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To map this issue, postgraduate researcher Cascade Tuholske, who is now affiliated with the Columbia Climate School, and his colleagues at UC Santa Barbara mapped out the ways that human sewage has introduced extra nitrogen and pathogens into watersheds. The team used data sets to detail whether populations were urban or rural, how much protein was consumed per person, how much nitrogen was then excreted, and how much the waste was sanitized and how, says Tuholkse....

As we see in the video the snow looks to be fresh powder, obviously much preferable to wet snow, or layers of icy crust. These guys weren’t taking any (more) chances! For comparison let’s start with the even more extreme (and obviously suicidal) case of jumping off of a 245 foot (75 meter) high building onto a concrete sidewalk. Neglecting significant air resistance we can estimate the velocity just before impact: v = (2aΔx)1/2 = 2(9....

As Phobos slowly inches toward Mars, the planet’s gravity tugs on the moon’s crust, distorting it as it spins. Eventually, in 20 to 40 million years, the dust-coated pile of rubble could completely fall apart from all that stress. If that happens, the debris could create a ring around the planet, according to calculations published today in Nature Geoscience. Saturn is thought to have gotten its iconic rings in a similar fashion....

You can view previous comics about science, culture, and accountability here and here.

“Current law already requires telecommunications carriers to protect the privacy and security of sensitive customer information,” Rosenworcel said in a press release about the proposal. “But these rules need updating to fully reflect the evolving nature of data breaches and the real-time threat they pose to affected consumers.” While this proposal starts the process towards actually changing the rules, the FCC did not offer a timeline for when to expect the next steps, such as a vote....

The regulator evaluated the products made by UPSIDE Foods in California, which creates cell-cultured chicken by harvesting the cells from live birds and growing the meat in stainless-steel tanks. In a press release, the FDA said that UPSIDE can enter markets in the United States after they have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and meet FDA guidelines. Under the terms of a 2019 agreement, the USDA and FDA regulate cell-cultured meat together, with the USDA overseeing the processing and labeling of these alternative meat products....

Last week in New York City Sony announced two new APS-C interchangeable lens cameras, the a6600 and the a6100, as well as some APS-C friendly glass. The a6600 is the new flagship of the APS-C line, and for good reason. The camera is built around a 24.2 megapixel sensor with BIONZ X processor. All that processing firepower grants it features like autofocus as fast as 0.02 seconds, 5-axis in-body image stabilization, 425 phase-detection auto-focus points that cover 84 percent of the frame, and an 11 fps burst rate with continuous AF/AE tracking....

New research also suggests that the predator may have performed similar migrations to modern whales. Today’s blue and humpback whales make annual migrations thousands of miles across oceans to breed and give birth in regions where predators are scarce. Many of these whales gather together year after year along the same stretches of coastline. Shonisaurus may have done something very similar. An international team of researchers published their findings Monday in the journal Current Biology, explaining how at least 37 of these marine reptiles died in the same location—a question that has stumped paleontologists for more than 50 years....

Power outages are all too common when the weather gets extreme—blizzards, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and far more can leave you in the dark for days or weeks. A long-term power outage can be much more than an inconvenience, especially for those who now keep heavy-duty, life-sustaining medical equipment in their homes instead of staying in hospitals, according to Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. No matter where you are, it’s possible that you could be affected by unexpected natural disasters, so it’s better to be safe than sorry....

For some, though, video games are too compelling — too addictive. The warning signs are obvious: compulsive playing, scorning friends and family in the real world, an inability to think about other subjects. Ten million people have signed up to play the PC role-playing game World of Warcraft. In Halo 3, the wildly popular first-person shooter for Xbox 360, almost 7 billion people have been killed online since its debut, and 11 million die each day, according to ITwire....

The Fluid Bike Trainer Stand holds your bike in place for safety and allows you to mimic a real bike ride—the harder you pedal, the more resistance you’ll face. A noise-reduction wheel makes workouts quiet, lowering friction to extend the life of your bike tires for maximum riding time. Assembly and disassembly only take a few minutes. The compact frame folds to 25.2 x 24 x 7.9 inches for easy storage, which means no more workout equipment standing out like a sore thumb in the living room....

The Associated Press puts the total sum of Bolt fires at 10. General Motors says in a press release that the issues lie with the LG-made batteries that power the vehicles, and that in “rare” cases a single cell of a battery could have two distinct problems. The carmaker has specific guidance for Bolt owners, which includes precautions like preventing the vehicle from charging over 90 percent, and never charging it overnight and indoors (such as in a garage)....

The Volcano Tracker On December 15, 1989, the 231 passengers aboard KLM Flight 867 were cruising at 28,000 feet over Alaska when a strange sulfur smell filled the cabin. Suddenly all four engines quit, and the Boeing 747 started to plummet. The pilots had skirted the edge of an ash plume billowing from Redoubt volcano, about 150 miles away. The ash, mostly made of tiny particles of rocks and glass, was almost invisible....

This is, as Wired points out, Google’s characteristic “moonshot” approach to making advances happen—invest in a single team that could get you to your goal, and others in the industry will follow suit. That makes the achievement even more likely, whether it’s by Google’s team or a competitor. And it’s worked in other fields (like self-driving cars). But can it work in medicine? On the one hand, that’s not how the majority of basic research has been done in the past....

Best for coffee lovers: BLACK+DECKER Single Serve Coffeemaker There are few better ways to start your day than with a fresh cup of coffee. But in an apartment with negligible counter space, who has room for a full-sized pot? Instead, this compact coffee maker (it measures 5.47 x 6.14 x 9.41 inches) can easily fit on the corner of a table and brews straight into a travel mug—saving your bud time during their morning routine....

But for the tongues of ice that extend off glaciers and into the sea, what’s happening below is also important. A new study in Nature Geoscience found that a previously unknown seafloor landscape is bringing warm water to the 79º North glacier, located in the northeastern part of the country, and eroding a 50-mile-long lobe of ice hanging off the glacier. And that could have serious repercussions for the entire ice sheet....

The International Olympic Committee has said it is confident in the technology but the inclusion of such sensitive data raises privacy issues that are further amplified by an impressive guest list of dignitaries and rich folks. A similar attempt was made prior to the 2006 World Cup but bagged shortly before with logistical and privacy concerns. We’ll see how it plays out this time. [Via SI]

On December 16, Xerox’s research division PARC, in collaboration with the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Rostock, and augmented reality company Patched Reality, was awarded a $5.8 million contract by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue-sky projects wing. The goal is to make a program that can guide users through complex operations beyond their existing knowledge, like letting a mechanic repair a machine they’ve never seen before. “Augmented reality, computer vision, language processing, dialogue processing and reasoning are all AI technologies that have disrupted a variety of industries individually but never in such a coordinated and synergistic fashion,” Charles Ortiz, the principal investigator for AMIGOS, said in a Xerox release, “By leveraging existing instructional materials to create new AR guidance, the AMIGOS project stands to accelerate this movement, making real-time task guidance and feedback available on-demand” AMIGOS falls under the broader goals of DARPA’s Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance research, which operates with the understanding that humans, with finite capacity, cannot possibly learn everything about every physical task they’ll be asked to perform before they are sent into the field....

When you stop and think about it, antlers seem like the stuff of science fiction rather than real life. They’re bones that grow extremely fast outside of a mammals body, and every year they fall off and grow back. For whitetails, at the peak of development, antlers will grow a ¼ inch per day; for bull elk it’s more like an inch. To put that in perspective, imagine that one spring morning, you woke up and had two bones growing out of your forehead....