by Emma Marris Robert Millage had heard the howls of wolves in the area the day before, so he knew where to wait. As the sun rose, and the howls rang out again, he blew on his hunter’s call, emitting a sound like a coyote in distress. Fifteen minutes later, a two-year-old she-wolf strode into the clearing. “You don’t have a lot of time to think,” says Millage, an estate agent in Kamiah, Idaho....
Robots are replacing human workers at a faster pace than any other point in history. Most of these robots are in factories, but a new kind of mechanized worker has hit apple orchards. Abundant Robotics in California has built an automated apple picker, that uses a vacuum system to suck the fruit straight off of the trees. “As a kid in Louisiana I was inspired by agricultural equipment such as combines, cotton pickers, and tractors,” Abundant Robotics CEO Dan Steere told the Newshour....
Biologist William K. Purves of Harvey Mudd College explains. Spider silk is not a single, unique material–different species produce various kinds of silk. Some possess as many as seven distinct kinds of glands, each of which produces a different silk. Why so many kinds of silk? Each kind plays particular roles. All spiders make so-called dragline silk that functions in part as a lifeline, enabling the creatures to hang from ceilings....
City dwellers in New York hoping to wake up to mountains of snow will have to content themselves with trawling Instagram pictures from New England. The blizzard of 2015—or really the #blizzardof2015 if we’re doing this right—brought less snow than expected to New York City and a number of points south. But to the east on Long Island and north throughout New England, the storm has lived up to, and in some ways exceeded, expectations with heavy snow and coastal flooding....
People still need electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, which is why renewable energy developers are increasingly investing in energy storage systems. They need to sop up excess juice and release it when needed. However, storing large amounts of energy, whether it’s in big batteries for electric cars or water reservoirs for the electrical grid, is still a young field. It presents challenges, especially with safety....
After a fierce battle over agricultural incentives in a landmark climate bill, Congress plans to ask the National Academy of Sciences to study how biofuel production in the Midwest can shift food production abroad, stimulating a wave of deforestation. Tomorrow’s expected vote in the House of Representatives on the climate bill would move the nation a step closer to a cap-and-trade system that would limit greenhouse gas emissions. But the bill’s sponsors have made significant concessions to Agriculture Committee Chairman Colin Peterson (D–Minn....
MAY 1956 THE HARDWIRED BRAIN–“How big a role does heredity play in behavior? In the lower vertebrates, at least, many features of visual perception–the sense of direction and location in space, the perception of motion and the like–are built into the organism and do not have to be learned. The whole idea of instincts and the inheritance of behavior traits is becoming much more palatable than it was 15 years ago, when we lacked a satisfactory basis for explaining the organization of inborn behavior....
Imagine you are trying to put a traumatic event behind you. Your therapist asks you to recall the memory in detail while rapidly moving your eyes back and forth, as if you are watching a high-speed Ping-Pong match. The sensation is strange, but many therapists and patients swear by the technique, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Although skeptics continue to question EMDR’s usefulness, recent research supports the idea that the eye movements indeed help to reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)....
Humanity’s light at Saturn has gone out. NASA’s robotic Cassini spacecraft burned up in the ringed planet’s atmosphere Friday morning (Sept. 15), ending a remarkable 13-year run at Saturn that has revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the outer solar system and its potential to host life. For example, Cassini discovered methane seas on Saturn’s huge moon Titan and geysers of water vapor blasting from fellow moon Enceladus. Both of these moons are worthy of much further study, as is the ringed planet itself and the diverse Saturn system as a whole, Cassini team members said....
Ever since astronomers realized that most of the matter in the universe is invisible, they have tried to sort out what that obscure stuff might be. But three decades of increasingly sophisticated searches have found no sign of dark matter, causing scientists to question some of their basic ideas about this elusive substance. In October the most sensitive experiment looking for proof of the leading candidate for dark matter—theorized particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles)—reported null results, disappointing scientists once again....
Spring Forward The “doomsday clock” crept two minutes closer to midnight this past January, a visual cue that represents the increasing likelihood of global catastrophe. Scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project created the symbolic clock in 1947, which is maintained by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For the first time, the board factored into its decision the dangers associated with climate change, in addition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons....
In the classic comedy Groundhog Day, protagonist Phil, played by Bill Murray, asks “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” In this movie, Phil is stuck reliving the same day over and over, where the events repeat in a continual loop, and nothing he does can stop them. Phil’s predicament sounds a lot like our cruel cycle with data breaches....
Turkey hunting in Texas dried up along with the state’s water due to the epic drought of 2011. And while the drought has relented, turkey season hasn’t been the same. Turkey season closed Wednesday in the state, and wildlife officials expect this year will continue a trend the state has seen since 2010, with hunters killing the fewest birds in decades. Turkeys don’t mate when stressed by drought, making them hard to find and triggering a ripple effect that plays out over the next few hunting seasons....
Astronomy is the science of the exotic, but the thing that astronomers most want to find is the familiar: another planet like Earth, a hospitable face in a hostile cosmos. The Kepler spacecraft, which was launched last March, is their best instrument yet for discovering Earth-like planets around sunlike stars, as opposed to the giant planets that have been planet finders’ main harvest so far. Many predict that 2010 will be the year of exo-Earths....
Earlier this year Los Angeles residents met about a new plan to release thousands of mosquitoes in their backyards. The bugs—all males—would not bite humans like females do, and area officials hoped these particular insects would block further reproduction of their kind. To some local residents the approach seemed a bit counterintuitive at first. Yet they were told the method would help curb pesticide use while simultaneously beating back their mosquito population....
Ever since Swiss astronomers astonished the world by finding a gas-giant planet orbiting close to its star, researchers have wondered how these so-called hot Jupiters arose. None exists in our solar system, where the planetary giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—reside in the deep freeze beyond the asteroid belt. Now a surprising discovery is providing fresh insight, suggesting that the more iron a star was born with, the more likely it is that the star’s hot Jupiter had a violent past....
OSLO (Reuters) - The baseline for “normal” weather used by everyone from farmers to governments to plan ahead needs to be updated more frequently to account for the big shifts caused by global warming, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday. The WMO’s Commission for Climatology believes rising temperatures and more heatwaves and heavy rains mean the existing baseline, based on the climate averages of 1961-90, is out of date as a guide, the WMO said in a statement....
The best time of day to release mosquitoes in northern Australia is midmorning. Later in the day, winds might sweep the insects away and dash any hope that they will find a mate. Earlier than that, the workers who drive around and release containers full of mosquitoes would have to get overtime pay. And so, on a sweltering January morning at the height of the Australian summer, I climbed into my white van with thousands of mosquitoes stowed in Tupperware cups on the backseat....
Each of us has abandoned a project at some point, whether as simple as a lapsed exercise plan or as complicated as the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, which has technically been under construction since 1882. But why does this happen? What gets between the light bulb of the bright idea and the finish line of completion? Turns out there are lots of reasons, which, lucky for us, means there are lots of solutions....
From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). For the first 27 years of his life, the mathematician Ken Ono was a screw-up, a disappointment and a failure. At least, that’s how he saw himself. The youngest son of first-generation Japanese immigrants to the United States, Ono grew up under relentless pressure to achieve academically. His parents set an unusually high bar. Ono’s father, an eminent mathematician who accepted an invitation from J....
