Posts

But on the bright side, back-to-school season presents an opportunity to purchase some new consumer tech and gadgets for the academic year. When school resumes, students need to connect with classmates, conduct research and attend extracurricular activities—oftentimes on the go. The market is flush with devices that can help students manage their busy schedules, but a few tools are particularly valuable for starting off the fall semester on the right foot....

Astronomers are about to unfold a new map of cosmic reality. The Gaia spacecraft, launched in late 2013 by the European Space Agency, is on a five-year mission to chart the heavens in unprecedented detail—and the first set of coordinates has been released. By the end of Gaia’s run, it will have pinpointed the positions of approximately one billion stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies with a resolution so high it can spot objects as small as five microarcseconds—roughly half the size of a dime sitting on the moon as seen from Earth....

They’re baaaaack! It’s been 17 years since the cicada horde known as Brood II last peeked its mandibles above the surface of the Earth, to court, mate and expire by the hundreds of millions. News stories from 1996 recount drifts of shed exoskeletons, so deep in places that driveways had to be cleared by snow shovel. Now, after a long and celibate hiatus underground, their progeny have themselves begun to show their faces along the East Coast....

The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent. Most scientific articles about our African origins focus on genetics. The part of the story that is not widely shared is about the creation of human culture. We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors. Early humans from the African continent are the ones who first invented tools; the use of fire; language; and religion....

“Medical cannabis saved my life,” says Nancy Partyka, a retired college psychology instructor in Frisco, Colo. For more than 20 years Partyka battled agonizing pain stemming from a car crash that injured her cervical spine. She tried physical therapy, steroid injections, acupuncture, exercise and meditation. She endured five spinal fusion surgeries and plenty of pills. “I was taking OxyContin, taking Aleve by the handful,” she recalls, but she was spiraling downward....

When Landsat 5 fell silent on 6 January, scientists across the globe mourned its passing but gave thanks for its fortitude. The satellite had lasted a record-breaking 28 years, snapping images of the changing planet from melting glaciers to burning rainforests, while its successors faltered. Landsat 6 failed during launch and Landsat 7, at 13 years old, is partially blind and has limited fuel. With the passing of Landsat 5, the future of the world’s longest-running — and perhaps most influential — set of data on global change rests with Landsat 8, which is scheduled to launch next week from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California....

The African continent has a wide variety of habitat types, but savanna ecosystems cover roughly half. And where there is savanna, there is fire. “It’s an important part of the ecology of the system,” says University of Liverpool ecologist James R. Probert. Burning allows grasses to dominate by keeping taller shrubs and thorn bushes from encroaching on the landscape. Loss of grasses could push out species such as wildebeest, which are famous for their spectacular annual migration....

NASA has chosen the first commercial companies that will carry the agency’s equipment to the moon during its lead-up to a human landing in 2024: Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond. The companies will build moon landers to ferry NASA science experiments and technology demonstrations to the lunar surface. Those flights will be the first step of the agency’s ambitious Artemis program to land humans on the moon in 2024. The first mission, by Orbit Beyond, will launch in September 2020....

A routine dentist’s tool may soon help with more than just oral health. A new study has found that dental imaging scanners can double as portable devices to track the growth of baby corals—a crucial predictor of how reefs will fare amid climate change. Heat stress can kill mature coral reefs and curtail their regrowth. “Growth, reproduction and survival are the main things that we’re always looking at in terms of how healthy reefs are,” says marine biologist Kate Quigley of the Australian Institute of Marine Science....

View Slide Show Madonna and Bon Jovi are no match for Hawaiian flies when it comes to karaoke hits at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln. In a popular exhibit activity, visitors attempt to mimic the unique courtship calls of different species of Hawaiian Drosophila, a group of 800 different flies that may have evolved from a single species. Fly karaoke is part of “Explore Evolution,” a permanent exhibit currently at Nebraska and five other museums in the Midwest and Southwest (the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, the Exhibit Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan and the University of Kansas Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center, plus an October opening at the Texas Memorial Museum) that explores evolutionary concepts in new ways....

It may seem that Mars was once a much more exciting planet. True, there are dust storms and possible water-seeps occurring today, but billions of years ago it was a dramatic place with huge volcanoes, a giant canyon system and branching river valleys being formed. But now planetary scientists have identified what looks like more recently formed volcanoes, in geological terms. Excitingly, they may have once provided the perfect environment for microbial lifeforms to thrive....

After a 30-year campaign, only 126 people in the world were known to be infected with the waterborne guinea worm in 2014, down from 3.5 million in 1986. If this trend continues, guinea worm disease could become only the second disease in history to be eradicated, after smallpox. It would be the first parasitic disease to be wiped out and also the first to be defeated without the use of vaccines or medicine....

By Brian Switek of Nature magazinePrimitive fleas were built to sup on dinosaur blood in the Jurassic period, more than 150 million years ago. The potential host-parasite relationship has been uncovered thanks to a set of beautifully preserved fossils found in China. Today, the varied group of parasitic insects known as fleas frequently infests mammals and birds. But little is known about their origins. The flea fossil record consists mainly of modern-looking species from the past 65 million years, and the identity of possible fleas from the Cretaceous period (145 million to 65 million years ago) has been debated by experts....

Soot from car exhaust and cookstoves, sulfates from coal-fired power plants, methane leaked during oil and gas production, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) from air conditioning are all greenhouse gases that trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere for a short while before decaying into less virulent chemicals. Cutting emissions of such “short-lived climate pollutants,” or SLCPs, will not have much impact on long-term climate change, finds a new study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences....

Voice assistants allow smartphone users to snap a photograph or send a text with a spoken command. Yet they also potentially let hackers do the same things by bombarding the device’s microphone with ultrasonic waves (sounds with frequencies higher than humans can hear). Researchers have previously demonstrated how they could trick a phone by sending these waves through the air, but the approach required proximity to the victim and was easily disrupted by nearby objects....

Byzantium is famous for the incessant intrigues and plotting that supposedly took place among the courtiers of the palace. Apparently, the Byzantine court in no way deserved this reputation. Modern historical research suggests that Byzantium achieved a remarkable stability and harmony by the standards of the first millennium. Reputations die hard, however, and this puzzle concerns a game show inspired by the imagined intrigues of Byzantium. We call it Byzantine Bettors....

Five years ago Medford, Oregon, had a problem common for most cities—treating sewage without hurting fish. The city’s wastewater treatment plant was discharging warm water into the Rogue River. Fish weren’t dying, but salmon in the Rogue rely on cold water. And the Environmental Protection Agency has rules to make sure they get it. So, instead of spending millions on expensive machinery to cool the water to federal standards, the city of Medford tried something much simpler: planting trees....

A patient checks into a rural African clinic with a high fever. The diagnosis could be anything from mild typhoid to Ebola. Even if laboratory blood tests are available, it will take days to get results. What is a doctor to do: Prescribe antibiotics or order a quarantine? Researchers have been working for a decade on quick, cheap paper diagnostics (think home pregnancy tests) that could save lives in such situations....

Humans have for the first time proven that they can change the path of a massive rock hurtling through space. NASA has announced that the spacecraft it slammed into an asteroid on 26 September succeeded in altering the space rock’s orbit around another asteroid — with better-than-expected results. Agency officials had estimated that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft would ‘nudge’ the asteroid Dimorphos closer to its partner, Didymos, and cut its orbit time around that rock by 10–15 minutes....

Scientists have figured out the worst that could happen if the mammoth chuck of continental ice at the bottom of the world—the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—continues melting. By 2100, ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by 7.9 inches, enough to pose a risk to low-lying nations, according to a study published today in The Cryosphere. By 2200, ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by 1.6 feet. The melted water from Antarctica and Greenland, glaciers, and the thermal expansion of the ocean due to higher temperatures are expected to raise sea levels by 3....