Midwest Tornadoes: Why It’s So Hard to Predict Where a Twister Will Strike
A series of tornadoes has brought devastation to the Midwest. Ideally, we could forecast such twisters, but the phenomenon is confounding. ...
Posts Tagged ‘science’
The Tricky Physics of How the Avengers Manage to Fly
To understand how Star-Lord flies, you have to consider both the forces acting on him (hello, jet boots) and the torque. ...
How to Solve a Rubik’s Cube in 5 Seconds—or Less
The world record for unscrambling a Rubik's cube keeps dropping, as fleet-fingered speedcubers hone their pattern recognition and "lookahead" skills. ...
A big red reason not to dig a mine in Alaska’s fat bear country
Like the sun promises to rise each morning, hordes of crimson salmon — numbering in the tens of millions — faithfully return to Alaska's Bristol Bay each summer. This land of untrammeled rivers, streams, and lakes is home to the richest r... ...
SpaceX launches the first part of its satellite internet network
The first part of SpaceX's ambitious satellite internet network is in orbit. On Thursday evening, the spaceflight company deployed 60 of its Starlink satellites from its Falcon 9 rocket, which launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch t... ...
You can do it, robot! Watch the beefy, 4-legged HyQReal pull a plane
It's not really clear just yet exactly what all these powerful, agile quadrupedal robots people are working on are going to do, exactly, but even so it never gets old watching them do their thing. The latest is an Italian model called HyQReal, which demonstrates its aspiration to winning strongman competitions, among other things, by ...
Scientists Find a Volume **** for Emotional Memories
Using mice whose neurons had been engineered to respond to light, researchers found they could dial up or down the emotional intensity of a memory. ...
The Reality Bubble: how humanity’s collective blindspots render us incapable of seeing danger until it’s too late (and what to do about it)
Ziya Tong is a veteran science reporter who spent years hosting Discovery's flagship science program, Daily Planet: it's the sort of job that gives you a very broad, interdisciplinary view of the sciences, and it shows in her debut book, The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our ...
The Pentagon Launched Another Space Agency. Do We Need It?
By going big on small satellites, the new Space Development Agency plans to defend the country against all manner of orbital attacks. ...
Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life
Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also of paintings. It's not perfect, but when it works, it is — like much AI work these days — eerie and fascinating. ...