(Credit: Shutterstock)
Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the diodes down his left-hand side. Is that how my toaster feels?
This all sounds ludicrous until we realize that our algorithms are increasingly being made in our own image. As we’ve learned more about our own brains, we’ve enlisted that knowledge to create algori ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Scientists may have found a way to generate environmentally friendly paper from poop—cow and elephant poop that is. Although this may seem strange and unconventional, this poo-per actually offers a more simple and sustainable alternative to the traditional, resource-intense papermaking process.
The cows and elephants streamline the papermaking operation by taking up a good chunk of the pre-processing duty in their digestive system.
In traditional paper production, ...read more
(Credit: Peter Schouten)
Tiny. Marsupial. Lion.
Those three words should be enough to stop you in your tracks, and if SEO worked like it ought to, this post would be flooded with traffic. I had no idea there was such a thing as a miniature lion with a baby pouch, and now that I do know, I’m feeling all Veruca Salt. Come on, it’s adorable.
It’s a hopeless dream, of course, Microleo attenboroughi has been extinct for about 19 million years. The species was one of eight kno ...read more
By: Caroline Juang
With the longer days of spring comes relief for many on the west coast: the end of winter also means the end of the wet season—the rainiest time of year—for coastal California, Oregon, and Washington. Since January of this year, states up and down the west coast have been inundated with mudslides and debris flows because of saturated soils, steep slopes, and—in southern California—deforested, barren hillsides from the California wildfires.
The Puerto R ...read more
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
