Wind ownership is available. As an unpaid intern at an energy company in England, Emilia Groupp spent two years creating wind maps for renewable energy development. Colleagues told Groupp to ignore the wind blowing across British borders, saying things like, “Oh, we don’t want French wind,” recalled Groupp, an energy anthropologist at Stanford University. The … Read more
A well-timed smile can be the ultimate speed dating hack. Artificial intelligence-enhanced smiles during video chats led to greater romantic attraction, researchers report Oct. 28. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Face filters, available to social media users around the world, can smooth out blemishes, whiten teeth and highlight hair. They can age you … Read more
Cancer-destroying particle beams have been caught red-handed. Particle beams can deliver a burst of destructive energy directly to tumors – assuming the beam is in the right place. Now, using a radioactive beam, scientists have determined the location of the beam while treating tumors in mice. It is the first successful treatment of tumors with … Read more
It’s one of the most massive migrations on Earth: a huge biomass of tiny plankton traveling from the deep sea to the surface. However, not all of these organisms have limbs to propel themselves up. So how some of them manage to undergo such a long journey has been a mystery. Now, a team of … Read more
At least one pig has contracted bird flu amid an outbreak in poultry on a backyard farm in central Oregon. While the infection seems limited to one farm so far, the discovery has raised new alarm bells thanks to pigs’ role as a sort of mixing pot for flu viruses, potentially leading to genetic mutations … Read more
Historians working with an artificial intelligence assistant have begun to trace the spread of astronomical thinking across Europe in the early 1500s. The analysis contributes to challenging the idea of the “lone genius” of scientific revolutions. Instead, it shows that knowledge of star positions was widespread and used in a variety of disciplines, researchers report … Read more
A hypothetical “fifth force” could attract asteroids, if it exists. But asteroid Bennu shows no signs that its orbit has been altered by such a force. This puts a ceiling on how strong a possible fifth force could be, physicists report Sept. 20 Physics of communications. Scientists know of four forces in the universe: electromagnetism, … Read more
The first glimpse of starlight from a galaxy hosting one of the most distant quasars known has revealed an astronomical wonder. Quasars – extremely bright galactic nuclei – owe their brightness to the intense heat that results when gas swirls around a supermassive black hole. The black hole powering a quasar 13 billion light-years from … Read more
A massive Mayan landscape is hidden beneath a forested area of southern Mexico. The newly discovered city, called Valeriana, spans an area roughly the size of Beijing and has “all the hallmarks of a classic Mayan political capital,” researchers reported in October. Antiquity. Its plazas connected by a grand causeway, temple pyramids, and water reservoir … Read more
About 6,500 light-years from Earth lurks a zombie star cloaked in long tentacles of hot sulfur. No one knows how those tents were formed. But astronomers now know where they are going. New observations, reported on November 1 Astrophysical Journal Letterscaptures the 3-D structure and motion of the debris left behind by a supernova that … Read more