Ian first made landfall in Cuba on September 27, taking out the entire island’s power grid (which is still not fully restored). It then barreled over the Gulf of Mexico, gathering speed and power from the abnormally warm waters, and was upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane before it breached Florida on September 28. So far, 12 deaths have been reported in the state, and several parts of Lee County have been utterly demolished....
“I can’t believe we woke up at 7 a.m. to pay all this money to get zapped with electricity,” isn’t something you usually hear from your workout buddy, but the girl next to me wasn’t wrong. I’d actually woken up at 6 a.m. to get zapped because we all have our cross to bear. After a year of following a regular and relatively intense weightlifting regimen, I’d been offered a chance to try an Electro Muscle Stimulation (EMS) workout at Shock Therapy, the first U....
Instead of relying on human repair crews, and their attendant equipment and traffic snarls, the University is teaming up with the city of Leeds to develop and deploy fleets of drones that can identify and repair basic infrastructure problems. “Detecting faults and weaknesses early and then quickly performing smart repairs is the key,” said Rob Richardson, director of the university’s National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems. “Our robots will undertake precision repairs and avoid the need for large construction vehicles in the heart of our cities....
The rover was digging a trench nicknamed Dodo-Goldilocks with its robotic arm when it hit some hard, refelective material. The scientists back on Earth who control Phoenix halted the digging, and spent the next couple of days taking photographs of the hole, trying to figure out what they were looking at in the ditch. Was the whitish material a kind of salt? But over those days of photography and scrutiny, something interesting happened to the marble-sized chunks....
But over the past few decades, the world of neutrino physics has been taking on a new challenge. From an experiment conducted deep under the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, physicists have found further evidence—published on June 9 in two papers—that a piece of the current theory of neutrinos is out of place. If they’re right, it could unveil a never-before-seen type of neutrino that could fly even more under the radar—and could explain why we can’t see the dark matter that makes up much of our universe....
Jackdaws, Corvus monedula, pitch into the sky in huge numbers come sunrise and then split into smaller groups to feed throughout the day. To figure out how such large numbers of these birds decide when to take off, researchers in the United Kingdom recorded hundreds of hours of their bird calls in Cornwall over several months. They measured when the first jackdaws began their calls, how loud the birds were, and how quickly the swell of calls rose, and then compared these sounds to footage of those birds’ departures....
Twenty years later, Bailey and his colleagues ran into a grapefruit paradox. When volunteers took an antihistamine and drank grapefruit juice, only half of the drug was absorbed. Naringin, an active ingredient in the juice, is to blame. It blocks OATP1A2, a chemical that hauls drugs from the small intestine to the bloodstream. (Conversely, fault CYP3A4, an enzyme that usually breaks down drugs, for boosting the body’s levels of other medications....
Note: Refresh this page to see the latest updates. All times EDT. 6:23 p.m.: The needs and roles of women and girls in climate change action has been a major part of this panel’s discussion. The panel had a majority of women speakers, in fact. The overall messages they’ve conveyed are that as over half the world’s population, and given how many direct impacts of climate change they are already taking on (changing agricultural patterns, family health, and more), women need to be at every table where discussions about climate change are taking place and decisions are being made–including the U....
The answer turned out to be: just about everything. An automated version of the joint is drawing interest from researchers at Johns Hopkins University, who are working on robotic prosthetic limbs, Pentagon officials developing bomb-diffusing robots, and roboticists designing new versions of Canadarm, the crane-like robotic arm on the International Space Station. Merlo is also in talks with companies to incorporate a manual model into camera tripods, flat-screen TV mountings and, of course, patio umbrellas....
If the test carries over to more high-powered lasers, then airplanes will be able to use the same kinds of energy weapons as those on ships and on the ground. Last year, in conversation with Popular Science, Lockheed’s Chief Technology Officer said of an airborne laser weapon: “It’s game changing. Should you develop an operational weapon that operates at Mach a million, that’s game changing.” This turret is part of that package....
Citroen’s tiny turbodiesel engine nets 80 miles a gallon, for instance, and plenty of manufacturers rolled out battery-based concepts. The luxury automakers mostly stuck to their high-horsepower, blazing-speed model. But then again, if you can afford a Bentley, what’s another five bucks a gallon? Launch our gallery here for the entire shiny roundup along with John Voelcker’s on-the-scenes reporting from the 2008 London Motor Show.
There are plenty of options if you’re in the market for a speaker that suits your specific needs and meshes well with your personal style—but you’re not likely to find one more stylish than the Emberton. Far from the typical “party speaker” with its loud accents, the Marshall speaker is modeled after the company’s iconic guitar amplifiers that have been a mainstay of the live rock experience since Jim Marshall (the “Lord of Loud”) invented them in the 1960s....
The 2020 MIT Koch Institute Image Awards speak to that innovative spirit by highlighting artful, unique points of view in science. The selections aren’t just focused on medicine: Aquatic critters, nanoflowers, and cell-on-cell drama also share the spotlight. But the array of photos on cancer and brain research strike a chord, effectively demonstrating the biggest challenges—and possibilities—in understanding how life works. Consolidating vaccines (above) Offering local delivery once every three days for up to six months, these hollow microparticles could really pack a punch against cancer....
Meta said that it is not partnering with Wikimedia (the non-profit organization that owns wikipedia.com) on this project, which is still in the research phase and is not being used to push live updates on Wikipedia. However, Wikimedia announced recently that it was using Meta’s technology in its Content Translation Tool. Sphere, Meta says in a blog post, is an AI model that performs knowledge-intensive natural language processing, the same task the virtual assistant on your phone does when you ask it a question like “who won the first Nobel Prize in physics?...
A manned mission to Mars will require shelter, breathable air, clothing, food, medicines, energy, and waste removal, among other services. Many of these needs can be met with living organisms. “We have been using biology as technology for literally thousands of years, to make our clothing, to make our houses,” says Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “To think that we’re going to do this some other way on Mars is sort of crazy....
Only three micronovae have been observed so far—and all of them exploded on white dwarf stars, mysterious celestial bodies that don’t behave like other star types. The small, dense white dwarfs are made up of the leftover cores of dead stars. They are what’s left when stars like our sun use up their fuel and blow out most of their material. Thanks to their semi-morbid origin story, white dwarfs have earned the nickname “zombie stars....
The milli-motein is made of metal rings and strips. The key innovation: specially designed motors that can be instructed to move at certain angles and can hold their own position even with the power switched off. “It’s effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes,” Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, says....
In the randomized, observer-blind, and placebo-controlled trial, 2,500 children ages 6 months to 1 year and 4,200 children ages 2 to 5 were given two doses of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. Each shot was 25 micrograms, administered 28 days apart. Adults receive two shots of 100 micrograms each, by comparison. The company said in a statement that vaccine efficacy was 43.7 percent in children 6 months to 2 years and 37....
In the largest genome-wide association study for height to date, they’ve updated their calculations, adding 2,111 more genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, according to the report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. About 40 percent of the differences in height from people of European ancestry were explained by the identified genes. It’s a common misconception that certain traits such as height, intelligence, or eye color have one or two “master genes” that determine the final outcome, says Rebecca Darrah, an associate professor of genetics and genome sciences at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who was not affiliated with the study....
