the (i) icon to the right of your new reminder, toggle the Remind me at a location switch to on, and then tap Location . Now you can pick any of your saved (pinned) locations, select your current position, or use the search box at the top to ...

[ad_1] A butterfly in the form of two tropical cyclones flapped its wings in the Pacific, and now Rome is covered in a dusting of snow. First, some pictures of that (since that’s partly why you’re all here): But wait! There’s more to this story than a few pretty pictures of snowy Roman roofs. There’s this sweet gif: That’s the polar vortex splitting into two vortices earlier this month. Normally the vortex swirls around the North Pole, only occasionally dipping down into lower latitudes. But in mid-February, two tropical cyclones formed and started pumping heat into the atmosphere. That warming destabilized the polar vortex and forced it to split, which hasn’t happened in five years. One of those sister vortices headed down toward eastern Europe and caused record-breaking cold snaps there, along with the snow in Rome. Normally, Europe gets most of its weather patterns off the Atlantic Ocean—winds generally travel around the world from west to ea...

[ad_1] The following is an excerpt adapted from The Edumacation Book: Amazing Cocktail-Party Science to Impress Your Friends by Andy McElfresh. Here’s my misspent youth: I spent many, many hours in a camping hammock behind my parents’ house devouring the Science Fiction Hall of Fame series, everything by Arthur C. Clarke, many things by Robert Heinlein, the complete works of Philip K. Dick, and especially issues of the short-lived Galileo magazine. I also read Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, which was a lot like Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspense Magazine, but with ray guns and the peculiar feature of having a different photo of Isaac Asimov in the upper left corner on each issue. One photo was of Asimov’s feet. I got into sci-fi when I was a young teenager. That’s when I really started pouring on the steam as a competitive swimmer and a member of a barbershop quartet, which meant I had a lot of free time to read all the way through high school while oth...

[ad_1] There’s no shame in firing up a private browsing window from time to time, whether it’s to visit a NSFW website or just to protect your personal information while checking your email on a public computer. But while private browsing modes do their best to erase your tracks, they can also leave digital clues behind. The virtue of a feature like Chrome’s Incognito Mode, of course, is that whoever uses that computer after you shouldn’t be able to see the sites you’ve visited, because the browser doesn’t record your history. But traces of your browsing can still remain on your computer after you’ve closed that Incognito window, a phenomenon that can happen in a couple different ways, says Frank Wang, a computer science doctoral candidate at MIT. One vulnerability has to do with something called a domain name service (or DNS) request. When a browser connects to a website—say, PopSci.com—it needs to translate those letters into numbe...

[ad_1] While you were busy forgetting that curling exists until the next Winter Olympics, the Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona, Spain. As a result, this week’s tech wrap-up is dominated by a whole pile of new devices from many of the big manufacturers not named “Apple.” Samsung unleashed the Galaxy S9 The latest additions to the Samsung smartphone line up are the Galaxy S9 and S9+. Both phones got significant camera upgrades—especially when it comes to shooting in low-light—and slow-motion video capture. The Galaxy S9 phones also have augmented reality emojis you can plaster on your face as well. You probably shouldn’t use them as your LinkedIn picture. Sony launched its XZ2 smartphone The new phones we’ve seen from MWC this year haven’t exactly blown the doors off the market. Sony’s top-of-the-line models are now the Xperia XZ2 and its companion, the XZ2 Compact. The pair of phones does everything you’d expect out...