(Credit: Cornel Constantin/Shutterstock)
The content you see on the internet is increasingly becoming tailored to you: Music based on your favorite jams, shopping suggestions corresponding to your recent purchases, and television shows similar to your most beloved episodes.
These “similarity searches” drive custom content, and they’re pretty tricky to do correctly and quickly.
I Know This Song
That is, for computers at least. Fruit flies, on the other hand, seem to be pretty ...read more
East of the now-submerged land bridge Beriniga, a large valley moraine in northern Canada’s Nahanni National Park dates to 13,800 years ago, roughly the end of the last ice age. (Credit Brian Menounos, UNBC)
One if by land, two if by sea…if only the debate about how the first humans arrived in the Americas was as easy to sort out as Paul Revere’s fabled lantern signal. Maybe it is. A new study from a different field offers indirect support to researchers advocating a coa ...read more
A crested pigeon in flight. (Credit: Geoffery Dabb)
When the crested pigeon of Australia flees potential foes, it can raise an alarm — not by calling out vocally, but with whistling feathers in its wings. These new findings may be the first proof of an idea Darwin proposed nearly 150 years ago suggesting that birds could use feathers as musical instruments for communication.
Birds are known for the songs they can sing, but many can also generate unusual noises with their feathers. Darwin ...read more
An epidermal sheet grown on a fibrin base, like the grafts used to heal a boy’s skin in Germany. (Credit: CMR Unimore)
Doctors have replaced the majority of a patient’s damaged skin using genetically-modified grafts.
In 2015, a seven-year-old boy was admitted to a German hospital with lesions and blisters across nearly his entire body. He suffered from a rare genetic condition called junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB) that prevents the epidermis, the outermost layer of our ...read more
An artist’s illustration of New Horizons zooming past its next target on New Year’s Day 2019. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Carlos Hernandez)
NASA needs your help.
The New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto two years ago to much fanfare, is heading towards another, even more distant world — (486958) 2014 MU69. It’s a maddeningly boring name, and it just doesn’t quite capture the adventure, the thrill, the awe of an earthly spacecraft visiting an object over 4 ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Google Street View can pretty much show you every location in the world, even the Faroe Islands thanks to camera-yielding sheep, from the ground. While Satellite View shows us a large-scale aerial of the world, what about what’s in between?
Gregory Crutsinger, a scientist who’s worked for drone companies like 3D Robotics and Parrot, recently started a UAV consulting company called Drone Scholars and is leading a citizen scientist drone project c ...read more
A suspension of stem cells in liquid nitrogen. (Credit: Elena Pavlovich/Shutterstock)
Tiny brain “organoids,” or clusters of neurons grown from human stem cells, have been implanted into rats.
The news comes from Stat, and it seems that two different teams have managed to integrate human brain cells into rat brains. The organoids began stretching out new cells, and even showed signs of activity when the researchers shone lights at the rat’s eyes, a sign that they were fu ...read more
