Posts

“Astronomy is one of the older fields of study, but for the vast majority of the history of science, we’ve been limited to what we can see with our eyes in the night sky,” says Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at the University of Texas. “The development of the telescope in the 1600s was really transformative, and it allowed us to peer deeper and deeper into the cosmos. That just led to one mystery after another; there are some answers, but more questions....

He wasn’t a scientist. He was the country doctor of Neponset, Ill., his hometown of 500 people; he was married, with three girls and one boy. In all his days at school, he hadn’t taken a single class in aerodynamics, and only took one course in physics. Then, at 38, his career in cooking up futuristic, unorthodox vehicles began. It was a mild June day when reporters from Popular Science knocked on his door, eager to photograph the newly developed “car without wheels” in his backyard....

For 400 years, pointe shoes have been built the same way with the same materials, producing bloody blisters for generations of female ballerinas (while their so-called masculine counterparts walk flatfooted with plenty of padding). A papier-mâché manufacturing method of satin, paper, hessian, paste and leather results in a shoe that every 12 year old girl, and a few special boys, yearn to wear but can’t wait to take off. So while you nodded off at the yearly Nutcracker performance, perhaps some sympathy was due for the Snowflake Fairy on tiptoes....

Link has been testing the new foot for the past six months, but 36-year-old inventor Jerome Rifkin has been building and rebuilding the flexible mechanical foot for more than eight years—ever since he broke his hip in a bicycle accident and spent three years learning to walk again. The mechanical engineer had studied prosthetics as an undergrad, but his physical therapy was a crash course in the biomechanics of walking....

Spear points are a pretty iconic aspect of the Clovis, an old culture of Paeloamerican hunter-gatherers. Those points typically date back to between 13,000 and 12,700 years ago, and are lanceolate (leaf-shaped) points made of stone, replete with a concave base that enables them to attach as a spear’s tip. So the discovery of spear points that predate the Clovis is quite a big deal. “This discovery is significant because almost all pre-Clovis sites have stone tools, but spear points have yet to be found,” says Michael Waters, a geologist at Texas A&M University and the lead author of the new study....

What happens when lightning strikes? A lot of bad language, for starters. YouTube footage courtesy of CorleoneQ8, beaker808, [moohead1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwfLxCj-NB0/ target=) and [PatNOregon](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubjfStRp4h8/ target=). Many thanks!

Every creature starts out the same-as a purplish blob floating in space. You click and drag with your mouse to make it longer or shorter and change the shape of its spine to give it, say, a curvy neck or an upturned tail. Spin the scroll wheel on your mouse to make sections of the body fatter or skinnier. After that, it’s plug and play as you choose from, and attach, eyes, legs, arms, horns and adornments like pig tails or wings....

Colloquially known as the “Wuhan coronavirus” after the city where it is believed to have originated, the disease is still poorly understood, and seems to be changing rapidly. (Scientists currently know it by the name 2019-nCOV, but a formal name for the disease has yet to be established.) Here’s what you need to know. We’re prepared, and so is China “The CDC has been proactively preparing for the introduction of the virus here,” the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, Nancy Messonier, said during a briefing on Tuesday....

Across all our 10 categories, gains in efficiency showcased our collective drive to optimize our world. A new hair-washing system creates a luxurious lather with less water, a spin on steelmaking spits out a mere fraction of the carbon, a clever AI plans airline routes for maximum efficiency, and a simple riff on a remote control zaps the need for disposable batteries. And, all the while, our push against the pandemic netted gains in prevention, testing, and treatment that will form the backbone of our resistance to the disease for years to come....

This week’s episode is extra special: it’s the first half of our second live show, which happened on February 1 at Caveat in NYC. As mentioned at the top of this week’s episode, you may hear hosts or audience members shouting “drink!” This is because we were playing a drinking game, which you’re welcome to recreate on your own time (assuming you’re of legal age and not driving while you listen)....

The new feature, known to employees by its internal name “swipey watch,” has been two years in the making, according to the design team that brought the gestural feature to fruition. “This is a relatively fundamental change to the page,” says Matthew Darby, product manager for YouTube Watch. It’s an alteration they didn’t make lightly. Previously, YouTube viewers had to active tap to move between videos, both on the site and on the app; now, app users can swipe left to see the video they were just watching, and swipe to move to the next recommendation in the queue....

As the disaster management aphorism goes, nature makes the weather, but humans make the disaster. Faulty warning systems, slow evacuations, and construction in flood zones all contributed to the death toll. Those systems are likely to be tested again soon: the rainfall appears to be a harbinger of what a warmer planet will mean for Europe. By Monday, scientists hadn’t pinned down what role climate played in this specific storm, as they have for the Pacific Northwest heatwave and Hurricane Sandy....

See, HD 26965 also goes by 40 Eridani A—the star orbited by Spock’s homeworld in Star Trek. That means they found Vulcan. Ok, fine, they found a real-world analog to a completely fictional world, but you can’t blame Star Trek fans for being excited. A star’s backstory The star was first suggested as a possible candidate for Vulcan’s host in a 1968 collection of short stories by James Blish adapted from episodes of the iconic original series....

The speed of this transition, seen by geologists in the sudden appearance of complex fossils such as trilobites in layers of rock, seemed so shockingly abrupt that it amazed and worried even Charles Darwin. As this flowering of complex multicellular life is used to mark the beginning of the Cambrian Period of Earth time, 541 million years ago, it has long been called the “Cambrian explosion.” We now know it was not quite so abrupt....

Bored by the uniform tastes born of modern industrialized farming, food historians, small-farm growers, and curious gourmands are resurrecting forgotten eats—once-famous crops ready for a second act. Their efforts represent a clarion call to embrace bites with flavors as rich as their backstories. Here are a few long-gone bites making delicious comebacks. Cocke’s Prolific white dent corn Cocke’s Prolific white dent corn scarcely resembles the sweet yellow cobs that line produce aisles and markets....

“By 8 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, they had defeated all the security layers that America’s civil aviation system then had in place to prevent a hijacking,” the authors of The 9/11 Commission Report, which the government published in 2004, summarize in the volume’s first chapter. The attacks may be far in the rearview mirror, but Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security with the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the threat to commercial aviation from terrorism is resurgent....

If you’re looking to give your home a facelift this spring with new paint colors, but are stumped as to what shade you’ll go for. The Nix Mini 2 Color Sensor V2 can give you a hand. A great deal for the DIY-er, it’s on sale for just $83.95 (reg. $99). Engineered with life in mind, this state-of-the-art tool matches any surface to an existing color, allowing you to make a decision faster....

The cargo truck of the solar system will use solar power to charge up and expel xenon gas from its backside. The method is said to be up to 10 times more efficient than current chemical propulsion systems. Aerojet Rocketdyne has a 36-month contract to produce the engine, and after that the space agency plans to test fly it on a mission to an asteroid. Later it might deliver cargo and maybe even people to Mars....

Clickbait—a term referring to articles with sensationalist headlines that fail to deliver on their premises—runs rampant on the internet today, as a growing number of media outlets greatly exaggerate or inflate relatively insignificant events to grab readers’ eyes. Large, bold headlines promise lists of items that will shock, delight, inspire, or amaze you (“You won’t believe…”). Eidnes built a neural network that read somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million of these headlines from the likes of mass online media outlets including Buzzfeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Huffington Post, and Unworthy (all of which have been accused of clickbait)....

Why Is NASA Developing Nasal Spray For The Masses?New Version of Classic Marshmallow Experiment Upends Original ConclusionsPopSci Q&A: How Much Do Presidential Debates Matter?Forget Telepresence! Smellepresence Is Here At Last And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It? FYI: Why Does Cheese Taste Better When It’s Melted? Rogue Geoengineer Dumps 100 Tons Of Iron Off Canada’s West CoastV-Moda M-100 Review: The Headphones That Made Me Love Headphones11 Unbelievable Microscopic Images From Nikon’s 2012 Small World CompetitionInteractive Fractal Tree of Life Zooms In On Earth’s Entire Evolutionary HistorySpontaneous Combustion Is Easier Than You ThinkInfographic: How Close Did Felix Baumgartner Get To The Edge Of Space?...