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The next day, Silver took the circuit to the summer camp where he taught and showed the campers how it worked. When it came in contact with conductive objects, they acted as extensions of the device: Users could touch the object to create different sounds, like pressing the keys on a keyboard. Silver’s campers tested it out, making music with everything from apples to bicycles. Later, a co-worker suggested that Silver hook up the circuit to a pencil, since electricity can pass through its graphite core....

The massive endeavor, which was led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, analyzed data sets on 829 physical systems and 28,800 biological systems around the world—ranging from frog mating (happening earlier than usual) to krill biomass (declining) to the snowmelt surge in streams (earlier)—spanning at least 20 years. Ninety percent of these changes, say the authors, are progressing in a way that makes sense with a warming climate....

A new study published today in the journal PLOS ONE finds that while human beings perform “above chance” (meaning just slightly better than they would randomly) at assessing interactions between humans, dogs, and monkeys, our brains struggle to predict aggressive behaviors in both dogs and humans. A group of researchers from four institutions in Europe sought to determine how well people can assess these social situations, by showing 92 participants 27 video clips....

The inevitable post-Florence debate among meteorologists and emergency managers included talk of scrapping the Saffir-Simpson Scale. As a weather reporter who’s spent years trying to talk about threatening hurricanes, I don’t think that’s entirely possible. The categories we use to describe wind strength in hurricanes is too deeply ingrained in the weather education of the United States to be able to completely remove it from the discussion. We have to work with the scale so that people in harm’s way pay proper attention to the winds, but also focus on the hazards posed by heavy rain and storm surge....

That team has since delivered seven more babies via ­donated wombs, and this past November, with ­Johannesson’s help, Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas achieved the first such birth in the U.S. In February, a second. A leading organ-transplant center, Baylor has ­reported that two more women are trying to conceive as part of a large-scale clinical trial involving medical ­experts in nearly a dozen specialties. Under the guidance of transplant surgeon Giuliano Testa, Baylor hopes to build on Sweden’s research-based work to develop a proof-of-­concept system that could be adapted around the world....

However, just because your new device supports wireless chargers doesn’t necessarily mean you should go for it or use it every time you need to amp up the juice in your electronics. Both standards have their pros and cons, including their speed, their convenience, and their energy efficiency. The benefits of wired charging While wireless charging is the newer and seemingly cooler tech, wired charging still has plenty of advantages....

Here’s the full picture, captured by the Landsat 8 satellite and posted by the Earth Observatory: Saying that something is “so big you can see it from space” implies that you could see it with the naked eye, rather than with a telescoping lens, which is what Landsat-8 uses. Up in the International Space Station, we’re pretty sure commander Scott Kelly and his fellow astronauts can’t see the trash fire–not with their eyes alone....

To create their BioBeer, the students are attempting to genetically alter a strain of yeast so that it produces resveratrol while also fermenting beer. Their lab isn’t filled with red plastic Solo cups and taps on the tables because they haven’t yet brewed their first batch. Most of the students involved in the project couldn’t drink it anyway—they are under 21. Fans of the Houston microbrewery Saint Arnold Brewing Company may someday recognize a hint of familiar flavor in the futuristic BioBeer since the team is working with a strain of donated yeast used to make the company’s wheat beer....

Listen to a special episode of the Techathlon Podcast Techathlon isn’t quite officially back from summer break, but we recorded a short episode to help soak up hours of driving during your long rides to the beach. This installment of the Techathlon Decathlon pulls 10 trivia questions from the past few weeks. Play along! When you do well, tell your parents you want to go pro. Or, just talk smack on Twitter about it....

We’ve always been separate from monkeys on one front, though. In countless documentaries about primates, after proving how intelligent monkeys are, the host always caveats it with a final statement: monkeys don’t like to share. Even when they split a banana with a fellow monkey, the reward centers of their brain don’t light up like ours. There you have it—we love altruism, so we’re better than them. Well, not quite....

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Looking back, the situation was prescient, even if not quite real. The students running around were part of an app-based educational simulation, and the pathogen they were dealing with was a virtual one spread through proximity-sensing Bluetooth communications. Every other element was no more than a stage prop. This experiential education platform, called Operation Outbreak, started as a simple lesson plan by Todd Brown, a former teacher from southwest Florida....

The company announced today an ultra-slim, flexible 18-inch OLED display that rolls into a cylinder without being damaged. However, it’s just a prototype, and probably not going on sale any time soon. Other competitors like Samsung and Sony have shown their take on the bendy screen, but none of the CES prototypes have been taken to market. What the company will actually be selling, though, are huge, non-bendy TVs. Coming in sizes from 65-inches to 139-inches, LG is gunning for both the high-end OLED TV consumer market, as well as commercial signage....

Los mejores purificadores de aire pueden mejorar el sueño y aliviar las alergias al eliminar las partículas del aire. La mayoría de los modelos de alta gama utilizan filtros True HEPA (aire particulado de alta eficiencia) para atrapar pedazos flotantes de moho y polen, así como para aspirar humo, polvo y bacterias. Estos filtros certificados limpian el aire del 99.97 por ciento de partículas pequeñas (tan pequeñas como 0.3 micrones de diámetro) en la primera ronda de filtración....

But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the media still disproportionately amplifies the views of businesses and coalitions pushing back on climate action. So while major publications may not necessarily be sowing doubt on climate change, they are still allowing a few powerful and wealthy groups to define the debate on how to address it. “Opponents of climate action are getting twice as much airtime as proponents of climate action,” says Rachel Wetts, a sociologist at Brown University and author of the study....

And though it may seem to have come out of nowhere, the Cosmic Crisp didn’t magically appear in grocery stores overnight. Its long, winding path to market started more than 30 years ago, and is a fascinating look at how a specialty apple gets made. Taking on big Red Delicious For about 50 years, the majority of apples sold in U.S. supermarkets were Red Delicious—but not because they taste especially good....

A follow-up survey Pew conducted in May 2021 sought to find out what lurkers were doing on Twitter if they weren’t tweeting. Age appeared to be the largest differentiator between active tweeters and lurkers. Frequent tweeters, defined as users who post more than five tweets, or retweets, a month, tended to be between the ages of 18 to 24. Lurkers, or the infrequent tweeters who post less than that, make up roughly half of US users, and tend to be between the ages of 30 and 49....

To help us understand how such a bold new form of expression gained the traction and influence it did over a span of just a few years, designers and curators at MoMA created a visualization that shows the many interpersonal connections between abstract artists of the era. According to its creators, the diagram shows that “abstraction was not the inspiration of a solitary genius but the product of network thinking–of ideas moving through a nexus of artists and intellectuals working in different mediums and in far-flung places....