Science

Science

Time is running out for the venerable NASA observatory. In September, the agency reckoned there was a 50 percent chance of an uncontrolled reentry by mid-2026, increasing to 90 percent by the end of the year. Although the spacecraft was launched in 2004, it remains operational and could continue to capture data on gamma-ray bursts if boosted to a higher orbit.

Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her brain-computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes - and simple melodies, such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', rang out.

In their system, the engineers use ultrasonic waves to shake the water out of the material that can absorb moisture from the air. This said material is an ultrasonic actuator made of a flat ceramic ring, which receives the electricity during vibrations. In their research, the team learned that this vibration can break the weak connection between the water molecules and the sorbent, so when the waves hit the flat ceramic ring and the system, the water inside it loosens and falls out as droplets,

Researchers and scientific journals can add a new possibility to a growing list of artificial intelligence-generated horrors: letters to the editor. Two days after researchers published a paper on the efficacy of ivermectin as a treatment for malaria in the New England Journal of Medicine this summer, the journal received a letter to the editor from another researcher criticizing the paper's findings.

Mysterious mental misfires are not random and, in many cases, predictable and avoidable. Once you understand the neuroscience behind these common tasks, the confusion evaporates, and you can avoid the self-doubt and humiliation that often come from what we sometimes conclude are examples of individual stupidity. What appears to be a personal flaw is actually just your ancient brain navigating a modern world.

In brief, circular (3-mm diameter) craniotomies were centred over ALM (2.5 mm anterior and 1.5 mm lateral from Bregma). We expressed the soma-targeted opsin ST-ChrimsonR in excitatory neurons by injecting a virus (10 12 titre; AAV2/2 camKII-KV2.1-ChrimsonR-FusionRed; Addgene, plasmid, catalogue no. 102771) into the craniotomy, 400 µm below the dura (five to ten sites, 20-30 nl each), centred in the craniotomy and spaced by approximately 500 μm between injection sites.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, reveal that, far from being a recent human cultural invention, kissing is an ancient trait deeply rooted in our biology. This is the first time anyone has taken a broad evolutionary lens to examine kissing. Our findings add to a growing body of work highlighting the remarkable diversity of sexual behaviors exhibited by our primate cousins, said Matilda Brindle, lead author of the study and an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Biology at Oxford, in a statement.

Science@Cal is proud to present a series of free public science lectures on the third Saturday of every month. These talks are given by renowned UC Berkeley scientists and aimed at general audiences. Talks take place on the UC Berkeley campus at 11 am. Doors open thirty minutes before the talk and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each talk is planned to last an hour, plus time for at least a few questions at the end.

"Shrimps is bugs" all over the city: Thank you for leading me to this rabbithole of scientific and taxonomic discovery.

Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that "smart" and "dumb" are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what's smart can shift over time. Yesterday's clever decision can look like today's regrettable blunder.

Generative artificial intelligence can now counterfeit reality at an industrial scale. Deepfakesphotographs, videos and audio tracks that use AI to create convincing but entirely fabricated representations of people or eventsaren't just an Internet content problem; they are a social-order problem. The power of AI to create words and images that seem real but aren't threatens society, critical thinking and civilizational stability.

Some say the reason most manhole covers are round is that a circle cannot fall through a smaller circular hole. Which of these other two-dimensional shapes cannot fall through a hole that is the same shape but slightly smaller? Shapes 1, 2 and 3 can all fall through their own holes. Shape 4 cannot. Challenge problem: Can you find another shape that cannot fall through a slightly smaller hole of the same shape?

"They're coming off the line at one a month right now, and then we're ramping from there," he said of the second stages, known internally as GS-2. "It would be ambitious to get to the upper level, but we want to be hardware rich. So, you know, we want to try to keep building as fast as we can, and then with practice I think our launch cadence can go up."

Around 38 percent of websites that were on the Internet in 2013 are gone now. Half of Wikipedia pages reference dead links. Information seems to be disappearing all around us, and that's nothing new. Over geological time, information loss is the norm, not the exception. Yet according to physics, information is never destroyed. In principle, a burned book is just as readable as the originalif you analyze the ashes of the fire, the smoke and the flames to re-create the incinerated words.

It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.

Roxbury puddingstone, the mottled rock quarried nearby and used for much of the old church masonry in Boston, formed 600 million years ago in violent submarine landslides off the coast of a barren volcanic microcontinent that rifted off Africa. This is so long ago thatin the course of the perpetual wander of continentsthe whole thing happened somewhere near the south pole.

First off, birds really like sitting on elevated lines, whether those are power lines, telecommunication wires or cable lines. The high wires provide an excellent vantage point for surveying the area, giving them a bird's eye view of the territory. From there, they can look around for food and watch out for predators. The lines are also a convenient spot for taking a rest and as there are other birds on the line, a chance to converse.

The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky. Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.

There are a few notable elements to NASA's launch this week of a new mission to Mars, known as Escapade. There's the matter of the Blue Origin rocket used to send the probe into space and returning successfully to Earth, making it a milestone for the spaceflight company's New Glenn rockets. As Blue Origin CEO Dave Limb said in a statement, "never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try."