What’s going on? Is the crisp autumn air, or the joy (or anxiety) of the holiday season, triggering more unprotected sexual intercourse? Or is it something else entirely? It turns out reproduction is seasonal across all living organisms, from plants, to insects, to reptiles, to birds and mammals—including human beings. The ultimate explanation for this phenomenon is an evolutionary one. Earth’s environment is seasonal. Above or below the equator, the year is structured by the winter, spring, summer, and fall....

While many of us tend to listen more to music on the radio than tune into the news, handheld radios are still considered essential, especially when it comes to emergencies. Red Cross recommends having at least one radio in your emergency preparedness kit so you can have continuous access to weather reports. It may be old-school tech, but radio travels significantly faster than an LTE broadcast, making it ever-reliable. With this radio, you can tune in to your favorite AM, FM, long-wave, or shortwave bands with manual and digital tuning....

Even our closest primate relatives cannot repeat our speech patterns despite being shown to understand language because their larynxes aren’t shaped to function the way ours do. Of course, parrots don’t even have lips and yet they can imitate human speech with amazing accuracy. Research from the University of Vienna says that parrots have the neuronal capacity to perceive, decode and reproduce the speech signal, overcoming the physical barrier to imitating human speech....

This is an excellent aerator by Niagara Conservation that will fit comfortably on most kitchen and bathroom faucets. It really makes saving water a no-brainer. There are three water flow rates, which is nice because you can adjust the pressure based on your needs. Most of the time, you shouldn’t need a high flow rate to wet your toothbrush or wash your face. If you have to hose down a dirty pan, however, just rotate the aerator to turn up the intensity....

Experimenting on the new moon rocks in a lab revealed that they contain materials possibly useful as catalysts to make fuel and oxygen on the moon. The team has proposed a strategy for how future lunar explorers could use these catalysts to create critical resources, instead of packing those supplies, one potential way to minimize the cost of long-term space exploration. They published their results on Thursday in the journal Joule....

Some asteroids contain valuable metals such as gold and platinum, while the moon and other celestial bodies contain water that could potentially be turned into rocket fuel. In 2015, the U.S. laid down the first legal groundwork to let companies mine for space resources. Luxembourg, too, will establish a regulatory framework, as well as investing in research and development for space mining technology, which is not yet ready for primetime....

With global warming dominating so many headlines today, it’s no surprise that many of us are looking to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases our activities produce. By assessing how much pollution each of your individual actions generates — be it setting your thermostat, shopping for groceries, commuting to work or flying somewhere for vacation — you can begin to see how changing a few habits here and there can significantly reduce your overall carbon footprint....

This bot is named ​​CICERO, and it can play the game Diplomacy better than many human players. CICERO more than doubled the average score of its human opponents and placed in the top 10 percent of players across 40 games in an online league. The program has been a work in progress for the past three years between engineers at Meta, and researchers from Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, and Harvard....

What makes a song metal? Metal emerged as a genre distinct from rock in the early 1970s, as artists pushed to create heavier music. According to Zett, a formally trained musician and the guitarist in black/thrash band Kömmand, “First and foremost, metal has to have distorted guitars. It also usually has riffs—repeating cycles of musical ideas—and it’s usually ‘heavy,’ that is, loud or crunchy.” Beyond that, what makes metal metal is difficult to answer in words....

A new study published in Nature found that people may be entering risky zones at an extremely fast rate. Researchers analyzed various datasets of population growth and movement alongside satellite data of major floods from 2000 to 2015 and found that the global population that is exposed to floods has increased by 24 percent since the beginning of the century, or 10 times higher than researchers previously thought. This means an increase in the flood-prone areas of over 80 million people....

While many people will become drone operators for the first time this holiday season, model aviation as a hobby goes back decades. The Academy of Model Aeronautics is a non-profit which aims to represent and promote the interests of all model aircraft enthusiasts, and they boast a membership roll of 185,000. The AMA was part of the FAA’s task force to come up with new drone rules, but the group appears to be dissatisfied with the results, claiming “these recommendations, as written, would make the registration process an unnecessary and unjustified burden” to its members, and noting that for decades model airplanes and people-carrying airplanes have coexisted....

The monkeys were first trained to use a joystick to control the arm, teaching their brain cells the process of retrieving the food. Electrodes were then inserted into their motor cortex and their limbs restrained in plastic tubes so that they would have to use the robotic arm to get the food. They quickly learned how to grasp the treats without knocking them over. The hope is to fine tune the technology to one day build an arm with which people will be able to bring a teacup to their lips or use a wrench to tighten a bolt....

The reasons for doing this are many. For one, a manned mission beyond the moon to a faraway asteroid would likely take six months or more to reach even the closest passing asteroid of interest. During that time out from under the protective umbrella of Earth’s magnetic field, astronauts would be exposed to long periods of cosmic radiation–the effects of which aren’t exactly defined. Moreover, it would be costly, dangerous, and might not yield that much scientific benefit....

According to NASA, a liquid hydrogen line did not adequately chill one of the rocket’s four core-stage engines, which are part of the preparations needed before ignition. The countdown was halted at T-40 minutes, as engineers continued to troubleshoot. Earlier in the morning, NASA stopped and restarted the fueling of the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak. Thunderstorms off of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center had already delayed the fueling by nearly an hour....

Orion entered the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at about 25,000 miles per hour, before its reentry and its parachutes brought the spacecraft down to roughly 20 mph before splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Orion performed its crucial crew module separation at 12:00 pm EST and began the crucial entry interface stage at 12:20 pm EST. Entry interface was described as the “moment of truth,” for Orion, where the spacecraft’s important heat shield felt the effects of temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit....

One of the major suspects in bee declines is neonicotinoids–a widely used class of insecticide. Neonicotinoids have been shown to be harmful to bees (particularly honeybees) in the lab, but proving that the pesticide is harmful in the field has been difficult. Now, two studies published this week show that these pesticides do impact bees’ behavior, and maybe even their lives. In the first study, published in Nature, researchers found that bees that were exposed to neonicotinoids didn’t pollinate as many apple trees, and the apple trees that they did visit produced apples with fewer seeds (a sure sign of decreased pollination)....

Wait, Nintendo introduced two versions of the same console? Nintendo Switch initially debuted way back in 2017. The Switch’s versatility sets its hardware apart from typical home-bound consoles like the Xbox Series X and the PS5. Plugged into a TV, the Switch acts like a typical gaming machine. Snap the JoyCon controllers onto the 6.2-inch LCD screen, however, and you can take the full Switch gaming experience out into the world....

FACT: Scientists and high-society ladies once used radiation to grow mutant flowers and veggies By Rachel Feltman Most folks know that during World War II, the Manhattan Project figured out how to harness nuclear chain reactions to commit unspeakably horrifying acts of mass-murder and war. But in the early 1900s, when we were just starting to understand radioactivity, nuclear science had a much more fantastical and optimistic following. This led to plenty of dangerous and misguided nonsense, like irradiated slippers designed to glow in the dark, but also a general sense that understanding physics would give us unlimited energy and unlimited food—that it could make resources so abundant that utopia simply had to follow....

This year’s Emoji class continues the consortium’s trend of emphasizing inclusion. There are more options for same-sex couples, gender neutral cartoon people, both manual and electric wheelchairs, and prosthetic limbs—all of which make it easier for people to communicate in a way that more accurately represents them. Of course, all that’s accompanied by the expected selection of whimsical nonsense like a kite, some underpants, and an adorable sloth emoji that I will use constantly the second it’s available....