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

[ad_1] Roads broke apart, cracks radiated up buildings, and books fell from shelves today when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked Anchorage, Alaska and surrounding areas. The quake struck around 8:30 a.m. local time (12:30 p.m. on the East Coast), triggering a tsunami warning and driving some residents to evacuate inland. A number of aftershocks between magnitudes 4 and 5.8 continued to hit the Cook Inlet, just south of where the Aleutian Islands meet the mainland, before the tsunami warning was canceled. At press time, no injuries had been reported. The ground shook for more than a minute, forcing people to take shelter under desks and doorframes as seen in this footage taken by KTVA 11 from an Anchorage courthouse. The shaking substantially damaged infrastructure, reducing multiple roads to fractured slabs, cutting power, and sending cracks through buildings. The Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport has halted flights, and utilities warned residents to watch out for gas leaks a...

[ad_1] There are plenty of ways to fall off a bicycle. Here’s one scenario: a city rider hits an open car door and goes flying. Another? A mountain biker bumps into a rock at a bad angle, wipes out, and smashes their noggin on the trail. While these types of crashes are different, they share a stark similarity: both have the potential to knock you unconscious, or even kill you. It’s accidents like these that a new sensor system from bike company Specialized is designed to detect. The gadget is roughly 1 by 1.5 inches in size, weighs less than an ounce, and attaches to the back of the helmet. If the onboard accelerometer and gyroscope detect a fall—maybe the whiplash of that car door impact, or the linear and rotational forces of a head strike on the ground—it uses its Bluetooth connection to your smartphone to initiate an alarm. If you don’t respond in time, it can email and text your emergency contacts, and will even give them a link to the location where ...

[ad_1] Scientist Paul Thomas won’t forget the first time he ripped into a package of truffles he ordered from France after his own attempts to forage for this delicacy in the UK had failed. “Once I opened the packet, the aroma filled my house,” Thomas said. “They flavored everything in our fridge. I was hooked.” Thomas can’t get enough of the ugly but intensively flavorful fungi. He cultivates them. He cooks with them. He even helps organize Napa Valley’s yearly truffle festival. Thomas, an academic in the department of natural sciences at the University of Stirling, has been studying truffles since the early 2000s. Much to his horror, his most recent research suggests that this prized gourmet treat — specifically Tuber melanosporum , a species of black truffle — may vanish from southern Europe by the end of this century. The reason — as is the case with many foods today — i...

[ad_1] The Earth glows faintly with the bustle of humanity. From far away you can’t pick out individual homes, or even cities, but by tracking the collective photons that our spotlights and streetlights throw out over time, you might be able to get a rough sense of the rise of technological civilization—and you might notice if all of the lights started going out. The same story applies to the universe at large. Stars are the ultimate light bulbs, and while some of their rays dead-end into dust-particles, others get away intact. Space has a reputation for being cold and dark, but out in the comparatively empty void between galaxies, these escaped particles of light collectively produce a diffuse glimmer everywhere. This glow tells you what’s out there without the hassle of counting all the stars and galaxies one by one. Borrowing tools from particle physics, an international team of astrophysicists has carried out the most accurate and sweeping measurement yet of this l...

[ad_1] This morning, Marriott hotels revealed that an “unauthorized party” accessed its Starwood reservation database and made off with information regarding roughly 500 million guests. The hotel chain has reported the breach to the authorities and now begins the long process of sorting out just how violated each affected customer really is. The leaked information is mostly what you’d expect—personal data you have to fork over when checking into a hotel for the night. That includes standard stuff you might lose in a typical breach, like your name, email address, phone number, and date of birth. Some credit card info also got out, but the chain says it’s not sure if the perpetrating scoundrels have the ability to decrypt it. What’s not typical, however, is the fact that the breach also includes passport numbers, a fact that comes with its own some specific risks. How serious is it? “Passport data is something you should hold onto more tightly tha...

[ad_1] After you’ve picked over the turkey carcass and officially bid farewell to Thanksgiving, it’s time to celebrate family and togetherness in a winter way: sawing off a life form’s vital organs, dragging it indoors, and keeping it unnaturally alive for several weeks. That’s right—we’re talking about Christmas trees. Joking aside, that “alive” part is key. Nobody wants to gather around some drooping, brown-needled vegetation. Luckily, extending the lifespans of these plants is easy—if you understand the science behind it. The botany of Christmas Most holiday conifers belong to the pine, fir, or spruce families of trees, although if you live farther south, you’re more likely to find a cypress. As you shop, you should check the needles to determine which species are available, because each evergreen comes with its own pros and cons. Pine needles are very long—up to 16 inches on older trees—and grow in clusters of t...

[ad_1] Spider milk may sound like a fictional ingredient you would find in Professor Snape’s potions class à la Harry Potter, but scientists in China have found at least one species of real-world spider that does indeed produce a milk-like fluid to nourish its young. The jumping spider Toxeus magnus lives in China and Taiwan. Its appearance mimics that of an ant, but it’s parental behavior is surprisingly mammalian. The mother spider cares for the newborn spiderlings for up to 20 days—a long time for a critter whose entire lifespan is just six months to a year. During these first 20 days, she secretes a white fluid that’s rich in sugars and proteins, from its abdomen. The “milk” is crucial for the survival of the young spiders, and surprisingly, it contains four times as much protein as cow’s milk, , according to a new study published this week in Science . “I thought it was remarkable, you don’t really expect spiders to be pro...

[ad_1] About a year and a half ago, Google decided that its Chrome OS (short for “operating system”) should play nice with Android apps, which were previously relegated only to smartphones and Android-powered tablets. It’s a logical step, and other companies like Apple and Microsoft have been working to marry the historically quarrelsome relationship between web apps that run in a browser and mobile apps downloaded from an app store in recent years. A device like the Pixel Slate is the perfect candidate to take that relationship to the next step. When you’re holding the tablet without its keyboard, the hardware itself to the Android selections found in the Google Play store. At the same time, the beautiful 12.3-inch screen demands a full version of Google Chrome that displays complete versions of websites rather than nerfing them down to the smushed mobile versions. While the Pixel Slate shows a lot of promise, it illustrates how much work there is to do before t...

[ad_1] You might expect scientists to encounter hazards out in the field. But laboratories aren’t safe havens either. We asked researchers about the most dangerous things they work with. 1. Liquid Helium ↑ Jenny Ardelean, graduate student in mechanical engineering at Columbia University To study the intrinsic properties of materials like atomically thin semiconductors, we need to get rid of heat, which causes subtle vibrations and makes our data fuzzy. We use liquid helium to cool substances to minus 453°F, a bit warmer than space. Our lab pipes it through a closed system to avoid having to transfer—and risk spilling—the expensive liquid. If that happened, the helium could evaporate, burn off your skin, or displace oxygen so you’d suffocate. 2. High-powered laser ↑ Donald Umstadter, director of the Extreme Light Lab at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln My lab develops imaging techniques using the Dio­cles Laser, which produces a beam rou...

[ad_1] Besides telling time and displaying notifications, an Apple Watch functions primarily as a health and fitness tracker. Right out of the box, the Series 4 device can monitor your heart rate, count steps taken and calories burned, record physical activities from yoga to swimming, remind you to take breaks from work, and more. And that's not all. Add in some dedicated apps, and the wearable becomes capable of boosting your health even more. We've selected some of the Apple Watch's top fitness apps—install a few and start feeling the burn. Among runners and cyclists, Strava is already one of the most popular activity-tracking smartphone apps. Its companion program for the Apple Watch adds the convenience of recording movement from your wrist, so athletes can leave their phones at home. When you wear your Apple Watch, its Strava app can log workouts from start to finish, displaying your stats—time, pace, distance, speed, and heart rate—on screen as you go. After you ...

[ad_1] F or more than a century, scientists have interrogated the link between seasonal weather and crime, consistently finding that warm summer temperatures yield more violence. Higher heat tends to fray nerves and shorten tempers, inspiring aggression, which is why riots tend to happen in the warmer months. Scientists in Colorado, however, recently explored what happens to crime when winters become warmer. Their study found that milder winters — which are occurring more frequently as a result of climate change — caused regional crime rates to rise over the past several decades. The researchers think crime increases during a warmer-than-normal winter because people don’t hunker down inside to stay warm. Instead, they go out. “People are out of their homes more,” said Ryan Harp, a doctoral candidate in the University of Colorado Boulder’s department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and the study’s lead author. “...

[ad_1] Released during the national hubbub of Black Friday, the Fourth National Climate Assessment is just the latest in a series of grim reports. Experts lay out what’s already unfolding around us as a result of climate change, and offer a series of future scenarios based on how much—and whether—the global community manages to slow down rising carbon emissions. “We’re seeing these predictions become reality all across the country now,” says University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban. Of course, to scientists, this dread is nothing new. “I would argue that it’s the exact same story that has been told for 25 years,” says Brett Scheffers, a global change ecologist at the University of Florida. “U.S. residents are now being forced to cope with dangerously high temperatures, rising seas, deadly wildfires, torrential rainfalls and devastating hurricanes,” report coauthor Brenda Ekwurzel wrote in a prepared statement publis...

[ad_1] All rhinos are unicorns, really—they just aren’t pearly white and magical the way our myths say they should be. These powerful beasts get their strength from stocky muscles and keratinized body armor instead of rainbows and magic, but they're the only unicorns we've got. And one extinct species is named accordingly: the Siberian unicorn. Elasmotherium sibericum was the last remaining survivor of the Elasmotherium genus, which was once a large, diverse group of giant rhinos. Siberian unicorns were once thought to have gone extinct during a broad “background extinction” that occurred during the early and middle Pleistocene, which covers a period from around 126,000 to 2.5 million years ago. The species hadn’t been studied much, but it was previously thought that E. sibericum died out roughly 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. But new research dating the fossilized molars of these ancient unicorns shows that they lasted all the way to the late Quaternary ...

[ad_1] If you fall hard and break your arm, your body will let you know with crackling hot speed that something is wrong. Robots, though, don’t have neurons, so need a method to know what’s going on with their artificial bodies. Consider a future where a robot operates autonomously, but an appendage becomes injured, says Robert Shepherd, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell University. “It’s going to continue moving its limb and thinking its hand or foot is going to be in one position, when it’s actually going to be in a different position,” he says. “We need skins, or internal neural-like sensors, to communicate this information three-dimensionally and continuously, to the robot’s controller.” Shepherd’s lab has developed a foam, light, and artificial intelligence system that allows it to sense what’s happening to it—whether the foam is bending up or down, or twisting, or both. The results we...

[ad_1] Bruce Poliquin received more than 131,000 votes in his bid to represent Maine’s 2nd district in Congress. Jared Golden got about 129,000 votes. Another 23,000 Mainers voted independent. Yet, on November 15, Golden was declared the winner. Understandably, Poliquin and his supporters are not happy. The outcome seems to fly in the face of democracy’s most basic tenets: one person, one vote, the candidate with the most votes wins. But Maine’s voters have chosen to do things differently. In 2016, Mainers approved an alternative scheme that redistributes votes from losing candidates until someone wins at least 50 percent. Researchers agree that the new system is mathematically superior to the old one, but that’s little consolation to Poliquin, who’s suing to be declared the winner. His lawsuit rests on a surprisingly complicated question—what is a vote? One straightforward vote for one representative works fine when there are two candidates—a s...

[ad_1] ↑ Ann Daniels, world-record-breaking polar explorer Twenty-five years ago, I never dreamed of exploring the ­Arctic—​I worked as a bank clerk in England. Then I saw the chance of a lifetime: a classified ad seeking “ordinary” women to join the first all-­female team to the North Pole. The trip required half a million dollars in total, and the two organizers thought amateurs would get more funding. Of course, no one was ordinary except for me—they were all outdoorswomen and mountaineers. I’d never even skied. After more than a year of training, the expedition began, and I stepped onto ­moving ice for the first time. One day, as we were traveling along the edge of some thin ice, it cracked. Nobody saw me plunge into the water or heard me shout. When you get wet in temperatures of minus 22°F, you develop frostbite in minutes. I grabbed the nearest chunk of ice and almost hauled myself out, but it broke—twice. I knew...