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

[ad_1] This 3,200-year-old find is exciting because it shows that the Ancient Egyptian’s shared our love of cheese—to the extent it was given as a funerary offering. But not only that, it also fits into archaeology’s growing understanding of the importance of dairy to the development of the human diet in Europe. Dairy in diets About two-thirds of the world’s population is lactose intolerant. So although dairy products are a daily part of the diet for many living in Europe, Northern India, and North America, drinking milk in adulthood was only possible from the Bronze Age, over the last 4,500 years. For most of human history, adults lost the ability to consume milk after infancy—and the same is true of people who are lactose intolerant today. After weaning, people with lactose intolerance can no longer produce the enzyme lactase. This is necessary to break down the lactose sugars in fresh milk into compounds that can be easily digested. People with lactose i...

[ad_1] ↑ Oluyinka Olutoye, pediatric surgeon and co-director of the Texas Children’s Fetal Center I am a pediatric surgeon, but I meet many of my patients when they’re still growing inside their mother’s womb. That’s because I specialize in fetal surgery—performing an operation on a baby before it’s born. Usually, we remove the baby from the uterus, operate, then put it back. But you can’t always do that. For example, spina bifida, a defect where bone and flesh don’t fully cover the spinal cord, requires intervention at around 22 to 25 weeks of gestation. If we make a large cut in the uterus at that time, when the fetus weighs less than a pound, the organ could tear as the baby grows, endangering mother and child. To get around that, doctors at my hospital created a technique to operate without opening the womb. We make two tiny incisions in the uterus. Then we insert probes with small cameras at the ends and carefully use them to re...

[ad_1] When was the last time you googled yourself? It’s not just about vanity: Potential employers, dates, and even friends may search for your name from time to time—and what they see can really affect their first impression of you. Unfortunately, despite what some people think, you can’t really control what the search engine says. “Google is just reflecting the web,” says Vanessa Fox, a search engine optimization (SEO) expert and author of Marketing in the Age of Google . Fox should know—she used to work at the tech behemoth, and even helped launch some of the tools we’ll be talking about later. “If you want to get something taken off of Google,” she says, “you’re really thinking about removing it from the web entirely.” However, that doesn’t mean you’re completely at the mercy of the search giant. Here are a few steps you can take to curate your image on Google. Request a takedown from Google While y...

[ad_1] Right on time, the Atlantic Ocean is waking up as we approach the peak of hurricane season. Conditions are looking more favorable for tropical development over the next couple of weeks, a far cry from the quiet, boring weather we’ve seen in the Atlantic Ocean so far this summer. It’s too early to tell if anything will threaten the United States—contrary to what many folks are saying on social media—but the uptick in activity is a reminder that it’s important to stay prepared even in a relatively quiet hurricane season. The growth of favorable conditions in the Atlantic is already apparent off the coast of Africa. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) started issuing advisories on Potential Tropical Cyclone Six near the Cabo Verde Islands on Thursday. The term “potential tropical cyclone” is a designation assigned to a tropical wave that hasn’t yet become a tropical cyclone, but it’s expected to develop into one soon and is close...

[ad_1] Supercomputers are powerful machines with great names—Blue Waters, Bridges, Jetstream, Comet. But a new one will soon be joining that list: Frontera. The $60 million machine will live at the University of Texas at Austin and is scheduled to come online next year. “It will be the fastest machine ever deployed at a university in the US,” says Dan Stanzione, the executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center. With supercomputers, the title of fastest is a moving target—what’s perhaps more important is not the exact ranking, but that they’re available for researchers to use in the first place. Right now, the fastest supercomputer in the world is called Summit, and it’s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and is specifically tailored for AI. But supercomputers located not at government labs but at universities—like Frontera and its ilk—play a crucial role in the ever...

[ad_1] If you looked up on the night of March 28, 2008 in Eastern Canada, you might have seen a bright, white-purple ribbon weaving up into the sky, unlike anything you had ever seen before. Could it be lighting? Fireworks? Maybe a spaceship finally bringing the first wave of envoys from the nearest habitable planet? No, it’s just STEVE. STEVE isn’t your friendly neighborhood alien—it’s an acronym: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. In simpler terms, it’s hot. Really hot. The purple arc is actually a collection of electrons flying westward through the atmosphere as they reach temperatures of more than 5600 degrees Celsius (more than 10,100 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s hotter than the surface of Sun, making it the hottest place near Earth on the rare occasions when it’s active, said Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Calgary and first author on a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters about STEVE....

[ad_1] Becoming an astronaut isn’t for everyone. Robb Kulin recently became the first astronaut candidate in 50 years to drop out of NASA's astronaut training program, and though it’s tempting to focus on the challenges and stresses he must have faced at NASA, former astronauts emphasize that this isn’t about one candidate who just couldn’t cut it. “I don’t want to speculate about any specific astronaut,” says Chris Hadfield, a Canadian Air Force pilot and astronaut on three separate missions to space. “But it’s not like someone was taking a course and they just couldn’t hack it and they quit.” Hadfield says this is exactly what the candidacy period is all about. It’s a time to evaluate whether this is something you truly want to do and where NASA has an opportunity to evaluate if you’re really the right person to do it. Being an astronaut isn’t just a job, he explains, it’s a life of service in a ...

[ad_1] Today, Google rolled out a new ability for the Google Assistant. The helpful, disembodied entity that lives inside smartphones and Google Home devices can now interpret two languages at the same time, including French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian and English. It’s a useful new function for the Google Home, especially as the number of multilingual homes increases. But, how will users know about it? It’s a question I recently encountered in my own personal experience. A few weeks ago, the familiar command that turns my Philips Hue lights on and off stopped working.“OK, Google, turn off the light in the living room.” The lights didn’t budge. I spent 20 minutes repeating the command and digging into the Google Home app, which I hadn’t opened in quite some time—after all, that’s why I have a voice assistant in the first place, right? Hearing my repetitive commands, my wife yelled from upstairs, “You have to say ‘turn o...

[ad_1] W ildlife rehabilitators Christina and Michael are used to strange calls. But this one was especially unusual. A man had come home to his tenth floor apartment to a pile of leaves and twigs on his bed. Looking closer, he realized it was a nest with a pair of just-born baby squirrels curled up inside. Christina’s guessed that the original nest was destroyed, and needing a safe place to give birth, a very pregnant squirrel scrambled through the apartment’s open window. The rehabbers tried to reunite the babies with the mother, who kept racing back to the apartment with more nesting material, but she wouldn’t take them. And she had a good reason not to. “Even if we could have reunited them, there was very little chance the mom could keep them warm because there was no nest,” says Christina. “The two babies would absolutely have died, so we had to intervene and take them.” Unfortunately, one of the babies didn’t make it, but Thumbelina...

[ad_1] Our smartphones are our constant companions. We hunch over their screens, gaze at their blue-tinted light, and sacrifice human companionship for digital company. Over time, all these habits can wreak havoc on our health. Luckily, you can avoid some of these negative effects without entirely relinquishing your pocket computer's company. Here's how to protect your health from your smartphone. Improve your posture How do you stand or sit when you're occupied with your smartphone? If you bend over the screen, neck cricked, then you're not alone. Unfortunately, this unnatural position, dubbed "text neck," could be causing an increasing number of neck and spine injuries, research suggests. As we gaze down at our phones for hours every day, we're reversing the typical backward curve of the neck, Todd Lanman, spinal neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters last year. He has a fix, although it might attract a few odd looks fro...

[ad_1] When those first fat drops of summer rain fall to the hot, dry ground, have you ever noticed a distinctive odor? I have childhood memories of family members who were farmers describing how they could always “smell rain” right before a storm. Of course rain itself has no scent. But moments before a rain event, an “earthy” smell known as petrichor does permeate the air. People call it musky, fresh—generally pleasant. This smell actually comes from the moistening of the ground. Australian scientists first documented the process of petrichor formation in 1964 and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology further studied the mechanics of the process in the 2010s. Petrichor is a combination of fragrant chemical compounds. Some are from oils made by plants. The main contributor to petrichor are actinobacteria. These tiny microorganisms can be found in rural and urban areas as well as in marine environments. They decompose dead or decaying or...

[ad_1] This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the 1988 Yellowstone fires—massive blazes that affected about 1.2 million acres in and around Yellowstone National Park. Their size and severity surprised scientists, managers, and the public and received heavy media coverage. Many news reports proclaimed that Yellowstone was destroyed, but nothing was further from the truth. I was there during the fires and returned that fall to view the aftermath. Burned forests extended for miles, with blackened tree trunks creating a stark and seemingly desolate landscape. But peering down from a helicopter, we were surprised to see that the fires had actually produced a mosaic of burned and unburned patches of forest. I have studied the recovery of Yellowstone’s forests since 1989, watching landscapes of charred trees transition into lush young forests. Fires play an important ecological role in many ecosystems, and Yellowstone’s native plants and animals are well-adapted to histori...

[ad_1] The annual IFA conference in Berlin is the biggest consumer electronics trade show in Europe. It’s a lot like the annual CES conference that happens in Las Vegas every January. IFA helps ease the pain of summer’s end by dumping a whole slew of new gadgets onto our list of gizmos to lust after. We aren’t on the show floor in Germany, but we’re keeping tabs on all the sweet new gear making its debut from afar. Here’s a running list of new stuff—andbe sure to check back for updates next time you see this post crawling through your social feeds. Bang & Olufsen Beosound Edge is a giant speaker that rolls B&O has a reputation for creating products that are outrageous and expensive, but also good. Its latest creation is a circular speaker that you control by rolling it back and forth on the floor. The promotional material also claims it can “feel your presence.” Can any of your current speakers do that? Didn’t think so. Acer ...

[ad_1] Fact: A Dutch anatomist build artistic scenes using baby skeletons and body parts—and the Russian Tsar loved them By Mary Beth Griggs Frederik Ruysch was a Dutch anatomist and botanist fascinated with embalming. As we discussed in this week’s episode, his professional career as a surgeon and obstetrician in Amsterdam gave him access to a lot of bodies, and in his spare time he made huge efforts to embalm humans and other animals in fanciful ways—to preserve their anatomy for future study, and give people a better idea of how the natural world (including humans) worked. Some amazing drawings of his work can be found here. He injected arteries with a liquid red wax after death. The technique not only gave the bodies a more lifelike appearance but also made it possible for early anatomists to trace tiny blood vessels that would otherwise have gotten lost. He created a museum where he could display his elaborate embalming jars, allowing the public to come in and see...

[ad_1] Self-driving cars. Faster MRI scans, interpreted by robotic radiologists. Mind reading and x-ray vision. Artificial intelligence promises to permanently alter world. (In some ways, it already has. Just ask this AI scheduling assistant.) Artificial intelligence can take many forms. But it’s roughly defined as a computer system capable of tackling human tasks like sensory perception and decision-making. Since its earliest days, AI has fallen prey to cycles of extreme hype—and subsequent collapse. While recent technological advances may finally put an end to this boom-and-bust pattern, cheekily termed an “AI winter,” some scientists remain convinced winter is coming again. What is an AI winter? Humans have been pondering the potential of artificial intelligence for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks believed, for example, that a bronze automaton named Talos protected the island of Crete from maritime adversaries. But AI only moved from the mythical realm to t...

[ad_1] As you enter Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in Les Epesses, France, you might come across a curious new attraction: crows collecting trash in exchange for treats. No, the birds aren’t the park’s newest cleanup crew. In fact, the performance is merely a training exercise. But Puy du Fou president Nicolas de Villiers says there’s an alternative motive to the workout as well—to send a message to park visitors: Don’t litter. “We want to show humans that they should pick up waste by themselves,” he says. “People have been a bit shocked seeing the crow doing this game. We’re not educating the crows, we’re educating human beings.” The whole thing actually started by accident. Puy du Fou hosts a number of live bird shows featuring falcons, owls, vultures, and crows. In one show, a crow is supposed to pick up a rose and offer it to a princess. But during a particular performance, instead of picking up a rose, the crow ...

[ad_1] The chip powering your smartphone is teeming with transistors. These Lilliputian gates open and close to control the flow of electrons, forming binary zeros and ones that tell the device what to do. Smaller gates mean more transistors—and faster chips. In 1975, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted counts would double biennially. (Yes, this is Moore’s law.) Analysts debate whether transistor counts will continue their exponential rise, but so far the trajectory has held steady. In 1971, the Intel 4004 chip had just 2,300; the ones inside ’90s-era personal computers sported millions; and today’s silicon can contain billions. But running that many transistors takes a lot of power. So in the mid-aughts, engineers began devising more-efficient chips by segmenting processors into cores, groupings of transistors that each handle their own parallel tasks and use less power. But these multicore chips still need to work quickly, so engineers continue to jam in tr...

[ad_1] The human brain is one of the most complex structures ever to evolve on this planet, but we’re still barely able to understand exactly what sets it apart. We may be a little closer to figuring it out, thanks to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience that reports a new type of brain cell—one unique to human beings. It’s called the rosehip neuron, and they comprise about 10 to 15 percent of the upper layer of the human neocortex—the portion of the brain responsible for much of our advanced cognition. The purpose of the study was to understand the diversity of the neocortex and see whether humans possess types of neurons that are absent in other animals. “We’ve never seen anything like it before,” says Gábor Tamás, a researcher from the University of Szeged in Hungary and coauthor of the new study. “The results are surprising, but we’re not surprised to find elements of this human neurocircuit that...