Physicists from Argentina and Spain have studied the pedestrian dynamics at the annual running of the particular bulls in Pamplona. In his first and arguably most famous novel, The Sun Also Rises , Ernest Hemingway wrote tersely but lovingly about the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, during the seven-day Festival of San […]
Enlarge / Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine hot-fire tests take place at the company’s facility in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin ) Welcome to Edition 4. 26 of the Rocket Report! This will be the final edition of 2021 due to a forthcoming (and much-needed) holiday break. As I write this, NASA and the European Space […]
Enlarge / Coal smoke and steam vapor pour out of the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant across from a largely abandoned children’s park on September 11, 2008, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. After two enormous toxic coal soot discharges in 2006 and 2007, the children’s park was rarely used. The 2,460 MW coal-fired plant wasn’t fully decommissioned until […]
Enlarge / Brian Anderson’s experiments with Lego minifigs led to the development of an interactive museum exhibit in Switzerland. (credit: Brian Anderson) Legos are a beloved staple of educational science activities and have even proved useful in particle physics experiments at CERN to explore the properties of hadrons. For Brian Anderson, a physicist at Brigham Young […]
Enlarge / The Aspen-M 40-qubit chip and its housing. (credit: Rigetti) On Wednesday, quantum computing startup Rigetti announced a number of interesting hardware developments. To begin with, its users would now have access to its next-generation chip, called Apsen-M, with 40 qubits and improved performance. While that’s well below the qubit count achieved by IBM, […]
Enlarge / Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor to the President, during the daily press briefing at the White House on December 1, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Anna Moneymaker) Though booster doses of current vaccines can foil the ultra-transmissible omicron coronavirus variant, a towering wave of omicron cases may peak in the […]
Enlarge / Scenes like this might become less common if a new SARS-CoV-2 protease inhibitor becomes widely available. (credit: Getty Images ) On Monday, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer released more data on its anti-COVID-19 drug, named Paxlovid. The company} had released its initial data on the drug in early November, and it looked extremely promising : […]
Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) Recently, when researchers were testing error correction on Google’s quantum processor, they noted an odd phenomenon where the whole error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this up to background radiation, a combination of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope. It […]
Enlarge / Veterinarians at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium have pioneered a lot of unusual procedures to diagnosis and treat the animals in their care—including figuring out to give MRIs to electric eels. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Right before Thanksgiving, we reported on how Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium solved the Curious Case of the Missing Chloroquine. […]
Enlarge / Medical workers carry a patient to a hospital in New York, the United States, Dec. 13, 2021. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency ) Health officials sounded the alarm Tuesday over the fast spread of the omicron coronavirus, which has now been detected in 77 countries worldwide and 33 states in the US—and […]