The verdict is still out on what exactly will be the outcome of a paleontologist, Sankar Chatterjee, putting his scientific head together with that of an aeronautical engineer named Rick Lind. But so far the results have been intriguing. The object of their collaboration is a project called the pterodrone, an unmanned aerial vehicle modeled on the flying prowess of an early Cretaceous pterosaur, Tapejara wellnhoferi. Aeronautical engineers indulging in cross-disciplinary collaboration is not without precedent....

Paper straws The first drinking straws were made from paraffin wax-coated Manila paper. Sold by inventor Marvin Stone, who filed the first patent for a straw in 1888, they offered a factory-made alternative to the hand-cut ryegrass or reed slurpers commonly relied on at the time. There was only one (very persistent) problem: paper straws wilt. It’s all fun and games until you’re on the wrong side of a flaccid cylinder, unable to suction your mint julep past the moist warp of the cardboard....

I’ve been impersonated online four times (that I know of). Three times, someone took my self-portraits and used them to catfish people on Tinder. The other time, someone created an email address and pretended to be me researching an article on Instagram accounts for a site I used to write for. They reached out to big accounts and attempted to get them to hand over their login credentials. In all four cases, I had no idea it was going on until someone who was directly affected contacted me to ask if they were being scammed....

More than 30 million people are dealing with excessive heat warnings dragging through the weekend, and a report has already come out showing that this weather would be virtually impossible without the help of climate change. “This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible,” Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a Dutch climate scientist, told the Associated Press. “And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did....

If you’re committing to new diet, weight-loss, or health-related resolutions, you may come across suggestions for kicking things off with a juice cleanse. Depending on which celebrity or influencer you ask, the supposed benefits of juicing can include everything from losing weight to clearing up acne to achieving better focus and improving your mood. But is juicing good for you? The short answer is no—at least not if you make these liquids a major component of your daily diet....

Flying on future Chinese rockets like the Long March 5, 7, and 9, the study proposes a 2 to 6 person crewed capsule. The semi-conical reentry vessel would be attached to the propulsion and cargo sections in the service modules, similar in configuration to NASA’s Orion capsule. At 14 tons, the basic next generation spacecraft would have nearly double the mass of the 7.8-ton Shenzhou. For deep space missions to near Earth asteroids and the Moon, the next generation spacecraft would have a larger service module, for a total mass of 20 tons....

While the coal ban was lifted at the beginning of February, the decisions to stop exporting both goods as a solution to alleviate shortages had been deemed questionable by experts. “Did the problems go away? No,” Bhima Yudhistira Adhinegara, the director of Jakarta-based Center of Economic and Law Studies told CNN Indonesia. “Instead, it was protested by overseas potential buyers. These kinds of policies need to be stopped.” Hundreds of farmers in Indonesia have protested as palm fruit prices dropped dramatically, while rival palm oil provider Malaysia has used the opportunity to scoop up market share....

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid nearly 10 kilometers wide slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The impact lit vast stretches of the planet on fire. Soot and dust choked the Earth. As the world burned, temperatures in the ocean plummeted, and creatures that once ruled, including ammonites, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, died out—along with 80 percent of the other animal species on the planet. In the void, new life flourished....

Aptiv Las Vegas, Boston, Pittsburgh, Singapore The name “Aptiv” might not ring a bell, but if you visit Las Vegas, you could ride in one of their autonomous vehicles after hailing a Lyft. They first began offering rides in their cars during the Consumer Electronics Show in January, 2018, and the program has grown from there. The company currently has 30 autonomous cars on the roads in Sin City; they cruise around 20 hours a day, seven days a week....

Except for public and private school transportation and open-air transport, masks are still required on all forms of public transportation, including taxis and ride-shares. This applies to all public transportation arriving in, traveling within, and leaving the United States (until it arrives at an international destination). It also requires masks in all indoor transportation hubs. People who are fully vaccinated are not exempt from any of these masking mandates. “Traveling on public transportation increases a person’s risk of getting and spreading COVID-19 by bringing people in close contact with others, often for prolonged periods, and exposing them to frequently touched surfaces,” the CDC states on its website....

Describing the issues as “extreme, egregious deficiencies,” Zatko also claims current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal fired him earlier this year after Zatko’s repeated attempts to address the problems. Zatko was hired by former company CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2020 following the infamous hacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. “This would never be my first step, but I believe I am still fulfilling my obligation to Jack and to users of the platform,” Zatko told The Washington Post, adding that he hoped “to finish the job Jack brought me in for, which is to improve the place....

Burmese pythons, native to southeast Asia, are massive constrictors, reaching up to 17 feet long. They were brought to Florida as pets and either escaped or were released into the wild, and found themselves an environment totally unprepared for them. South Florida, especially the area in and around the Everglades, is home to an astounding number of rare and vanishing plants and animals, vanishing faster due to an all-out frontal environmental assault from land developers and politicians....

A new study, published February 11 in Nature Sustainability, helps explain why. One main driver is the “fertilization effect,” brought about by humans burning fossil fuels. As CO2 increases in the atmosphere, this boosts photosynthesis—as long as water, light, and nutrients are not limited. When plants take up more of the gas, they produce more food and unfurl new leaves. But researchers also found another cause for the change in hue: planting more crops and trees....

Unlike humans and other living creatures, batteries do not have DNA. There are no chromosomes in a lithium-ion battery cell. But their importance to society as the world looks for ways to decarbonize is hard to overstate—lithium-ion batteries power electric vehicles, can help with storage on the electric grid, and can even be used to propel new aircraft on very short flights. In a paper published earlier this month in the journal Joule, a group of 28 scientists are calling for a “battery data genome” project....

This technique isn’t new: fire departments in wildfire country have been using foil wrap for decades to protect structures like ranger stations, monuments, and remote US Forest Service buildings. But recent photos of houses miraculously intact amidst smoldering rubble have inspired some homeowners to take matters into their own hands—at times even shelling out big money for the same shiny wrapping material used by the pros. Other homeowners have opted for a higher-tech approach: a few weeks after Raymond’s success, Martin Dikey spent more than $6,000 on fire-resistant wrapping foil laced with fiberglass and acrylic adhesive to save his second home, a wooden house on the California side of Lake Tahoe....

When questioned on whether Americans will have to cut back on some aspects of their carbon-intensive lifestyles, such as eating red meat, Kerry answered that “I think it’s a false choice you’re presenting to people. You don’t have to give up quality of life to achieve some of the things we know we have to achieve.” Then he added that 50 percent of the emissions reductions needed to get to net zero by 2050 “are going to come from technologies we don’t yet have....

Researchers analyzed information from 909 Baltimore-based participants in a long-running National Institute of Mental Health study. In following the aging subjects, the study found that women seem to experience more memory loss potentially linked to stress than men do. Scientists already know that almost twice as many women as men get Alzheimer’s disease, the illness studied by study author Cynthia Munro, a psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins University. What they don’t know is why....

The decision will guide what further steps and preventative measures the organization will take to combat this outbreak. Of particular interest is deciding whether Zika is the cause of the increase in microcephaly, a condition that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads. Since October, Brazil has reported 4,180 cases; previously, the country reported only about 150 cases per year, according to The New York Times. In addition to microcephaly, there have also been reports of a connection between Zika virus and Guillain-Barré syndrome–a condition in which the immune system attacks the nerves and can lead to paralysis; the syndrome is often triggered by a bacterial or viral infection....

In a fan-made creation, IBM’s Watson, the artificial intelligence algorithms used to beat Jeopardy in 2011, proposes a run for president. The real Watson has gotten much “smarter” since 2011, due to IBM’s litany of research initiatives and acquisitions. IBM has specifically pushed healthcare as a main focus of topic, saying that Watson informs lung cancer treatment decision for 90 percent of nurses at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “It is our belief that Watson’s unique capabilities to assess information and make informed and transparent decisions define it as an ideal candidate for the job responsibilities required by the president,” states the Watson 2016 Foundation, a fake website dedicated to Watson’s presidential bid....

“It’s about taking a trip down memory lane and trying to understand, ‘how did we get here?’” says paper author Benjamin Santer, a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “In taking that trip down memory lane, it turns out that the events of 1979 were important… and were related.” Satellites above The paper links these three historic anniversaries, but it started with the satellite data. “We now have forty complete years of satellite-based estimates of global scale changes in the temperature of the atmosphere,” Santer says....