These could be the delivery drones of the future. (Credit: YouTube/Denzeen)
When you think of drone delivery, what comes to mind? Pizzas falling from the sky, crowded skies or maybe you just don’t think it’ll ever happen? No matter the case, a new video shows what a future with delivery drones might look like.
PriestmanGoode, an industrial design agency based in London, released the trailer for “Elevation” — a film of a drone delivery concept — at t ...read more
An artist’s interpretation of the Zanclean flood. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
One of the largest floods in Earth’s history may have deluged the Mediterranean Sea more than 5.3 million years ago, leaving behind a mass of debris roughly the size of Greece’s largest island, Crete, researchers say.
Scientists investigated a roughly 640,000-year span of time starting nearly 6 million years ago when the Mediterranean became a hyper-salty lake. This so-called Messinian salinity cris ...read more
It’s hard to yell “BACK OFF!” when you have no lungs, but this caterpillar has figured out a way. Under attack, the Nessus sphinx moth caterpillar emits a sort of crackling buzz from its mouth. Scientists compare the unusual mechanism to a whistling teakettle. Or a rocket.
Lots of insects make noise, of course, as opening a window on a summer evening will remind you. Conrado Rosi-Denadai, a graduate student at Carleton University, and his coauthors write t ...read more
Marcus is the world’s strongest storm so far in 2018[embedded content]
After strengthening into the year’s first Category 5 storm, Tropical Cyclone Marcus has weakened.
At it strongest, the storm attained maximum sustained winds of 160 miles per hour as it swirled off the northwestern coast of Australia on Wednesday. As I’m writing this on Thursday (Friday morning in Australia), Marcus has settled down to 120 mph, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
It ...read more
Cherenkov radiation glowing in the core of the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. (Credit: Argonne National Laboratory)
When we hear the word “radiation,” we tend to think of atomic bombs (like the ones that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), or environmental mishaps like the three-eyed fish living outside Springfield’s nuclear power plant on The Simpsons. But radiation – a term that refers to the transmission of energy through waves and particles – ...read more
On Twitter, I learned about a curious new paper in Scientific Reports: Long-Term Study of Heart Rate Variability Responses to Changes in the Solar and Geomagnetic Environment by Abdullah Alabdulgader and colleagues.
According to this article, the human heart “responds to changes in geomagnetic and solar activity”. This paper claims that things like solar flares, cosmic rays and sunspots affect the beating of our hearts.
Spoiler warning: I don’t think this is true. In fact, I t ...read more
An artist’s illustration of Scholz’s star. (Credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester)
When ‘Oumuamua passed by our neck of the woods last fall, it got everyone talking. Sure, some of your Facebook friends were likely eager to speculate on the rock’s possibly extraterrestrial origins. But as the first known interstellar visitor, it got scientists curious too. Maybe there are other intergalactic interlopers among us?
Perhaps it would be possible to study the orbits ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Inside a dog’s furry head are millions of neurons firing away, passing chemicals to one another and generating thoughts. We may guess at what our canine pals are thinking about: food, a walk, their loving owners.
But for all the time humans spend interacting with dogs, their thoughts largely elude us, and it’s easy to see why: dogs can’t speak their minds (at least in any language we know). But we still are curious about our best bud’s mindset, an ...read more
