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

[ad_1] The pockets of oil trapped between Earth’s strata are finite, at least on a human time scale. It takes millennia of immense pressure and heat to transform ancient remains into fossil fuels. Economists and geologists are still ­debating when, whether, and how we’ll run out­—the answer is a ­moving target. In the meantime, here’s our best guess as to how much of Earth’s milkshake we’ve got left to drink. The planet's top producers: Venezuela: 301 billion barrels Saudi Arabia: 266 billion barrels Canada: 170 billion barrels Iran: 158 billion barrels Iraq: 143 billion barrels Though the U.S. became the top oil producer in 2018, our proven reserves didn’t crack the top five. The United States of Oil Proven reserves: 35.2 billion barrels Oil companies measure reserves based on how likely they are to go get them. Proven reserves are those they already have the tech and infrastructure to extract. Though the rate at which ...

[ad_1] NASA’s Mars InSight mission has only been in full swing for about a little over four months now, but it’s already poised to reveal some of the biggest mysteries inside the red planet. On Sol 128 (also known as April 6, or the lander’s 128th day on Mars,), the InSight lander recorded tremblings that most likely came from within the planet itself. If further analysis confirms what we’re already suspecting, we’ll have officially made the first-ever measurement and recording of an earthquake on Mars—a "marsquake"—demarcating the beginning of Martian seismology. As explained by Philippe Lognonné, a planetary scientist from Paris Diderot University and the principal investigator of the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument on the InSight lander, the goal of the mission is to do on Mars what seismologists did on Earth at the turn of the 20th century. (Coincidentally, the first remote quake on Earth was measured 130 yea...

[ad_1] Nothing tastes better—or makes prepping dinner easier—than walking out your back door to grab lettuce or tomatoes from the garden. Fresh produce contains more nutrients, tastes better, and is often cheaper than the fruits and veggies at your local farmers’ market. But gardening also requires more time and effort, not to mention space and a green thumb. Fortunately, there’s a solution: hydroponic farming. It involves less space, time, money, and effort than traditional in-the-soil gardening, and yields spectacular results jam-packed with nutrients. What is hydroponic gardening? Hydroponics encompasses several methods of using nutrient-infused water to cultivate plants without soil. Aeroponic gardens, for example, use misters to bathe plant roots in nourishing water vapor, while aquaponic setups pump nutrient-rich water from tanks of fish or snails. Hydroponics also uses a number of different types of systems, from shallow, tabletop-style trays with irrigati...

[ad_1] You’ve likely been hearing plenty of news about 5G—the next-generation cell network that promises super fast connection speeds. After all, Verizon has touted the fact that it now offers 5G in parts of Chicago and Minneapolis, and AT&T has bragged about launching 5G in places like Atlanta and Houston. Both companies say that more cities are going to join their networks this year. Today, for example, Verizon said that 20 additional cities, like Boston, Denver, and San Diego would be getting on the 5G express train in 2019. Speeds with 5G could be more than 1 gigabit per second, as AT&T recently boasted. (For comparison, a recent test of my phone’s data connection showed a download rate of about 17 megabits per second, which is about .02 gigabits per second.) But you should temper your excitement and, most importantly, save your money. This next-gen cell network is indeed coming, but it’s not here yet—and right now, unless you fit into a very sp...

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...

[ad_1] It’s easy to get a rise out of a local TV news crew. Especially in a slo-mo state capital like California’s. So it was on September 6, 2007, when KCRA’s LiveCopter 3 hovered over a Sacramento parking lot, at 8:23 a.m., beaming images of a slow-­moving red van, tailed by a black-and-white police cruiser. As soon as the van pulled over, a man in a white baker’s cap popped out. Instead of making a run for it, which is how you expect these things to play out, he labored up to a reporter’s microphone, arms weighed down by bread dough. “It’s about 40 pounds,” he said. A crowd of bystanders cheered. The Boudin Bakery in San Francisco, the city’s oldest and one of the best-known purveyors of its famous sourdough bread, was delivering a key piece of its history to its newest outpost. Since 1849, the bakery has relied on a bacteria-and-yeast-rich “starter”—a small amount of dough that bakers regularly “feed...

[ad_1] Children spend a lot of time outdoors playing tag, shooting hoops, or climbing trees. If they live in cities, they might run around near busy roads. Parents always teach their kids to watch out for oncoming cars and never run into the street — but no one tells them not to breathe. Just being outside near traffic can prove dangerous, contributing to their developing chronic asthma. An attack can leave a child literally gasping for air. And many children don’t outgrow it. “Since there is still no cure, once a child develops asthma it will be a lifelong affliction,” said Pattanun Achakulwisut, a researcher at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Asthma is the most common chronic illness among children globally, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and occurs when inflammation causes the airways to narrow, prompting breathlessness and wheezing. It afflicts an estimated 235 million people, including...