The process is safe, and though it has some side effects, it’s usually effective. However, it doesn’t work for everyone. “Not everyone is a good candidate for the regular standard of care,” says Stephanie Smith-Berdan, a research specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We as scientists should find alternatives.” In a new study in mice, Smith-Berdan and her colleagues took the initial steps towards a new approach. The team found that a combination of Viagra and a stem cell mobilizer called Plerixafor were able to pull stem cells out of the bone marrow and into the bloodstream (like GCSF’s do), where they could be easily harvested....

This argument that human-caused carbon emissions are merely a drop in the bucket compared to greenhouse gases generated by volcanoes has been making its way around the rumor mill for years. And while it may sound plausible, the science just doesn’t back it up. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide....

According to a paper recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from Carnegie Mellon have used a combined robotic and artificial intelligence system to design better electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries. In particular, the team was looking for electrolytes that would allow for batteries to charge faster—which is one of the biggest problems in battery technology today and a major barrier to widespread electric vehicle adoption. Lithium-ion batteries have a cathode and an anode surrounded by an electrolyte....

Like jet fuel, lithium-ion batteries can be flammable, thanks to the liquid electrolyte within them as well as the fact that they store oodles of energy and can experience a fire-starting reaction called thermal runaway. And fire on an aircraft can be disastrous. This test, examining how a battery system holds up following a hard impact, took place at a facility called the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) in Wichita, Kansas....

How fast? In the GIF above, that’s a drone flying at 45 mph, or 20 meters per second. That’s 10 miles-an-hour faster than the recent DJI Phantom 3 and just 5 mph slower than the new Parrot fixed-wing drone, the Disco. And it’s not just flying fast, it’s carrying with it a fairly functional payload of cameras and LIDAR. While it’s not quite as fast dodging obstacles, it can still fly relatively well through a box maze....

While we’ve seen evidence of Nigerian armed drones before, notably after one crashed, this time there’s video evidence of a strike, released by Nigerian itself. There are two big implications from this strike. The first is that, when the United States doesn’t sell countries drones over fear of how they’ll use them, the countries buy their drones from elsewhere, often China. Much of Nigeria’s drone arsenal are Israeli-made Aerostar UAVs, which are unarmed....

Then there’s Toyota. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) just released a video that shows a modified Supra screeching its tires as it drifts around obstacles on a track. The vehicle’s occupant, Jonathan Goh, may have been in the left-hand seat, but the car was doing the fancy driving. Drifting a vehicle on purpose is not something most people would ever do, and the main reason someone might experience something like it is when their car is skidding sideways, if they hit ice or otherwise lose control of the car....

It’s not entirely surprising we’ve previously failed to peg the mass of the Milky Way. The galaxy is made of billions upon billions upon billions of hot, blusterous stars, planets, and objects of all kinds of sizes, strewing about through a dark vacuum. And nearly 90 percent of everything out there is dark matter, which we have never directly observed in any capacity (we only know it exists because we can observe its gravitational forces acting on the objects that we can see)....

The wheel above shows some of the ways that select elements power and enrich our lives, how we get hold of them, and how ready we should be to live without. This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 Make It Last issue of Popular Science.

Over the past few years, researchers have been decrypting the link between genes and obesity. There’s not just one obesity gene. A mutation in one gene makes energy from food more likely to be stored as fat instead of burned; another affects the levels of the hormone leptin, which could make a person more likely to overeat. Understanding those genes, combined with technologies that allow for constant monitoring of disease and nutrition, may make cookie-cutter diets a thing of the past....

“We are in the height of West Nile virus season, but there are things you can do to decrease your risk of being bitten,” said Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan, via press release. Vasan explained that steps like using an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) registered insect repellent and wearing long sleeves and long pants during dusk and dawn can help prevent contracting the virus. “In addition, you can stop mosquitoes from laying eggs in the water by emptying outdoor containers that hold water,” Dr....

Our system lags in part because it’s physically bound to its own long history. A century ago, for instance, it made sense to route telegraph and phone lines alongside train tracks, where someone had already negotiated right-of-way, but that means 21st-century data packets now run through networks optimized for 19th-century railroads. No wonder Latvia, South Korea, and others are pulling ahead: They’re building from scratch. Several recent experiments are showing how we could start over with a new system ourselves—one that’s not just faster, cheaper, and more accessible, but also far less likely to become outmoded....

But for some people taking the pill, COVID still comes back. The phenomenon, called Paxlovid or COVID rebound, is relatively new and poorly understood. For a smattering of patients, rebound means a flare-up of fever, cough, or other symptoms. For others, the rebound is asymptomatic, but they begin testing positive after testing negative at the end of treatment. Kami Kim, director of the Division of Infectious Disease and International Medicine at the University of South Florida Health Morsani College of Medicine, spoke to Popular Science while in quarantine with a rebound COVID case....

Recent studies suggest there could be. First of all, there’s no reason to cut sugar completely out of your diet. That’s a pretty hard thing to do, says Leslie Bonci, a registered dietician and sports nutritionist. She says it’s unlikely that most people will stick to a sugar-free diet. Everyone, to a certain extent, has a desire for sweet-tasting foods—and for good reason. Sugar provides us with needed energy. So, if we eat a diet completely devoid of sugar, “psychologically, that can be devastating....

There are signs that the US could be headed in the same direction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that in 25 percent of the wastewater surveillance sites it tracks across the country, COVID readings have at least doubled in a week. As the Pandemic Prevention Institute pointed out on Twitter, those counts could just be noisy data—when COVID rates are low, as they are now, doubling isn’t necessarily a significant change....

A frost quake—or cryoseism, if you want to use the scientific name—isn’t a “real” earthquake, because it isn’t tectonic. Earthquakes happen when tectonic plates, the enormous sheets of Earth’s crust that move around at geologically slow paces, slip suddenly. Sometimes two plates slide past one another, or one plate may subduct beneath the other. These jolting movements are the result of built-up friction between the plates getting released all at once....

Their spirits may have been driving, but the planets also needed a vehicle for motion, so they were assumed to be riding on pure crystalline spheres. The spheres were invisible from Earth and interlocked, like the gears of a clock, to produce collective motion at a constant speed for all eternity. That clockwork universe was the one German astronomer Johannes Kepler inherited. He accepted it, at first. When the constellation Cassiopeia suddenly gained a new star (it was actually a supernova, the bright explosion at the end of a star’s life), Kepler recognized that the idea of the unchanging heavens could not be correct....

Do I need a booster if I got the J&J shot? You are still protected against COVID-19 with just that first shot, but new evidence released directly from J&J indicates that a second booster shot protects you a whole lot more. A first dose had a recorded 75 percent efficacy rate of protection against severe/critical COVID-19 globally, but after a second dose, this efficacy extends to moderate symptomatic cases, too. If you have reason to suspect you had a depressed immune system response to your first shot, perhaps as an elderly or immunocompromised individual, getting a second dose can only help....

This can be determined by a species’ habitat, as well as their diet. For example, snowy owls spend their summers in the Arctic, when the sun stays up for 12 to 24 hours a day. They also mainly eat lemmings, chunky rodents that are easier to catch on the tundra while it’s light out. But what would cause these finely tuned hunters to switch their schedules? A study published today in the journal PNAS traces an “evolutionary reversal” in one of the largest living groups of owls and presents “the first fossil evidence for diurnal behavior” among the birds, according to the abstract....

As one of the few black men in the doctorate program at Southern Illinois University, the experience was quite traumatic. “He held up my draft, pulled his waste basket from under his desk, and dropped my thesis in the trash with a bang,” says Thomas, now a public health professor at the University of Maryland College Park. “Only later did I find the words to describe his type: He was a tormentor, not a mentor....