A bird of paradise spreads it feathers as it engages in a mating dance. (Credit: BBC/Youtube)
Vantablack has been called the world’s darkest substance. When it was unveiled in 2014, the material made headlines for the way it seemed to leach objects of their three-dimensionality; it was so black that every feature merged into a black hole.
Darker than a black bear in a cave on a starless night, Vantablack looks downright otherworldly. But, humans are hardly alone when it comes to ink ...read more
(Credit: Seinfeld/YouTube screengrab)
From far above, the area around Yanghai cemetery looks like a collection of ground-dwelling wasp dens, drilled into a gravelly desert. It gets hot in this region of remote western China — up to nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. That’s a hard-knock climate, but it’s perfect for preserving ancient artifacts. And if you zoom in on the region, and dig in, as archaeologists have, you’ll find tombs with well-kept secrets. Inside two ...read more
This parasitic plant turns off its hosts’ genes to hide its theft. Photo Credit: Stefan.lefnaer/Wikimedia Commons
Organisms’ immune systems are constantly trying to detect and boot freeloaders. No living thing is particularly willing to give up its hard earned resources to just any moocher that comes along, so all parasites must find a way past their hosts’ defenses and survive incessant attacks. Some constantly disguise themselves to move about undetected, ...read more
A wide area around the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest is now in severe drought — and the three-month outlook is grim
When it comes to snow cover, a comparison of satellite images shows just how much a difference a year can make. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman)
While downtown Boston streets were flooding and then freezing as a result of the powerful bomb cyclone that pummeled the U.S. East Cost, folks in the U.S. Southwest were no doubt wond ...read more
(Credit: Viktorus/Shutterstock)
Siri and Alexa are good, but no one would mistake them for a human being. Google’s newest project, however, could change that.
Called Tacotron 2, the latest attempt to make computers talk like people builds on two of the company’s most recent text-to-speech projects, the original Tacotron and WaveNet.
Repeat After Me
Tacotron 2 pairs the text-mapping abilities of its predecessor with the speaking prowess of WaveNet for an end result that is, fra ...read more
A woman enjoys a stress-reducing whiff of worn shirt. (Credit: Shutterstock)
The human sense of smell is perhaps our most underrated ability.
The power of scent may not get the credit it deserves because we experience it differently than our other senses. Rather than proceeding directly to the thalamus—the seat of consciousness—like other sensory signals, scent information travels to parts of the brain associated with emotions and memory. Therefore, much of the information we recei ...read more
Blockchain technologies could help homeowners sell their green electricity to their neighbors. (Credit: Shutterstock)
Imagine buying a solar panel from a hardware store, mounting it on your roof, then selling the green electricity you produce at a price you set.
Is this even possible? Some companies certainly think so. These startups are harnessing the power of blockchains to democratize green power.
Before you can understand how blockchains are part of the solution, you first need to know a fe ...read more
(Credit: Monty Python and the Holy Grail/Columbia Pictures)
Being labeled a witch can do great harm; it did during the Salem witch trials and continues to today in many places in Africa and Papua New Guinea.
Now, researchers investigating villages in China have analyzed the effects the reputation of witchcraft could have on everything from recruiting workers to getting married. It’s data that could shed light on why this belief persists in societies.
Scientists examined farming villages ...read more
Modern neuroscience has been accused of being a ‘new phrenology‘ but now neuroscientists have conducted a modern evaluation of phrenological claims using neuroscience methods.
In an enjoyable new preprint called An empirical, 21st century evaluation of phrenology, Oxford researchers Oiwi Parker Jones and colleagues say that they’ve rigorously tested, and debunked, phrenology for the first time.
Notoriously, the phrenologists believed that the shape of an individual’s sku ...read more
