Posts

FDA Says Giant, Genetically Modified Salmon Is Environmentally SafeSay Goodbye To Christmas By Watching This Giant Tree ExplodeAsparagus Prevents Hangovers, Incredibly Useful Study FindsStuffing Your Face With Holiday Cookies Disrupts Your Body Clock, Just Like Mars Time Would And don’t forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week: Popular Science’s Best Longreads Of 2012The 6 Best Video-Game Experiments Of 2012What Kind Of Violence Kills Americans? [Infographic]The Most Egregious Science Mistakes In Movies This Year12 Incredible Works Of Astrophotography By Brad GoldpaintThe Year On Mars: The Red Planet’s Greatest Moments Of 2012GameSci: The Wii U’s Unlikely InfluenceFYI: What Causes Motion Sickness, And How Do You Cure It?...

You’re not alone: Around 30 percent of people who exercised during the pandemic did so at lower intensities, and the same percentage shortened the length of their workouts. Comparatively, only 9 percent upped the intensity and 24 percent spent more time moving. Maybe we were all focused on trying to get groceries without contracting the virus. Maybe we had less access to our usual gyms and exercise programs. Maybe our workout buddies couldn’t make it, decreasing motivation....

At some point, a tiny beetle happened to visit one of those flowers. Then, covered in tiny flecks of prehistoric pollen, this unlucky insect landed on the wrong tree and got caught in an avalanche of resin. In the ensuing millenia, that resin hardened into amber. According to a study published on Monday in the journal PNAS, that pollen-covered beetle has helped fill a significant gap in the fossil record, deepening the history of insect pollination by nearly 50 million years....

President Donald Trump has evidently undergone an election-year conversion on the topic of the Land & Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), pumping new energy into the campaign for full and permanent funding of this critically important access and habitat conservation tool. This week, Trump used his favorite platform—Twitter—to express his enthusiasm for LWCF. He wrote: “I am calling on Congress to send me a Bill that will fully and permanently fund the LWCF and restores our National Parks....

The cosmetic surgery she had had extracted adult stem cells from her belly fat, isolated them, and injected them around her eyes, along with calcium hydroxylapatite as a filler. In the presence of the mineral, the stem cells — which have the ability to develop into many sorts of cells — turned into bone. The FDA has not approved any cosmetic product or treatment involving stem cells, but they are growing in popularity regardless, both in clinics in the U....

The Seattle Aquarium has found the first case of asthma in a sea otter, a 1-year-old named Mishka. This means that for the first time, veterinarians are grappling with the question of how to put an otter and an inhaler together. Mishka’s trainer, for her part, seems to have solved the problem by using food to teach the furry swimmer how to take breaths from an inhaler. Mishka first started experiencing shortness of breath after smoke from wildfires began reaching Seattle this summer....

Featuring four massive tires, the XT looks like a car designed for a GI Joe playset only without a place to put a driver. However, Rheinmetall notes in a release that “If necessary, this robust, tried-and-tested mechanical platform can operate in manned configuration, with an integrated joystick and emergency seat.” It’s about 12 feet long and 8 feet wide. The default configuration for the vehicle will be as a mostly autonomous cart rolling alongside troops....

The Five Freedoms are used as a way to assess animal welfare around the world, but they’ve been criticized for their focus on limiting suffering rather than giving animals a good environment to live in. The British Farm Animal Welfare Council revisited these standards in 2009 and asked a new question that has shifted the way we think about animal welfare. Does this animal have a “life worth living?” It’s no longer enough to know if an animal is suffering, we also need to know if it’s happy....

If you spend the first half hour after lights out stacking and squishing your pillows to try to get optimal support, this wedge pillow could save you valuable time. Choose from three options which are all 24 inches in length and width, but vary between 7 and 12 inches tall at their highest point. Lay the pillow down to rest your head and shoulders on a gentle slope, or prop it up against your headboard to rest your back as you read before bed....

What are you eating and/or cooking for Thanksgiving? This year I am traveling in the United Kingdom, where Thanksgiving is not such a big deal. However, in the past, I’ve served grasshopper kabobs, cricket and chestnut stuffing, and cranberry cockroach relish, among other bug delights. I also enjoy deep-fried tarantula spiders and chocolate-dipped capulines, which are small, wild-harvested grasshoppers that have been roasted and seasoned in Oaxaca. Another one of my all-time favorites is my three bee salad....

What are you eating and/or cooking for Thanksgiving? I will be spatchcocking a turkey for Thanksgiving this year, which involves flattening the turkey out so all of the meat finishes cooking at the same time. Let’s just talk about turkey meat for a minute: the thighs and legs are done when they get up to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, but the turkey breast is done when it gets up to 145 degrees....

It’s unlikely that viewing fireworks—chemical explosions that create blasts of crackling sounds and dazzling colors—from space would be as mesmerizing as watching from your favorite picnic spot. The small sparklers waved by eager partygoers and bottle rockets shot off in their backyards aren’t putting on any light shows for astronauts flying overhead. But what about huge, bombastic industrial-type fireworks: Would even those be pinpricks of light to space travelers looking down at us?...

At such depths, these liquids are under very high pressure. Pump petroleum out, and the pressure in the well drops. Water in the surrounding rock, which is also packed under high pressure, then pushes its way into this low-pressure pocket until the pressure reaches equilibrium. “It’s just like digging a hole at the beach, where water in the sand around it flows into the lower pressure zone of the hole,” explains Chris Liner, a professor of petroleum seismology at the University of Houston....

This year an estimated 1,000 containers have fallen off ships into the ocean already, which is the biggest spike the industry has seen in seven years. Heavier items tend to sink to the bottom of the sea, but lighter cargo like Nike shoes and bath toys sometimes float. Thousands of tons of cargo have gone overboard and then washed up on coastlines far from where those orders were placed, even in some remote places....

“I would have never guessed there would be consequences medically, later on,” Gauvin says. Twenty years later, Gauvin has suffered from bladder cancer, inflammation in his nose, acid reflux, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). All of these health impacts—along with other cancers, respiratory diseases, and mental health conditions—are especially common among the first responders and survivors who worked at the World Trade Center site, both on September 11 and in the months of clean up afterward....

But Enceladus is not Earth, and planetary scientists couldn’t be certain how to interpret the peculiar cocktail of molecules the Saturnian moon spits out into space. Were they the result of alien chemistry, or alien biology? Researchers still aren’t sure. Enceladus may or may not be home to alien “methanogens”—microbes that gobble up hydrogen and carbon dioxide and belch out methane. But a new analysis by a team of biologists, published yesterday in Nature Astronomy, shows that it’s almost impossible for so much methane to result from the most obvious chemical reaction alone....

The folks onboard the International Space Station successfully grew, harvested, and ate their own lettuce this year, but the plants in the picture are looking not-so-crisp. What happened? The space lettuce crop is not in jeopardy. The dying plants in the photo are Profusion zinnias (Zinnia hybrida), a type of flower that you might find in your neighbor’s garden. They’re generally grown for their beauty rather than as food, but they are technically edible....

Now, folks across North America are feeling the effects of wildfires hundreds of miles away: hazy conditions and air quality alerts have descended on the Midwest and reached as far as the East Coast. It may be the first time your local weather has suffered as a result of fires on the other side of the continent—but it won’t be the last. That’s why it’s crucial that you understand when to worry about wildfire haze, and what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones....

General Dynamics is teasing this Next Generation Abrams through four videos, each with a title that reads like promotional material for a bonus character in a video game. They are “Legend Mode. The Next Generation of Dominance,” “Superpower. Cape Not Included,” “Brains and Brawn. A Lethal Combination,” and “Silent Strike. They’ll Never Hear Us Coming.” The videos, each under a minute, feature the camera panning over a glossy rendering of a tank, highlighting features such as headlights, embedded cameras, treads, and the turret’s main gun....

But some renewable energies are a little bit trickier—and climate change could make our favorite renewable resources a lot harder to harness. A recent uptick in droughts shows us just how devastating this could be for our use of hydropower. You can theoretically harness the kinetic energy of rushing or falling water without using up the water itself, so it’s not a limited power source like fossil fuel. In 2021, it generated about 260 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity in the US, which amounted to around 6....