“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves,” announced LIGO director David Reitze this morning. “We did it.” On September 14 of last year, the LIGO location in Livingston, Louisiana picked up a gravitational-wave signal, and seven milliseconds later, its fellow observatory in Hanford, Washington detected an identical signal. This signal exactly matched the calculated behavior of gravitational waves produced when two black holes collide. When two black holes merge, they begin by orbiting one another....

Here’s what you need to know from May 2019 Global carbon levels passed a new threshold, reaching 415 parts per million in May. Seismologist Lucy Jones set this change to music, and the result will haunt you.Thousands of tufted puffins starved to death in the Bering Sea and scientists think climate change is to blame.The United Nations issued a devastating report on extinction, which estimates 12.5 percent of species on Earth face extinction in the near future....

Google’s CEO went to Washington Until this week, Sundar Pichai’s name was notably absent from the list of tech CEOs asked to testify in front of Congressional committees this year. But on December 11th, Google’s CEO sat for roughly 3.5 hours and answered some of the most ill-informed and sometimes downright pointless questions you could imagine. We did learn a few tidbits, like Google has been internally workshopping a search product that could work on the censored internet in China, but has no plans right now to go back to the country it left in 2010....

If you are interested in learning the ins and outs of coding but don’t know where to begin, then there is good news for you. Right now you can get the 2023 Premium Learn To Code Certification Bundle for a dramatically lowered price. The premium bundle includes 14 courses and over 244 hours of content to help you become a great coder. With “Learn to Code with Python 3,” best-selling instructor Joseph Delgadillo, who has a 4....

Imagine you’re pulling out of a driveway to go left on a two-lane road: there’s nothing protecting you—no traffic light or stop sign—from the traffic barreling toward you from the left. Not only do you have to sneak through a gap in the traffic speeding from that side, you also need to ensure that once you do, cars coming from the right in the lane you’re joining don’t hit you, either....

According to CERN, the organization that manages the LHC, a coolant line ruptured midday on Friday September 19th while scientists conducted a test to ensure the components were working properly. The accident damaged a magnet and resulted in coolant leaking into the final section of the 17-mile long tunnel that houses the LHC. An early investigation by CERN revealed that faulty wiring between two giant magnets melted while testing the magnets performance at high voltage, causing the mechanical failure of the coolant line....

Now a team of researchers has developed metal nanoparticles that are non-toxic and make anti-cancer drugs more effective, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. The nanoparticles are made of alloyed gallium indium, a metal known to be a stable liquid at room temperature. The researchers used ultrasound to turn the metal into particles each about 100 nanometers in diameter. Then, they used special molecules called “ligands” to stick molecules of doxorubicin, a common chemotherapy drug, to the metal particles....

Blockchain technology soared to popularity thanks to cryptocurrency, when many saw the promise of investing in virtual money. And now, people are starting to gain interest in non-fungible tokens or NFTs to buy digital art and other digital goods, all of which are also powered by blockchain. At its very core, blockchain is simply a digital ledger that facilitates the process of logging and storing data of any kind. It’s predicted to power many future technologies, and you can discover all the ways you can capitalize on it with the 2022 Blockchain Development Fundamentals Bundle....

I didn’t know it was possible to get a sunburn on your eye until it happened to me. I thought I was safe—having thoroughly basted my uncooked chicken-colored skin with SPF 50—but my eyes were vulnerable, and I woke up the next day feeling like I’d been punched in the face. Know this: your eyes can be sunburned, and they’re not the only body parts you’re likely to forget to protect from dangerous ultraviolet rays....

The small, black, wingless workers run around the pavements, crawl up your plants tending aphids, or collect tasty morsels from your kitchen. And the flying ants that occasionally appear on a warm summer’s evening are actually the reproductive siblings of these non-winged workers. Here’s what else you need to know: 1. Most ants you see are female Ants have a caste system, where responsibilities are divided. The queen is the founder of the colony, and her role is to lay eggs....

Two papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology this week, found that mealworms can eat Styrofoam, turning a huge source of waste into compost that can be safely used on soil. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock,” said Craig Criddle, who supervises plastics research at Stanford, in a press release. Styrofoam, and in particular Styrofoam cups, are everywhere, and less than 10 percent of those used in the United States get recycled....

Yet the immense megalodon abruptly vanished from the fossil record around 3.6 million years ago—not long after the emergence of great white sharks. Scientists have speculated that the two species might have competed for prey, ultimately contributing to megalodon’s extinction. A study published on May 31 in Nature Communications offers indirect support for this idea. Researchers compared the chemical composition of teeth from living and extinct sharks, and concluded the great whites and megalodon occupied similar rungs of the prehistoric food chain....

The state of Michigan, which coincidentally is home to the first paved road in the country, may also become home to the first wireless electric vehicle “charging” road in the country. Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently announced the new initiative to develop the country’s first wireless charging infrastructure on a public road. The charging road will help advance state goals for more electric vehicle adoption and environmental sustainability in the state, hopefully creating more clean energy based jobs and reaching carbon neutrality by 2050....

With the COVID-19 pandemic, this couldn’t have come at a worse time, but the breakage of these dams didn’t shock Mark Ogden, coauthor of an American Society of Civil Engineers report card that gave America’s aging dam infrastructure a D and highlighted the urgent need for change—three years ago. “Dams like that shouldn’t be failing,” Ogden told Popular Science. “They should be properly maintained and upgraded. Unfortunately, in many cases they’re not....

“We’re decoding the human perceptual experience — your ability to see different things and understand what they are,” lead author Kai Miller told Popular Science. The researchers used electrodes to measure brain signals in seven volunteer subjects. They showed the subjects images of human faces and images of houses in 400-millisecond-long flashes, instructing them to report whenever they saw an upside-down house, in order to make sure that they stayed focused on the task at hand....

To get to that future —one where we don’t need to dig oil out of the ground—companies will need to dig a whole lot of metal out instead, and that’s potentially bad news for people who work in mines or live nearby. Like solar panels and wind turbines, electric car batteries are made from some of the most hard-to-get metals on Earth—dysprosium, neodymium, manganese, cobalt, and lithium — the list of materials reads like Tony Stark’s shopping list....

Well, hang on to your butts, because things are about to get even stranger: new data processed by the New Horizons team shows us that MU69 is actually flat. Instead of two spherical blobs, it’s really more like two flattened rocks that came together at one point and got stuck, like pancakes cooked side by side on a pan meeting at a neck where the batter merged. “This really is an incredible image sequence, taken by a spacecraft exploring a small world four billion miles away from Earth,” said the Southwest Research Institute’s Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, in a press release....

These nanotube fibers can lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than natural muscles of the same size, according to scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas and collaborators from Australia, China, South Korea, Canada and Brazil. They work by combining a waxy substance with a yarn made of carbon nanotubes. The wax expands in response to heat (or a voltage), and the yarn volume increases while its length contracts....

The field work can be grueling. “The first summer was a heat wave in northern Ontario, and the mosquitoes were atrocious,” said Laura Duncanson, assistant professor of geographical sciences at the University of Maryland, laughing as she recalled her early days in the field as an undergraduate. “We were measuring the stem diameters of tons of spiky little spruce trees, and I was covered in insect bites, sweat, and scratches....