Posts

Scientists delved into atoms of the element cesium, where a process called the hyperfine transition emits and absorbs microwaves, which scientists could time very precisely with the help of a vibrating quartz crystal. That underpins the basis of how scientists measure time today, and allowed them to craft a more accurate definition of the second in 1967. That definition hasn’t changed significantly in over half a century, nor has the timing of the atomic clocks used to create it....

You can customize the time allotted for moves with this clock, as well set incremental time increases such as the Fischer bonus. Common game controls are preset for easy activation, and the display contrast can be adjusted for maximum visibility in bright light or dim club rooms. This clock is great for dedicated U.S. players but is more limited for international play styles: For example, you can’t use it for Japanese Byo-yomi time control or the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) Bronstein delay....

Paek’s strategy is fairly simple: Five tons of paintballs full of white powder would be launched towards an asteroid from a nearby space craft, 20 years in advance of a possible collision with Earth. The force of the pellets hitting the object will push it off course, but also the reflectivity–the albedo–of the white paint would increase, and over time the photons bouncing off the surface would also force the asteroid away from our planet....

Yesterday, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced a proposal to place the tricolored bat on the endangered species list due to this disease. “White-nose syndrome is decimating hibernating bat species like the tricolored bat at unprecedented rates,” said USFWS Director Martha Williams in a press release. “Bats play such an important role in ensuring a healthy ecosystem. The (USFWS) is deeply committed to continuing our vital research and collaborative efforts with partners to mitigate further impacts and recover tricolored bat populations....

Bats aren’t hunting humans or practicing Dracula impressions—they’re just hanging upside down, keeping their fur clean, and saving the world billions of dollars in agricultural costs by hunting insects. These creatures are vital to the function of our ecosystems, which is why this fall, you should make your outdoor spaces a better place for them, and ditch the plastic blood-sucking decor for the real deal. You’ll be showing your appreciation for everything bats do, while also scaring the socks off the kids in your neighborhood—it’s a win-win....

Starting today, Twitter users will be able to choose to automatically shuffle tweets they might have missed to the top of their timeline when they launch the app, even if those tweets were posted minutes or hours ago. When the user refreshes their timeline, the out-of-order tweets disappear and Twitter resumes as it always has. “When you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order,” writes Mike Jahr, a senior engineering manager at Twitter, in a blog post today....

“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm,” the Twitter Safety team wrote in the blog. “The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.” The policy update, which is already in effect, allows people to report media shared without consent on the platform as they would any other tweet that violates Twitter Rules....

“At that point, we were practically running on fumes,” says Marc Rayman, Dawn’s chief engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The fact that Dawn’s tank ran dry just two days after the exoplanet-hunting Kepler telescope made similar headlines came as a surprising, but not shocking coincidence, as both teams had been aggressively managing their dwindling supplies for months. While the two spacecraft worked in different regions of the solar system, the arcs of their lives—and deaths—are similar....

Miner says that more than 750,000 developers have downloaded the tool required to write an Android-based program, four times as many as accessed the iPhone’s tightly regulated kit. That means Android users could have far more mobile applications to choose from. But we still don’t know how those apps will stack up next to Apple’s. Android-equipped phones—set to go on sale this summer—should be less expensive than the iPhone, since manufacturers won’t have to pay licensing fees for the software....

But that wasn’t always true. Or rather, it wasn’t always possible for male túngaras to sing to their maximum potential. This is all according to a new study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, in which a group of international researchers explored the sex appeal of túngara frogs in the Panamanian jungle. They started with what’s now common knowledge: animals change their behavior in urban areas, often in response to light and noise pollution....

When it comes to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says “the war has changed.” Data released by the agency on Friday demonstrates that while vaccines are still likely to be highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death due to COVID-19, even immunized individuals are capable of catching and spreading the potent new Delta variant. Meanwhile, infection rates and cases of severe illness are skyrocketing among the unvaccinated....

That changed this week. We’re now in the next generation of gaming consoles and Sony’s new PS5 is an extremely impressive piece of hardware. Hardware By now, you may already know what’s inside the PS5. It has an eight-core Zen 2 processor and a 10.2-teraflop RDNA 2 GPU. But, the beauty of buying a console is that you don’t actually need to know what any of that means. Every PS5 owner has the same machine and no one ever expects you to crack it open and swap out parts to try and maintain credibility on the message boards....

The outbreak has prompted the governor to declare a public health state of emergency—a decision that frees public health officials to implement critical disease control measures rapidly, says James Hodge, professor of public health law and ethics at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “They make a critical difference in the timing of government interventions,” Hodge says. “Things can’t be done as quickly outside of an emergency....

This new, smaller Atlas is just 5’9” and 180 lbs. It made friends in the wild. Those contacts led quickly to a job at a warehouse. Not everyone at the warehouse was happy to share a workplace with a robot. Some people were, in fact, very unhappy. Fortunately, Atlas was able to pick itself up and walk into a less-hostile environment. It is more morally uncomfortable for the people watching what’s happening to the human-shaped machine than it is for the machine itself....

Yes, the real-life Timons in this image are aggressively fending off another group of meerkats by erecting their tails and puffing out their fur, both of which are apparently quite intimidating if you’re a small carnivore. So says a study about intergroup aggression in meerkats published in Royal Society Proceedings B this week. The researchers spent more than a decade observing 422 separate interactions involving 36 meerkat groups living in the Kalahari desert in South Africa....

Designed for display in virtual reality headsets, the video also looks really weird when captured as a gif. Thanks to the 10 engines and the digital camera on the plane, the video is also a really good showcase of how progressive-scanning cameras capture moving objects sequentially, turning spinning disks into really weird blobs. Watch the full video below, and explore the 360 degree view:

That’s right, this short, called Anyone Can Quantum, has everything. Footage from Ant-Man. An immortal Keanu Reeves from 700 years in the future. Cat videos. Trash talk. Fake Twitter commentary from celebrities and the Pope. Anchorman references. Bill and Ted references. The participation of both Bill and Ted (Alex Winter directs and has a brief cameo while Reeves voices his future and present selves). And, of course, quantum weirdness. Why does this video even exist?...

While we might like to think we are more enlightened today, our predatory behavior hasn’t improved. We’re still eating big animals into extinction. Many of these are creatures we know and love —lions and tigers and bears (oh my!)—like African elephants, several species of rhino, large sea turtles, giraffes, and Somali ostriches. That’s not to mention the many reptiles and fish, including the Beluga sturgeon and the whale shark, the largest fish in the world, which is highly valued for its use in shark fin soup....

Aging boomers and lifelong earbud addicts could help give some of these design principles an increasingly universal appeal. But even if your senses stay pitch-​perfect, consider how a few changes could make your house more accessible—and make life easier for everyone. The greatest room A counter facing into the living area keeps the cook from missing any action. Appliances with insulation to hush hums and rattles make it easier to hear soft voices and feel buzzing alerts....

That’s finally starting to change. A team of immunologists, pediatric physicians, and infectious disease researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology and University of California, San Diego decided to look more carefully at the immune responses different kids had to strep infections. What they found suggests that there are some genetic factors that determine whether a child is likely to get it recurrently. They published their results in Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday....