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As demand falls for COVID-19 vaccinations here in the US, India faces a deadly surge and Africa’s vaccine supply is threatened. Here’s what’s happening in the global pandemic. US finally lifts ban on export of raw materials needed for vaccine production in India On Monday, official data from the Indian government reported nearly 353,000 new COVID cases every day for the fifth consecutive day. The spike sets an unenviable world record of the highest number of infections per day....

The show floor officially opened today, and I’ll be spending time checking out the new products from the big companies. So far, I’ve been able to dig into some of the lower-profile gadgets making their debut here in Las Vegas. Here’s a look at what’s new. Lovot (pictured above) This adorable android first showed up at CES last year, but it was just a prototype back then. This companion bot has grown up into an official product and is almost as adorable as it is expensive....

Versions of the ZTZ-59 have been modified to operate without a human driver inside. Viewing operations via tank mounted video cameras, operators can guide the vehical by an off-board system with a joystick. As with any other driverless system, potential upgrades may allow for greater autonomy. While images of a robot tank evoke science fiction futures, the reality of this particular vehicle’s purpose is to act as a moving target for exercises and weapons targeting....

Engineer Huang Shuilin hopes that the Swift Gazelle will become a widespread feature in Chinese daily life. It’ll probably also be a bit part of the PLA arsenal. The PLA, if it chooses to take a leaf from George Jetson’s book, would likely use flying cars for mountainous operations, air cavalry, Special Operations, and search and rescue. If the Swift Gazelle proves successful, China could take off in an area where America’s flying military car projects have been unable to advance past the testing stage....

Scientists examined climate records and historical documents describing more than 730 avalanches since the 1780s in France’s Vosges Mountains. They saw that when winter temperatures rose in the mid 19th to early 20th centuries, the number and size of avalanches plummeted, and those that did occur seemed to shift upslope. The findings could have implications for efforts to understand how climate change will affect such hazards in years to come....

The pollutants—which include arsenic and lithium—seep into the ground from piles of toxic waste scrubbed from the stacks, called coal ash. This tainted groundwater poses a health risk for any drinking water wells nearby. It’s an example of how producing and burning fossil fuels is more than just a seemingly distant, incremental concern posed by a warming climate. With that in mind, here are five other hazards posed by oil, natural gas, and coal....

For a long time, athletes, coaches, and researchers alike all thought that the suffering that ensues during an ice bath was well-worth the benefits to their muscles. The idea was that the intense cold would alleviate the swelling associated with DOMS, thus soothing the muscles. But over the past few years, the science behind ice baths has become rather murky. Despite many athletes swearing by its benefits, there’s little physiological evidence to suggest it does all that much for your muscles....

It’s been all over the news, and in countless political speeches, so we know clean coal is popular. It’s in the new economic stimulus package to the tune of $2.4 billion. And its first pilot project was canceled last year after costs accelerated out of control, so we know clean coal is expensive. But what else is it, really…? After the jump, a short primer in comic form. Next: “Right now, it’s little more than a fantasy…” Next: “Clean coal aims to stem the tide of CO2…” Next: “At a pilot plant in Germany, the coal is burned, compressed and sequestered…” Next: “Critics argue even the term is hype…” Next: See the whole strip on one page....

These funding opportunities for conservation come at a critical time. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report revealed that the world’s current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a threshold to avoid the most catastrophic impacts. To hit this goal, governments now need to not only transition to clean energy and reach “net zero” emissions as soon as possible, but also remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide that are already in the atmosphere....

People don’t usually think of infrasound as sound at all. You can hear very low-frequency sounds at levels above 88–100 dB down to a few cycles per second, but you can’t get any tonal information out of it below about 20Hz—it mostly just feels like beating pressure waves. And like any other sound, if presented at levels above 140 dB, it is going to cause pain. But the primary effects of infrasound are not on your ears but on the rest of your body....

For Native people who live in remote areas, the ongoing pandemic’s interruption to food supply has made getting food complicated. In normal times, many remote Tribes need to drive to grocery stores that are an hour or more away. With pandemic-related panic buying, what’s there when people arrive isn’t always even helpful. “You’re driving two hours to get to a place where there’s bare and empty shelves,” says Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and the executive director of Oklahoma State University’s Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy....

After analyzing satellite photos of 8,000 cows in 308 different locations, German scientists have found that the milk-makers usually confront the world in a north-south direction. This preference isn’t an indication of the cows sunning themselves, researchers say—it shows that they can sense the Earth’s magnetic field. The scientists were careful to correct for the animal’s whims: they only studied photos of cows that were resting on flat ground, and avoided ones that were near drinking or feeding areas....

Did you know that brown bats sleep around 19 hours a day, or that sea otters hold hands while they sleep so they don’t drift away from one another? We’re not promising you’ll sleep that soundly, but these animal-pattern sheets, made with 1500-thread-count cotton, are certainly cozy and cute. Oh, and wrinkle-resistant, too. Armadillos are not known for being extremely social creatures. In fact, armadillos are around each other mostly to keep warm or to procreate....

New Scientist writes about the research done by Joel Haddley and Stephen Worsley at the University of Liverpool. The two mathematicians were investigating monohedral tilings–a pattern in which all the tiles are the same shape. “Such tilings are produced on a daily basis by pizza chefs by taking radial cuts distributed evenly around the centre of the pizza,” the researchers note in the paper. That’s the traditional method of cutting where all the slices meet at the center of the pie....

The image below is just a snapshot. You can check out the whole thing here.

And DevBot has a driver. The bare-bones car was built to test the technology that will be used by Roborace, so it has the exact same drivetrain, sensors, communication technologies, and processing capabilities as the race car will have. But it’s still in the testing stage, so there is a driver inside a custom-built “standardised safety compliant racing cabin” while DevBot is on the track. The DevBot team has reached this point in the development of an autonomous race car in about 9 months, and Roborace is scheduled to begin during the 2016/17 Formula E race season....

Fortunately, on the road to answers, scientists have a particularly showy time capsule to light their way into the past: diamonds. The highly-prized gemstones are uniquely useful samples that preserve secrets to Earth’s ancient past. In fact, they’re “the only sample that we have which comes directly from deep within the Earth,” says Michael Broadley, a geochemist at the Center for Petrographic and Geochemical Research (CRPG) in France. Now, by studying gases trapped within the carbon cages of some particularly old diamonds, Broadley and his colleagues have presented evidence that suggests the life-giving gaseous composition of our air today is actually pretty similar to what the planet’s atmosphere looked like over 2....

These diagnostic codes are surprisingly important. Because they allow physicians to describe what they’re doing and why so they can get paid by insurers, the codes can influence the way doctors think about disease and what interventions they offer. Currently, medical professionals treating obesity are only able to bill using a simple diagnostic code provided by the International Classification for Diseases (ICD): E66.0, defined as “obesity due to excess calories....

That question is fueling conflict across several states as utility companies move to cut back on policies that make rooftop solar cost-effective and appealing for many homeowners. In a recent report, the nonprofit Environment America Research & Policy Center highlighted examples of utility companies and interest groups lobbying to decrease the rate at which rooftop solar owners can sell their power back to the grid. This battle would have the largest impact in California, where more than a million homes and businesses have rooftop panels....