What’s happening in the West over the long run is less about reduced snowfall and more the result of warming temperatures A comparison of satellite images showing the Rocky Mountains. Snowpack in April of 2016 was much more substantial than it is now. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman) In the western United States, the most important reservoirs are not the manmade ones along rivers, but the natural ones high up in our mountains: the snowpack that accumulates all w ...read more

Some of the drones just didn’t feel like dancing in formation. (Beijing News/YouTube) Drones have flown over blowholes and detected heartbeats from the sky. They’re also good entertainers. Ehang, Chinese drone manufacturer known for its autonomous flying taxi, flew 1,374 drones over the Xi’an City Wall. The company reclaimed the Guinness World Record for the “most number of unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.” The drones danced into&nbs ...read more

(Credit: Valentyna Chukhlyebova/Shutterstock) Superman was the Man of Steel. We can’t possibly be like him. But guess what? Ounce for ounce, our bones are stronger than steel. So why are people always breaking them? It’s because bones are also light and flexible, and the physics behind the speed and angle of blows make mincemeat of strength measures. That’s why a karate expert can break brick with his hand, but might also break a finger after slipping on ice. Chest compressio ...read more

An example of a Turing structure. (Credit: L. Yang and I.R. Epstein/Youtube) Water, it’s safe to say, is pretty important. A key necessity for life to flourish, the substance is also chemically important, the “universal solvent” that enables many familiar reactions. Also, we need to drink it or we die. It’s becoming an increasing concern. South Africa’s Cape Town barely managed to push back its “Day Zero,” when taps would literally run dry, into 2019. ...read more

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(Credit: Shutterstock) Here’s a sentence.  Here’s another one.  Notice anything? If you’re like me, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. Using two spaces after a sentence seems to serve no other purpose today than to signify that the typist probably learned their keyboard skills in another era. And it’s pretty annoying, to boot. Nevertheless, there’s a minority of purist (or simply contrarian) keyboard warriors who hold that the two-space r ...read more

Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, as photographed by Galileo. (Credit: NASA/JPL) Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede, is colossal. It’s bigger than Mercury or Pluto and boasts bright auroras, along with a unique magnetic field. Much of what we know about the moon comes from the Galileo spacecraft’s flybys of Ganymede in the 1990s. But a lot of information from the NASA mission has yet to be published. A magnetosphere, or the area where a planetary body’s magnetic field is dominant, i ...read more

A representation of a blastoid, which is a synthetic embryo formed in the lab, from stem cells. The green cells are the trophoblast stem cells (the future placenta), whereas the red cells are the embryonic stem cells (the future embryo). (Credit: Nicolas Rivron) Studying human development — especially the earliest stages of pregnancy — can be a tricky thing. Usually, scientists need embryos to examine these early stages. The problem is, embryos are an expensive, limited resour ...read more

Researchers say cut and percussion marks on a rhino suggest a hominin presence in the Philippines more than 700,000 years ago, ten times earlier than previously known. (Credit Ignicco et al 2018, 10.1038/s41586-018-0072-8) More than 700,000 years ago, in what’s now the north end of the Philippines, a hominin (or a whole bunch of them) butchered a rhino, systematically cracking open its bones to access the nutritious marrow within, according to a new study. There’s just one ...read more