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

[ad_1] Of all the wonders in our solar system, there’s no place beyond our own planet that’s been studied more intensely than Mars. Since humans first took to the stars we’ve sent over 21 different spacecraft to study our rust-colored neighbor. Right now there are two rovers driving around inside of craters, and six satellites overhead. But all of this activity still isn’t enough—Mars is about to get one more resident. In about a week NASA will launch a lander called InSight. This will be the first lander to touch down on the dusty surface in ten years since the Phoenix lander touched down near the north polar cap in 2008. Unlike the recent Curiosity rover, landers like InSight and Phoenix don’t rove around the planet. Instead, they explore their surroundings firmly planted in the place they landed. While Mars has garnered attention for decades, there’s still a lot about it we don’t know. We know it has a core, but scientists are unsure ho...

[ad_1] T hat unassuming search bar offers the answers to so many questions, all without the judgment we risk when asking our know-it-all friends. As such, we ­unwittingly confess our deepest misunderstandings to the ­omniscient ­engine almost every day. Don’t worry: You are not alone in your ignorance. We mined the internet to find those truisms so many of us are embarrassed to learn are false, then dug up counts on corresponding Google searches. These are our greatest myths, verified by the volumes of compatriots who also seek an answer to that eternal question: Does a duck’s quack echo? 231,060 people think individuals learn best in a certain style Many teachers believe each of us has an optimal learning style (visual, auditory, etc.), but neuroscientists disagree. Preferences exist, but you don’t absorb less information just because you dislike the delivery. 164,020 think there is a gene for [insert trait here] Headlines often reference genes that inf...

[ad_1] Take it from me: there’s a lot of music under the sea. A healthy section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, is full of it—damselfish hooting, clownfish chirping, shrimp clicking their claws. ”There’s this whole sort of orchestra of animals making noise,” says University of Exeter PhD candidate Tim Gordon. But when reefs get damaged, animals die and the orchestra stops playing. That silence makes it harder for young fish that have grown up in the open ocean to find a way back to their adult homes, further degrading the already-suffering reefs. “A reef without fish is really a reef that’s in trouble,” says Gordon. The marine biologist is the lead author on a new paper, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA , that compared the sounds of coral reefs recorded in lagoons around Lizard Island in 2012 before several major climate change- related events to recordings taken in the same plac...

[ad_1] One piece of tech I hope for every year is for robotic eyeballs to replace squishy ocular blobs in my head, which get ravaged by allergies in the spring. Sadly, that’s not quite a reality just yet, but there’s still plenty to talk about in the technology world this week, including Snap’s latest face cameras, Amazon’s new deliver-to-your-car service, and the latest version of Windows. Download the latest episode of the podcast! This week’s edition of the Last Week in Tech podcast covers the top stories from Amazon, Google, as well as an in-depth look at some looming privacy changes on the web that will affect the way you use the internet. Check it out in the embedded link above, subscribe via SoundCloud, follow along on iTunes, or add us to your Stitcher rotation. Snap made new Spectacles Last year, Snap—the company that brought you SnapChat and a dancing hot dog that was everywhere for part of 2017—widely released its first hardware produ...

[ad_1] To stay hidden from predators, the long-tail glasswing butterfly relies on a pretty unusual type of camouflage. Patterns of tiny bumps on this South American butterfly’s wings allow it to appear completely transparent. Now, engineers have mimicked these nanostructures in an eye implant for people with glaucoma. By scattering light like the butterfly wing does, this implant could give accurate readings of the fluid buildups that can eventually lead to blindness. Glaucoma, a group of eye diseases that damage the optic nerve, causes irreversible blindness in around 5 percent of cases. Although doctors measure eye pressure when people come in for checkups, it can fluctuate dramatically between visits, or even over the course of a day. “There’s times when the pressure really spikes,” says Hyuck Choo, a medical and electrical engineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of a study published Monday in Nature Nanotechnology . ...

[ad_1] Virtual reality is a gateway to powerful experiences. Strap on a pair of VR goggles, look around, and the scene you see will adjust, in real time, to match your gaze. But the technology is a visual one. Virtual reality doesn’t include touch, although there are controllers that provide “hand presence,” allowing you to manipulate objects in the virtual world, or shoot a simulated gun. So while VR today could simulate a Westworld -like setting, you’re not going to be actually feeling the hug of a cowboy-robot on your body while using any of the major platforms—at least not for a while. The Force Jacket, a garment from Disney Research, aims to address that gap. Made out of a converted life jacket, the prototype uses embedded airbags that inflate, deflate, or even vibrate to literally give its wearer a feeling of being touched. When coupled with VR software, the setup can simulate something bizarre—a snake slithering on you—or more pedestrian:...

[ad_1] So many people long to be astronauts when they grow up, but only a few people ever actually make it to space. The ones that do are emissaries for the rest of us, their pictures and stories and data giving us a tenuous link to the burgeoning world of spaceflight. There are books and conferences where you can learn about what being an astronaut is like, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield—of Space Oddity fame—just launched a program to take that learning experience one step further. This week, he announced a partnership with MasterClass, offering an in-depth course featuring 28 classes exploring what it’s really like to be an astronaut. The content is available exclusively on MasterClass’ new app for the first week, and on their website after May 1. The course isn’t exactly cheap—it's $90 for one class, or $180 for access to all of MasterClass’ content—but the lessons are interesting, and Hadfield hopes the platform will give peopl...

[ad_1] C limate change is causing spring to arrive earlier and earlier, posing a challenge for plants and animals — as well as the scientists who study them. An early thaw can throw off the rhythms of nature, causing flowers to blossom before bees arrive to pollinate them, or spurring birds to head north before the ice has melted at their destination. Scientists looking to catalogue these changes are faced with a difficult job. They must track hundreds of species across thousands of miles, year after year after year, to understand how nature is responding to the rise in temperature. To complete this task, they are asking for your help. Anyone can collect data. Sheila Salmon, 85, used to set up libraries in New York City public schools. Now that she’s retired, she likes to document the lives of plants inhabiting the New York Botanical Garden, a hobby she took up after seeing an ad in the botanical garden’s newsletter. “It said, ‘Citizen scientist...

[ad_1] “The science that we use is going to be transparent, it’s going to be reproducible,” Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told the audience assembled at the agency on Tuesday. He was describing a newly proposed rule for the EPA, which would limit the kinds of research the agency could take into consideration when making policy decisions by requiring all data be “publicly available.” Those two keywords—transparent and reproducible—came up again and again in the following days, a kind of verbal talisman for Pruitt and supporters of the proposed rule. On their face, transparency and reproducibility are hard to argue against; they are fundamental principles of the scientific method. But in practice, calls for greater transparency have almost always been part of industry efforts to cast doubt on unfavorable research. In particular, the mandate for public data access that Pruitt proposes would disbar most if not a...

[ad_1] Ask Us Anything It’s possible, but it’s not the most likely culprit. Unfortunately for us, the line of disease transmission does not end with germy children and coughing colleagues. Dogs, cows, mosquitos, ticks, mice, sushi, your… [ad_2] Written By Annie Cebulski

[ad_1] M ost of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered how far away the stars are or in what direction they are moving. The truth is, scientists don’t know the exact positions or velocities of the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way. But now a new tranche of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, aiming to map stars in our galaxy in unprecedented detail, has come in to shed light on the issue. The Gaia Archive opened on April 25, making public Gaia’s second data release to everyone. To quote the character Dave Bowman in the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey: “It’s full of stars”. In fact, it contains data on the distances to more than 1.3 billion stars. The Gaia satellite was launched [in 2013 and has been scanning the sky with its two telescopes continuously ever since, with the aim of deciphering how our Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved. To do this, it is measuring something called parallax. If you hold a finger...

[ad_1] You might think a ground sloth would be easy to kill. Surely you could just, you know, walk right up to it. They’re so slow . What’s it gonna do, walk away from you at half a mile per hour? If you, like me, made this joke when reading the recent headlines about humans stalking sloths, I have some bad news. Ground sloths were actually terrifying and quite hard to kill, not in the least because they were about eight feet tall and possessed long, curved blades on their feet (known better as “claws”). Some species even had bony bits incorporated into their skin that acted like chainmail, along with thick hides to protect them from spears. The humans who hunted these behemoths must have been badasses. It’s been difficult to tell whether humans hunted them at all, though, because sloth fossils aren’t often found with cut marks on their bones. This may be because they were simply so big that people didn’t need to scrape down to get enough meat o...

[ad_1] We’re finally starting to move away from that awful transition period when the weather can’t quite decide if it’s winter or spring. Now that warmer days have arrived, we can look forward to budding flowers...and an onslaught of ants. These little crawlers are lying in wait to snap up your crumbs and move into any spare space in your building. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to prevent them from taking over your home. How bad will ants be this year? That depends on where you live. “It’s going to be a very ant-and-buggy year for most of the country,” says Michael Bentley, an entomologist and the director of training and education for the National Pest Management Association (NPMA). The NPMA, a trade association for the pest-management industry, puts out a bug barometer every year, forecasting the predicted pest activity of different regions. This year, the northwest, southwest, north central, and midwest states all have a really good c...

[ad_1] C limate change is causing spring to arrive earlier and earlier, posing a challenge for plants and animals — as well as the scientists who study them. An early thaw can throw off the rhythms of nature, causing flowers to blossom before bees arrive to pollinate them, or spurring birds to head north before the ice has melted at their destination. Scientists looking to catalogue these changes are faced with a difficult job. They must track hundreds of species across thousands of miles, year after year after year, to understand how nature is responding to the rise in temperature. To complete this task, they are asking for your help. Anyone can collect data. Sheila Salmon, 85, used to set up libraries in New York City public schools. Now that she’s retired, she likes to document the lives of plants inhabiting the New York Botanical Garden, a hobby she took up after seeing an ad in the botanical garden’s newsletter. “It said, ‘Citizen scientist...

[ad_1] It turns out human bones, especially thigh bones, were prized by New Guinean warriors as materials which could be carved into exceptionally strong, fierce daggers. Until the 20th century, males in New Guinea often used bones, particularly femur bones acquired from large birds, to carve out sharp tools which served as both combat weapons as well as symbols of prestige and respect in the community. However, in a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science , a team of American researchers find that bone daggers fashioned from human thigh bones actually made for the strongest type of weapons, and were by extension often viewed by members of the community as symbols of status and notoriety. “[Paupan] men [of New Guinea] made human bone daggers differently,” says Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and the lead researcher of the new study. “They made them to be stronger—which we interpreted as a d...

[ad_1] In early January, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced that more than 90 percent of the outer continental shelf in federal offshore areas is now available for offshore drilling exploration and development. In the official release, Zinke noted that the plan for this new exploration would strike a balance between protecting the coasts and achieving “energy dominance” in America. But marine scientists say that scale is really tipped. Opening up more areas to drilling, they say, means far more disruption for marine ecosystems and an even greater increased risk for oil spills. Offshore drilling is way more than sucking up oil through pipes. Mohammed Gabr, professor of civil engineering at North Carolina State University, says that offshore drilling requires three steps: investigating the site, boring exploratory wells, and laying the pipe, and each one can affect the ecosystems that surround the area. To find potential oil deposits, engineers can use seismic...

[ad_1] Right now, many of the big websites, services, and apps you use are rushing to get their new privacy policies and terms of service in order. You’ve probably noticed all the notifications about it popping up on your phone and in your email. Just this week, we’ve seen messages from Etsy, Instagram, GoDaddy, Squarespace, Square, LinkedIn, Strava, SoundCloud, and just about any other app that requires you to sign up for an account. The driving force behind this change is Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which has been approved since 2016, but goes into effect on May 25, 2018. GDPR is a massive overhaul of privacy on the Web laid out over the course of a 261-page document that you can read here if you’re feeling studious. The recent wave of privacy policy and terms of service notifications, however, mostly stem from a part of the regulation regarding consent and taking steps to prevent companies from opting users into terms that are hidd...

[ad_1] Every time you send an email or text, or even look up a friend's address on Google Maps, you rely on a digital list of your contacts. But just because you use it all the time doesn't mean you treat it very well. Many of us let old numbers, needless duplicates, and unlabeled mystery addresses pile up in whatever contacts app we prefer. This makes it harder to find the information we need when we need it. Luckily, the apps that store contact lists—we're focusing on those from Google, Apple, and Microsoft—can help you clean up duplicates, delete contacts with missing or outdated information, and sync these changes between apps and devices. In general, to avoid having your contacts list sprawl across too many accounts, we'd recommend that you pick one of these contacts services to serve as your primary account, based on the apps and devices you rely on the most (heavy iPhone users should go through Apple, Android devotees should pick Google, and so on). Once you'...