“The example that I often think about is the smell of coffee, which you identify as being a distinctive aroma,” says Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University. “It’s made of about 200 different molecules, and none of them individually evoke a strong perception of the smell of coffee. If you compare it to other sensory worlds that we live in, the chemical world is much larger and variable....
Let’s look at the facts. Did a big rock fly by Earth on Thursday morning? Yup: Asteroid 2019 OK is an estimated 187-427 feet across and moved at around 55,000 miles per hour. Did it catch scientists pretty much totally unaware? Yes indeed. Truly, they were shook. Did it “just miss” a collision with our planet? Yes and no. When Asteroid 2019 OK careened through our neighborhood on Thursday, it came within 45,000 miles of Earth....
The planet is 75 light-years from Earth and very young–only 12 million years old. (For comparison, the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.) Until this week, we didn’t know much more about it. But last week, researchers from The University of Edinburgh published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that revealed a stunning discovery; the planet had clouds. And not just any clouds. The planet’s clouds are made of dust and bits of molten iron, and reach temperatures of approximately 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit, warmed by heat from the planet’s core....
Previous research has linked the plight of the bees to common pesticides, pests and pathogens, and global climate change. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, could contribute by messing with the balance of healthy bacteria in bee guts and making them more susceptible to disease, according to a new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “There are many factors causing death in beehives related to colony collapse disorder, and we want to know what’s really causing that,” says Erick Motta, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of the new study....
For decades, paleontologists have been searching for a way to explain the stark contrast in diversity. One leading theory is that an environmental disaster wiped out most animal life prior to the Cambrian explosion. A new analysis, however, indicates that earlier animals had already formed complex ecosystems before the Cambrian Period kicked off. Researchers examined data from fossil beds around the world and determined that animal diversity may have dipped during a period known as the late Ediacaran, around 572 million to 541 million years ago....
A funny language, I’ll admit. It’s dense, terse, and painstaking to read. While I zip through five chapters of a Twilight novel, you might not even turn the page in your math textbook. This language is well suited to telling certain stories (e.g., the relations between curves and equations), and ill-suited to others (e.g., the relations between girls and vampires). As such, it’s got a peculiar lexicon, full of words that no other tongue includes....
Lensa relies on Stable Diffusion (which we’ve covered before) to make its Magic Avatars. Users upload between 10 and 20 headshots with the iOS or Android app, and Lensa trains a custom version of Stable Diffusion’s image generation model with them. By using a personalized AI model, Lensa is able to create dozens of images in an assortment of artistic styles that actually resemble a real person instead of the abstract idea of one....
But 66 million years ago, the world’s climate drastically changed. Dinosaurs had thrived in the warm temperatures and mild weather of the Mesozoic era. All of a sudden, the Earth became much colder and darker. Plants died and food became scarce. All the dinosaurs—except for the ancestors of modern birds—and three quarters of the creatures living on Earth went extinct. To this day, scientists debate what caused this sudden change....
Because salt affects protein structure and how food holds moisture, adding it early can make some foods tougher but others more tender. And exactly when you add it to certain veggies can affect how they brown. Thankfully, learning even a little bit about how salt interacts with various ingredients can help you manage this delicate culinary balancing act. Let’s consider a hamburger: Salting the meat far in advance means that unraveling process starts much earlier, so those proteins are going to tangle back up much more quickly when you slap the patties on a grill and add heat....
While it’s clear that electric vehicles pose unique challenges to the emergency teams fighting them—the blazes can be persistent and hard to snuff out for good—one issue that’s less clear is whether they’re more likely to catch on fire than a car with a traditional combustion engine in it. A recent report by an online car insurance marketplace, AutoinsuranceEZ, shed some light on the issue, although it’s likely not to be the last word on the topic....
Identified only as “KH” in the case study, the woman has lived for 60 years without being diagnosed. KH has trouble identifying her daughter over the phone, and for many years only talked to her friends and co-workers after she had booked a time to talk with them in advance. When she read about prosopagnosia — the inability to recognize faces — in a science magazine, she realized that her unusual condition might be related....
Easy to miss against the blue sky are the tiny liquid droplets or solid particles floating by—also known as aerosols. Though often invisible, they’re crucial to the way our atmosphere works. Every parcel of air around you is filled with hundreds of aerosols. They might act as the seeds that sprout clouds. Or they might come together as city-choking smog. Aerosols remain one of the most poorly understood aspects of Earth’s atmosphere, but it’s clear that they don’t just drift through the atmosphere without consequence....
“The thing about Black Friday that people misunderstand is that people shop for a lot of different reasons,” says Kit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University and a consultant for exactly the kind of stores people wait in line for. She explains that we tend to assume everyone is just hungry for a bargain, because that’s the common denominator on Black Friday. But in talking to consumers who willingly wait in those lines, she’s found that they’re usually not in it for the sales....
That part of the world is hardly unfamiliar with intense floods, but what happened in 2008 wasn’t just any flood. Rivers don’t often change courses with reckless abandon. But when they do, scientists who study rivers use a special term: an avulsion. Avulsions are rare, but as the Koshi River disaster showed, the consequences can be catastrophic. Now, scientists have carried out an unprecedented global survey into where avulsions happen, published in Science on May 27....
A spokesperson from the FAA told Popular Science an investigation is ongoing into the July 11 suborbital flight, which brought the billionaire and five Virgin Galactic employees from the New Mexico desert to the cusp of space. With a successful takeoff and landing, the mission, dubbed Unity22, was widely hailed as a milestone on the path towards space tourism, though it also attracted criticism for its cost and carbon footprint....
If you’re ignoring the app, though, you’re missing out. It’s much more than just a setup utility for the Echo speakers, and it just got a major overhaul that means it’s more intuitive to use than ever. Get to know the home screen Open up the Alexa app and tap Home to get to the home screen (if you’re not already on it). This displays a useful overview of the help you’re getting from Alexa: you’ll see upcoming reminders, lists that you’ve edited recently, and speaker skills that you might want to try (from making a call to controlling your smart home)....
That means no more downloading sketchy add-filled apps, and no more “That would be a great reaction, but I can’t be bothered to make it right now.” Turning memes into stickers is now quick and easy—if you do it from the web. Although this tool is currently only available in a browser, WhatsApp will soon make it available for its desktop app as well. Whether we’ll ever be able to make stickers on Android or iOS without a third-party app, however, is unclear....
It’s fairly easy to cut through these halos by looking at the nutrition label—but let’s be honest, most of us don’t. Yogurt feels healthy because of all those beneficial microbes, so we just figure it’s all pretty healthy—especially if it’s organic. But as a recent study in the British Medical Journal shows, that intuition isn’t always a great guide. Researchers in the U.K. decided to survey yogurt available in British supermarkets and compare the nutritional profiles of each, and found that many of them were packed full of sugar....
“It immerses us into natural cycles that inextricably link us all,” said Logan Davis, who has a small farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania, as well as a business that creates “edible” forests for others. “Farming is more real and more important than answering phone calls and emails.” Teddy Moynihan, who raises vegetables, pigs, and grass-fed lamb, also in Bucks County, shares this feeling. His young son, now 4, ate his first solid food from a carrot Moynihan pulled from the ground, then pureed....
