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

[ad_1] The words “singing mice” might conjure up memories of Cinderelly’s—er, Cinderella’s pals and a squeaky yet exquisitely harmonized Christmas song sung by another trio of rodents. Those musical mice might be fictional, but singing mice actually do exist—though their songs don’t sound anything like Gus Gus’ or Alvin’s. Some mice squeak out tunes to woo females, though they aren’t always audible to human ears. But Scotinomys teguina , more commonly known as Alston’s singing mouse, scurries through Central American cloud forests and breaks into audible song to communicate and find mates. And interestingly, male mice will often engage in fast-paced back-and-forth singing duels, the response speed of which has only been matched by two agitated, arguing Aaron Sorkin characters. All joking aside, these tropical mice really are special. They communicate in song using nearly 100 audible notes and respond to one another almost...

[ad_1] Wheeler's time as acting administrator indicates his EPA will weigh the needs of industry higher than those of human health and planetary well-being. In October, the EPA disbanded two panels formed to determine whether air quality standards should change. One was a 26-person panel of experts previously tasked with evaluating evidence on fine particulate matter, a particular type of air pollutant associated with various health problems. The other was meant to review the dangers of smog. Instead, the agency announced, both national air quality standards would be reviewed by a group of seven people: a pulmonary physician, five representatives from local, state, and federal environmental agencies (including an aquatic ecology and invasive species expert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), and a consultant whose clients have included the American Petroleum Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and tobacco company Philip Morris International. The EPA also proposed an alte...

[ad_1] Turning left is hard. In fact, one of the hardest maneuvers for any driver is called an “unprotected left.” Imagine you’re pulling out of a driveway to go left on a two-lane road: there’s nothing protecting you—no traffic light or stop sign—from the traffic barreling toward you from the left. Not only do you have to sneak through a gap in the traffic speeding from that side, you also need to ensure that once you do, cars coming from the right in the lane you’re joining don’t hit you, either. These tricky unprotected maneuvers come in multiple flavors. A slightly less complicated version is when you’re at a traffic light, and a circular green light—not a green arrow—gives you the go-ahead. You want to turn left, and must find a gap in the oncoming traffic. You get the idea: left turns without protection are hard, and not just for cars driven by people. “Unprotected lefts are one of the trickiest things you can...

[ad_1] The enormity of climate change is hard to understate. It affects the entire planet and everyone on it. Its worst effects are decades off, but it’s also already unfolding. It touches on culture, cars, carbon, and cows, but is driven by something invisible to the naked eye: greenhouse gases. To help you get a grip on our shifting planet—and the ever-evolving state of environmental science—we’ve created a monthly round-up for all things climatology. Here’s what you need to know from February 2019 This month marked the debut of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, one of the most anticipated climate change books yet written. Like his seismic New York Magazine article of the same name, it’s organized around climate plagues, from heat death to hunger. But it’s also full of novel observations about our failure to create useful storylines around this catastrophe, the role of Silicon Valley in this crisis, and the advent of a new kind...

[ad_1] Turning left is hard. In fact, one of the hardest maneuvers for any driver is called an “unprotected left.” Imagine you’re pulling out of a driveway to go left on a two-lane road: there’s nothing protecting you—no traffic light or stop sign—from the traffic barreling toward you from the left. Not only do you have to sneak through a gap in the traffic speeding from that side, you also need to ensure that once you do, cars coming from the right in the lane you’re joining don’t hit you, either. These tricky unprotected maneuvers come in multiple flavors. A slightly less complicated version is when you’re at a traffic light, and a circular green light—not a green arrow—gives you the go-ahead. You want to turn left, and must find a gap in the oncoming traffic. You get the idea: left turns without protection are hard, and not just for cars driven by people. “Unprotected lefts are one of the trickiest things you can...

[ad_1] Ryan Lamy began his restaurant career selling hot dogs from a cart in Pasadena, Maryland. But all the while, he longed to open a real café. In 2009, his dream came true when he found a small space to rent on the Annapolis waterfront and turned it into Pip's Dock Street Dogs, one of the many shops and restaurants in the trendy area known as City Dock. Pip's offers multiple varieties of dogs and burgers, and — he boasts — the best cheesesteak outside of Philly. People flock to Pip's every day, especially on weekends. That is, unless they have to slosh through a foot of water to get there. "The water can be anywhere from a couple of inches to a foot," Lamy said. "It's always been like this, but it's steadily getting worse. When I first opened, we would flood a few times out of the year. Now, it seems like it's three to five times a month on a regular basis. This past fall, we were flooding two days out of each week." Most of the time, it...

[ad_1] If you're a train commuter or a dedicated multitasker, there's a good chance you use your phone to play games. Below, find tips for leveling up that experience—improving performance and stability, getting the action up on a big screen, and more. Whether you're an Android or iPhone user, part-time or dedicated gamer, you should find some useful ideas here for boosting gameplay on your mobile. Silence notifications You don't want an immersive gaming experience interrupted by messages about dinner from your family, so turn off notifications while you're gaming. On Android, swipe down on the home screen with two fingers, then tap Do not disturb . On iOS, swipe down from the top right corner of the home screen with one finger, and tap the Do not disturb icon (the crescent moon). Both these modes can be configured further—through Sound and Do Not Disturb in Settings on Android, and through Do Not Disturb in Settings on iOS. It's possible to allow calls from...

[ad_1] Drop a frog into a boiling pot of water and it immediately hops out. But place it into cool water and slowly heat it, and the frog won’t catch on, eventually getting cooked. This metaphor is totally wrong about frogs, but it is true of humans tweeting about unusual weather. Unusual weather, in which temperatures deviate from long-term averages, is becoming more common as we warm the planet. Compared to pre-industrial times, we’re seeing more frequent heat waves, warm winters, and—in some places—cold snaps. But, in boiling frog fashion, we find such temperature extremes unremarkable after just a few years of repeated events, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . An analysis of 2.18 billion tweets from users in the continental United States revealed this near-term baseline for thinking about weather. Basically, scientists looked at posts between March 2014 through November 2016 that used words from...

[ad_1] Climate change is real, and humans are causing it. Thanks to forty years of satellite data, scientists are certain of those two facts. More than that, though, experts have been clear on the inevitability of climate change—and outspoken about it—for four decades, as a new paper documents. The comment, published in the journal Nature Climate Change earlier this week, celebrates the 40th anniversaries of three key pieces of climate science that contribute to modern certainty about anthropogenic climate change: the beginning of satellite temperature measurements in late 1978 and the 1979 publications of a report and a paper that shaped how scientists looked for human fingerprints in the climate signal. “It’s about taking a trip down memory lane and trying to understand, ‘how did we get here?’” says paper author Benjamin Santer, a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “In taking that trip down memory lane, it turn...

[ad_1] UNTIL JUNE 2018, I HAD NEVER RUN more than 14 miles at once. I jogged often, and had completed a couple of half-marathons, but nothing more. As such, doubling that distance seemed far out of my reach. But shortly after, I was given the opportunity to gain a spot reserved for media to run the 2018 Chicago Marathon in October (through Nike, one of the marathon’s official sponsors). With access to top-level coaching and gear, I had an opportunity to see how elite athletes set themselves up for success—and I wanted to find out what the average human can learn from their tricks. I set out to understand how evolution, technology, and know-how can come together to propel the human body across 26.2 miles. Here’s what I learned, and how it can help you run a marathon of your own. 00.00 miles Marathons have become far more popular in the past few decades than they had been at any other time in the past—and especially among women. After a sharp rise starting in 1990...

[ad_1] There’s no question that we need fast and far-reaching action to curb our emissions if we’re to stop the catastrophic effects of impending climate change. That’s why a number of policies—at local, state and national levels—are advancing new goals to meet our energy demands from clean and renewable sources. The Green New Deal, a resolution introduced by Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, is the most recent national proposal to transform our energy system. As part of its 10-year plan, the text includes the goal of “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources, including— (i) by dramatically expanding and upgrading renewable power sources; and (ii) by deploying new capacity.” It’s an ambitious target that some have called politically or economically infeasible, but the idea is not new. In fact, scientists have been exploring roadmaps ...

[ad_1] When it comes to your laptop, the fewer applications you've got, the better—it means more room for the apps you actually make use of, less of a strain on your computer, and fewer potential security holes to worry about. With all that in mind, here's how to keep your laptop software lightweight: first get rid of pre-installed programs you don't want, and then ensure your laptop doesn't get cluttered up with unwanted software in the future. Banish the bloatware Your shiny new laptop might already be weighed down with unnecessary applications. It's called bloatware, basically programs installed by the laptop manufacturer pushing its own services. Some of these can be useful, but you don't have to keep them around if you don't want to. In Windows, click the Settings cog icon on the Start menu, then choose Apps and Apps & features . You'll see all the applications on your system listed—select any entry in the list and then Uninstall to remove it....

[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 hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Anchor, and 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. FACT: Benjamin Franklin liked to sit around naked By Rachel Feltman Air bathing is exactly what it sounds like: It's like bathing, but with air. Of course, one could also refer to air bathing as "sitting around in the nude," and they definitely wouldn't be wrong. One famous proponent of this practice was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Here's a paper on the subject written in the early 1900s, featuring excerpts from the founding father's pro-nude-napti...

[ad_1] The Midwest was once the most happening place north of Mexico. In 1250, the Cahokia settlement, located just across the Mississippi River from modern-day St. Louis, Missouri, had a population larger than London’s. But within 100 years, the district was largely abandoned, and the reasons for this desertion remained a mystery. Now, ancient poop molecules are helping scientists understand how climatic changes at the time likely played a role in Cahokia’s demise. Last year, a team of climate scientists and archeologists analyzed sediment from the bottom of Horseshoe Lake in western Illinois, where the Cahokia lived. By comparing the number of fecal molecules present in each layer of sediment to environmental indicators that signify drought and floods, the team was able to better understand how ancient changes in climate––such as periods of drought and floods–– caused people to either move to higher ground in the area, or leave Cahokia all together....