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As written, both bills would make both of Haughwout’s armed drone uses illegal. here’s the text, as it appears identically in Raised Bill 148 “An Act Concerning The Weaponization Of Drones Based On A Program Review And Investigations Committee Study” and raised Bill 5274, “An Act Concerning The Use Of Drones”: Raised Bill 148 is currently being considered by the Program Review & Investigations Committee, and is sponsored by committee co-chair Rep....

New daily cases in the United States resumed their decline this week, but the Delta variant is on track to become the most common strain in the coming months. International travel continues to be complicated, but domestic fans will be able to attend the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games—with some caveats. Here’s what’s new this week. US surpasses 600,000 COVID deaths as cases gradually begin to decline again After a two-week stall in the springtime national decline in newly reported COVID-19 cases, the 7-day average has fallen to 11,138 cases per day, the lowest recorded level since March 2020....

The newly released images are actually a couple of weeks old, but it doesn’t much matter for our purposes. Curiosity is now rolling on lighter-toned, harder ground on which its tracks aren’t easily visible anyhow. But for the first 100 or so Sols (that’s a Martian day) Curiosity was making serious tracks. In the image above, Bradbury Landing is basically the dark smudge at left. The tracks weave across the lower half of the image over to the boundary where you can see the terrain changing....

To understand jazz—an infamously improvisational and unpredictable style of music—the program will lean on a database of jazz solos that the researchers behind the project are compiling. Once the machine has absorbed jazz, it will then create responses, based on what it knows. It’s music as language, with the computer taking the role of a toddler learning to string phrases together. Ben Grosser, an Assistant Professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who’s working on the project, told LiveScience: So why is the military interested in musical machines?...

Emperor penguins are one of only two open-sea Antarctic penguin species and depend on the sea ice for survival. After breeding, emperor penguins feed among the coastal pack ice where stretches of water are exposed. As a result of disappearing ice, the emperor penguins are being forced to retreat inward and could easily become displaced by other animals, losing out on nesting space. After examining data from the Terre Adelie penguin colony, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts found the emperor penguin population is facing a quasi-extinction, equal to a 95 percent or more population drop by the year 2100....

A well-populated breeding ground in southern Patagonia hints at one reason early sauropodomorphs were so successful: They knew how to stick together. When scientists analyzed the eggs and skeletal remains of juveniles and adults of a species known as Mussaurus patagonicus, they found that the fossils were segregated by age, suggesting that the dinosaurs raised their young as a community. The 193-million-year-old site represents the earliest evidence of herd-living in dinosaurs, the team reported on October 21 in Scientific Reports....

Uninvited guests at your summer cookout can be real pests. So get rid of your annoying insect visitors with a DIY bug trap. But bear in mind that not all the traps you find on the internet work. A sonic mosquito repellent is one failure of an insect trap. “There is no scientific basis for bug-repellent traps that claim to use a high-pitched frequency to drive away pests,” says Roxanne Connelly, an entomologist at the University of Florida....

“Birds don’t have a sense of smell, so I don’t understand why you’d study that anyway.” This extraordinary statement, expressed offhandedly by neurobiologist Dr. Jim Goodson while we waited in a cafeteria line at lunchtime, caught me off guard. Every form of life, even plants and bacteria, has the ability to sense chemical compounds in their environments. Chemical senses, which include smell and taste, are critical for avoiding harmful substances, like poisons, and finding beneficial ones, like food....

Caffeine is still the most intense stimulant. “It blows the others out of the water,” says Crystal Haskell-Ramsay, a nutritional psychologist at Northumbria University in England. But caffeine doesn’t act alone. Tea, for example, contains the amino acid theanine. In 2008, Haskell-Ramsay showed that subjects who took large doses of caffeine and theanine together felt more alert than if they had taken them separately. The subjects also had better reaction time and working memory....

Categorizing the food we eat over the holidays as “unhealthy” is a well-documented American tendency that has little to do with actual health—and the guilt we experience over our food may actually hurt us in the long term. If you’re feeling the pressure to start trying to atone for the festive treats you’ve enjoyed over the last few weeks, you may need to cut a few misconceptions out of your information diet....

Not surprisingly, the true believers preach the driverless car gospel louder than anyone. Anthony Levandowski, the brilliant engineer who headed up driverless car projects for both Google and Uber told Burkhard Bilger of the New Yorker, “Once you make the car better than the driver, it’s almost irresponsible to have him there.” Those who might oppose his righteous crusade are either irresponsible or irrationally afraid of a robot uprising. “Every year that we delay this, more people die....

To the study authors, drones would be most useful in bringing patient samples to more sophisticated labs, where they’re tested to be used in diagnoses or even regular checkups. As they write in the paper: “the majority of specimens are obtained in physician offices or clinics that tend to have small laboratories with limited testing menus. Thus samples must be transported to larger, more complex laboratories to provide the testing required for clinical care....

Aside from being one of many bizarre moments in the Land of Enchantment’s long history of them, the drone flight may be the first time in American history that such a craft has been piloted through a hall of government. Captured by official cameras, the video quality isn’t great — but the flight itself is pretty remarkable The presentation is in support of House Bill 64, introduced by James E....

The answer unsurprisingly lies in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. The good thing about silly traditions like this one is they provide an easy way to study the extremes of human bodies. Without the incentives of a national title and televised event, it’d be hard to convince grown-ups to crush piles of franks until they puke or pass out. But with piles of data from Nathan’s famous annual showdowns, we can get a somewhat clear answer to how many hot dogs a person can stomach....

For a long time, people assumed that the finest parchment, used for delicate beautiful books like pocket bibles, came from smaller animals like rabbits, or was made from the skins of newborn or aborted calves and sheep. The latter theory even gave rise to the name of the parchment, uterine vellum, but some researchers were skeptical, because using the skin from newborn or aborted farm animals would have been unsustainable agriculturally, especially with medieval farming practices....

You can mouse over the arcs for annotations of both the real and alternate versions of each person’s lifespan. To see the full version of the graphic (without scrollbars), go here.

That’s the conclusion of two reports published at the end of 2018. Both agree that limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels is needed to stop dangerous and damaging heat waves, droughts, sea level rise, and other impacts. That’s pretty dire, given we’ve already warmed the planet by about 1ºC. According to the International Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5ºC, if we don’t lower our current rates of burning fossil fuels, we could bring on that extra half-degree as soon as 2030....

A new show on the Science Channel, Secret Space Escapes premieres tonight at 10 pm, and features astronauts and cosmonauts detailing their brushes with disaster in their own words. In the first episode, noted Canadian astronaut (and musician) Chris Hadfield tells the story of his first spacewalk when he was blinded by a substance getting into his eye. He lived to tell the tale (which he’s told before at TED talks), but it’s an amazing story to see as well as hear....

Instead, in a happy accident, millions of Bangladeshi farmers have managed to create a flood control system of their very own, taking advantage of the region’s wet-and-dry seasonal climate. As farmers pump water from the ground in the dry season, they free up space for water to flood in during the wet season, hydrogeologists found. Researchers published the system they’d uncovered in the journal Science on September 15. And authorities could use the findings to make farming more sustainable, writes Aditi Mukherji, a researcher in Delhi for the International Water Management Institute who wasn’t involved in the paper, in a companion article in Science....