A year and a half ago, Alan Eustace, a Google senior vice president at the time, set an impressive record. With an exhilarating 14-minute journey from the upper stratosphere to the New Mexican desert, Eustace gained the title of world’s highest sky diver. The effort was famously discreet – only a close inner circle of family and engineers knew the project was happening – but a new documentary offers a glimpse behind the scenes and into the scientific and engineering advances that
No let up yet in the relentless rain pummeling Texas and surrounding Southern Plains
Parts of Europe have also been deluged, and today, Paris is flooding A slow-moving low-pressure system sucking tropical moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into Texas and nearby areas is forecast to become nearly stationary today. The very unfortunate result: More thunderstorms will pummel a region already reeling from record rainfall. Flooding from the rainfall has been implicated in the deaths yesterday of five U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas. Their military vehicle overturned at
Hidden Risks in a Warming Antarctic
As the rest of the world heats up and the Arctic hemorrhages ice, a different story is playing out in Antarctica. Total ice coverage there has actually increased, and temperatures have risen only mildly. As researchers have attempted to adequately model the changing climate, the Antarctic paradox has served as ammunition for climate change deniers and challenged climate scientists. But three recently published papers help explain why the Antarctic isn’t falling in line with the rest of th
You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks (if the Dog Is a Parrot)
Like Snapchat abstainers or reluctant Slack users, adult parrots have a hard time learning new tricks. Older birds stay set in their ways while young birds innovate and try new things. Researchers say that’s just as it should be—even if it means the grownups miss out on a treat now and then. Young animals might be better at creative problem-solving because they’re fearless and like to explore. On the other hand (or paw, or claw), older animals might do better because they have more knowle
King Tut Was Buried with a Cosmic Dagger
King Tut took some out-of-this-world weaponry with him into the afterlife. That’s the conclusion drawn by Italian researchers who say that an iron dagger found in his tomb was crafted from metal brought to this world by a meteorite. The knife was originally found laying across his right thigh after Howard Carter discovered the tomb in 1925, and it is housed in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The dagger’s composition hadn’t been studied before, because previous methods would have damaged the
FOUND: Medieval Dinosaurs!
Feels like dinosaurs follow me wherever I go (note: not complaining). I’m on vacation here in the amazing Republic of Georgia and thus a little bit out of the loop on new sciencey stuff but HEY, would ya look at this? After hiking up to the famous Church of Tsminda Sameba, sitting pretty at an altitude of nearly 2200m in the Great Caucasus, I couldn’t help but notice something a little odd about one of the carvings on the 15th century belfry. The two critters scampering across
‘Jumping Gene’ Painted the Peppered Moth Black
The peppered moth is a poster species for evolution by natural selection. The typical peppered moth, Biston betularia, is white with black speckles, a color scheme that helps it hide from predators on light-colored tree bark. But during the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, coal-fired factories caked buildings and trees in black soot. In 1848 the first entirely black peppered moth was identified, and by 1895, nearly 98 percent of peppered moths observed in Manchester were th
Anyone Can Solve a Rubik’s Cube With Augmented Reality
To the uninitiated, a Rubik’s Cube is a devilishly complex contraption — as anyone who has idly picked one up only to throw it aside minutes later can attest. But there is hope for the impatient: A new program made by an undergraduate in Prague uses augmented reality to project a step-by-step solution onto any Rubik’s Cube, allowing even a novice to end up with a perfectly arranged cube. One Step at a Time The mistr kostky (Czech for “master cubes”) system, designed by Martin Španěl as
When you’ve been stung more than 1,000 times, it’s only sensible to write a book about stinging insects.
You can tell a lot about an book by the author’s photo. My author photo for Venomous, for example, paints me as the intrepid explorer; I look adventurous and daring as I smile unabashedly through the legs of a large tailless whip scorpion (amblypygid). But while the photo is startling, it’s not as bold as it seems. It’s a facade of bravado, not real bravery, as the menacing-looking animal on my cheek is actually harmless. Meanwhile, in his author photo for Sting of the Wild, Justin Schmidt s
The Billionaire and the Doomsday Dust-up
First of all, let me reassure you that this post has nothing at all to do with Donald Trump. The billionaire in question is not the presidential candidate but Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft. The doomsday I’m talking about is not political but physical. And the dust-up comes down to a contentious but ultimately quantifiable issue: What is the real risk from asteroid impacts? In a recent paper, Myhrvold charges that NASA scientists have made some serious error
Price Hikes May Turn Off Robot Taxi Customers
Robot taxis represent one of the first goals for both tech giants and automakers developing self-driving cars. Popular ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft have also made plans to eventually switch over from human drivers to self-driving cars. But a recent study suggests many Americans may not be willing to pay more for the privilege of riding a robot taxi compared with hailing a human driver. Adults surveyed on self-driving car technology were mostly unwilling to pay more than $1 p
A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: The “Epidemic” that Duped the Nazis
In September of 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, marking the beginning of World War II in Europe. By the war’s end in 1945, Poland had suffered the deaths of more than five and a half million citizens – a fifth of her pre-war population – with the majority of these the victims of war crimes at the hands of the Germans. A large community in southeastern Poland, however, escaped persecution and the horrors of deportation and death thanks to an ingenious ruse employed by two Polish physicians. W
The Origins of Intravenous Fluids
Flushing a vein with a liter of saline is standard protocol in clinics and hospitals. To receive fluids intravenously is an ubiquitous therapeutic, a common tool to alleviate many conditions, so standard that there are even businesses that offer an IV and a bag of saline as a cure for the common hangover. Intravenous fluid resuscitation relies on the principle of replenishing our precious bodily fluids through delivery directly into the blood vessels, but where did this concept come from? Ho
Wound-plugging Device Saves a Soldier’s Life
A simple technology meant to stop major arterial bleeding has passed its first field test on the battlefield. The device, called XSTAT, was put to the test recently when a soldier with a gunshot wound to the thigh remained in critical condition after a seven-hour surgery failed to staunch the bleeding from his femoral artery. As a last resort, the forward medical team operating on the soldier decided to use the XSTAT, an oversized syringe filled with absorbent sponges that are injected di
How a ‘Flying Jug’ Symbolized US Airpower in WWII
Toward the end of the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan,” American soldiers played by actors Matt Damon and Tom Hanks witness U.S. fighter aircraft swooping to their rescue. “They’re P-51s, sir, tank busters!” Damon exclaims. In reality, the fighter aircraft swooping to the rescue of embattled U.S. infantrymen would more likely have been the P-47 Thunderbolt, a stocky aircraft with the unflattering nickname of the “flying jug.” During the aircraft’s 75th anniversary, it’s worth remembering how
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