An unpublished study of nearly 70,000 Southern Californians posted on January 11 to medRxiv found that people who caught Omicron were hospitalized at lower rates, had shorter hospital stays, and were less likely to be admitted to the ICU or die than Delta patients. Even among unvaccinated people, those with Omicron infections were less likely to be hospitalized than those who caught the Delta variant. The findings haven’t yet been peer reviewed, but are consistent with data from other countries, including a January 14 report from South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases....

Take what has become the predominant way to show case counts: a map. Visualizing where in the world has the most number of confirmed coronaviruses cases isn’t an inherently bad idea—at PopSci, we made such a map towards the beginning of the outbreak precisely because it seemed smart to show readers where the epidemic was hitting hardest. But there are some problems with these maps. One is the difference in scale between countries hit hard (like China, the United States, and Italy) and those currently more spared is massive....

Asymptomatic people who test positive and unvaccinated individuals exposed to the virus need only isolate or quarantine for five days, the CDC’s new guidelines say, with the clock starting the day of a positive test. After five days, asymptomatic people can resume normal activities, but should wear a mask around other people for another five days. Anyone experiencing symptoms at all, regardless of vaccination status, should immediately get tested and isolate if positive....

“I really liked the mac and cheese,” he told a group of reporters gathered at Orwashers bakery in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in June. Surrounded by such fare as gourmet pigs-in-a-blanket and elegantly displayed charcuterie, he still had high praise for NASA staples such as reconstituted shrimp cocktail and gooey rice dishes designed to stick to spoons in zero gravity. “Are we getting any of the mac and cheese today?...

Furze, a plumber in Stamford, England, rode BMX bikes as a kid and missed the adrenaline rush as an adult. So in his twenties, he sought new thrills. “For some reason, I thought building a nice big fire was the answer,” he says of his first project. Furze’s 50,000-square-foot inferno, which he lit by launching a rocket into a mountain of wood, earned him a spot in the 2006 Guinness World Records book....

On May 22, 1960, the largest earthquake ever measured struck off the coast of southern Chile. Once the shaking stopped, Denis García, a resident of the nearby port town Corral, noticed something odd. He was searching for his family, not realizing they were safe and on high ground, when he caught sight of Corral Bay. The waters had drawn back, leaving the seafloor bare. García went to investigate. He did not see the 40-foot-high tsunami barreling toward him until it was too late....

Back in 1975, scientists surmised that our brains formed this way not because of biochemical reactions–another theory–but simply by the laws of physics. At the time though, they couldn’t figure out a proper experiment to prove their theory. Now a group of researchers came up with a fun experiment to demonstrate the forces at work. First, they created a 3D-printed gel model of a developing fetus’s smooth brain, before the folding happened....

In a draft document released this week, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which develops guidelines for health screening tests, is recommending that physicians also screen for illicit drug use in patients over the age of 18. In this case, the task force defined illicit drug use as taking any illegal drugs or using prescription medications, like opioids, in ways other than what they were prescribed for. There are multiple screening tools that detect drug use, and the recommendation leaves the choice of how to screen up to the individual physician....

Previous research, he later found, had showed that genetics affects medication response in other areas, like cardiology medications—and he wondered why similar questions hadn’t been asked about birth control. “We’ve been using the same drugs for decades, with no thought to see if they could affect people differently,” he says. In a first stab at that question, his team conducted a study that found people with particular gene variants, normal alterations to the human genome, metabolize one birth control hormone more quickly—reducing its concentrations in their body....

The holidays are a wonderful time to partake in our most beloved food-centric celebrations—many of us spend more time cooking this time of year than any other. And when we sit down with our families to share a holiday meal, we’re also sharing our values and our cultural traditions. For those who practice sustainable living, considering the environmental impact of our daily consumption, the holidays present an important opportunity to think about what we’re eating and where it’s from....

But honey bees aren’t the only bees out there. Earth is home to some 20,000 named species of bees, and there may be another 20,000 waiting to be discovered and named. We don’t know much about these species, what they’re like, or how they’re faring in the “global pollinator crisis.” In a new book, biologists Sam Droege and Laurence Packer shine a spotlight on some of that incredible bee diversity–for example, did you know that some bees have a tongue longer than their bodies, or that others drink sweat?...

Sanskrit is an ancient an classical Indo-European language from South Asia and the sacred and literary language of Hinduism. It is also how much of India’s greatest science, philosophy, poetry, and other secular literature has been written. It is spoken in the country by roughly 25,000 people today. “Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit, and we still don’t fully understand what our ancestors achieved, said Rajpopat, who first learned Sanskrit as a high school student and is now at the University of St....

Eyes bleeding? It should be so much simpler than that! Stanford University epidemiologist Kristin Sainani is on a mission to improve matters, turning scientists into people who can communicate their research in actual English. “Academia has a way of writing that can be very challenging to read,” she said. “It keeps a lot of people from being able to read it. Scientific literacy in this country is a whole other topic, of course, but part if it is that it’s really hard to read science....

Scientists have identified a new monster dinosaur, which bears a close resemblance to a creature featured in the original Ghostbusters movie. A Paleontologist named this new species Zuul crurivastator after Zuul, an intimidating horn-faced demigod that looks extremely similar to a skull pulled out of a fossil-rich formation in Montana. IF SEEN – you know who to call. The most volcanically active place in our solar system is one of Jupiter’s 67-ish moons, Io....

Archaeologists were excavating materials from the prehistoric entrance to Einhornhöhle, or the “Unicorn Cave,” in the Harz Mountains in Germany when they found the 2.2 inch-long bone. Scientists identified it as a phalanx, or toe bone, of a giant deer, and radiocarbon dating suggested that it is at least 51,000 years old. But what was most remarkable about this bone was how it had been modified: Etched into its surface were a series of lines creating a chevron-like pattern....

Flettner used those cylinders—called rotor sails—to power his ship, harnessing the same source that first drove vessels through the sea hundreds of years earlier when they began sailing: the wind. At the time, his invention couldn’t compete with steam, coal and, ultimately, the modern diesel engine. But today, as the world copes with climate change, the shipping industry—indeed, the entire global transportation sector—must find ways to wean itself from fossil fuels and transition to cleaner energy....

Clearly, something catastrophic had occurred in Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, but whatever it was, it apparently went undetected by the 350 million people living on our planet at the time: the historical records contain no mention of strange celestial events that year, catastrophic or otherwise. The event is recorded, instead, in the amount of radioactive carbon trapped in the annual growth rings of some of the world’s oldest trees. Carbon’s key radioactive isotope, carbon-14, forms when energetic particles enter Earth’s atmosphere and collide with nitrogen atoms....

In honor of Mueller’s memory, we turned to our archives. Wernher von Braun quoted Mueller a number of times in his columns for Popular Science, for his expertise in manned space flight. In a January 1964 Popular Science article, von Braun detailed a November 1963 meeting with President John F. Kennedy: In March 1968, von Braun wrote about the success of the Saturn V-Apollo’s flight test using the all-up method for Popular Science: You can read a 1969 article Mueller wrote for the New York Times about the manned lunar landing and his ambitions for the future here, and read his NASA oral history interviews done in 1998 and 1999 here....