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How not to pose To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, good photo poses are all alike, but every bad photo pose is bad in its own way. There are essentially unlimited ways to look awful or unintentionally ridiculous in a photo, and it’s possible you’re doing some of them whenever a camera is pointed at you. These are a few of the classic mistakes. The forced grin What we have here is the overeager forced grin....

In Brazil, vultures are responsible for the highest number of wildlife-aircraft strikes with some 980 collisions occurring between 2000 and 2011. As recently as 2012, two turkey vultures struck a plane at the international airport in Manaus, causing $750,000 in damage. So, ecologists Weber Novaes and Renato Cintra of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia studied black vultures (Coragyps atratus) and turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) in Manaus in order to determine how vultures make use of a city and how to minimize conflict with its human inhabitants....

Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce firm, is already making drone deliveries in Shanghai. Through the software of its Ele.me subsidiary, Alibaba’s drones grab meals and other packages and fly them between delivery points. Human drivers then shuttle the packages the final distance to the customer. By using aircraft, the delivery service can skip China’s crowded roads, cutting total delivery time to 20 minutes for customers in the participating area. Currently, drone delivery is only for the 22....

Most Americans quickly recognize Apollo 11 and 13—one marked humanity’s first footsteps on another world, and one turned into a desperate fight for survival—but Apollo 8 was a historic journey as well. It wasn’t the first time humankind went to space (or even the first time Americans did) but it was the first time our species orbited the moon. We’d seen our planet from above with the help of satellite imagery, but Apollo 8’s crew were the first to witness the full globe of Earth rise up in the distance, providing a speck of dazzling color against the alien lunar landscape....

But the crust isn’t alone in behaving like that. Many metals—including steel, copper, and aluminum, which are critical to making the modern world tick—are made of little crystal bits. If you take a sheet of one of those metals and pull on it or squish it down, those little bits move against each other, just like tectonic plates. Their boundaries can shift. After years of trying to see those shifting boundaries for themselves, materials scientists have now shown that they can zoom into the atomic scale to watch it happen....

The fuel required to return home from a human mission to Mars would cost 8 billion dollars alone. So, a team of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology proposed a plan to carry microbes to the red planet to biologically produce fuel for astronauts’ return journey. Researchers have been looking into ways to chemically make fuel on Mars for some time. Though microbes would probably need heavier support equipment, they would theoretically consume less power than chemical methods, according to the team’s new study published in the journal Nature Communications....

That’s because plastics never fully decompose. The material just eventually breaks down into small pieces called microplastics. These plastic pieces are so small—less than 5 millimeters in size—that they can be transported by air, accumulate on the ocean floor, or end up in the food chain. Because microplastics are everywhere, human exposure is pretty much a given. However, there is still much to know about its impacts on our health....

There are no actual cars in this showroom. Instead, prospective buyers wear goggles for Microsoft’s HoloLens system, which displays virtual objects like they’re holograms, and walk around virtual visions of both the car and the invisible systems that make the car and its safety features work. The cars’ invisible sensor fields are envisioned as colorful waves, a neon-bright world of awareness that you’d never see in a regular showroom. As new, safer cars get increasingly autonomous, convincing humans that it’s a good idea for a car to have control is a tricky proposition....

Eighteen of those 23 successes were launched by the U.S. Like the space race, the marathon to Mars has been dominated by Earth’s superpowers: the Soviet Union (later Russia) and the United States. A coalition of European countries called the European Space Agency entered the scene in the 1970s, but they focused on collaboration with other agencies and basic research. They’ve worked with NASA on multiple international projects and have only recently launched their own Mars missions....

The government agency currently uses its own fleet of near-Earth satellites to communicate with ground facilities and orbiting spacecrafts, but, according to Engadget, many were launched in the 80s and 90s, and NASA is now in a long-term process of decommissioning them. Working with commercial businesses to fill this void will allow NASA to dedicate time to other projects, the agency’s statement explains, such as deep space exploration. Each company has its own technical approach to facilitate near-Earth communications, which NASA says must also “lower costs, increase flexibility, and improve performance for a broad range of missions....

Liquid water is a great first sign when looking for a habitable environment, but the Clipper spacecraft will try to determine if the ocean has other chemicals needed to support life, like hydrogen, carbon, or oxygen. Clipper will also simply provide scientists with a closer view. “We only have about 14 percent of Europa’s surface that’s been imaged at better than 500 meters per pixel, which is not super high resolution,” says Kate Craft, a geophysicist at John Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab who oversees the different teams working on Europa Clipper....

The probe’s team members found that high-speed impacts with dust particles are not only more common than expected, they’re making tiny plumes of superhot plasma on the surface of the craft, according to an announcement for a new study. The probe’s main mission goals are to measure the electric and magnetic fields near the sun and learn more about the solar wind—the stream of particles coming off of the sun, says David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics....

Though natural gas burns cleaner than coal, it’s no climate savior. And a new study of gas and oil resources of the northeastern part of British Columbia shows that many of the wells there are losing gas through leaks. That gas is mostly made up of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “It’s a really impressive dataset in terms of the number of samples,” says Amy Townsend-Small, a biogeochemist at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the study....

The policy expands on a less-detailed three page fact sheet posted to the Obama campaign website earlier in the year. The policy focuses on doubling the budget of the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health and other science oriented agencies over the next ten years, creating scholarships to augment the salaries of math and science teachers, and, of course, investing in green technologies. The new Obama policy also pledges to “ensure independent, non-ideological, expert science and technology advisory committees....

According to the latest statistics, at least 68 records are lost every second, and personal information is compromised. That’s devastating when you have irreplaceable memories and moments you want to keep dear to your heart. Degoo’s impressive AI-based cloud storage space allows you to rediscover your favorite photos and videos with just a few clicks. For a limited time, the lifetime plan is price-dropped at over 90 percent off for the New You, New Focus event....

Those case spikes are obvious in retrospect. What’s harder is figuring out the exact toll of each individual variant. A new report, released in advance of formal publication and independent review, by a team from Yale University’s epidemiology department and the public-interest lobbying group Public Citizen, provides a basic estimate of each variant’s death toll. “A significant fraction, almost half and rising, have died after the ancestral strain” of SARS-CoV-2 was replaced by variants, says Jo Walker, a graduate student at Yale and the report’s lead author....

The “back door” metaphor isn’t too far from the truth, so let’s flesh it out for a minute. In a memo sent out in support of the bill this week, the bill’s author does that for us. He describes a phone that cannot be unlocked except by the owner like this: Except, and I think this is the crucial point, if there’s a mandated back door, then it’s not a safe that the government can access, it’s a safe anyone can access....

The new species, described in a paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports, swam the seas surrounding the present-day North American continent during the end of the Cretaceous period, about 145 million to 66 million years ago. “The discovery of the new species itself was a surprise,” Albert G. Sellés, a co-author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, tells PopSci. “We are used to finding dinosaur bones in northeastern Spain, and some of them are really big, but until now we have never found the fossil remains of a marine animal, and even less one of such colossal size....

That’s not really all that unexpected, but after successfully reaching orbital space on Monday there was some degree of hope–even in the midst of condemnation for what the global community sees as a thinly veiled ballistic missile test–that North Korean engineers have a clue what they are doing. It’s becoming increasingly clear that they do not. The satellite has an unstable trajectory, American officials have said. It could come crashing back to Earth....