Hello! This is the holiday contest. I know that the following options may not be your favorites. Don’t worry! Feel free to comment on your favorite, but please vote on the holidays listed below. The winners will have the chance to share their ideas, and I will even give a shout-out! Pick one and good […]
Did you know that arid deserts in several countries have turned into lush, fertile land? In countries such as the United Arab Emirates and China, fruits and vegetables now flourish, providing fresh produce for their inhabitants. But what caused this miraculous transformation? Lets find out! What is Nanoclay? In the 1980s, the Nile Delta in Egypt, known for its reliable farming, suddenly became barren. For decades, the Nile floodwaters had spread minerals, nutrients, and clay particles over the soil. However, the newly built Aswan Dam prevented clay particles from flowing, reducing the soils...
Hey guys! Welcome to this group. I am AthenaDaBest, and I am creating this for all people who LUVVV mythology and Percy Jackson fans and other Rick Riordan books, but other mythology series are allowed. Have fun!!
Chiral (adjective, KY-rul)
A chiral molecule is one that comes in a left- and right-handed form. If a molecule is chiral, it cannot be placed over its mirror image in a way that matches perfectly.
To understand this, we need only look at our own hands. Hands are chiral. They come in a left- and right-handed form. These forms are mirror images of each other. (Place your palms together, and your fingers will align thumbs touching thumbs, for example.) But when the left and right hand are facing the same direction, one cannot be placed over the other in a way that matches perfectly.
You can try this yourself, or with a friend. Turn both hands palm up. Try to move your upward-facing right hand behind the upward-facing left hand. There is no way to align your upward-facing hands so that your thumbs are on top of each other. This is chirality.
Water molecules, like the one illustrated here, are achiral. That means a water molecule perfectly matches its own mirror image.ALI DAMOUH/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images
Some molecules, such as water (H2O), do perfectly fit their mirror images. These molecules are called achiral. Imagine a water molecule facing its reflection in a mirror. If you moved the water molecule over its reflection, the two could overlay perfectly. In other words, a water molecule could superimpose its mirror image.
Chirality is important in chemistry because it affects how molecules interact. Consider drug chemistry. Left- and right-handed forms of a drug molecule may affect the body in very different ways. So a chemist must know which form they are creating.
Chirality is also important in biology. Heres an example. Living things make amino acids, which combine to form larger protein molecules. Amino acids come in a left- and right-handed form. Yet almost all living things on Earth make and use only the left-hand form. The reason why remains a scientific mystery.
However, scientists recently studied amino acids that formed in space. In an asteroid, they found equal amounts of left- and right-handed forms. These amino acids were probably not formed by living things. Thats why there was no selection for the left-handed form.
In a sentence
Scientists developed chiral sound-dampening fabrics by twisting the connecting links in long molecules.
Check out the full list of Scientists Say.
Acollection of 1,000 prehistoricstructures dubbed mustatils the plural form of the Arabic term for rectangles scattered across 124,274 miles(200,000 kilometers) innorthwest Saudi Arabiamay be theworld's oldest monuments. A team of archeologistsfromthe University of Western Australia (UWA)reached this conclusion afterradiocarbon dating of charcoalfound inside the courtyardsindicatedtheywere constructed in 5,000 BC or about 2,000 years before theEgyptian pyramids or monuments likeStonehenge in southern England.
Graphene is a wonder. This single layer of carbon atoms is stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum. It conducts electricity better than many other materials. And recent studies now show it can even kill germs. A new graphene-based material is being developed to harness that surprising superpower.
Lets learn about graphene
To turn on this germ killer, all you need is a little light. Exposing graphene to light starts a chemical reaction, says Giacomo Reina. That reaction produces molecules that can take down microbes such as bacteria, viruses or fungi.
A materials scientist, Reina works at EMPA, a research institute in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He was part of a team that unveiled the new material last year in EcoMat.
As a liquid, the substance could one day coat surfaces often rife with germs. Those might include doorknobs or handrails in hospitals. Right now, though, Reinas team wants to use it in the human mouth. Its a particularly germy place. Installing new dental implants can put someone at risk of infection. But coating the implant with this germ-fighting coating should greatly lower that risk.
Graphenes greatness
In the 22 years since graphene was discovered, scientists have probed and explored it in many ways. Theyve even developed different types of useful graphene. It can add strength to concrete and tennis rackets. It can also boost the performance of electronic devices.
Nowadays, Reina says, graphene is more a family of materials. His team used a type called graphene oxide. Its a layer of carbon atoms with oxygen-containing molecules attached. This formula mixes easily with water to form an acid.
To that liquid, the EMPA team added a dash of nitrogen. When scientists place some extra stuff in a material, they call it doping. So this new material is called nitrogen-doped graphene acid.
Making it requires high precision at a small scale. As such, graphene can be difficult to work with. Unplanned defects can make it unusable, Reina notes. The added nitrogen, he explains, helps keep it stable.
When I saw this [material], I fell in love, Reina says. I wanted to try to see if it [would] work as a germ-killer coating.
An acid made from graphene is plated onto the dish held up here by Reina. The black circles mark where bacteria cannot grow. EMPA
Graphene vs. germs
When light strikes it, the doped material responds in two ways. First, it warms enough to kill certain microbes. But that light also triggers a chemical reaction between the doped graphene and oxygen in the air. This now creates a class of microbe-fighting molecules called radicals.
Turning the doped material into a liquid that could be used to coat surfaces took more than a year of trial and error. The scientists had to answer many questions about how the light was interacting with it, Reina says. What happened with oxygen? What happened without oxygen? What kind of reaction are we generating? Does it work many times?
To find out, the scientists compared the radicals produced by the doped material under different conditions. They also mixed the acid with a liquid plastic that could be easily spread on a surface.
The resulting material, Reina says, improves on past anti-germ coatings. For instance, unlike others, this one uses no metals (which may need ultraviolet radiation to activate their germ-killing action).
It can become antimicrobial under just ambient light, says Sara Imani. She calls that a plus point for the new material. Imani is a mechanical engineer in Canada at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She, too, works on new antimicrobial coatings (although not this one).
The Porphyromonas gingivalis bacteria (illustrated above) occur naturally in the mouth and other places in the body. They play a role in gum disease and other oral infections. The new graphene-based material can kill those germs on contact.KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Getty Images
Taking down tough microbes
Reinas group combined its material with bacteria in lab experiments and found that it could kill germs when bathed in infrared light. Those wavelengths are present in sunlight and some room lighting. They also tested the doped acid on a chemical that mimics living tissue, such as skin. It triggered no harmful reactions.
Those tests suggest that the new material is safe for the human body, including the mouth. Thats critical for how Reina and his colleagues intend to use it.
Their team is now working with dentists and researchers to develop a splint. Its a type of tray filled with a liquid film that can fit over the teeth. Within a few minutes, the tray could coat teeth with the new graphene-based material. Then, light shined into the mouth would kick on its antimicrobial activity.
The researchers have been testing the material against common infectious agents in gum tissue. One day, after having a dental procedure, someone might wear the splint and expose it to light. Its something the patient can do at home, too, Reina says, to kill harmful germs in their mouth.
He sees the new coating as a potent new tool in the ongoing fight against microbial superbugs. Many harmful germs dont just spread easily. Some also have developed resistance to drugs, such as antibiotics. These infections are now very hard to knock out. In fact, resistant infections kill more than 1.25 million people each year, according to the World Health Organization.
Materials like graphene, which deliver germs a one-two punch, could offer new ways to quash such resistant germs.
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Every big planet begins with a pebble.
Okay, not just one. It starts with lots of pebbles a flat sea of them stretching perhaps hundreds of times wider than the distance from Earth to the sun. Their sizes vary greatly. Some may be mere dust particles. Others may be small to fairly substantial rocks.
Explainer: What is a planet?
These pebbles tumble violently within the gassy disk encircling a young star. Lurking within that disk are the ingredients not only for planets, but also for asteroids, comets and living things. What they become depends not only on those ingredients, but also on their location and the temperature of the gas.
Like fussy chefs in a kitchen, astronomers today debate over how much of which ingredients must have been present in that early solar system. And when. And how they might have interacted and combined. And what would happen if you changed their temperature.
We all know how the planet-making process ends. It produces rocky worlds like Earth, Mars and Venus. It also leads to gas giants like Saturn and ice giants like Uranus. Outside the solar system, the planetary zoo includes stranger worlds. Scientists have spotted a world that they first thought was made of diamond but now believe has oceans flowing with lava. Theyve observed a hot gas giant where drops of iron probably fall like rain and a small hot planet enshrouded in steam.
An artists interpretation of a binary star system, with a surrounding ring (in brown) that might give rise to a rocky, Mars-sized planet. JPL-Caltech/NASA
But how disks of gas and rocks become planet factories is still under debate. The beginnings where dust grains barely micrometers (a few ten-thousandths of an inch) across stick together to form rocky solids isnt too controversial. And thanks to powerful telescopes, researchers have ideas for how planets move once theyre fully-formed.
But in-between is a doozy. For centuries, scientists have been testing and fighting over ideas about how to connect the beginning to the end. Most of the seemingly best ideas have run into problems.
Over the last 10 years or so, however, a process called pebble accretion (Ah-KREE-shun) has gained popularity. Accretion refers to somethings gradual growth. This occurs as new bits of material join something or glom onto it. In this case, its a swirling disk of gas and pebbles that clump together to form a family of planets.
According to the theory, tiny rocks in the disk slow and heat up as they fly through the gas near a larger rock. Its a phenomenon similar to how water in a pond slows a sinking rock. These flying pebbles eventually spiral down to land on the surface of larger rocks nearby. Pebble by pebble, a giant planet is born. And compared to the age of the universe, its a fast process, only taking a few million years.
Pebble accretion really did revolutionize the way that people thought about planet formation, says Katherine Kretke. Shes an astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
This theory would solve many of the riddles that challenged previous ideas. For example, says Seth Jacobson, It is really the only mechanism that comes close to explaining how Uranus and Neptune formed. Jacobson is an astrophysicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Explainer: Stars and their families
Planet accretion also has gotten a boost from recent studies of distant stars. Observations by the largest radio telescope network in the world, perched on a lonely desert mountain in Chile, match up with some of this theorys unusual predictions.
Anders Johansen, an astronomer at Lund Observatory, in Sweden, knows a lot about pebble accretion. He has been one of the leading researchers arguing in its favor. Puzzling out how it might work consumes his days.
He compares studying the origins of planets to working through a detective story. The solar system provides clues in the planets we know, he says. Exoplanets beyond the solar system provide more clues. Scientists have to connect those clues to piece together the whole story.
It is just so much fun to work on this, he says.
The planet-making process has produced an incredible variety of worlds, such as these seven exoplanets that orbit the star TRAPPIST-1. JPL-Caltech/NASA
In the beginning
Ancient Greek philosophers believed that planets formed from the chaos that filled the universe. In the 17th century, French scientist and philosopher Ren Descartes suggested that every star sat at the center of a swirling vortex. Planets, made of darker stuff, rested in concentric bands that circled the star.
In the 18th century, a Swedish mystic named Emanuel Swedenborg proposed a different idea. He described planet formation in a way thats closer to modern ideas. The whole thing begins, he said, when the crusty shell around a star explodes. It crumbles. The debris settles into a giant ring encircling that star at its center. Material in that ring eventually clumps into what will become planets. The idea that the planets formed from a swirling cloud of star stuff is called the nebular hypothesis.
That remains the backbone of ideas today. It also has led to the creation of a long list of new words. Dust doesnt refer to the stuff in your house that mix of dead skin cells, bits of cobwebs, dirt and more. Its the tiny particles too small to see with the eye. When scientists say pebble, they mean small rocks from about the size of a dime up to the size of a sled. They also talk about planetesimals (Plaa-neh-TES-ih muls). These are space rocks that might be as big as a city. Then there are protoplanets, a planet thats almost done forming.
As scientists have hashed out the details, theyve also run into challenges. One idea popular in the 20th century, for example, proposed that planets formed from the collisions between ever-bigger rocks.
This is an artists depiction of a pebble-ridden disk surrounding the star Fomalhaut, 22 light-years from Earth. Data suggest this disk has begun separating from its sun as it dust (pebbles) have fallen onto inner planets. Larger giant plants imagined near the edge of the disk. David A. Hardy/astroart.org
That explanation, too, starts with a disk of gas and dust, notes Alessandro Morbidelli. Then the dust sticks together to form planetesimals the size of asteroids and comets. Morbidelli is a planetary scientist at the Cote dAzur Observatory in Nice, France. Just forget about the dust, he says. Then, you produce protoplanets by colliding those planetesimals with each other.
This process may sound reasonable. However, Morbidelli also believes thats almost impossible. For one thing, planets that form far from the sun grow slowly. Worlds like Jupiter and Saturn would need tens of millions of years to get so big through smash-ups. But the dust and gas disk from which they were to form only stuck around a few million years. It seems difficult by this process to grow the cores of these planets within the lifetime of the disk, he argues.
Another problem: That model requires planetesimals to collide by crossing orbits. You have all these collisions, all this debris, says Jacobson. The current planets dont look anything like that. We have very nice orbits, almost circular. They dont look like they came from a violent, messy process.
Finally, collisions between big objects dont always produce bigger objects. Its easy to check this one: Just try smashing one stone into another.
If you take two fist-sized rocks, theres no velocity at which you can bring them together and they will stick, says Jacobson. So collisions alone, he argues, cant explain how planetesimals form.
As seen in this artists illustration of the solar system (not to scale), the planets in our solar system travel roughly circular paths around the sun. But scientists know that no orbit is perfectly circular, and some veer closer and farther from the sun during their journey. MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Paying attention to pebbles
In 2010, two astrophysicists at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, found a workaround. The answer, they suggested, was in the disks gas. As it moves through a fluid, a solid object slows and heats up. This is due to a force called drag. Because of drag, you need more effort to walk through water than to walk through air. The drag from gas in a disk would likely slow down the pebbles.
This idea became known as pebble accretion with a study published two years later by Johansen and Michiel Lambrechts, another astronomer at Lund Observatory. They used computer models to test their ideas. In parts of the disk having the right temperatures, those pebbles can slow enough, they found, to spiral down to the surface of a planetesimal. From there theyd stay put.
It is a really efficient process, says Kretke. If you have a ton of these pebbles around at the right size, she says, then boom! You can form a planet.
Two big objects spinning through space have only a small chance of colliding. But for one big object streaming through an ocean of pebbles and dust, a collision is likely. With pebble accretion, a planet can grow as big as Neptune or Uranus during the short lifespan of the gas disk. It doesnt need giant outer-space smashups of asteroids and comets to form. And once a planet like Jupiter has a big core, its gravity can attract the lighter elements to jacket it in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.
The project Disk Detective is recruiting citizen scientists to examine NASA data on their computers and phones. Theyll be hunting dusty debris disks that may mark the birthplaces of new planets.
Pebble accretion does a good job of explaining how big planets form, says Morbidelli. It also suggests that the gas and dust in a disk determine what type of planet forms near a star or if a planet forms at all.
Or maybe it doesnt have to be a smooth disk. With pebble accretion, planets may form from misshapen rings of dust and gas that swirl around a star. In 2018, scientists studied some gas and dust orbiting stars. They used the largest radio telescope network in the world, called ALMA. (The name stands for Atacama Large Millimeter Array.) This group of giant, silvery dishes peer into space from atop a desert mountain in Chiles Atacama Desert.
What they found was shocking. Some stars have rings of dust and gas not disks. Others have large disks, or small disks. And not all rings were smooth. Some had regions where the dust and gas got stuck and clumped. Other regions seemed sparse.
We saw such diversity at the disk level, says Morbidelli.
The challenge now, he says, is to use pebble accretion to connect those ring structures to planets that may emerge.
Problems in pebbleland
Most astronomers agree that pebble accretion is a good explanation for how big planets form. Nobody questions that, says Morbidelli. But the complete explanation of how planets form is likely much more complex. Getting pebble accretion to produce planets, even in models, requires other parameters to be just right, he cautions.
For instance, pebble accretion requires a bigger rock onto which the smaller pebbles land. So we still need collisions of planetesimals to create moon-sized objects before pebble accretion takes over, he suspects. Disks must also exist filled with plenty of matter to supply all those pebbles. ALMAs observations suggest such giant disks can exist. But scientists are still collecting evidence to prove that.
Johansen and others also caution that pebble accretion likely falls short of explaining the whole story. A study published this past February showed how planetesimal collisions could have produced Jupiter, no pebble accretion needed. Gennaro DAngelo at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues authored the work. Their new paper doesnt rule out pebble accretion; it just shows that it may not be the only explanation for planets. Scientists still need to explore other possibilities.
Pebble accretion may not explain the formation of all planets. One recent study, for instance, showed that the planet Jupiter could have formed from collisions of planetisimals no pebble accretion required.Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing: Tanya Oleksuik (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
And they are. In a paper published in 2018, scientists combined planets and planetesimals in a kind of hybrid scenario.
Pebble accretion helps explain conditions under which big planets can form, DAngelo says. But that process depends on getting the timing and temperature just right. Without that, the pebbles might drift too quickly through the disk, he says, and the growing planet might not have time to accrete them.
Plus, theres a Goldilocks issue with pebble accretion. The planet-growing time has to last long enough to allow a stream of pebbles to land onto the core. But observations of other systems show that disks dont last forever. They often last only a few million years. And that puts a deadline on planet formation. So a planet cant grow too fast or too slow or it wont form at all.
Can pebbles lead to Earths?
Another lingering question about pebble accretion is whether it can form small, rocky worlds such as Earth and Mars.
Johansen thinks it can. In a February paper in Science Advances, he and his colleagues describe a model that shows how a stream of pebbles might do this. Pebbles collect on planetesimals at about the same distance from the sun as Mars is today. After the planets form, they migrate or drift over time into their current positions.
Computer simulations allow researchers to visualize how planetesimals formed, giving rise to planets, billions of years ago. Later, these visualizations suggest the neighborhood temporarily got very violent as the giant outer planets changed their orbits, wreaking tumult everywhere.
Morbidelli has his doubts. Personally, I think that somehow the giant planets grew by pebble accretion. But the terrestrial [rocky] plants, he believes, were mostly immune. Jupiter is the solar systems oldest planet. And as it grew, it blocked the flow of pebbles toward the inner solar system. That would have left no more pebbles to build the rocky planets. The solar systems inner planets, including Earth, could instead have formed through big collisions, he suspects.
Finding a way for planets to form is only the first step, says Kretke. The next question is, do we actually have a situation where pebble accretion dominates the process? In our solar system, or some other planetary system?
Scientists need better evidence before anyone declares pebble accretion to be the main planet-forming process in the cosmos. But given the wild diversity of planets both close to home and far away, he suspects scientists will find a range of explanations.
The physics is not different from here to there, he says, But the planets and the processes will depend on the conditions where they form.
Understanding those processes, says Johanson, promises two major rewards. First, scientists could understand each step in how to make a world, from dust to planet. Second, such studies could help point out where to look for life beyond the solar system.
If we want to understand habitable exoplanets, he says, we have to understand our own habitable planet.
Heads up, weather geeks. U.S. weather has just hit a new normal. The government has changed its reference values for temperature and precipitation. And these show that the last three decades have been the warmest on record.
People in the American West and the Pacific Northwest may not be surprised. Many cities there hit repeated record temperatures in June. They occurred during two back-to-back heat waves.
In mid-June, cities from Omaha, Neb., to Sacramento, Calif., set records of at least 105 Fahrenheit (40.6 Celsius). Phoenix, Ariz., and Death Valley, Calif., hit monster extremes on June 17 of 118 F and 128 F (47.8 and 53.3 C, respectively).
Then, in late June, another heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest. Seattle set a record high temperature of 105 F (40.6 C). Portland, Ore., reached a record 116 F (46.7 C). Even in Lytton, a village in Canadas British Columbia, temperatures soared to 121 F (49.6 C). That set a new record for the entire country.
NPR.org cited the director of the Arizona Burn Center in Phoenix to put Junes extreme heat in context: “If you look at hot pavement or asphalt at two o’clock in the afternoon in direct sunlight, the temperature is usually somewhere around 170 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit.” (Thats 76.7 to 82.2 C.)
Hot spots
NOAAs new climate normal shows that average temperatures across mainland United States increased nearly everywhere compared to the preceding three decades.
U.S. mean temperature change: 19912020 compared with 19812010
CISESS, NOAA
The new normals
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, reports climate normals. These offer a standard way to compare todays weather against 30-year averages. But figuring out a new normal isnt simple. The agency compiles 30 years of observations from about 8,700 U.S. weather stations. Later, it ensures the quality of those data. Only data that past that test are used to calculate multiple measures of climate.
Over the past 30 years, the average temperature across the U.S. mainland was 11.8 C (53.3 F). The previous periods average was 11.6 C. But bump in temps varied across the United States. That likely was due in part to geography. Seasonal waverings also played a role. Some of the largest increases were in the South and Southwest. Those same regions showed a dramatic drop in rainfall.
The World Meteorological Organization requires the United States and its other member nations to update their climate normals once each decade. These allow people to view data on daily weather events against what has happened in recent history. Farmers use these data to track droughts or risk of freezes.
Keeping track of shifting averages also helps us understand the skyrocketing pace of climate change. NOAA compared the current and previous 30-year normals to the average highs in daily heat between 1901 and 2000. No part of the country is cooler now than that 20th century average. And temps in large swaths are higher by 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.6 to 1.1 degrees Celsius).
Rising temps
The average temperatures for consecutive 30-year periods in the U.S. mainland show the country getting hotter since 1901. Here, each 30-year period is compared with the average temperature for the entire 20th century.
U.S. 30-year temperature averages compared with 20th-century average
NOAA Climate.gov, Jared Rennie/NCEI/North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies
NOAA Climate.gov, Jared Rennie/NCEI/North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies
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Ch1- The Hogwarts Express Ethan Potter was an umm, unusual kid. Other than being a wizard, he was the grandson of one of the most famous wizards of all time, Harry Potter. Hes only met his grandfather 3 times. One time was when he was only 2 years old in Godric’s Hollow when his Grandfather […]
Tectonic plate (noun, Tek-TAHN-ick PLAYT)
Earths outermost layer, or lithosphere, is broken up into a giant jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates. These huge slabs of rock hold both Earths continents and its seafloor. Theyre around 100 kilometers (miles) thick on average and include both Earths crust and upper mantle. Earth is covered in about a dozen main tectonic plates. And its the only planet known to have tectonic plates.
Explainer: Understanding plate tectonics
Earths tectonic plates continually slide around atop the hot, swirling rock beneath them. They move only a few centimeters per year. But over millions of years, those tiny movements add up. When tectonic plates bump into each other, they push up mountains. When plates slide beneath each other, they can form volcanoes. Plates can also slide past each other. Each of these movements can trigger earthquakes.
Even more dramatically, the shuffling of tectonic plates can give Earths surface a complete makeover. More than 200 million years ago, Earth had only one huge landmass: Pangaea. Over time, the shifting of tectonic plates broke that landmass apart and gave rise to the continents we see today.
In a sentence
A single catastrophic collision may have given Earth both its moon and its tectonic plates.
Check out the full list of Scientists Say.
Last time, I shared a post about famous logos with hidden meanings. If you havent read it, you can check it out here. Now, lets talk about brand names. Its all around us, too. Think about it: when you ride in your parents’ car, you probably see signs for fast food places like KFC or […]
Skywatchers are in for a treat. On March 3, 2026, a spectacular total lunar eclipse will turn the Moon a deep reddish color, creating what is known as a "Blood Moon." The eclipse will be visible wherever the Moon is above the horizon during the event. This includes much of the Americas, Australia and East Asia. This will be the last total lunar eclipse until late 2028.
Toddlers are the daredevils of the chimp world.
Those 2 to 5 years old are more likely than older chimps to free-fall from treetops or leap wildly from branch to branch. Past age 5, such dangerous behaviors decrease by about 3 percent each year.
Researchers shared these new observations in January in iScience.
Among humans, teens are the real daredevils. Compared to younger children, for instance, theyre more likely to break bones or die from injuries. Kids might want to behave as recklessly as chimp toddlers but rarely get the chance. Parents and caregivers are likely to put a stop to such fun and the risk of broken bones among human toddlers.
If humans scaled back their oversight, our kids would be way more daredevilish, says biologist Lauren Sarringhaus. An author of the new study, she works at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.
No monkeying around
Human and chimp caregivers show different patterns. Chimp moms largely parent alone. Dads dont help. Nor, typically, do grandmothers, older siblings or other group members. Youngsters cling to their moms for the first five years of life. But by age 2 or so, young chimps begin to explore some on their own. Moms cant readily help kids swinging high up in the air.
Lets learn about chimpanzees and bonobos
Human children, by comparison, have caregivers beyond their parents. Called alloparents, these include teachers and coaches at supervised after-school activities. As such, todays kids spend less time unsupervised and playing outside than those in generations past. Some human-development experts criticize the rise of this type of intensive, or helicopter, parenting.
The new data point to really exciting research on how caregiving influences risk-taking behavior. Theres not a lot of research out there addressing this point, says Lou Haux. Shes a psychologist who studies primate behavior. Haux, who did not take part in the new study, works at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Thats in Berlin, Germany.
Risky moves
Sarringhaus and her team studied more than 100 chimps. Part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Ugandas Kibale National Park, they ranged in age from 2 to 65. The researchers observed the apes swinging through the tree canopy. Along the way, they measured how often each member lost contact with tree branches. That included falling to a lower branch or leaping across a gap to another branch.
Chimps 2 to 5 years old were three times more likely than adults (15 and older) to take risks. Teens aged 10 to 14 were no chumps either. These chimps still engaged in such behaviors twice as often as adults.
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Risky maneuvers in tall trees come with a tradeoff, though. Roughly a third of chimpanzees show signs of past bone breaks, other research shows. But toddlerhood may be an ideal time for dangerous exploration.
Smaller chimps and humans have flexible bones and are relatively lighter weight than bigger ones. Thats why they are less likely than adults to suffer grave injuries from falls.
But, Sarringhaus says, my goal is not for this to lead to parenting advice.
Instead, Haux adds, this sort of research helps put human parenting in broader perspective, such as: How did all this evolve?
Okay, Okay. I see some of you would like a part 2. And that’s what you’re reading! But today, I want to change the script a little. I want to take a look of the most popular LEGO SETS. So let’s get started! Type: T. rex Fossils Franchise: LEGO Released: 3/25 Customers: 76968 Total Comment: Yeah, […]
What’s your favorite book of all time? Or a book you like to read?
For decades, scientists have been trying to find signs of life outside our planet and even our galaxy. Theyve sent powerful telescopes to study distant planets, carried out space missions, and sent spacecraft deep into space to figure out places that might have suitable conditions for life. Now, heres some exciting news. Cambridge University scientists […]
Hello everyone! Welcome to Candies Cool Group! We will talk about candy for the holidays, to a tier list, and to your favorite candies! Hope everyone likes candy, ’cause FunNews is ready to write! (And eat!)
One ancient type of wasp appears to have had an especially freaky way to trap prey 99 million years ago. It used a mouth-like structure on its backside, fossils now suggest.
When you look at the head, the thorax and the wings, [this wasp] looks quite normal, says Lars Vilhelmsen. But its abdomen is very different, the insect biologist points out.
Most stinging wasps, such as yellow jackets, have rounded abdomens that end in a point. The ancient wasps totally unique abdomen instead has flaps that lay on top of each other. He likens it to a plant the Venus flytrap.
Vilhelmsens team shared its findings March 27 in BMC Biology.
It’s significant and amazing, he says, that we can find something that looks like nothing that we see today. Vilhelmsen works at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Its part of the University of Copenhagen.
Amber-jacketed surprise
Along with researchers at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, Vilhelmsen examined 16 wasp fossils. All had been unearthed from a valley in northern Myanmar (a Southeast Asian country also known as Burma).
At first, Vilhelmsen couldnt believe it. He thought an air bubble trapped in the amber might have caused the wasps abdomens to look so weird. But the amber in which they were encased had helped preserve their anatomy. And CT scans would confirm the abdomen truly was bizarre.
The ancient wasp is suspended in amber. This gives the fossil a yellowish tint and prevents it from decaying.Qiong Wu
Entomologist Anderson Lepeco, too, was shocked when he first saw pictures of these wasps. I’ve never seen something like that, he says. Lepeco, who was did not take part in the study, works at the University of So Paulo in Brazil.
For a second, Lepeco thought the first wasp that he saw was deformed. But when all had the same anatomy, he became convinced that this species was a really, really cool bug.
Named for a monster
The scientists named the wasp S. charybdis (Kur-IB-duss) after a sea monster in Greek mythology. Why? The wasps abdomen reminded them of the mouth full of teeth depicted in some drawings of Charybdis.
The wasps abdomen is split into three flaps an upper, middle and lower one. In a few fossils, the lower flap gaped far from the other two. In other specimens, the lower flap pressed tightly against the middle and upper ones. Because of this difference in position, the team thinks the flaps could grasp things.
The lower flap also had several thin hairs poking out of it. These hairs would likely trigger the flaps to shut when a critter brushed against them, the team suspects. Thats much like how the hairs on Venus-flytrap leaves trigger these leaves to snap shut, locking in a meal.
When an insect, such as this shield bug, touches the trigger hairs of a Venus flytrap, the plant snaps its leaves shut.Videologia/Creatas Video/Getty Images
Predators usually trap prey. When a praying mantis catches its dinner, for instance, the prey is so close to its mouth it can dine quickly. But this wasps weird abdomen is far from its mouth. It is much closer to the insects egg-laying organ.
For that reason, the scientists suspect these wasps might have wielded their back-end traps to restrain other creatures so that they could lay eggs on or inside of them.
I think it’s the most likely explanation, agrees Lepeco. Parasitoids are insects that lay their eggs on or in other animals, he notes and all the insects in [this wasps] group are parasitoids. When a parasitoids babies hatch, theyll feed on the animals that are carrying them.
Lepeco studies a group of insects that use stingers to inject a paralyzing venom into their prey. Afterward, they lay their eggs on this victim. Lepeco suggests the newly discovered ancient wasps might have laid their eggs on other creatures to feed their hatchlings.
Scott Shaw is an entomologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He agrees with Lepeco that the most likely reason for the weird abdomen was to restrain insects. He, too, believes the wasps likely laid their eggs on their hosts, rather than inside of them. But, he adds, clearly no one has observed the behavior in the now long-extinct wasp. So scientists cant be certain of this.
Still, the mere existence of this feature is remarkable, says Lepeco. Like dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers, insects of the past were very special, he says. We forget that at the same time those species were alive, there were also insects and the insects were also cool.
Hey guys! This is a Katseye group where you can talk about any Katseye-related topic you want. So, have fun! Pstt, let me know what your favorite Katseye song is!
Yosemite National Park in California is famous for its giant sequoia trees and towering rock formations, such as El Capitan and Half Dome. But in mid-to-late February, the spotlight turns to El Capitan's Horsetail Fall. During this brief period, the seasonal waterfall can glow a bright orange. It looks like lava is pouring down the rock surface. This striking sight is called the "firefall."
Imagine that youre helping judge a writing contest at your school. You want to make sure everyone did their own work. If someone used an artificial intelligence, or AI, model such as ChatGPT to write an entry, that shouldnt count. But how can you tell whether something was written by AI? New research reveals a simple way to test whether a person wrote something or not. Just ask a bot to rewrite it.
If you ask AI to rewrite content written by AI, it will have very few edits, says Chengzhi Mao. When AI rewrites a persons text, it typically makes many more changes.
Mao, Junfeng Yang and their colleagues designed a tool called Raidar. Its a detector that uses AI rewriting to detect bot-generated text. Mao is a researcher at the Software Systems Lab at Columbia University in New York. Yang leads this lab.
Separating bot-talk from person-talk is very important, says Yang. Lots of AI writing has already flooded social media and product reviews. It has fueled fake news websites and spam books. Some students use AI to cheat on homework and tests. Tools like Raidar could help expose AI-powered cheaters and liars.
Raidars creators shared the tool at the International Conference on Learning Representations. That meeting was on May 7 in Vienna, Austria.
Weeding out AI
Mao regularly uses ChatGPT to help polish his own writing. For example, he sometimes asks the bot to rewrite and improve an email. He noticed that this bot can do a pretty good job the first time it rewrites something that he wrote. But if he asks it to improve an email again revising its own bot writing then it wont change much.
Thats how we got motivated, Mao says. He realized the number of edits a bot makes to a piece of writing might say something about how the original text got written.
Its a pretty neat idea, says Amrita Bhattacharjee. Nobody had thought of it before. Bhattacharjee is a PhD student at Arizona State University in Tempe. She has researched AI-generated text detection, but wasnt involved in developing Raidar.
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Raidar is a tool that determines whether text was likely AI-generated or not. To test Raidar, the team gathered writing samples from people and several different chatbots. They did this for a few kinds of text, including news, Yelp reviews, student essays and computer code. Then, the team had several AI models rewrite all the human-written and bot-written samples.
Next, the researchers used a simple computer program to calculate the number of changes between the original and edited version of each writing sample. This step doesnt require any AI. Based on the number of changes in a revision, Raidar could sort writing samples into human-generated and AI-generated. This worked well even if the AI that did the rewriting was different from the AI that wrote the original sample.
Raidars sorting is not perfect. The tool sometimes identifies a human text as AI, or vice versa. But it performs better than other tools designed to detect AI-written text, the researchers found.
Most other tools use AI models and statistics to learn to recognize the kind of text that bots produce. These tools typically work best on longer passages of text. They may not work at all on short blurbs, like the ones found on social media or homework assignments. But Raidar works well even on text thats just 10 words long.
A human and the AI model behind ChatGPT (GPT-3.5-Turbo) both wrote Yelp reviews, shown on the left. Researchers then fed those reviews back into GPT-3.5-Turbo. They told the AI model to rewrite them to be more concise. The revised reviews are shown on the right. Red text indicates what was deleted during revision. Yellow text marks what was added. The AI made a lot of edits to the Yelp review that the person wrote. But it changed almost nothing in the AI-generated review. Click image to enlarge.Columbia University
A red flag
Yang and Maos team is working to make Raider an online tool that anyone can use. When its done, people could send text through the tool and find out if it was likely AI-generated or not.
Until then, the idea behind Raidar is easy for anyone to use, says Yang. You don’t have to be a computer scientist or data scientist. For example, a suspicious teacher could ask any chatbot to rewrite a students work. If the bot makes very few edits, that could be a red flag that the student may have used AI.
Bhattacharjee notes that teachers shouldnt take action based on Raidars output alone. The final judgment should not be based entirely on this tool, she says. Thats because Raidar isnt always correct. Also, some students may have good reasons to use AI. For example, AI can help clean up grammar.
Meanwhile, Yang is thinking about how something like Raidar might flag other types of AI-generated media. Hes now studying what happens if you ask an AI model to revise an image, video or audio clip. If the model makes a lot of edits, that could indicate original human work.
Thought experiment (noun, THAWT Ex-PAIR-eh-mint)
A thought experiment is a hypothetical scenario addressing a big question.
The scenario can sometimes seem absurd. But considering such scenarios can highlight the consequences of a particular idea or theory.
One famous thought experiment is known as Schrdinger’s cat. Physicist Erwin Schrdinger devised it in 1935. He did this to illustrate a point about quantum theory.
Lets learn about the quantum realm
Quantum theory attempts to describe physics at the tiniest scale. One aspect of quantum theory is a concept known as superposition. Superposition says that particles can exist in different states at the same time. Quantum theory also says that when these particles interact, they adopt just one state.
But many scientists took this a step further. They said that just observing such a particle caused it to pick a state. Schrdinger found that idea ridiculous. So, he came up with a thought experiment.
His scenario describes a box with a cat inside. This box connects to a single atom. This atom represents the superposition idea. The atom has a chance of decaying. That means the atom has two potential states: decayed and undecayed.
The cat’s fate is bound to the atom in this thought experiment. If the atom randomly changes state from undecayed to decayed, then poison “kills” the imaginary cat Schrdingers cat, as it came to be known.
And here’s the important part. In this scenario, the cat, box and atom are all unobserved. With no observer, that atom would hypothetically be in a state of superposition. It would be both decayed and undecayed at the same time. But the cats life is linked to this atoms state. So, if the atom exists in two states, so does the cat. The cat is both alive and dead. And its state dead or alive would only be determined if someone observed the cat or the atom.
That, Schrdinger pointed out, is absurd. But it doesnt mean quantum theory is flawed. In fact, this thought experiment has become a helpful device for understanding the absurd nature of subatomic particles.
Thought experiments are not limited to science. Other fields, such as philosophy, history and economics use them, too. Thought experiments help us reconsider information we already know. But they can also help propose new ways of thinking through and discussing complex questions.
In a sentence
Thought experiments help to illustrate the quantum mechanics principle of superposition.
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An iconic scene in the classic 1993 film Jurassic Park begins with water glasses shaking on a dashboard. The vibrations sending ripples through the water turn out to be the stomping steps of a huge Tyrannosaurus rex. After escaping its enclosure, the dinosaur lumbers out onto a road. There, it uses its jaws lined with knife-sized teeth to tear apart a car, trying to eat the terrified park visitors huddled inside.
This scene gets some things about T. rex right. But other aspects dont quite match what paleontologists know about this famous dinosaur.
Lets get the word Jurassic out of the way first. Despite the name of the park in the film, T. rex did not live in the Jurassic Period. (That was about 201 million to 145 million years ago.) T. rex lived about 68 million to 66 million years ago. That puts it firmly in the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago).
See all the entries from our Lets Learn About series
In its time, T. rex truly was a fearsome predator, stalking prey across what is now western North America. Fossils have shown that T. rex could grow up to 12 meters (40 feet) long and 3.6 meters (12 feet) high. (Some scientists suspect T. rex could have gotten even bigger.) It may have weighed as much as a large elephant.
Whats more, a T. rexs jaws really were jaw-dropping in size. They could be about 1.2 meters (4 feet) long and filled with roughly 15-centimeter-long (6-inch-long) teeth. Its bite packed a force of more than 6 metric tons, which was enough to crush bones and maybe even a car.
But Jurassic Parks depiction of the T. rex maw may not have been quite right. The movie monsters teeth were on full display, even when its mouth was closed. This is similar to the setup in modern crocodiles mouths. But recent evidence suggests that T. rex teeth like those of modern Komodo dragons were hidden behind lips.
Science also casts doubt on how fast T. rex ran in the movie. In another famous Jurassic Park scene, a sprinting T. rex keeps up with a speeding car. But calculations based on fossilized footprints show that T. rex could only run about 20 to 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles) per hour. Recent experiments with birds the only dinos alive today suggest that those estimates may be off.
There are still many other open questions about possibly the most famous dinosaur of all. Yet scientists including curious teens continue to uncover new insights into the terrifying T. rex.
Want to know more? Weve got some stories to get you started:
Analyze This: How big was the biggest T. rex? Only around 80 fossil Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons have been found. They probably dont include the biggest T. rex that ever lived. (11/20/2024) Readability: 6.2
Just how brainy was a T. rex? A debate rages over how to count brain cells in dinosaurs. At issue: figuring out how these extinct animals likely behaved. (7/25/2024) Readability: 7.9
The secret to T. rexs incredible biting force is at last revealed The force of a T. rex bite was roughly 6 metric tons. A new study points to whats behind that mighty force. (6/1/2021) Readability: 7.3
Tyrannosaurus rex is far from the only dinosaur to star in the Jurassic Park movies. How do the films portrayals of T. rex and other dinos stack up to science? A paleontologist explains.
Explore more
Scientists Say: Dinosaur
Scientists Say: Jurassic
What is a dinosaur?
Explainer: The age of dinosaurs
Dinosaurs are still alive. Today, we call them birds
T. rex may have hidden its teeth behind lips
T. rex pulverized bones with an incredible amount of force
Newfound fossil is not a teen T. rex but a whole new species
This big dino had tiny arms before T. rex made them cool
New clues about dino speed come from birds strutting through mud
Cool Jobs: Bringing paleontology to the people
Activities
Word find
Test your knowledge and flex your creativity with T. rex- and other dino-related activities from the American Museum of Natural History. Build your own T. rex or T. rex roar, solve a fossil puzzle or print off an age of the dinosaurs card game.
Did you know that albino animals are some of the rarest creatures you can find in nature? Albinism is a genetic condition where animals lack color in their skin, fur, or feathers, making them appear completely white. Albinism is uncommon in the wild because it often makes it harder for animals to survive. Due to […]
WOW FACT ALERT! Get ready this one is WILD Octopuses have THREE hearts! Their blood is actually BLUE They are super smart and can solve puzzles They can change color to hide or show feelings Thats basically a real-life superhero QUESTION TIME!Would you rather Change colors like an octopus […]
Bees are crucial for our ecosystem because they pollinate many plants, fruits, and vegetables we rely on for food. Sadly, their population continuously decreases each year due to challenges like pesticide use and habitat loss. Without bees, we could face serious environmental and food problems. But heres some good news! Researchers at MIT have created […]
Juneteenth isobservedannually on June 19. The federal holidaycommemoratesthe end of slavery in the United States (US). On this day in1865, the last enslaved people in America learned they were free.
Orcas,also known as killer whales, are the largest members of the dolphin family. The mammalshunt in pods of up to 40 individuals. Theyareknown for theircoordinatedattacks onmarine animals. But the whalesrarely pose a threat to humans.
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to sit down with someone you really admire and ask them a question? It could be a historical figure, a celebrity, or someone famous. This is your chance to learn from someone you look up to, see the world through their eyes, and learn about […]
A never-ending, X-ray explosion coming from a dead star has posed a mystery until now. This steady radiation appears to come from scorching-hot wreckage left behind by the annihilation of a giant planet.
The discovery stems from four decades of X-ray observations of the Helix Nebula. It lies some 650 light-years from Earth. The stream of X-rays has remained constant for at least 20 years. Now, scientists suggest a convincing explanation for why. The ruins of a Jupiter-sized world are streaming toward the nebulas white dwarf, the remains of a dying star. The collision makes the frazzled star glow in X-rays.
Researchers shared their findings in the January Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
We dont know very much about how planetary systems behave after their star transitions from a red giant to a super long-lived white dwarf, says Paul Byrne. Hes a planetary scientist who did not take part in the research. He works at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. The new work offers a potential glimpse of the far, far-off future of the solar system, he says.
The Helix mystery
The Helix Nebula is like a colorful explosion frozen in time. Its halo of gas was cast off by a star that was losing its nuclear fuel. At its center lies a white dwarf the leftover heart of that once-mighty star.
The white dwarf is not quiet, either. It appears to be “screaming” in X-rays. This emission was picked up by two space-based observatories. NASAs Einstein Observatory spotted it in the early 1980s. Then in the 1990s, the internationally operated ROSAT saw it.
It is very unusual to find single white dwarfs with an X-ray emission, says Sandino Estrada-Dorado. Hes an astrophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
To try and crack the case, Estrada-Dorado and his team studied more recent observations of the nebula. Some were taken by NASAs Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 1999. Others came from the European Space Agencys XMM-Newton mission in 2002.
X-ray marks the fuel source
The team found that the X-ray emissions arent a fluke but rather a constant. To burst so brilliantly for so long requires a hefty fuel source. One possibility is that matter from a big, blasted planet has been raining down onto the white dwarf. This debris is heated so fiercely that it shines brightly in X-rays.
Calculations show the X-ray emissions are very intense. That means a Jupiter-sized world is the most likely culprit.
Explainer: Stars and their families
Long ago, such a planet might have drifted too close to the white dwarf. The flyby would have shredded the planet. The disk of debris left behind could then power the X-ray blaze.
X-rays could offer researchers a new way to explore the final chapters of planets. It could even help scientists study the core of those destroyed worlds.
We have precious little data about the deep interiors of giant planets, Byrne says. Its possible that through observations here and from other white dwarfs we can better distinguish the signals of the star from the infalling planet, he says. Then we might be able to tease out information about the planets composition, too.
Rising sea levels, fueled by global warming, are escalating at an alarming rate, putting coastal communities worldwide at risk.By 2050, experts predict that nearly 300 million people living in coastal areas will face annual flooding. Japan'sN-Ark hopes to combat the impactof climate change with an innovative floating city.
What if you woke up and discovered that you have a superpower? How awesome would that be, right? Would you rather read minds or talk to animals? Which one would you choose, and why? Share your thoughts, and let us know why you’d pick one over the other!
A mystery object has just been spotted in our galaxy. The puzzling entity could be a very heavy neutron star the left-behind corpse of a giant star. Or maybe its one of the lightest black holes ever observed.
The MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa spotted the unidentified object circling a pulsar. The observatory was monitoring pulsars in a star cluster 40,000 light years from Earth.
As these pulsars spin, they shoot out powerful beams of light, like cosmic lighthouses. Some pulsars beams flash by Earth as regularly as the ticking of a precise clock. If the flashes dont arrive quite when expected, researchers can tell that another object in space is messing with the pulsars motion. They can use the timing of the light flashes to work out the other objects mass.
The flashes of a pulsar called PSR J05144002E revealed an invisible companion. The object weighs 2.1 to 2.7 times the mass of the sun. That might make it too heavy to be a neutron star. But it would be lightweight for a black hole. Scientists suspect that once a neutron star gets to be about two to three times the mass of the sun, it collapses and forms a black hole. But no one knows at what mass this occurs. So astronomers cant be entirely sure of the space objects identity.
Researchers shared these findings in the January 19 Science. The team hopes to unveil the objects identity as it continues to track the pulsars flashes. This may shed light on other similar space oddities, too.
Misfit mass
M. Fishbach/Science 2024
Scientists have studied many neutron stars and black holes. These observations have included electromagnetic events (orange points). Such studies capture light to learn about space objects. Other observations are based on ripples in spacetime, or gravitational waves (blue and dark gray). Neutron stars have lower masses (left of gray bar). Black holes have higher masses (right of gray bar). The newfound mystery object (large yellow dot in the grey region) falls between typical neutron star masses and black hole masses.
Data Dive:
Look at the X-axis. What does it mean to describe an objects mass by solar masses?
What type of observation is most common for neutron stars? What kind is most common for black holes?
The data points on the left are neutron stars. Look at how their masses are clustered. Roughly what is their average mass?
The data points on the right are black holes. Look at how their masses are clustered. Roughly what is their average mass?
How does the mass of the new mystery object compare with that of neutron stars? How does it compare with the masses of black holes?
Four of your senses are located just on your head. Taste is in your mouth. Smell is in your nose. Sight in your eyes and hearing in your ears. But touch? Touch is all over your body. Your fingertips and face can sense touch, and so can the bottoms of your feet and the backs of your knees. Its completely essential. Without it we wouldnt know if we stubbed our toes or burned our skin.
See all the entries from our Lets Learn About series
Your skin (and your organs, bones and muscle) is full of receptor cells for different aspects of touch. These cells might respond to pressure or heat. They could respond to something that causes pain. Some of these receptor cells can also respond to cold and different chemicals. Each of the receptor cells connects to a sensory neuron. These are cells that send information back to the spinal cord and brain. There, your brain processes the touch your receptors felt, and determines whether you just tried to pet a cat or a cactus. Some areas of your body are more sensitive to touch than others, which is why you pet a cat with your hand and not with your back.
Its pretty easy to fool our eyes, ears or noses with sights, sounds and scents. But touch? Thats tougher. Scientists are working on haptic devices technologies that can mimic our sense of touch. Some use stretchy fabrics to make our skin feel something thats not there. Others are using sound waves that we cant hear to make illusions real to the touch.
Virtual reality is mostly sight and sound right now. But with the power of haptics, it could be touch, too.
Want to know more? Weve got some stories to get you started:
Touching allows octopuses to pre-taste their food: Special sensory cells in suckers in the animals arms sense chemicals. Those cells allow them to taste the difference between food and poison. (1/4/2021) Readability: 7.1
This artificial skin feels ghosts things you wish were there: Engineers have developed a wearable device that simulates the sense of touch. It may benefit robotic surgery and deep-sea exploration. (11/20/2020) Readability: 6.4
Testing the power of touch: We pet dogs with our fingers, not our arms or backs. Our fingers are more sensitive to touch. But how do we know? Here’s how you can test that. (2/5/2020) Readability: 6.3
Explore more
Scientists Say: Neuron
Explainer: What is skin?
Explainer: What is a neuron?
Shaking hands could transfer your DNA leaving it on things you never touched
Feeling objects that arent there
A do-it-yourself map of touch
Activities
Word Find
Some areas of our bodies are more sensitive to touch than others. In fact, you can measure your skin sensitivity and draw a map of it with a free program. The resulting misshapen body is called cortical homunculus. Its a representation of how our brain perceives touch all over our bodies.
Some 230 million people in the United States face the risk of damaging earthquakes in the next 100 years. Thats according to the latest U.S. National Seismic Hazard Model, or NSHM. The NSHM estimates the risk of earthquakes based on historical data and seismic studies. The number of people expected to be at risk by the new NSHM is about 40 million more than NSHM had suggested in models from 2018 and earlier.
Lets learn about earthquakes
This hazard model forecasts where we think the future earthquakes will occur, says Mark Petersen. A geophysicist, he studies earthquakes at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. The new work also reveals where theres a chance of damage from a quake.
The NSHM draws from data on some 130,000 quakes. That includes recent ones and some that happened long ago. It also considers data from nearly 500 active faults. A fault is a split in Earths crust where rocks rub past each other. The NSHM also uses new methods that estimate ground shaking at specific places during a quake.
All this new data revealed that, on average, earthquake hazards have increased across the United States. Petersen and his colleagues shared their findings in February in Earthquake Spectra. Their new map will help people prepare for possible temblors.
Explainer: Seismic waves come in different flavors
A quakes energy ripples out in ground-shaking vibrations called seismic waves. The updated model is better at estimating the shaking of sedimentary basins, Petersen says. Those places have deep soil that can amplify seismic waves. That can really boost certain waves from a quake, causing more damage to tall buildings and long bridges. Accounting for amplified waves increased the hazard forecast for cities such as Seattle, Wash., Los Angeles, Calif., and Portland, Ore.
But quake hazards arent limited to the U.S. west coast. Or even to the places where tectonic plates meet. In the middle of the country, in southeastern Missouri, quakes sometimes rumble along ancient rifts in Earths crust. And in 1886, a then-unknown fault near Charleston, S.C., caused a devastating temblor. It led to 60 deaths and damaged thousands of structures. The new map draws attention to the earthquake risks those more eastern states may face in the future as well.
This map shows the probability of a damaging earthquake occurring anywhere in the United States in the next 100 years. Its based on the updated National Seismic Hazard Model.
U.S. Geological Survey National Seismic Hazard Program
An earthquake counts as damaging if it is a level VI or higher on the Modified Mercalli Intensity, or MMI, scale. MMI ratings describe earthquakes severity based on the effects observed during a quake. An earthquake rated as VI is felt by all in the area and can be frightening. It moves some heavy furniture and may knock a bit of plaster off of walls. Overall, it results in slight damage. Click image to enlarge.
Data Dive:
Look at the figures legend. What does it mean when an area is dark red? What does it mean when an area is blue?
What places in the United States have the highest risk of a damaging earthquake in the next 100 years?
Which of these high-risk places have high population densities? Which have low population densities?
Which areas of the United States have the lowest chance of a damaging earthquake in the next 100 years?
What other information would be useful to those in places at high risk of damaging earthquakes?
Thalia Levee sat in a crimson armchair looking down at her round-faced grandchildren. She pressed her lips together, considering the request that had just left her grandsons mouth. Please Grandmother! The small boy begged from his spot on the hardwood floor. Thalia sighed. Just one last story. Then we will go to bed, I promise! The boy exclaimed. His younger sister nodded eagerly from beside him. Fine. One last story. Thats it. Thalia gave in. She knew in the shining eyes of her grandchildren she was just an old woman, a grumpy one at that. But when Thalia looked at herself in the...
You saw the title, and Im sad to say its true. I am taking a month or two break from kn, like I said on the wall. This whole argument is getting out of hand and is upsetting me greatly. I have cried myself to sleep more times than a few because of this. I […]
School may be out for the summer, but the astronomical start of the warm season in the Northern Hemisphere will not be until June 20, 2025. Known as the summer or June solstice, this is when the North Pole is tilted closest to the Sun. As a result, those in the Northern Hemisphere will enjoy the longest day of 2025. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere will welcome the start of winter with the shortest day of the year.
Hi ho, friends! In my last post, I said you guys are called Munchkins, but I decided you can choose! I do not know how to make a poll (someone please teach me in the comments), so you will choose either Munchkins or Puggy Army in the comments, and whichever has the most votes by […]
Columbus, Ohio Bananas grow best in full sun. To protect their sensitive skins from damaging ultraviolet rays, banana peels produce a natural sunscreen. A teen has now peeled back the secrets of this natural sunblock. What shes found could lead to more eco-friendly sunscreens for all of us.
Taylor Maguire investigated how banana peels might lead to more eco-friendly sunscreens.T. Maguire
“My mom always raised me to pay attention to the ingredients in my cosmetics,” says Taylor Maguire, 15. She prefers “organic products over synthetic ones.” That led this sophomore at Garden City High School in New York to ask: “What’s in my sunscreen?
These products protect our skin against blistering solar rays. But their use comes at a price. Some of sunscreen’s chemicals may cause cancer, Taylor notes. And when these chemicals wash into our environment, they can hurt animals. For example, some mineral sunscreens interfere with the ability of freshwater animals to navigate. High enough exposures, she says, can kill some organisms.
So, Taylor looked for alternatives to mineral-based sunscreens.
Bananas can naturally filter out much of the sun’s more damaging rays. Could their natural sunblock replace mineral sunscreens? Taylor investigated. And what she found out won her a spot here in May at the 2025 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF.
Extracting the goods
Bananas tend to grow in a “UV-intense environment,” Taylor says. UV short for ultraviolet is a band of light wavelengths. This high-energy light is invisible to the human eye. But it causes most of the sun’s damage to our skin. For a sunscreen to work, it must protect against certain UV rays.
Taylor had reasoned that bananas “must have their own mechanism.” After all, they grow near the equator. That’s where UV exposures are strongest.
Plants typically make flavonoids pigments that come in a rainbow of colors as a defense against the suns UV. Taylor wondered if banana flavonoids might work to protect our skin from UV, too.
She wasn’t sure exactly which bananas flavonoids to use. Taylor heated, froze and blended the outer layer of a banana peel. “That’s the part that’s exposed to the sunlight,” she explains. Any UV-filtering chemicals likely lie there.
Breaking open the cells released many of their chemicals. From this soup she made two extracts. One of these contained only components that would dissolve in water. That was her aqueous extract. The other contained only chemicals that wouldnt dissolve in water. That was her nonpolar extract. Nonpolar chemicals dissolve in oil rather than water.
Putting banana extracts to the test
A sunscreen must absorb UV light before it reaches your skin. And the more it absorbs, the better. To test how well each extract could do that, Taylor turned to a light-measuring tool. Called a spectrophotometer, it measures how much of any color of light a liquid absorbs.
The tool confirmed that both of her banana extracts absorbed UV light. But the nonpolar one went a step further. It absorbed the full range of UV wavelengths and especially the most damaging ones. They belong to a part of the UV spectrum called UV-A.
Would banana-based sunscreens also be safe for the environment? After all, Taylor says, typical drug-store sunscreens can harm aquatic life. To find out, she recruited planarians (Girardia tigrina) as her guinea pigs. Planarians are a type of flatworm that live in water. They’re often used in drug-safety studies, Taylor explains. A chemical that harms these worms might also pose a risk to other aquatic animals.
Taylor created two banana-extract solutions one nonpolar and one aqueous. She also created mineral-sunscreen solutions for comparison. Spectrophotometry allowed her to test wavelengths of light absorbed by each sample. She also used a microscope to observe planarians’ locomotion or movement when exposed to UV light.T. Maguire
The plan was to put planarians into dishes with different extracts and expose them to strong UV light for 10 minutes. If the worms movement slowed or stopped, she took that to mean the light damaged them. Her five test solutions included her two extracts, a drugstore sunscreen solution, plain water and glycerol.
Why glycerol? The nonpolar extract and sunscreen solution both contained this thick liquid. Taylor tested glycerol by itself to check if it caused problems on its own.
And it did. The nonpolar banana, the glycerol and the mineral sunscreen [appeared] fatal to the worms, she found. They stopped moving.
That was surprising, Taylor says. Glycerol is actually an ingredient found in a lot of sunscreens, she says. Its not known to hurt people. But shes pretty sure it killed her planarians.
Taylor used these peels to create her banana extracts.T. Maguire
In a later test, Taylor would notice that glycerol damaged planarians’ skin even with no UV exposure. Glycerol is used in many products. Taylors work now suggests it might pose risks to aquatic life.
But planarians survived just fine in the aqueous extract. And these outperformed the water-only group the only other ones left alive, the teen says.
Taylor confirmed this later when she stained those same planarians. She used a special dye. It stains damaged tissue so that it glows under her microscopes UV light. Basically, the more glow, the more damage there is.
The three glycerol-exposed groups exhibited the most damage. The aqueous extract group showed the least. Where damage did show up, Taylor says, it looked spotty. That probably means a worm “was not fully coated.”
The next step is figuring out exactly what chemical provided the aqueous extracts UV protection. Identifying that, she says, could allow for a new class of eco-friendly, banana-based sunscreens.
Regeneron ISEF is a program created and run by the Society of Science (which also publishes this magazine). Taylor was among 1,657 students from 62 nations or territories competing at the 75th annual ISEF. They shared in nearly $9 million in prizes.
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