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

[ad_1] O n January 17, 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murder at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection, though. Forster was going to be electrified. The experiments were to be carried out by the Italian natural philosopher Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered “animal electricity” in 1780, and for whom the field of galvanism is named. With Forster on the slab before him, Aldini and his assistants started to experiment. The Times newspaper reported: It looked to some spectators “as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.” By the time Aldini was experimenting on Forster, the idea that there was some peculiarly intimate relationship between electricity and the processes of life was ...

[ad_1] We aren’t exactly a nation of readers. On a typical day, just 15 percent of men and 22 percent of women read for pleasure. In the last year, one in four Americans haven’t read a single book in any format—paperback, audiobook, or otherwise. But social media and smartphone app companies think they may have the solution to our reading aversion. From Silicon Valley heavyweights to bookworm-run startups, efforts to bring fiction to our smartphones are proliferating. While reading a book in Facebook Messenger or “chat fiction” on Snapchat might seem strange, silly, or tedious, each new initiative is pushing up against the boundaries of the book cover. Last year, James Patterson, one of the most commercially-successful authors of all time ( Forbes pegged his 2016 income at $95 million), and his team approached Facebook about adapting one of his forthcoming novel to its messaging app. So the author, who believes Americans need “a shared literature," o...

[ad_1] Deep in the bowels of the Scarehouse Pittsburgh’s most extreme haunted attraction, lurk zombies, demons, and a sociologist obsessed with fear. Margee Kerr has been studying fright for over a decade, and her most recent experiment tries to make sense of why so many people willingly place themselves at the mercy of machete-wielding monsters this time of year. As sociologist-in-residence at the Scarehouse, Kerr also uses her findings to help design the attraction for maximum horror. But Kerr’s work is about more than achieving the maximum air during a jump scare. While fear is generally regarded as a negative emotion—albeit one that has helped us survive as a species—her latest research suggests that it can also do wonders for your mood and, paradoxically, help you relax. People who chose to go through a frightening experience came out feeling happier and less stressed, she and her colleague at the University of Pittsburgh found. The scare-ees exhibited decre...

[ad_1] In times of old, as legend goes, travelers wandering near a marsh would see the flicker of a light in the distance and confuse it with the glow of a candle from a far-away home. But there was no home and no candle. As they followed the glimmer into the wetland, the light would disappear—but not before the betrayed wanderers found themselves lost among the reeds, where many of them met their chilling end. This fiery orb, typically seen above stagnant water, became personified in European folklore. Some historical accounts say it was considered a satanic sprite that wielded a fleeting wisp of fire, earning it the name “Will with the wisp,” or will-o’-the-wisp. In other tales, it was the lost soul of a man named Jack. After being denied entry to the underworld, he haunted the night with a homemade light—a burning piece of coal inside a carved turnip—and became known as “Jack with the lantern,” or jack-o’-lantern. While the exact ...

[ad_1] Bitcoin needs electricity to exist. The currency requires computers that perform complicated math, which demands massive amounts of electricity. An alarming new—albeit disputed—study forecasts that the future energy use of all that computing power, just from Bitcoin alone, could spur the planet to warm, over the next 11 to 22 years, above the 2-degree-Celsius goal set by international climate scientists. The study, in the journal Nature Climate Change , estimates that Bitcoin-related computing was responsible for 69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017. Then the researchers examined the way that other technologies have been adapted over time—tech like electricity, credit cards, or dishwashers. Using that as a guide, they projected different paths that Bitcoin itself could take in terms of its use in the future. If society adopts it very quickly, it would take 11 years before, all by itself, it pushes the globe over the temperature line in the...

[ad_1] The visceral urge to flee roving sharks has kept us safe for millennia. So it makes sense that 25.4 percent of us fear these toothy predators, despite zero Americans dying in an attack in 2017. Other terrors aren’t so obviously rooted in evolution, but pack some of the common ones into a house—as we did—and you’re bound to find something to rattle your bones. 1. Heights: 28.2% We’re not born acrophobic, but we learn to be early on. Even in our largely cliff-free lives, a fear of heights remains so fundamental that 9-month-old babies avoid drop-offs when crawling. 2. Reptiles: 23.6% Each year, 100,000 people die from snake bites, but it could be worse. Humans are especially good at spying slitherers: Even in our peripheral vision, we’re better at spotting snakes than other potential threats such as spiders, likely because the fanged reptiles pose a greater danger. 3. Public speaking: 20% Although glossophobia is extremely common, it’s rare...

[ad_1] Islands breed strange animals. Isolated from the rest of the world, these ecosystems often produce creatures uniquely adapted to their idiosyncratic environments. Nations like Madagascar and New Zealand can thus support strikingly similar life despite dissimilar climates. So while most of the world has birds that rely primarily on vision, Madagascar and New Zealand has a couple of strange additions. Or in some cases, had . Though the phrase “elephant bird” probably conjures images of an emu or ostrich, a recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that these extinct giants had more in common with the kiwi. Both were flightless and, according to the new research, were mostly blind and nocturnal. This sort of fits into how you might think of a kiwi. They’re diminutive, with tiny fluffy brown feathers and preposterously large eggs in comparison to their bodies—you might even call them silly. The fact that they can hardly see and roa...

[ad_1] What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s newest podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, PocketCasts, and basically everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you'll love the show. Check it out: Fact: Fetuses can turn to stone—and stay inside their mothers for decades By Rachel Feltman A few years ago, a 75-year-old Moroccan woman named Zahra Aboutalib went to the hospital with abdominal pain. Scans revealed a strange mass, and eventually, doctors figured out the shocking source of her pain: a baby she conceived 46 years before. You can learn more about Aboutalib's incredible ordeal in this doc...

[ad_1] Halloween is tomorrow, and there will be hordes of children (and adults) stuffing their faces with chocolate of all kinds all over the place—a reminder that humans have a pretty personal relationship with this delightfully sweet candy. And now it looks like that relationship started further back then we imagined. New evidence reported in Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday suggests that the cacao tree, from which we collect cocoa beans to make chocolate, was domesticated by humans in South America more than 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. This would push back cocoa bean domestication to 5,400 years ago, making this new discovery the oldest archeological evidence of domesticated cacao in the world, and would also peg the origin point of cocoa production to the upper Amazon of South America, not Central America as was once thought. The new findings paint a more complicated and deeper picture of humans’ relationship with cacao, one of the world’s...

[ad_1] The Tyrannosaurus rex was a nightmarish lizard, a menacing meat-eater that chomped down on other dinosaurs like the Triceratops and Edmontosaurus with a bone-crushing bite. They likely even cannibalized members of their own species. But what about the more than 700 other species of dinosaur that existed millions of years ago? For many of them, meat wasn’t on the menu. They ate salad instead. That’s according to Jordan Mallon, a paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, who says the vast majority of dinosaurs were actually herbivores, munching on plant matter rather than flesh. “In any ecosystem, you have more herbivores than carnivores,” Mallon says. This applies to the landscapes of today—there are more deer than, say, wolves—and to ancient ecosystems. During his digs, he says, “I probably see six herbivorous dinosaurs to every one carnivore.” And surprisingly, the bigger the dinosaurs were, the more likely they were to b...

[ad_1] Around 11 p.m. on Monday, NASA’s mission to “touch the sun” officially broke the record for fastest moving spacecraft—therefore becoming the fastest human-made object ever, relative to the sun. Registering just one historical moment wasn’t enough for the plucky explorer though, because on the same day the Parker Solar Probe also got closer to the sun than any other probe before it. “It’s been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we’ve now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history,” said Project Manager Andy Driesman in a press release. The new speed to beat is 153,454 miles per hour as viewed from a stationary sun, according to the team’s calculations. That’s more than 90 times faster than your typical bullet and more than twice as fast as the Earth orbits our host star, which is the fastest most of us will ever get to travel. That clip also works out to just over two ten-thousandt...

[ad_1] Dogs are the superheroes we don’t deserve. They look incredible in capes, can parse human speech, and can even read your mood. They also might be able to sniff out malaria. A group of researchers in the United Kingdom trained dogs to detect malaria in people infected with the disease but who had no fever or physical symptoms. They presented the results this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans. Malaria is a global problem. Despite $2.7 billion in funding to eradicate the disease, malaria still infected 216 million people and killed 445,000 worldwide in 2016, according to the World Health Organization. Some countries have had success—Sri Lanka, for example, declared itself malaria-free that same year—but others, like South Africa, have fallen behind the WHO’s goal of eliminating malaria in that country by the year 2020. The effort to train malaria-sniffing dogs developed out of a paper published ...

[ad_1] Science doesn't typically drive voters to the polls. Just consider this: Most Americans agree that the government isn’t doing enough to protect the environment, yet neither curbing climate change nor ecological protection has yet cracked the list of America's top 10 policy priorities, according to Pew Research. But even without a public push from the majority, the results of next week’s midterm elections could have a lasting impact on the federal government’s science and tech priorities. Enough House and Senate seats are on the ballot to flip legislative control—though a House swap is more likely. FiveThirtyEight says there’s an an 85-percent chance that the lower chamber will change hands, and the Cook Political Report has marked 49 races as toss-ups. A sweeping change could reset the agenda on dozens of issues, including incentivizing renewable-energy efforts and protecting net neutrality. “One of the primary things we would see immediately w...

[ad_1] It’s easy to feel disconnected from those who do science. The people you read about making big discoveries seem so distant and learned. So today your biology homework is to watch this video of actual scientists—who are in charge of millions of dollars worth of deep-sea roving equipment—get all squeal-y about a lil octopus. Now, are they hamming it up a little for the video feed? Maybe. But this is also a genuinely exciting find. Dumbo octopuses live multiple miles beneath the ocean surface, which makes them exceedingly difficult to study, and this was a rare glimpse at a living specimen. Plus, come on, it’s so cute! Those fins flapping like elephant ears, that rippling mantle, those twisting, turning suckers. Any scientist would be thrilled to witness a creature like that, much less a scientist who has prepared for this mission for months—probably more like years—and is now finally getting to see what life is like at the bottom of the Pacific O...

[ad_1] The new iPhones got their time to shine a few months ago, but now Apple is back to announce more products before the close of 2018. We won’t know for sure what the company has for us until Tim Cook and his pals take the stage, but there are some rumors about what we might see. Here’s a quick rundown of what we expect. We will finally get a redesigned laptop to replace or refresh the MacBook and MacBook Air lines. The stakes are high with that product. The new iPad will show up with no home button, very little bezel, and possibly USB-C connectivity instead of the typical Lightning adapter. A consumer Mac Mini could show up as a companion to the enterprise-specific Mac Mini was got earlier this year. We will be watching the live stream of the event right here and updating this page with new products and announcements as well as some sarcastic jokes because it wouldn’t be a semi-live blog without them. [ad_2] Written By Stan Horaczek

[ad_1] On Sunday, Brazil elected a new president: Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro has been compared to President Donald Trump for his far-right politics. Like Trump, his election is a sign of dissatisfaction with the status quo in Brazil, but also like Trump, his actions on matters like the environment will have consequences that reach around the globe. In this, he might beat the United States president, because he now governs an incomparable resource—the Amazon. “There’s really nothing that Bolsonaro is putting on the table that makes conservationists and scientists happy right now,” says noted conservation biologist William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia. Among his many controversial statements, Bolsonaro vows to open up indigenous lands to resource exploitation, ban environmental NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund, place Brazil’s environmental ministry under the control of its ministry of agriculture, and relax laws safeguarding the Amazon from ...

[ad_1] As part of an animal’s routine check up, the veterinarians at the Oregon Zoo send each “patient” through an x-ray machine. The zoo also recently tweeted out a compilation of their spookiest x-ray pictures as an early Halloween celebration. We talked to a veterinarian at the zoo, Richard Sim, about some of the wild anatomy in each image. “They have a lot of strength in their hands,” says Sim. “Often when gripping a branch, they’ll have two toes on one side and two toes on the other,” as you can see in this image. Chameleons extend their tails for balance, so the fact that this little guy has his curled up into a perfect spiral means he must be pretty relaxed. Taking a look at this bat skeleton you can see the lightweight bones and backwards knees that allow these little mammals to fly. But what’s really crazy are the thin, curved bones at the top of the x-ray. Those are the bat’s fingers . Sim says bats evolved really lon...

[ad_1] There’s a lot to do the week before Halloween. You have to put the finishing touches on your outfit, stock up on candy for trick-or-treaters, and “like” all those photos your friends posted over the weekend from various parties. Don’t worry if all that preparation made you fall behind on all the week’s tech news. Here’s a recap of what you missed, plus a podcast that you can listen to as you try to drive to a Halloween party in an enormous and uncomfortable costume that makes you look like one of the dragons from Game of Thrones . Listen to our podcast! You may have noticed that Last Week in Tech showed up in your podcast feeds last Friday instead of this Monday. We’re switching up the schedule a little as we move offices. This week’s episode has a rundown on the iPhone XR and its new position as the default iPhone. We also talk about the Facebook Messenger redesign which focuses on simplicity, as well as the future of internet priv...

[ad_1] Last week, following an announcement from Science in Poland , a polish public information service, news reports around the web went something like this: A giant bird digested the finger bones of an ill-fated neanderthal child in Poland over 100,000 years ago. That’s an incredible amount of detail to surmise from just a few small finger bones. So is it true? It turns out that the news release was based on research that has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and won’t be until later this year. It’s impossible to judge evidence you can’t see, and the the authors of the new research declined to provide specifics before their study comes out. So we turned to a fossil expert who walked us through what it would take to get from bone to bird. Paleontologist Yolanda Fernandez-Jalvo is an expert in taphonomy, which is, as she likes to explain it, “the forensics of fossils.” She figures out how fossils become fossils. Fernandez-Jalvo says she ...