The Star Wars droids C-3PO (left) and R2-D2 (right) were the most popular science fiction robots in a recent survey by Conversica. Credit: Disney | Lucasfilm Disney seems to have a lock on many of the more popular science fiction robots between owning Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise and the beloved animation studio Pixar. A recent survey of Americans found that the Star Wars robot duo of R2-D2 and C-3PO topped the choices of people’s favorite sci-fi robots drive ...read more

(Credit: Mopic/Shutterstock) Any last words? It’s a question prisoners on death row hear before their execution begins. Along with last meals and long cell block walks, the opportunity to give a final statement has become deeply ingrained in the highly ritualized process of executing prisoners. Most prisoners take the opportunity to pause on the lip of annihilation and utter a final statement, and the content of these messages range from expressions of guilt and sorrow to expletive-laced ...read more

When researchers deposited the little fanny-pack-wearing amphibians deep in the jungle, they were already planning a rescue mission. The poison frogs were disoriented, half a mile from home, and in dense underbrush they’d never seen before. Yet, impossibly, the frogs turned themselves in the right direction. They hopped straight back to their home turf. And the results would no doubt teach scientists something about animal navigation—if they had any ide ...read more

Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933, three years before his death. (Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons) The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, went extinct in the 1930s after a concerted eradication campaign by humans. But a new study suggests that the marvelous marsupial native to Australia may have been in trouble long before then. Among recently extinct animals, few capture the imagination quite like the thylacine. The Tasmanian tiger&n ...read more

(Credit: FAO Panama) Indigenous tribes from the Pacific Northwest to the Amazon Basin face a similar set of challenges: How to manage their lands, defend against corporate encroachment and document historic and religious sites for future generations. Often working with limited resources, many indigenous groups are turning to drones to protect and preserve their traditional lands. Many Central and South American countries have laws that, on paper, limit what companies can do on indigenous lands. ...read more

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The obscuring smoke from the Thomas Fire — now 70 percent as large as L.A. — smothers a large swath of SoCal’s coast. An image acquired by NASA’s Terra satellite shows thick, brownish smoke billowing across a large area of the Southern California coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara on Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017. Please click on the image to enlarge it. (Source: NASA Worldview) I’ve seen my share of satellite images of wildfires. And whether it has been the ...read more

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