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The cause of the backup, say port officials, is strictly-enforced Covid restrictions at the ports, including those in Asia, as well as unprecedented demand for goods from China, South Korea, and other Asian exporting countries. The top items on backed-up ships include furniture, auto parts, and textiles. Although there was a significant uptick in ships awaiting entry into the port at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the backup accelerated significantly in the fall of 2020 when demand for goods exploded, filling up berths at the ports, and requiring ships to anchor offshore....

“The North American monsoon has always been a little bit strange,” says William Boos, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). It spans a smaller geographical area than the range of its mighty cousins in Asia and Africa. The North American monsoon is also weaker in rainfall, and its cyclical flip in the wind patterns is not as pronounced compared to the other monsoons around the world....

Combined with an LTE or Wi-Fi-connected smartphone camera, this compact audio mixer for streaming is a pocket-sized problem solver. Whether you’re a podcaster, vlogger, videographer, or musician in the studio or on stage, the Roland GO:MIXER PRO-X helps get your audio to the masses. What is the Roland GO:MIXER PRO-X The battery- and/or USB-powered GO:MIXER PRO-X features nine channels of audio for microphones, instruments, and line-level sources like music players....

News organization RT reports that the mission would take place in a new spacecraft, which will begin test flights in 2021. The announcement comes just a few weeks after Roscosmos announced a partnership with the European Space Agency to send a robotic mission to the moon in 2020. And that isn’t the only partnership that Roscosmos is forging. RT also reports that the Russian government was in talks with China over a potential collaboration on a scientific lunar base....

So why does the belted giant lean? Astronomers surmise that Saturn’s tilt is due to gravitational interactions with its planetary neighbor Neptune. Saturn’s tilt precesses (a circular motion similar to a spinning top) at nearly the same rate as the orbital spin as Neptune. A new study published today in the journal Science finds that Saturn and Neptune’s gravity may have once been in sync, but Saturn has since escaped Neptune’s pull due to a missing moon....

If you’re planning on hanging out by the campfire with your friends and family this spring, you may want to find an alternative that takes less effort to set up and clean. An excellent option would be to pick up this Trellick Tabletop Concrete Fire Pit because, for a limited time, it’s available on sale for an extra 15-percent off with code FIRE15. A great companion for your outdoor entertaining space, this fire pit lets you enjoy the warmth and ambiance of a real flame anytime and pretty much anywhere you like, whether indoors or outdoors....

Researchers from Indiana University crunched the data from the 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, examining the most recent sexual “event” for adults ages 18 to 59. The people who used condoms and lubricant during their “event” rated the experience “as highly arousing and pleasurable with few differences based on condom or lubricant use.” The team’s results are published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. And a bonus, sort-of-obvious subpoint emerged, too: more than twice as many men as women knew the condom was lubricated or what material it was made out of....

In recent years, abortion access has become an increasingly partisan issue. Research shows that this link between our opinions and our group affiliations makes it even more difficult for us to change our minds, even in the face of good evidence. But when it comes to hard facts and measurable data, abortion bans are not an effective way of making abortions less common. Meanwhile, a lack of access has a serious impact on human health and wellbeing....

Scientists as well as bioethicists, government officials, and various patient advocacy representatives gathered to discuss how research should proceed on the novel gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9 (known commonly as CRISPR), which allows scientists to easily edit the human genome. While other editing tools exist, CRISPR has sparked the interest of researchers worldwide as it is arguably the easiest and most efficient method to date and has the potential to be used in both research and clinical applications to treat and prevent disease in humans as well as other animals and even bacteria....

Prions are misfolded proteins that are somehow infectious (we’re still not really sure how or why) and for which we have no treatments or cures. If you were to catch one, you’d basically deteriorate over the course of several months, possibly losing the ability to speak or move, and eventually you would die. Doctors wouldn’t be able to do anything to save you. Right now, CWD appears limited to deer, moose, and elk....

A study published December 9 in the journal Physical Review E details the similarities between the trajectory of sea urchin sperm and computer systems that use a type of real-time search approach called extremum seeking. Engineers from the University of California, Irvine and University of Michigan made a mathematical model of the sperm’s pathway to better understand its behavior. According to the authors, assessing the sea urchin’s biological nature could help design miniature robots that follow cues from sources in the same way....

It turns out, the spicy component in peppers, capsaicin (CPS), affects a muscle protein called SERCA. Normally, SERCA burns ATP, a type of molecular fuel, to “pump” calcium ions across a membrane to help our muscles relax after they have contracted. But the addition of capsaicin shuts down the calcium pump, causing the ATP burned by SERCA to be released as heat, a process known as thermogenesis. Multiply this by a factor of several thousand, and you’re producing a noticeable amount of warmth....

Fans of Die Hard With A Vengeance will remember this one: To disable a bomb, Detective John McClane must measure out exactly 4 gallons of water, and place the resulting weight on a scale. His tools are yours: a 3-gallon and a 5-­gallon jug—and a single fountain. McClane did it in less than 5 minutes, but we won’t time you. This go-round, lives probably aren’t on the line. Answers Below A) Fill the 5-gallon jug....

Click to launch the photo gallery_ The first real lunar base should look literally out-of-this-world cool. Maybe it will look as spacey as Apple’s new campus, or Virgin’s Spaceport America. Foster + Partners, the architectural firm to dream up those ideas, has a new lunar-base concept for the European Space Agency. (Let’s hope it is better-executed than Las Vegas’ beleaguered Harmon Hotel.) It may never be built, but it could be a feasible design for future moon base planning, according to ESA....

In a paper published in Science Advances, researchers found that some populations of white storks in Europe were changing their migration patterns to take advantage of landfills–an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds. By tracking white stork populations in Europe with GPS tags, the researchers found that the once long-range migratory birds were moving over much shorter distances, only traveling from Spain and Portugal down to the Sahel desert in Africa, instead of continuing down into the tropics for the winter....

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego determined the molecular basis for the interruption of our “food clocks,” or food-entrainable oscillators. People who have jet lag or work night shifts–or Mars shifts–have the same problems. Our bodies have master regulator genes that help us function according to natural circadian rhythms, and we can lose sleep when these are interrupted. Medical researchers are just figuring out how to re-train our bodies using natural cues, like blue light, to reset those disturbed clocks....

“The wind-turbine design out there right now is a thousand years old,” Selsam points out, as he lets one of his carved wooden blades speed to a blur in the makeshift wind tunnel he’s made of the alley behind his Fullerton, California, apartment. He brainstormed his multi-rotor approach in the early ’80s, in a fluid-dynamics class at the University of California at Irvine. “The textbook said, this single-rotor turbine design is the most power you can get....

My “old” laptop is a unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro with just under two years of mileage on it, which makes the contrast even more dramatic. Both machines share the same overall design language, and both feel modern, sleek and sexy, true to their maker. One just feels grossly, almost comically oversized. Because after using the 11-inch MacBook Air for a week, a tiny axe-blade wedge of machined metal (that folds out into a computer, I had to keep reminding myself), it’s hard to remember why I needed such a “huge” machine in the first place....

Normally, when states dissolve, their country-specific domain names follow a few years later (it takes time and manpower to redirect all the tubes, etc). It happened to Czechoslovakia’s .cs domain in 1993, when the country split into Slovakia (.sk) and the Czech Republic (.cz), and Zaiire’s .zr in 1997, which was fully transitioned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s new .cd by 2001 (which was infamously used by the Torrent site oink....