It’s not quite as intense as the rebels abandoning the ice planet Hoth in the Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, but it’s still pretty dramatic.
Russia is engaged in the biggest military build-up in the Arctic since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mars is well-known to NASA and European Space Agency scientists as a place with extremely challenging terrain, fraught with craters and machinery-damaging dust. So, when German researchers recently wanted to test how a brand-new rover system performed in the most difficult of topographies, they looked around Earth for a similar environment. They they found it in Utah.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet one of the newest known members of the animal kingdom.
When we think of the carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine all that odorless, invisible gas causing global climate change. But a new NASA supercomputer project uses satellite measurements of CO2 to model how this critical greenhouse gas moves through the atmosphere. The 3-D visualization shows how CO2 seems to pool and swirl, mostly above the heavily industrialized northern hemisphere, over the course of one year, from September 2014 to September 2015.
Almost 50% of Americans will shop online for holiday gifts this season, and many will use an online vendor’s gift wrapping option.
David Goodsell is not a household name, but if you’ve ever spent time perusing a cellular biology textbook, there’s a good chance you’ve come across his work.
In the video above, undocumented workers rushed to the Dolores Mission in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights on Wednesday following the election of Donald Trump. The mission offers a weekly legal clinic to help immigrants gain citizenship. Dozens of people, many of whom have been living in the US for years, came to the clinic in a desperate effort to get legal advice and their papers filed before Trump assumes office.
A recent video released by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) reveals in startling detail how different safety standards for cars can lead to dramatically different survival results for their human occupants. Even though no one is hurt, the video is terrifying to watch. It features two cars, a 2015 Nissan Tsuru and a 2016 Nissan Versa. Both cars are made in Mexico, but the Tsuru was made according to Mexican highway safety standards, while the Versa abides by US standards. The Tsuru is not sold in the US, while the Versa is.
Imagine after an earthquake, a swarm of flying robots about the size of a coin spin into a room to sniff for poisonous gas. This is how the creators of the Piccolissimo imagine that their tiny invention might someday be used.
In the video above, there is something fascinating happening: a group of Brazilian capuchin monkeys are busily hammering rocks together, often creating sharp-edged stone flakes that spin off in all directions. The presence of those rock flakes has caused a stir in scientific circles. The reason is that over the decades, scientists have often found similar rock chips and attributed their existence to early human tool use. Rocks, when they are split a certain way, make handy cutting tools, ideal for scraping meat off of a dead animal or breaking a bone.
About as long as hobbyist drones have been popular, there have been people who want to knock them out of the sky. Maybe the drones were flown over brush fires, disrupting fire fighting efforts. Others are sometimes flown near airports, causing alarm and, occasionally, grounding flights. In a truly scary turn, ISIS militants have even used drones to carry small bombs.
Behan Gifford and her husband Jamie had it all. Three young children, a lovely home on an island near Seattle and two well-paying professional jobs. So why did the couple leave it all behind and decide to live aboard a sailboat for eight years?
Where elevators are concerned, this new ship lift is an engineering marvel. Built to carry cargo ships over the controversial Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River, the elevator knocks down the travel time past the dam to 40 minutes from the three hours or so it took previously via five stages of locks.
In the video above, a new robot called the Minitaur looks at first like a cute, gamboling puppy. Then it climbs a fence. And opens a door. By itself.
Drones do amazing things. Today, they are racing, surveying crops and performing inspections. In the near future, they may be delivering stuff right to your home.
On Sept. 15, US president Barack Obama declared the creation of a new national marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s called the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument and lies about 150 miles southeast of the coast of Cape Cod, and contains over 4,900 square miles of ocean.
For years we have known that the New Caledonian crow used sticks as tools to pry insects and grubs from hard to reach spots. But a recent study of captive Hawaiian crows shows that the skill may not only be more common than previously thought, but also that it may be genetic rather than learned.
The scientific expedition Nautilus, led by the famous explorer Robert Ballard, has had an eventful year.
Ever since Hollywood celebrities began building mansions in the chaparral hills above Los Angeles they’ve had to contend with two pests: paparazzi and rattlesnakes. When it comes to the deadly reptiles, they often call one man: Bo Slyapitch, rattlesnake wrangler to the rich and famous.
When most of us think of consumer drones, what comes to mind are the buzzing quadcopters currently ushering in a new era of aerial photography (and paranoia). But, French drone company Parrot wants you to think differently.
With big, stuffed animal-like eyes, this creature looks like a cartoon, or a sea-dwelling Pac Man ghost. It’s called a stubby squid, also known as the North Pacific bobtail squid. But it’s not really a squid at all. It’s more closely related to cuttlefish.
The Atlantic Canyons and Seamounts is an underwater ecological hotspot about 150 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. It’s a thriving, incredibly diverse biological ecosystem, where hundreds of species of fish and invertebrates swarm over underwater mountains called seamounts. Several canyons there plunge into black depths teeming with a broad array of life, including colorful species of deep water corals, some of which grow over ten feet tall and are known to live for over a thousand years. It’s also been the site of exciting recent scientific discovery: an number of species believed to be new to science were found on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expedition in 2013.
Researchers at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan filmed smiles in sleeping Japanese macaques, possibly revealing more about the origin of smiling and laughter in humans. Until now, we thought the smiles, called “spontaneous smiles,” only happened in humans and chimpanzees. They’ve never before been observed in more distantly-related primates.
