Enlarge (credit: Natalie Fobes | Getty Images) Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin […]
Enlarge / Aeration System, Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant, Camarillo, Ventura County, California. (credit: Getty | Universal Images Group) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday announced it is now publicly logging levels of SARS-CoV-2 found in sewage from around the country. The announcement elevates a growing system for wastewater surveillance that the […]
Enlarge / NASA Television of the Crew-2 landing shows three main parachutes deployed, with a fourth one lagging behind. (credit: NASA TV) Officials from NASA and SpaceX say that they are paying attention to a parachute issue with the Dragon spacecraft, but they do not believe significant actions will be needed to address it. Upon […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) There’s a disconnect between when people want to use electricity and when solar tends to produce it. Most often, people use power during the evening or the early morning, when the Sun isn’t yet up. “There is a mismatch between solar irradiation arriving on Earth and the time […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) Training AIs remains very processor-intensive, in part because traditional processing architectures are poor matches for the sorts of neural networks that are widely used. This has led to the development of what has been termed neuromorphic computing hardware, which attempts to model the behavior of biological neurons in hardware. But […]
Enlarge / Composite image showing a Falcon 9 rocket launching, and a first stage landing, at Vandenberg Space Force Base this weekend. (credit: SpaceX) Welcome to Edition 4.31 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX launched three Falcon 9 rockets in three days this week, bringing its tally of orbital launches in 2022 to six. Not bad […]
Enlarge / Painting by Samuel Atkins of the HMS Endeavour off the coast of New Holland during Cook’s voyage of discovery (1768-1771). (credit: Public domain) The HMS Endeavour is famous for being sailed by Capt. James Cook to the South Pacific for a scientific expedition in the late 18th century. But the Endeavour (by then […]
Enlarge / Picture of the US embassy in Havana, taken on September 29, 2017, after the United States announced it was withdrawing more than half its personnel in response to mysterious “health attacks” targeting its diplomatic staff. (credit: Getty | AFP) A device delivering pulsed electromagnetic energy or ultrasound “plausibly explains” the enigmatic health incidents […]
Enlarge / The patterns of the ocellated lizard are predictable by a mathematical model with regard to phase transitions. (credit: UNIGE or Michel Milinkovitch) Zebras and tigers have stripes, cheetahs plus leopards have spots, and the ocellated lizard ( Timon lepidus ) boasts a labyrinthine pattern of black-and-green chains associated with scales. Now researchers from […]
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches on a pillar of fire in January 2022. (credit: SpaceX) SpaceX has been launching Falcon 9 rockets thick and fast of late. With 10 launches since the beginning of December, the company has flown rockets at a rate greater than one mission a week. And another launch could […]