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Unlike ballistic missiles, which arc up into space before traveling back down towards earth, cruise missiles fly close to the ground, making it hard for radar on the ground that’s pointed up at space to see them. The perceived threat from new cruise missiles is driven by tech developments occurring across the globe, as new materials, better aerodynamics, and sophisticated sensors and guidance systems make possible the fielding of weapons, like hypersonic missiles, that had mostly been just theoretical decades ago....

Scientists have proposed countless hypotheses to explain why same-sex sexual behaviors (SSB) persist despite the supposed Darwinian paradox—why would animals spend time and energy on sexual activities that have zero chance of resulting in offspring? A new theoretical paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution shifts away from the traditional question of “why” and instead asks… well, why not? The authors of the paper propose that these behaviors occurred in a common ancestor from which all animals evolved, and have persisted because they have few, if any, costs....

That’s a lot of time lost to lethargy, but the consequences of chronic sleeplessness can be even more serious. Those who average less than six hours an evening have an increased risk of accidents, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Yet our quest for slumber meets so many intersecting obstacles, from the glow of screens down to our DNA. Like a fast-fading dream, the full scope of the problem is difficult to comprehend....

NASA is developing a nasal spray version of Scopalamine, a drug for treating motion sickness. Motion sickness occurs when the central nervous system gets conflicting messages from the other systems. Usually, the inner ear detects motion when the eye doesn’t, or vice versa. The current prevailing theory is that your brain then decides you’re hallucinating from the poison of your choice (or blunder) and then proceeds to purge said poison....

I. Early on a Saturday morning, about 60 planetary malcontents gathered in a narrow auditorium on the campus of George Washington University. They’d come to hear about a plan to build a self-sustaining colony in space, and they hoped to be among its first settlers, leaving the rest of us to live and die on Earth. “How many of you would like to take a one-way mission to Mars?” asked the balding engineer on stage....

How would you describe the flavor of parmesan cheese? What about the aftertaste of a rich beef broth, or the earthy tones of fresh mushrooms? You can almost place it, it’s just at the tip of your tongue … ah, umami. This millennia-old flavor was identified in only the last 120 years, and entered Western lexicon even more recently. The Japanese word translates to “pleasant, savory taste” or “mouthfulness,” and has its place alongside sweet, salty, bitter, and sour as the basic gustations....

Despite seismic shifts in the very nature of money, the 230-year-old operation will keep on pumping fresh coins into circulation this way. Digital currency is trending, and countries around the world have unveiled bold plans for centralized electronic banks. But the alternatives won’t make physical cash go extinct, at least in the US. The total volume of hard currency in national circulation, including pennies and nickels (which cost more to produce than they’re worth) swelled by more than 5 percent each year over the past decade....

Stephan’s Quintet Four galaxies within Stephan’s Quintet (about 620,000 lightyears across) are doing an intricate dance with gravity. The fifth galaxy is merely an observer, watching from a distance. The images of the quintet taken by JWST (which have red, orange, yellow, green, and blue colors) shows never-seen-before features and details of the, “results of these interactions, including sweeping tails of gas and bursts of star formation,” according to NASA. The Chandra data (in light blue) of this same system shows a shock wave heating up gas to tens of millions of degrees, while one of the galaxies passes through at about 2 million miles per hour....

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is changing over time. While scientists are still unsure whether viruses are actually alive (they can’t survive or replicate without the help of another lifeform, but inside one they clearly thrive), they do have DNA or RNA and copy it to make more versions of themselves. And like plants, animals, and bacteria, the new coronavirus will inevitably make mistakes during this process. These errors lead to mutations—changes in genetic material between the new virus and its parent....

The HTC Vive is one of the most advanced virtual reality headsets in the world. It’s so groundbreaking, we gave it the Grand Award in our 2015 Best of What’s New issue, meaning that it was identified a technological breakthrough that will have an impact on our world for years to come. The VR headset’s spatial recognition features and its wireless controllers added a level of immersion that’s just never been seen in VR headsets before....

People who eat lunch at their desks are usually commended for having a relentless work ethic. As it turns out, the downside to an uninterrupted day typing away is an accumulation of food bits between the keys. Those morsels are breeding grounds for bacteria, and as British researchers recently discovered, they can make your keyboard several times more polluted than a toilet seat. Doubtless your hands are a guilty party as well—the test results showed coliform bacteria in higher than normal levels (coliform comes from fecal matter)....

We all make mistakes. It’s only human. But what happens when our mistakes are combined with treacherous conditions in the outdoors? What happens when our blunders combine into a series of unfortunate events? Here we’ll look at the conditions and thought processes that get people into trouble, and the simple fixes that could get you out of a life-threatening situation. 1. Go With a Partner Maybe no one was free on the afternoon you wanted to hike or scout that new hunting location....

The modern Luddite tends to have a more personal, less violent disdain for technology than his predecessors, but that doesn’t mean he owns, or wants to own, a smartphone. What this person needs instead is an addictive toy that doesn’t run on batteries. He could probably also use a good old-fashioned shave and some high-end personal accessories. Check out our gallery for a full list of suggestions.

Five years, and five lunar landings later, the nebulous idea that the government faked the whole moon shot on a soundstage somewhere in the Southwest finally coalesced when, in 1974, Bill Kaysing, a former technical writer for Rocketdyne, a company that worked on the Atlas V launch vehicle, self published a book_ We Never Went to the Moon: America’s $30 Billon Swindle_. Kaysing claimed that the Apollo program was faked to allow the U....

Of course, the procedure is so expensive, complicated, and risky that it’s not replicable as a large-scale public health strategy, but we’ll ignore that for a minute. Here’s how they did it. Drs. Gero Hutter and Eckhard Thiel are blood cancer experts at the Charite Medical University in Berlin. Their patient, an American ex-pat, was suffering from leukemia as well as a full-blown case of AIDS. His case was so desperate that his doctors decided to get craaazy and give him a bone-marrow transplant–(this isn’t the crazy part)–using blood stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV (this is)....

That latter feature has gotten the organization in some trouble. Internet Archive was sued by a suite of four corporate publishers in 2020 over copyright controversies—with one side saying that what Internet Archive does is preservation, and the other saying that it’s piracy, since it freely distributes books as image files without compensating the author. Last week, the ongoing case entered a new chapter as the nonprofit organization filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to put a stop to the lawsuit, arguing that their Controlled Digital Lending program “is a lawful fair use that preserves traditional library lending in the digital world” since “each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and paid for....

Shortly after, the US Navy issued a release confirming the finding of USS Samuel B. Roberts off the coast of the Philippines. “This expedition has been a solid combination of historical detective work and cutting edge, innovative technology. The team onboard are well versed in delivering highly technical operations in the hadal zone—the deepest areas of our ocean,” Kelvin Murray, the expedition leader onboard DSSV Pressure Drop, told PopSci. “Despite all the research, technology and expertise, it is fair to say that a certain amount of luck helps in finding deep ocean shipwrecks....

Since then, space travel has gone from science fiction to tweetable real-life experience. With that, our designs for protective gear–both real and imagined–have gone from impractical to immobilizing to workable. Click here to enter the gallery In Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden traces the development of astronaut outwear in both fact and fiction from the first hot air balloon flight in the late 1700s to the present....

“It happens quite abruptly,” says Gary Mo, a bioengineer at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “The cells will literally pop.” Scientists had previously thought that pyroptosis is a one-way street—once set in motion, the decision can’t be reversed. In a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications, Mo and his team found that a cell has an inbuilt mechanism to revoke pyroptosis, allowing it to die another day. The insights from the discoveries could clue researchers in on how pyroptosis can be regulated, be it to kill off cancer cells in a patient, or to suppress the phenomenon in immune cells and prevent the onset of cytokine storms when the body battles a particularly gnarly infection....