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That distinction is part of what makes Leica’s new M10 Monochrom camera so interesting. It costs over $8,000 before you add a lens and it doesn’t have the capacity to capture color photos. This isn’t one of those cases where a company uses software to cripple a device like Nikon did with its DF DSLR that doesn’t shoot video. Instead, Leica built the M10 Monochrom around a sensor that isn’t physically capable of producing a color photo....

The frog makes its home in the basin of the Putumayo River, which runs through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. Researchers found the new species during a 2019 expedition to learn more about the basin’s mysterious amphibian residents. The frog’s most distinctive feature is a long, protruding snout resembling that of a tapir, a pig-like, hoofed mammal with a distinct trunk. The shape of the frog’s schnoz may hint at a life spent nosing through soft, wet soils....

The idea that these faceless organizations care about your penchant for scouring Etsy for the softest alpaca yarn (uh, just an example) can seem somewhat absurd. You commute to work, order takeout, hang out with family and friends, and generally lead a fairly normal, uneventful life. But they do care. Where you see basic information about yourself, they see dollar signs—a lot of them. Ad tech companies collect 72 million data points on the average American child by the time they’re 13, and Facebook alone is rumored to track 52,000 data points per user....

“It’s extremely rare,” says Shanna Simpson, animal curator at the Topeka Zoo. “We never even heard about this happening until we saw Zuri.” Zuri currently looks a bit like a teenage male lion just beginning to grow out a mane despite being an 18-year-old female. The caretakers began to notice the tresses after Avus, the only male of the zoo’s three lions, died in October 2020, Simpson suggesting that the new do may be linked to a change in hormones and that she may be taking on more of a protector role of the pride....

World leaders are meeting this week for COP24, a key United Nations climate change conference being held this year in Katowice, Poland. They’re working on the implementation plan for the 2015 agreement, AKA the Paris Agreement, to keep warming below two degrees Celsius. United States President Donald Trump is notably absent from this conference, since he pulled the U.S. out of the agreement last year. But whatever happens in Poland will have consequences that the United States will certainly feel....

As a response to rising outbreaks, the US is gearing up for monkeypox vaccination campaigns. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced it is expanding vaccine access by 296,000 doses in the next few weeks and 1.6 million doses in the coming months. About 56,000 vaccines will be immediately available to states requesting monkeypox treatments. The administration is also working to make FDA-cleared tests available to detect monkeypox. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent out tests to five commercial laboratory companies to increase access to monkeypox testing in health sites....

This week’s episode features an extra weird, very special guest: Wendy Zukerman, host of the Science Vs podcast. Take a listen below (or wherever you like to get your podcasts) and keep scrolling for more info on some of the stories we shared. And don’t forget to take a listen to Wendy’s full Science Vs episode on the placebo effect. Fact: Tomatoes took a long time to take off in the U....

Fact: The history of fonts gets surprisingly dramatic By Eleanor Cummins Fonts, when they’re good, aren’t particularly noticeable. They’re mostly there to deliver information, not detract from it. But every once in a while, a font finds itself at the epicenter of a controversy much bigger than itself. This week, I talked about the simmering history of a font called Fraktur, which came to be identified with the German people—and later the Nazi Party....

Now, researchers have created a global map that details in high-resolution where those benefits lie—and how that overlaps with our need for them. The new analysis, published Thursday in Science, is perhaps the most fine-scale visual of global ecosystem services out there. “That fine scale is critical to really getting these services right,” says Becky Chaplin-Kramer, lead researcher of the study and lead scientist with Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project....

But general relativity is not flawless. While it explains the vast majority of what we observe through the universe, it leaves its fair share of cracks. This has given rise to alternative models of gravity that attempt to fill in these knowledge gaps. One of these models is a “chameleon theory” called f(R) gravity, and a new study published in Nature Astronomy this week suggests it may be a viable model for describing how gravity has influenced some of the biggest objects in the known universe....

Come on, how often do I need to shower? There’s not one right answer, but a range of right answers. Generally, people shower somewhere between every other day and twice a day, depending on their personal preference and how their skin reacts to getting hosed down, says Jeffrey Cohen, a dermatologist and assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine. So if you’re in that range, you’re doin’ fine. He further recommends that when you do shower, you use lukewarm water and limit it to 10 or 15 minutes....

With the upcoming release of iOS 9.3, people who use their iPhone or iPad in the late hours of the day will benefit from Night Shift–a feature that will change your screen’s color to account for the time of day to make it easier on your eyes, similar to f.lux, a popular third-party app. And better still for iPhone and iPad users, the latest out of Apple Canada points to Night Shift coming with its own quick toggle in Control Center....

Fortunately, we need not go blindly into this future. Robot Law is volume of research on robotics law and policy edited by Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin, and Ian Kerr. Calo is a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who frequently writes about where the laws of man and the laws of robotics intersect. So what better way to illustrate the book’s cover than a cartoonish, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robot game turned into full bar-side brawl?...

Oases is a beautifully designed flight game where, contrary to the entire genre, you never crash, land, encounter obstacles, or have a destination. And it’s all in tribute to the pilot-grandfather he never knew. “My grandfather died in 1960,” explains Gibson, “during the Algerian Independence War when his plane was reported lost in the desert, days before the birth of his first child, my father.” Since Gibson wouldn’t be born for years to come, the game build wasn’t really a coping mechanism....

Our map is a comprehensive snapshot of all food flows between counties in the US—grains, fruits and vegetables, animal feed, and processed food items. To build the map, we brought together information from eight databases, including the Freight Analysis Framework from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which tracks where items are shipped around the country, and Port Trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows the international ports through which goods are traded....

As designed, the UISS can be operated from a dedicated control ship, such as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, or a “vessel of opportunity,” which is a catch-all term for other ships on hand capable of using it. The Littoral Combat ship is a long-troubled class of warship. Its promise, when it was first planned in 2004, was that it could operate in shallower waters than the rest of the Navy’s deep-sea vessels....

Starting October 28, you’ll have a chance to find out. At “Flavor: Making it and Faking It,” the debut exhibit from the Museum of Food and Drink’s MOFAD Lab, visitors can play these and other notes on the Smell Synthesizer, an interactive display that lets visitors explore the connections between chemicals and sensations. (Tickets are available online.) There are a few precursors to the Smell Synthesizer. In 1902, the poet and bizarre aesthete Sadakichi Hartmann played a “perfume concert” at Carnegie Lyceum, using electric fans and essential oils to transport his audience on a journey through the Far East; he was booed off stage in less than five minutes....

OK, we can see it too. The “cosmic lightsaber” as they’re calling it, is indeed far, far, away (1,350 light years to be precise), but it’s firmly inside our own galaxy. The ‘lightsaber’ parts are two jets of incredibly hot material getting shot out of a newborn star. The jets are located along the rotation axis of the star. Along each of the jets are knots of nebulous gas, called Herbig-Haro objects, which form as the jets collide with the surrounding gas in the Orion B molecular cloud complex, a place where many new stars are being born....

The guidelines were created by the three companies and were “facilitated by” the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, SpaceX is the largest operator of satellites—by far. It has a whopping 2,219 satellites in orbit as part of its Starlink constellation, which dwarves everyone else, including NASA (73), the US Air Force (95), and the Russian military (73). OneWeb, another satellite internet operator, is a distant second with 427 satellites in orbit....

The Weizhengheng container house is a modern prefab modular home with a ton of bells and whistles. It is constructed out of 20-foot shipping container. A built-in hydraulic system allows occupants to expand the size of the home using the included remote control. When folded, it is 87 x 228 x 98-inches. Expanded, the home is 94-inches wider. It’s a sweet option for people that want a small second home or a spot for guests to stay on your property....