Science

Science

I don't know who invented this crazy challenge, but the idea is to put someone in a carved-out ice bowl and see if they can get out. Check it out! The bowl is shaped like the inside of a sphere, so the higher up the sides you go, the steeper it gets. If you think an icy sidewalk is slippery, try going uphill on an icy sidewalk. What do you do when faced with a problem like this? You build a physics model, of course.

Specifically, I take people around downtown Seattle to explore the stone that makes up our buildings. On the corner of Second Avenue and Cherry Street is an elegant six-story structure built with two-foot-tall blocks of rough-hewn sandstone, about 44 million years old, quarried in Tenino, Washington. The building rose soon after much of downtown Seattle burned to the ground in 1889, and the jagged stone gives it a feeling of rugged permanence, certainly what the city needed after the great fire.

It did so with the blessing of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who decided to delegate the meticulous work of route planning to Anthropic's AI model. This involves consulting orbital and surface imagery of Mars in order to set a series of waypoints to guide the rover's movements. Once plotted, this data gets transmitted about 140 million miles or 225 million kilometers - the average distance from Earth to Mars - where it's received by Perseverance as a navigational plan.

A US-led research team has verified the first Mediterranean mass grave of the world's earliest recorded pandemic, providing stark new details about the plague of Justinian that killed millions of people in the Byzantine empire between the sixth and eighth centuries. The findings, published in February's Journal of Archaeological Science, offer what researchers say is a rare empirical window into the mobility, urban life and vulnerability of citizens affected by the pestilence.

Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.

Brain drain refers to circumstances in which highly trained experts from underdeveloped and overexploited countries migrate to wealthier international job markets. Such loss of human capital can be catastrophic for a nation's development, as a shortage of trained workers tends to strain critical sectors like healthcare and education. Now the United States government - which once fielded as many as 281,000 scientists and engineers - is experiencing a similar phenomenon.

Intensely cold air is scouring the central and eastern U.S. again and will send temperatures plummeting all the way to the tip of Florida. Along with this new Arctic incursion, a major bomb cyclone storm is strengthening off the coast of the Carolinas, potentially bringing rare blizzard conditions to the region. Some areas haven't seen this amount of accumulating snow in over 30 years, wrote the National Weather Service's office in Wilmington, N.C., on Facebook.

That seemingly paradoxical dynamic results from several factors. Foremost among them is the rebound of land beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, a mile-thick body of glacial ice that covers 80 percent of the island and is being lost to melting at a rate of roughly 200 billion tons each year. As the ice sheet loses mass, the land beneath rises.

Sauropodshumongous reptiles with a long neck and tail and thick, elephantlike legsplayed a starring role in the dinosaur ecosystem, according to a new study. These massive dinosaurs are the largest creatures to ever walk on land. But they also played a crucial part in the food chain, the study authors write, acting as ecosystem engineers. The research was published on Friday in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.

The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms. Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Last year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis that they say solves the puzzle.

Careful kinematic research, such as that done by a Japanese team headed by Naomi Wada, has determined that the dog's tail was designed to assist the dog with balance. When a dog is running and turns quickly, he throws the front part of his body in the direction he wants to go. This causes his back to bend; however, the forward velocity is such that his hindquarters will tend to continue in the original direction.

I've always had what I would consider a hacker mindset, a curiosity to take things apart, understand them, and use that knowledge to solve problems. That mindset took me on a circuitous route into the cybersecurity industry; after being kicked out of high school for hacking computer systems, I worked a range of jobs, managing office supply companies by day and cracking Wi-Fi networks by night until I started a Digital Forensics degree which led me to the world of security research.

Particularly when it comes to stepping out of the spacecraft - the agency has yet to pick between Blue Origin and SpaceX's offerings in that regard - staying protected from the extreme temperature swings, space radiation, and lack of atmosphere is extremely challenging. That's not to mention the physical limitations of an extremely bulky spacesuit, which could physically tax astronauts even more than stepping outside of the International Space Station during a spacewalk.

Entrants will be required to write three- to five-page white papers that explain their idea and how they would shape markets and strengthen the space economy or national security. Papers are due by June 30, and judging will be complete by August 15. As an additional incentive, the best ideas will be briefed to relevant policymakers, including key members of Congress, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, and Saltzman, of the Space Force.

When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first high-definition infrared images back to Earth, astronomers noticed several tiny, glowing, crimson stains. These objects, quickly named "Little Red Dots," were too bright to be normal galaxies, and too red to be simple star clusters. They appeared to house supermassive black holes that were far more massive than they had any right to be.

Battery degradation on high-mileage EVs is not as big a deal as some might make you believe. Real-world data shows that EVs with over 150,000 miles are still going strong, with minimal degradation. Older EVs are more affected by high mileage, but technology has made newer models more resilient. Battery degradation is inevitable, but new research shows that EV owners should just keep driving their cars without worrying about what happens with the thousands of cells that live in their cars' floors.

If you were asked to build a future bestselling author, how would you go about it? Chances are, you'd start young, scouting for early signs of promise. You'd probably reinforce that raw talent right away, sending your protégé to writing workshops and private tutors. You might line their shelves with Pulitzer winners, assign the classics, fast-track an English degree - tracing a path right up to the gates of publishing.

The condition is the result of repeated traumatic brain injuries, which can happen repeatedly over the course of a football season. According to Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, a Harvard University professor and co-director of sports concussion at Mass General Brigham in Boston, CTE easily flies under the radar because it can only be diagnosed via brain analysis after a person's death.

Called AlphaGenome, the model could help scientists discover why subtle differences in our DNA put us at risk of conditions such as high blood pressure, dementia and obesity. It could also dramatically accelerate our understanding of genetic diseases and cancer. The developers of the model acknowledge it's not perfect, but experts have described it as "an incredible feat" and "a major milestone".

The eighth H3 rocket lifted off from Tanegashima Island in southern Japan on December 22, local time, carrying a roughly five-ton navigation satellite into space. The rocket was supposed to place the Michibiki 5 satellite into an orbit ranging more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. Everything was going well until the H3 jettisoned its payload fairing, the two-piece clamshell covering the satellite during launch, nearly four minutes into the flight.