Amanda Seyfried stars as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s new original series, The Dropout. Regular Ars readers have no doubt been following our ongoing coverage of the Elizabeth Holmes fraud trial. The disgraced Theranos founder’s meteoric rise and equally rapid fall has already been the subject of a 2018 nonfiction book and the HBO documentary […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) All too often, digital ads wind up improperly targeting the most vulnerable people online, including abuse victims and kids. Add to that list the customers of several digital-medicine and genetic-testing companies, whose sites used ad-tracking tools that could have exposed information about people’s health status. In a recent study from researchers […]
Enlarge / This song sparrow would be a better parent if the ravens would just shut up. (credit: Reed Kaestner) On paper, predators and prey have a pretty straightforward relationship when it comes to population totals. A lion kills a zebra, so there’s one less zebra in a herd. However, new research suggests that predators […]
Enlarge / The atoms (center foreground) alter the laser so it extracts energy from a membrane (blue). (credit: Departement Physik, Universität Basel ) Way back when I was still working in the lab, there was a new lot of buzz about something called “coherent control. ” The basic idea was to take the principles of […]
A chimp named Suzee inspects a wound on the foot of her adolescent son, Sia, then catches an insect out of the air, puts it in her mouth, presses it between her lips, and applies it to the wound while the girl daughter, Sassandra, observes her. (Alessandra Mascaro) In November 2019, Alessandra Mascaro was observing […]
Enlarge / Roscosmos Head Dmitry Rogozin is seen before Russia-China talks at the Moscow Kremlin. (credit: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images) Nearly four years have passed since Dmitry Rogozin became director general of Roscosmos, the state-run corporation that manages the country’s human and civil spaceflight programs, rocket production, and space technology development. Roscosmos is a […]
Enlarge (credit: Wabtec) Battery-electric power is commonplace in cars and trucks and is being tested in planes, helicopters, and container ships. Now, battery power is coming to trains, in place of the diesel-fueled generators that have powered locomotives for more than a century. Last week, Union Pacific Railroad agreed to buy 20 battery-electric freight locomotives […]
Enlarge (credit: Barash et al 2022) When the first members of our species ventured out of Africa, they walked into a world that earlier hominins, such as Homo erectus, had first explored a million years earlier. According to a recent study of a 1 . 5 million-year-old vertebra, those earlier hominins may have expanded beyond […]
Enlarge / View of the fossilized skull of an extinct species of stargazer fish, showing preserved fecal pellets in the brain. (credit: Calvert Marine Museum) A fossilized cranium of an extinct species of stargazer fish was stuffed with tiny fecal pellets known as coprolites , according to a recent paper published in the journal Rivista […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Trinity College) On October 21, 1638, people were congregating at a church at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Devon, England, when a severe thunderstorm broke out. Witnesses described an 8-foot ball of fire hurtling through the church, tossing large stones from the walls to the ground, smashing pews and windows, […]