Trapped ions have previously only been entangled in one and the same laboratory. Now, teams led by Tracy Northup and Ben Lanyon from the University of Innsbruck have entangled two ions over a distance of 230 meters. Read More

February is a cold time of year, and its snow moon nickname pays homage to that. What are some other nicknames for February's full moon and what do they mean? Plus, when can you see the snow moon? Read More

Before Tuesday night’s game between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron James stood a hundred and seventeen points away from passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record for points scored in a career. James’s chase of Abdul-Jabbar down the halls of history has had an odd, preëmptively anticlimactic vibe. It’s an incredible feat whose impending reality we’ve had three or four years to digest. Barring a major injury—which, on the one hand, is always possible, especially for a player in his later thirties, but which, on the other hand, seems hard to imagine, given LeBron’s remarkable durability—nobody has doubted, for almost half a decade, that the record would eventually belong to him. Last year, when he passed Abdul-Jabbar’s record for points in the regular season and post-season combined, it barely registered in the news—largely, I think, because those of us who care about such things were anticipating, without much true suspense, this season’s weightier milestone. Maybe that certainty has been unfair. The lead-up to LeBron’s big accomplishment hasn’t felt like the bazaar of praise that welcomed Steph Curry’s triumphal assumption of the record for three-pointers made. That might be because the Lakers have been so strangely mediocre for the past two seasons. Their other, younger star, Anthony Davis, was supposed to take over as the team’s best player, allowing LeBron, who recently turned thirty-eight, to rest a bit, but Davis is stuck in a purgatorial loop of injury, convalescence, return, and reinjury. Last season’s chief acquisition, Russell Westbrook, was an outright disaster as lead guard before settling into place as the team’s sixth man. Recently, James scored forty-six points in a loss to the Los Angeles Clippers. Toward the end of the game, the cameras fixated on his defeated posture as he sat on the bench. He looked like the lost parent of a wayward... Read More

A new type of ice called medium-density amorphous ice has the same density as liquid water, so studying it could help us understand water’s strange behaviour at low temperatures Read More

Chemical residue found in the jars allowed researchers to identify mixtures of fragrant or antiseptic oils, tars and resins, according to the study. This, matched with writing inscribed on the exterior of the containers, provided them with valuable new details about the mummification process, the researchers explained. “The inscribed vessels can now be connected with specific materials and mixtures of materials that were unknown before,” Susanne Beck, one of the study’s authors, told NBC News via email Thursday. Read More

Warm dense matter (WDM) measures thousands of degrees in temperature and is under the pressure of thousands of Earth's atmospheres. Found in many places throughout the universe, it is expected to have beneficial applications on Earth. However, its investigation is a challenge. Read More

A palm oil plantation in Perak, Malaysia, on November 12, 2019. Joshua Paul/Bloomberg via Getty Images Palm oil once destroyed orangutan-filled rainforests in Southeast Asia. Now, the industry is cleaning up its act. In the last two decades, palm oil has become an environmental boogeyman, an ingredient that conscious consumers should try to avoid. The oil, found in everything from baby shampoo to ice cream, earned its bad reputation. Over the last 30 years, palm oil companies leveled acre upon acre of trees in Southeast Asia, which were full of life and carbon. The demand for this ingredient, now the world’s most common edible oil, undoubtedly has fueled two of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change and the loss of biodiversity. But the story of palm oil is changing — seemingly for the better. Over the last decade, the amount of deforestation caused by the industry has actually declined nearly every year in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer. And in 2021, it hit a 22-year low. Malaysia has seen a similarly positive trend, experts say, indicating that companies are now cutting down fewer trees. “I don’t want to sit here and say that the palm oil industry has suddenly become shiny green and sustainable, but it’s mostly stopped deforestation,” said Glenn Hurowitz, the founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group. Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images Young orangutans play at a rehabilitation center in North Sumatra, Indonesia. The industry has a horrific legacy, no doubt, and it’s still wrecking some forests in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Yet it’s not the villain it once was. This, of course, is good news for the wildlife of Southeast Asia, and for our climate. It’s also a reason to feel less guilty when indulging in doughnuts or creamy peanut butter. But more importantly, the story of palm oil may hold lessons for other industries that still stock our grocery stores with forest-flattening foods. How palm oil destroyed the environment Palm oil, which comes from the fruit of oil palm trees, is something of a super ingredient. It has little odor or color. It doesn’t spoil easily. It contains virtually no unhealthy trans fats. And it’s incredibly cheap to produce. These characteristics helped palm oil rise to dominance, wrote journalist Paul Tullis, who called it “the world’s most versatile vegetable oil.” In the ’90s, big food companies were looking to replace trans fats in their products like margarine; palm oil offered a solution, Tullis wrote. Around the same time, cosmetic companies wanted plant-based alternatives to synthetic and animal-based chemicals. This industry, too, saw promise in palm oil. Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images Workers inspect a pile of oil palm fruit near a processing facility in Preah Sihanouk province, Cambodia, on September 16, 2016. With help from governments and international banks, which saw palm oil as a way to alleviate poverty in parts of Asia, production skyrocketed. Nearly all of the growth was in Indonesia and Malaysia, partly because the climate is suitable and the government backed industrial-scale plantations. (The oil palm tree is native to West Africa). Between 1995 and 2005, global palm oil production doubled. By 2015, it had almost doubled again. The world now produces more than 75 million metric tons of palm oil a year. For comparison, we produced roughly 3 million metric tons of olive oil in 2020. Palm oil and its derivatives are now in as many as half of the packaged products in supermarkets and 70 percent of cosmetics. These staggering numbers came at a huge cost. In the last two decades, Indonesia lost nearly 25 million acres of forest, an area larger than the entire country of Ireland. Roughly a third of that deforestation was caused by palm oil, according to a 2022 study. In Borneo, an island split among Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the palm oil industry caused roughly 40 percent of deforestation between 2000 and 2018, or roughly 6 million acres of forest loss. That’s almost five times the size of Delaware. When the forests fall, so do hugely important ecosystems that influence the entire planet. The jungles of Indonesia and Malaysia are home to a stunning array of plants and animals including orangutans, tigers, and the world’s largest flower, the stinking corpse lily. Wet forests known as peatlands — many of which have been drained and replaced by plantations — also store massive amounts of carbon, which can escape into the atmosphere when they’re destroyed. Jefta Images/Future Publishing via Getty Images A forest cleared to plant oil palm trees in Aceh, Indonesia, on June 15, 2017. A rare successful campaign to make a product more sustainable The destruction of forests didn’t go unnoticed. In the last two decades or so, advocacy groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth published report after report linking palm oil in our everyday products to environmental harm. These groups (and journalists!) helped out palm oil as dirty. And ultimately, that helped provoke change within the industry. According to Mighty Earth’s Hurowitz, 2013 marked a turning point: Late that year, he and other advocates helped convince Wilmar — one of the world’s largest palm oil companies — to limit deforestation in its supply chain. The company didn’t need to clear forests to grow palm, Hurowitz argued, because there were plenty of already-degraded lands. A year later, most other major palm oil companies had followed suit. Other forces helped transform the industry, as well. A couple of years earlier, Indonesia stopped granting new permits for palm oil development in primary forests and peatlands, in part to reduce carbon emissions. In the last decade or so, technologies to monitor deforestation, such as through satellite imagery, have also improved dramatically, helping watchdogs hold palm oil companies accountable. “We can now see deforestation in near-real time,” said David Gaveau, a landscape ecologist at TheTreeMap, a research organization, and lead author of the 2022 paper on palm-driven deforestation. “It’s not the Wild West it used to be.” The Washington Post via Getty Images A palm oil plantation that replaced a peatland in Sarawak, Malaysia, in September 2021. While it’s hard to say exactly which efforts were most effective, recent analyses suggest that at least some of them worked. A study published in 2019 found that palm oil deforestation in Indonesia peaked in 2009, and then steadily declined — meaning, fewer trees were cut down — in the years that followed. Gaveau’s study found a similar trend: The conversion of forests to palm oil plantations has fallen every year between 2012 and 2019. Experts said Malaysia is following a similar trend. Things are also looking good more recently. An analysis by TheTreeMap found that in 2021, deforestation linked to palm oil in Indonesia hit its lowest point in more than two decades (though it rose slightly in 2022). So, is palm oil sustainable now? No, not exactly. Most palm oil in our products was grown on land that was once forest, and little of it has been restored back to its natural condition. “The palm oil industry has an enormous legacy of destruction that they have not addressed yet,” Hurowitz said. “We’ve had great success in stopping deforestation and not as much success and persuading the big palm oil companies to heal the damage.” (Some groups are trying to restore old palm oil plantations to forest or make new plantations more environmentally friendly.) And while deforestation tied to the industry is way down, companies are still razing forests for palm oil. Last year, roughly 47,000 acres of forests were cut down in Indonesia and replaced with palm oil plantations, according to TheTreeMap. That’s a little more than three times the size of Manhattan. Some experts also worry that the drop in deforestation may have more to do with the price of palm oil — which started collapsing in 2011 — than with corporate or government policies. When oil is cheap, it often doesn’t pay to expand production. This is concerning because the price of palm oil has, in the last few years, bounced back. So far, however, the story remains positive, and the rise in palm oil prices has yet to drive a spike in forest loss. “The initial sign that [the] deforestation rate continues to be low suggests that we may be observing a decoupling of palm oil production from forest loss,” Kemen Austin, a palm oil expert and director of science at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said by email. In other words, growing palm oil production may no longer require cutting down trees. “We may still need another year or two to be able to quantify that with confidence, but its certainly a good sign,” she said. There are other reasons to believe that deforestation related to palm oil will remain a success story. In December, the European Union agreed on a landmark law to prevent companies from selling palm oil and a handful of other commodities in the European Union if they’re grown on land where forests were recently cleared. (The EU represents a relatively small part of the global palm oil market.) Progress in palm oil is not enough for the world’s forests Today, curbing global deforestation is less about palm oil and more about cleaning up other, more destructive products. “The change in the palm oil industry is a massive success, and the tragedy is that has not been sufficiently replicated in other industries,” Hurowitz said. The main one is beef. It’s a far more devastating to the world’s forests than any other commodity. Indeed, between 2001 and 2015, cattle caused roughly four times as much deforestation as palm oil, globally. Hurowitz and other advocates are now focused on translating what worked for palm oil to the beef industry, which has a massive footprint in the Amazon rainforest. Mighty Earth, for example, identifies influential corporations, such as the meatpacking firm JBS or the supermarket Carrefour, and then tries to pressure them from multiple angles to change. “We’re trying to create the kind of perfect storm of pressure on the meat industry that worked so well in palm oil,” Hurowitz said. As for what you can do as a consumer: Try as you might, you’re probably not going to cut palm oil from your diet or beauty products. It’s just too widespread, like plastic or corn. What might help, however, is eating fewer burgers. Read More

Tiera Fletcher carefully read through an artificial intelligence chatbot's attempt at rocket science. "That'strue, that's factual," she said thoughtfully as she scanned the AI-generated description of one of the most fundamental equations, known simply as "the rocket equation." Read More

WASHINGTON (AP) — The dodo bird isn’t coming back anytime soon. Nor is the woolly mammoth. But a company working on technologies to bring back extinct species has attracted more investors, while other scientists are skeptical such feats are possible or a good idea. Colossal Biosciences first announced its ambitious plan to revive the woolly mammoth two years ago, and on Tuesday said it wanted to bring back the dodo bird, too. Read More

Egyptian researchers have "digitally unwrapped" the mummified remains of a teenager buried 2,300 years ago, known as Egypt's "golden boy." Radiologists at Cairo University used CT scans to examine the remains non-invasively, revealing that he was adorned in a gold mask and 49 protective amulets, NBC News reports. The boy's remains were first discovered in 1916 at a cemetery in southern Egypt called Nag el-Hassay, used between approximately 332 BC and 30 BC. He was sent to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo along with thousands of other preserved bodies excavated in Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries, per CNN. Due to the destructive process of unwrapping preserved remains, the golden boy was moved into the museum's basement and remained unexamined until recently. Read More

Small isolated wetlands that are full for only part of the year are often the first to be removed for development or agriculture, but a new study shows that they can be twice as effective in protecting downstream lake or river ecosystems than if they were connected to them. Read More

A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that it's possible the ant's brain isn't involved in the whole process at all. The paper found that as the fungus grows inside the ant's body, its cells create an interconnected network of fibers that almost entirely fill the body cavity of the host ant — and it is that network that is most likely coordinating the ant's movements. Using AI they discovered it's possible the fungus didn't need to enter the ant's brain at all in order to manipulate the insect's head, thorax, abdomen and legs. "We found that a high percentage of the cells in a host were fungal cells," said David Hughes, lead author of the study and associate professor of entomology and biology at Penn State, in a press release. "In essence, these manipulated animals were a fungus in ants' clothing." Read More

Postscript He Was Tom Verlaine Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music. Read More

Wormholes, which are strange hypothetical tunnels through space-time, could act as cosmic magnifying glasses for objects behind them Space If wormholes – strange tunnels connecting two regions of space-time – exist, we may be able to spot them by the way they magnify light. This phenomenon, in which light from behind a cosmic object is stretched around the object due to its gravitational field, is called gravitational microlensing, and wormholes may be some of the most powerful lenses around. Gravitational lensing is fairly common in space and is used to probe some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, including dark matter … Read More

JUNEAU, Alaska — The Biden administration released a long-awaited study Wednesday that recommends allowing a major oil development on Alaska’s North Slope that supporters say could boost U.S. energy security but that climate activists decry as a “carbon bomb.” The move — while not final — drew immediate anger from environmentalists who saw it as a betrayal of the president’s pledges to reduce carbon emissions and promote clean energy sources. Read More

When most people think of deserts, the word that often comes to mind is sand—and a lot of it. Deserts cover almost a quarter of the earth, yet it's hard to imagine life thriving in such hostile environments, regulated by how much water and food is available. Read More

Two transonic truss-braced wing airplanes in flight. Boeing NASA has a plan to “skip a generation” of passenger aircraft design to fight climate change. After more than 50 years in production, the final 747 is taking to the skies. Boeing delivered the last 747 ever built to Atlas Air on Tuesday. Aviation enthusiast John Travolta was there and said the plane was the “most well-thought-out and safest aircraft ever built.” Richard Branson said “farewell to a wonderful beast” in a Reuters interview, bemoaning the high fuel costs for transatlantic flights on the jumbo jet. Airlines had a similar attitude, as slowing 747 sales reflected higher demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient planes. In fact, sustainability is on Boeing’s mind as well. Air travel is a massive contributor to climate change, and it’s getting more popular. Flying accounts for up to 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and as more and more people fly, the United Nations expects carbon dioxide emissions from planes to triple by 2050. A transatlantic flight produces about a ton of CO2 per passenger, which amounts to about half the carbon footprint a person would produce by eating food for a year. The Boeing 747, which can seat over 500 people, is the third-largest plane in the sky, so you can imagine the environmental cost of keeping the so-called “Queen of the Skies” flying. This isn’t the end of the 747 — existing planes could remain in the air for decades — but it is a pivotal moment for the future of aviation. A couple weeks before the 747’s big send-off, Boeing and NASA announced a major partnership, the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, to produce a wacky-looking single-aisle plane that promises to slash fuel consumption for commercial aircraft. The new aircraft looks like a giant glider with long, skinny wings propped up by diagonal struts to reduce drag. It’s called the transonic truss-braced wing concept, and if widely adopted could transform sustainable air travel as we know it. Unlike cars, you can’t simply bolt a battery onto a plane and make it electric. (Making an electric vehicle is more complicated than that, but you get the point.) Improvements to airplanes happen in small increments over the course of decades. Typically, a single-digit reduction in an aircraft’s fuel consumption would be meaningful. Boeing says the innovations in the new truss-braced wing concept will amount to a 30 percent reduction. That’s exactly the kind of leap NASA wanted to get out of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, which Boeing won. “If you think that, or have the perception that, aviation hasn’t been working on sustainability or environmentally friendliness, that’s a bad perception because every generation of aircraft that’s come out has been 15, 20, 25 percent better than the one it replaces,” Rich Wahls, NASA’s sustainable flight national partnership mission integration manager, told Recode. “What we’re trying to do now is skip a generation.” The big idea behind the transonic truss-braced wing concept is an update to the aircraft configuration, or the plane’s architecture. Unlike the low-wing design that dominates the commercial aircraft configuration today, the new Boeing design has wings that stretch over the top of the plane’s tubular body. This reduces drag, but it also allows for a wider variety of propulsion systems, from bigger jet engines to exposed propellers. It’s also fast. The “transonic” part of the concept’s name refers to its ability to fly just shy of the speed of sound, or around 600 miles per hour. NASA likes this idea so much it’s investing $425 million into the project under a Funded Space Act Agreement. Boeing and other partners will chip in an additional $300 million. Once Boeing builds a full-scale demonstrator aircraft, NASA says it will complete testing in the late 2020s, and if all goes well, the public could see the new technologies in commercial aircraft sometime in the 2030s. NASA Here’s a sampler platter of new aircraft configurations NASA is exploring. If you squint your eyes, though, the new transonic truss-braced wing concept looks an awful lot like the commercial aircraft you see on runways today. That’s not a bad thing. For one, it’s not a radical redesign — unlike, say, the very odd-looking blended wing X-48 — that might scare off passengers. The similar design also has some benefits for the manufacturing process. But at the end of the day, new aircraft configuration alone won’t make these next-generation planes greener, according to Brent Cobleigh, project manager for NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project. “Lighter-weight materials, better aerodynamics, better propulsion systems, more direct operations,” Cobleigh said, “you need all of those together to squeeze as much efficiency out as we can, to make the biggest impact.” Because, again, it’s really hard to make airplanes more efficient. And aircraft configuration is just one piece of the puzzle. More efficient propulsion systems and cleaner jet fuel are the other two moving parts that need to fit together. Further down the line, we’ll see designs for hybrid propulsion systems that use both jet fuel and batteries to power a plane. Fully electric planes are already taking to the skies, although it will be decades before we see big battery-powered passenger aircraft. In the near term, hydrogen increasingly seems like a viable replacement for the fossil fuels we currently put in planes. Rolls-Royce and easyJet successfully tested a hydrogen-powered jet engine, the world’s first, just a few months ago. What we’ll see before those big breakthroughs are more incremental improvements. Just a couple weeks before the NASA-Boeing announcement, for example, Rolls-Royce showed off a new UltraFan propulsion system for plans, which it says offers a 25 percent jump in efficiency and can run on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, which is a biofuel derived from waste material. Although it’s not a conventional fossil fuel, SAF still spews carbon into the atmosphere, and it’s also in short supply. Some commercial flights already use SAF mixed with conventional jet fuel, and United did a demo last year with a flight from Chicago to Washington, DC, powered by 100 percent SAF. An innovation like SAF certainly is a move in the right direction — what you might call an evolutionary change — but it’s not what’s needed to make air travel as green as it can be. “The revolutionary change would be to change the energy source, like, if you change to hydrogen or if you did hydrogen fuel cells,” explained Marty Bradley, a sustainable education educator and consultant who worked at Boeing when the company was exploring early truss-braced wing concepts. “That would be that big jump.” This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one! Read More

"So we're just gonna go in a freezer," says Tulio de Oliveira. We're at the institute that he directs, the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, South Africa. And he's taking me to a cold storage room chilled to 20 degrees below freezing. Read More

Something on the surface of Mars bears a resemblance to a certain animal. Read More

About 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. With the beginning of the cultivation of cereals, such as wheat and barley, and the domestication of animals, the first cities emerged in a new social context marked by a productive economy. Read More

News headlines talk about a rare green comet appearing in the sky. The comet itself is rare, but green comets, not so much. What makes some comets appear green? Read More

For a time, the director’s name was a pop-cultural punch line. With the release of his new film, “Knock at the Cabin,” he says, “You know, things are going well for me, and it makes me scared.” Read More

Mysterious ripples in the sun’s plasma have gone unexplained for decades, but they may be caused by strange beams of high-energy electrons fired inward by solar flares Read More

The Yale School of Public Health honored 9-year-old Bobbi Wilson in a ceremony last month for her efforts to curb the presence of an invasive species — the spotted lantern fly — in her hometown of Caldwell, New Jersey. The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale accepted Bobbi's donation of her personal lantern fly collection, presenting her with the title of "donor scientist." The collection is now available for public viewing in the museum's database, according to the university. Read More

Climate change alters the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn alters precipitation and evaporation in large parts of the world and, in consequence, the amount of river water that can be used locally. So far, projections of climate impact on stream flow have usually been calculated on the basis of physical models, e.g., the projections reported by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Read More

A Centers for Disease Control scientist in a protective airtight suit, handling influenza virus specimens, in a biosafety level 4 laboratory, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2005. Douglas Jordan/Centers for Disease Control/Getty Images New rules around gain-of-function research make progress in striking a balance between reward — and catastrophic risk. Imagine you’re a virologist. You’re doing research into monkeypox, and in an effort to better understand which genes make monkeypox deadly, you take genetic components of one of the clades of monkeypox that is more deadly and components from a clade that is less deadly but more transmissible. (Because you’re a virologist, you know that a clade is a group of organisms sharing specific genetic traits.) You combine them to make a new monkeypox variant with traits from both the deadly version and the contagious version. Would this work be covered by US guidelines that require heightened safety scrutiny for research that could potentially spark a deadly pandemic? Under the current guidelines, this actually isn’t clear. When researchers with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) planned such an experiment, a safety panel concluded they were exempt from review. Monkeypox, after all, isn’t a “potential pandemic pathogen,” one of the exceptionally risky viruses like influenzas and coronaviruses at which the guidelines are aimed. And while the current guidelines also target work on any virus that is “enhanced” to be more dangerous, the NIAID researchers said they didn’t expect their new hybrid virus to be more deadly than the deadlier of the starter strains or more virulent than the more virulent of the starter strains. This may seem like a bizarre way to decide when heightened safety standards are appropriate for virology research. Surely, the thing we care about is not how viruses are classified but how much damage would be done if the end result infects people — as happens with worrying frequency in lab accidents around the world. Fortunately, a new set of proposed guidelines released last week by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) would change how we evaluate research with the potential to cause a pandemic — hopefully making the process more transparent and more reasonable while keeping the public safer from potential catastrophe. It represents “a number of important steps forward,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Defining pandemic potential by results Here’s a simple way to define whether research should be subject to additional safety oversight: Is the final result of the work, or any intermediate results, a virus that could spark a pandemic? If so, additional safety oversight is probably appropriate! That’s approximately the standard put forward in the new proposed guidelines, but it largely wasn’t the case previously. The NSABB board found substantial shortcomings in the current standards. “The current definitions of a PPP [potential pandemic pathogen] and enhanced PPP (ePPP) are too narrow,” they write in the report. “Overemphasis on pathogens that are both likely ‘highly’ transmissible and likely ‘highly’ virulent could result in overlooking some research involving the creation, transfer, or use of pathogens with enhanced potential to cause a pandemic.” Say a pathogen is incredibly contagious but only mildly deadly. It may not sound that bad, but you’ve just described Covid-19, which has killed tens of millions of people worldwide. As we should all know by now, a pathogen that is only as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 is still catastrophic if it’s contagious enough to go global. Furthermore, under the current standards, if the method by which the virus is made more virulent or more deadly involves swapping components of the virus with a different variant that is more contagious or more deadly, that also doesn’t count as an “enhanced’ virus. But of course, in the sense public policy should care about — the odds that millions of people will die — the changes are obviously enhancement! “What matters isn’t the starting pathogen but the resulting pathogen,” said Inglesby. “If it results in a novel pathogen or a novel variant that has novel high transmissibility or novel high lethality, then that’s subject to oversight.” The NSABB board proposed these revised guidelines: “Amend USG P3CO policy to clarify that federal department-level review is required for research that is reasonably anticipated to enhance the transmissibility and/or virulence of any pathogen (i.e., PPPs and non-PPPs) such that the resulting pathogen is reasonably anticipated to exhibit the following characteristics that meet the definition of a PPP: Likely moderately or highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations; and/or Likely moderately or highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans” Pandemics can be nightmarish. Our policy needs to reflect that. Biologists have made huge advances in their ability to understand and manipulate DNA and RNA over the last few decades. That has been enormously advantageous for humanity, and no one wants to bring the research that leads to those advances to a halt. But it’s not that rare for pathogens to escape the lab. It’s not the stuff of conspiracy theories — as a recent investigative series in the Intercept uncovered, lab accidents are far more frequent than we might know, and rarely result in serious policy change. And given how much damage a pandemic can do, it means that research into creating new pathogens that have pandemic potential needs to be subject to a level of oversight that the government has, up to this point, struggled to provide clarity on. Part of the confusion stems from the scaling challenge around catastrophic risks. Most workplace safety rules are assumed to protect the lives of the employees — perhaps dozens of people. Engineering reliability rules for bridges and skyscrapers are meant to protect the lives of hundreds of people, maybe thousands. If something goes wrong — if those rules aren’t tough enough or aren’t enforced — it’s a very bad day for those people, but not beyond them. Pandemic prevention rules, though, are needed to protect the lives of literally millions of people. A mistake in a lab that unleashes something like Covid — or something worse — doesn’t just endanger those working in that lab, but potentially all of us. The degree of caution required for these astronomical stakes is simply different from anything else. Looming over all of this is the question of the true origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. While there’s no smoking gun that indicates the SARS-CoV-2 virus began life in a lab — and there likely never will be — the very fact that it’s difficult to know precisely what may have happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should give us pause. The number of biolabs dedicated to work on the world’s most virulent pathogens is growing, as is our ability to fiddle with the genetics of a virus. That’s a dangerous combination. The new guidelines aren’t perfect. For one thing, they’re still focused on the US, and any effective effort to prevent human-caused pandemics and ensure risky research happens safely needs to be global — just as the pandemics such work could spark will be. But it’s a huge step toward making the rules more consistent, more reasonable, and more focused on the place where the stakes are the highest. A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe! Read More

The illness sends tens of thousands of babies to the hospital each year. If approved, the new injection would be the first broadly available prevention tool. Read More

Scientists confirmed the presence of the "rare and remarkable" Pallas's cat on the world's highest mountain. Read More

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is an industrially important chemical with versatile applications. However, the traditional method used to produce H2O2 is energy intensive and produces significant emissions. Read More

Mercedes-Benz hopes to have more than 400 high-speed EV charging hubs online in North America by 2027. That's great for global emissions. Is it great for the electrical grid? Read More

Postscript He Was Tom Verlaine Patti Smith remembers her friend, who possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music. Read More

Lab-grown neurons were transplanted into the brains of rats with damaged visual cortexes. After two months, the neurons responded when the rats saw flashing lights Read More

The male northern quoll, a small endangered marsupial, is walking so far and sleeping so little in its desperate search for sex that it may be causing its own early death, according to a study published Wednesday. Read More

Volunteers deliver food supplies to residents at a gated community after Shanghai imposed a citywide lockdown to halt the spread of Covid-19 epidemic on April 8, 2022 in Shanghai, China. Chen Chen/VCG via Getty Images Short-term lockdowns could be key to ending pandemics early. For the first time in three years, millions traveled within China earlier this month to reunite with loved ones for the country’s most important holiday, the Lunar New Year. Unfortunately, these celebrations coincided with — and are sure to exacerbate — a Covid-19 outbreak currently spreading throughout the country. This spike comes on the heels of China’s National Health Commission ending many of its “zero-Covid” policiesin December. These public health regulations had heavily restricted travel within and to the country, quarantined infected individuals in government-run facilities, and enforced city-wide lockdowns that required millions to stay indoors for months at a time. While the US threw the term “lockdown” around in the early stages of the pandemic, China was one of the few countries that actually did lock down its population. These initiatives did prevent repeated surges in Covid-19 cases. But it also led to inadequate responses to other health crises and emergencies — including a November 2022 building fire in the Xinjiang region where virus-related blockades prevented an effective emergency response. Protests over the last few months of 2022 bubbled across major cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Urumqi, calling for an end to lockdowns, censorship, and in some cases, even Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s presidency. Beijing’s decision to end zero-Covid policies may have saved the nation from further social chaos. But how it eased up resulted in a public health crisis, with an estimated 2.02 million government-confirmed Covid-19 cases(though that’s likely an undercount) as of January 29, compared to 119,836 cumulative cases a year ago. Although a variety of zero-Covid strategies have been tried in different countries since the start of the pandemic, they have varied in intensity, length, goals, and outcomes. In some nations, lockdowns were used intermittently to control outbreaks and to give public health leaders time to develop and distribute vaccinations. China’s lockdowns were used as a primary prevention measure. Partially, China’s current outbreak stems from the country’s all-or-nothing mentality, experts told Vox. The country eased lockdowns, travel restrictions, and mass testing, all at once — and the virus came rushing in. Lockdowns aren’t a popular public health strategy when strung out for long periods of time. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be a useful option in the pandemic playbook. Lockdowns cannot contain a disease like Covid-19 indefinitely — especially more contagious variants — but they can mitigate the spread and give public health leaders time to prepare for other aspects of their pandemic response, such as vaccinations. The public health lessons learned from the end of China’s zero-Covid era might be some of the most important in preparing for future pandemics and learning how to live with diseases. “At the beginning [of a pandemic], if there’s no treatment, no vaccine, and we have very limited knowledge about this new phenomena, a lockdown is more acceptable,” said Jennifer Bouey, chair of the global health department at Georgetown University. “Once there are vaccines, once there’s treatment, once we understand the nature of the pathogen, then they should be switched to a combination of different things.” Lockdowns worked during SARS. China hoped they would work again. In January 2020, only two days before the Lunar New Year, China banned travel to and from the 11 million-person city of Wuhan because of the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus, soon known as Covid-19. In March, as the threat of the virus grew, other countries closed their borders, with the World Health Organization declaring Covid-19 a pandemic. Many countries, including China, adopted true lockdowns as a means to stamp out the Covid-19 virus. These measures quarantined infected and exposed individuals, and locked down entire buildings, cities, and regions. China had reason to believe this strategy would work again, given that during the outbreak of SARS — now called the SARS-CoV-1 virus —in the early 2000s, the nation used a citywide lockdown of Beijing in 2003 to contain the disease. “People didn’t go out for six weeks, school was canceled, the streets were empty, and the epidemic ended,” said Elanah Uretsky, chair of international and global studies at Brandeis University, of China’s SARS response. “It ended because of those lockdowns and massive quarantine policies. And we learned to believe in them.” In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, little was known about how the virus spread, so public health guidance changed constantly. The application and length of lockdowns varied by country. In France, there were clear guidelines that allowed residents to travel outdoors for activities such as walking a pet. In contrast, in Wuhan, only one member of a household was permitted outside every two days to buy necessary resources. New Zealand, an island country with a zero-Covid approach, prevented Covid cases and deaths early in the pandemic by closing its borders. However, Covid-19 proved to be more “elusive” than SARS, said Uretsky. Covid can present asymptomatically — unlike SARS — and therefore it can evade some contact tracing protocols. While it isn’t as deadly as SARS, Covid is more transmissible, meaning that one person infects multiple people at a higher rate. Meanwhile, it was difficult for countries with large populations and land masses, such as the US and China, to have the type of nationally coordinated response seen in smallerisland nations like Singapore and New Zealand. Given its size and politics, the US was unable to nationally coordinate the country’s Covid response and instead relied on individual regions or states to dictate public health measures. Instead of zero-Covid, the US opted for a strategy of “flattening the curve,” which entailed decelerating the rate of Covid-19 infection to ease the burden on hospitals. “I think China’s massive error, considering that their population is enormous, was not doing what many countries did, or strived to do, which was ‘flatten the curve,’” said Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist with the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. In mid-2021, even nations that had maintained low case numbers and death rates through lockdowns adjusted their policies, and instead focused on vaccination campaigns and ramping up contact tracing efforts. Wealthy nations with access to vaccines began immunizing their populations in December 2020, and by the end of August 2021, over 2 billion people were fully vaccinated. Over the last year and a half, many former zero-Covid countries prioritized administering booster vaccines and slowly phased out contact tracing protocols. Li Zhihua/China News Service via Getty Images Medical workers and Covid-19 patients are seen at the mainland-aided San Tin community isolation facility on March 14, 2022 in Hong Kong, China. Meanwhile, in China, the nation’s zero-Covid policies dragged on for two years. The nation was able to keep cases low, relative to its population, until March 2022. At that time, the omicron variant of the virus swept through the country, leading to a lockdown in the 25 million-person city of Shanghai for two months. This extended lockdown sparked anger among residents and would add fuel to the growing anti-government sentiments that manifested via protests later that year. Why China’s post-zero-Covid era is going so poorly After over 150 partial and fullcity-wide lockdownsand months-long protests,China released new Covid-19 guidelines in early November and early December that softened orreversed earlier zero-Covid practices. In November, the guidelines cut down isolation time, removed mass testing sites, and increased resources to health care facilities. In December, health codes (proving lack of Covid exposure or a negative test result) to enter most public spaces were no longer required and infected individuals with mild or no symptoms could quarantine at home rather than at government-run facilities. However, China lifted these policies not because it was prepared to do so, but because of political pressure from the nationwide protests, said Ha-Linh Quach, a research assistant at Duke NUS medical school in Singapore. Quach — who also previously worked with Vietnam’s National Committee of Covid-19 — said Vietnam followed China’s lead when attempting to manage the spread of the virus, but also found that mass quarantines were publicly unpopular. Instead, in 2021 the country began prioritizing social distancing, mask-wearing policies, and vaccine distribution. Unlike other countries — like Taiwan, South Korea, or Singapore — that used periods of strict lockdowns to prepare for their inevitable reopening, and the internal travel that it would spawn, China did no such thing, said Uretsky. Rather than reopening in stages, China lifted many of its most useful measures all at once — despite the fact that prior to easing these regulations, Covid cases were already on the rise. “Unfortunately for China, lack of preparation for the inevitable breach of an increasingly infectious pathogen results in exactly what we’re seeing,” said Miller. For example, alongside these eased regulations, China announced it would ramp up its vaccination of the elderly, something the experts Vox spoke to say should have happened much earlier. When the restrictions were lifted, only 40 percent of Chinese residents above the age of 80 had received a Covid-19 booster shot, according to China’s National Health Commission. Other countries that exited periods of intense lockdowns, such as Vietnam, not only used vaccines to prepare, but also bolstered their social distancing policies and contact tracing programs as they transitioned, said Quach. As part of its zero-Covid policies, China used a digital health code system that assigned users QR codes based on their exposure and testing status, and that were needed to enter public spaces. Now, these codes are no longer required to access many public areas or to travel in China. Yet Singapore, when the nation lifted many of its zero-Covid policies in June 2021, continued to use its version of these health codes for almost a year. These codes helped Singapore track down those who were exposed to someone with Covid-19 at an expedited rate. “It is not a breakthrough technology,” Quach said. “But it’s amazing to me how it is being used for public health.” That said, these codes, while effective in the small nation of Singapore, had limited success in China due to the country’s size and lack of data-sharing. “On paper, it can work, but it’s very difficult to implement in the real world, especially in such a large country,” said Bouey. “It turns out that every province is doing their own work, and they’re not integrated. So when people travel from one province to another, the code suddenly doesn’t work.” Lack of data and rampant misinformation have also exacerbated China’spost-lockdown problems. The current outbreak is thought to have begun in November 2022, and although the official number of totalCovid-19 deaths in China, as of January 30, is now over 110,000 — which would still be lowrelative to the nation’s 1.4 billion population — the true figures are thought to be much higher. One model from December predicted that as many as 1 million people could die from Covid in China over the first few months of the year, but without transparent information from Beijing, these forecasts remain speculative. “In the absence of data, there is misinformation,” Miller said. “I think the seeds of the spread of Covid were already happening in China. But the information as to the extent of it and the location of it would have allowed people to make informed decisions. In the absence of that, people are making whatever decision they want to make.” What this teaches us for the next pandemic Assuming another unknown virus will spread across the globe again in our lifetimes, the Covid-19 pandemic has given public health leaders fresh insight into what policies can be most effective in mitigating the spread of diseases. And lockdowns, when used appropriately and swiftly, remain a useful tool in our arsenal for early pandemic days. Covid-19 was actually the “ideal candidate” for lockdowns, said Miller. This is because of the virus’s highly transmissible, airborne, and often asymptomatic nature. “Candidates for lockdown include pathogens that are novel to human populations, and therefore there is no innate immunity to them,” Miller said. “Highly infectious pathogens for which there are (currently) no vaccines or treatments are also candidates for lockdown.” In theory, the only type of diseases that lockdowns cannot mitigate are those that are not transmitted via human-to-human contact, such as water or foodborne illnesses, said Bouey. Lockdowns give leaders time to develop vaccination distribution campaigns, set up contact tracing programs, and learn more about the pandemic-causing disease, Miller added. This is why it’s important to distinguish between “short-term lockdowns with underlying goals” and “long-term lockdowns that hope to beat the odds and keep Covid out indefinitely,” said Miller. Brief lockdowns that helped “flatten the curve” were effective and helped keep hospitalizations and deaths down. But extended lockdowns, like the ones seen in China, failed to contain the virus and damaged the country’s economy and well-being. “As we have seen, these lockdowns are very disruptive, in terms of economic livelihood, as well as social life and even mental health,” said Bouey. “There is profound damage to the society and to the economy.” Read More

Yi-Kai Tea recently returned from a 35-day expedition to explore the deep seas surrounding a new marine park in the Indian Ocean. They gathered thousands of specimens. Read More

WASHINGTON (AP) — With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the specter of nuclear weapon use, Earth crept its closest to Armageddon, a science-oriented advocacy group said, moving its famous “Doomsday Clock” up to just 90 seconds before midnight. “We are really closer to that doomsday,” former Mongolian president Elbegdorj Tsakhia said Tuesday at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists annual announcement rating how close humanity is from doing itself in. He and former Ireland President Mary Robinson joined scientists to underscore what they consider a gathering of several existential threats, with Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s actions and words chief among them. Read More

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PHOENIX (The Borowitz Report)—Kari Lake said that she is “absolutely furious and outraged” that no one has performed a search of her home for stolen documents. “The F.B.I. has been raiding the house of every Tom, Dick, and Harry, but somehow doesn’t think mine is worthy of their attention,” she said. “This doesn’t pass the smell test.” Read More

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The U.S. is about to take a bite out of the shark fin trade. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is currently reviewing the funding and implementation of a long-awaited ban on the trafficking of shark fins through U.S. ports, a move that could disrupt their broader global trade. Read More

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A new HBO show, The Last of Us, is about a fungi-fueled apocalypse. Above, lead characters Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Tess (Anna Torv) discover a human body that was taken over by a fungus. Liane Hentscher/HBO The good news: You’re safe if you’re not an ant. The scariest shows and movies are often the ones rooted in reality — about psychopathic serial killers, late-night home invasions, and AI robot dolls. Zombie apocalypses typically don’t count. But a new show on HBO, called The Last of Us, presents a compelling case that perhaps there’s such a thing as a realistic zombie. Or realistic-ish. And it’s definitely scary. The premise of the show, which is based on the popular video game of the same name, isn’t that different from your typical post-apocalyptic horror story: US cities are crumbling, there are rabid humans everywhere, and a manly man has to protect a young girl as they travel across the country. The zombies, however, are truly inspired. More specifically, they are inspired by nature — by real zombies that live on Earth. Liane Hentscher/HBO Pedro Pascal, of The Mandalorian and Narcos, stars in HBO’s The Last of US as Joel Miller, the lead protagonist. In the show, which premiered last Sunday, it’s not a virus that turns people into brainless automatons but a kind of fungus called Cordyceps. The fungus takes over their minds and bodies and makes them want to spread the fungus to the uninfected. This fungus is real. In tropical, subtropical, and even temperate forests around the world, there are many species of fungus in the genuses Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps (these fungi were formerly called just Cordyceps) that infect insects like ants and other invertebrates. And they do essentially turn them into zombies. The fungi take over their minds and bodies, causing them to behave in such a way as to spread spores to others of their kind. The fungi were popularized in 2016 by the show Planet Earth, which captured an Ophiocordyceps parasitizing a bullet ant. And it was actually the clip below — in which the fungus causes the ant to climb up a branch, before killing it and sprouting a spore-producing mushroom from the ant’s head — that inspired the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann. So, the fungus is real and it can turn bugs into zombies. That’s pretty rad. But does it pose a threat to us? A comforting fact is that people have been eating Cordyceps for centuries now without turning rabid. It’s a traditional Chinese medicine, used to treat kidney disease and other ailments. Even wellness brands are now marketing it. But to be sure — because one really can’t be sure enough, right? — I reached out to Charissa de Bekker, a mycologist who researches Ophiocordyceps. A professor of biology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, de Bekker has not seen the show but is familiar with the game. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. To be clear, the fungus in the show The Last of Us is real, right? Yes. Cordyceps and Ophiocordyceps fungi are real and infect insects in the wild. There are many different species out there. Many!? How many? Researchers have described at least 30 Ophiocordyceps species that parasitize ants, but we know there are many more, because every ant species that gets infected has its own specialized Ophiocordyceps species. There are also Ophiocordyceps and Cordyceps fungi that infect other insects like wasps and flies. We also see this go beyond insects to arthropods like spiders. Then there’s a whole other group of fungi, in the order Entomophthorales, that does manipulation as well — and these species don’t look anything like Ophiocordyceps. Manipulation has evolved multiple times across the fungi kingdom. The biodiversity of these fungi is probably really high, we just haven’t discovered them all yet. Kevin Wells/Getty Images A type of Cordyceps fungus growing on a bullet ant near Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui, Costa Rica. Quang Nguyen Vinh/Getty Images Another kind of “zombie” fungus grows out of a dead winged insect in a rainforest in Vietnam. How do these fungi manipulate their hosts in the wild? What we see, specifically with ants, is that they pick up spores [which are kind of like seeds for fungus] when they go out to forage for food. The spore infects the ant and fungal cells start growing inside its body. In the beginning, this ant might act normally. But eventually, it stops participating in the foraging efforts of the colony. It doesn’t communicate well with its nest-mates anymore. And then this ant starts to become hyperactive and no longer has the same daily rhythms of the other ants. Most carpenter ants, for example, forage during the nighttime, but the infected ant basically becomes active all the time. Reza Saputra/Getty Images A “zombie” fungus sprouts a fruiting body (mushroom) out of an ant in Indonesia. At one point, the infected ant wanders off from the colony to find a spot in the forest to climb and bite [down on the twig or vine]. This is where the fungus will quickly start to consume everything inside, which kills the host. The fungus uses that energy to sprout a stock with a fruiting body — the mushroom, if you will — which has spores that will fly out and infect more ants. By climbing higher up in the forest, the ant basically helps the fungus spread its spores. The specific spot it chooses to climb may actually help with the development of the fungus. This whole process could take days or weeks, or even months. What you often see in zombie movies, or The Last of Us, things happen a lot quicker. In nature, things take some time. Are Ophiocordyceps actually controlling the minds of ants? We think this fungus is secreting certain chemicals that can bind to or interact with receptors or other sorts of proteins that are related to the nervous system, and normally give rise to different behaviors. For instance, these could be receptors that normally would bind to dopamine or serotonin, that might then elicit a certain type of behavior. We’re still very much in the process of trying to figure that out. We certainly think it’s more than just this fungus gnawing away on some brain tissue because the behavior is so specific. Liane Hentscher/HBO A zombie is plastered to the wall by the Cordyceps fungus in Episode 1 of The Last of Us. Would you call these infected hosts “zombies”? Is that scientifically accurate? If you compare it one-to-one with zombies from pop culture, it’s not completely accurate. These insects are very much alive, whereas in fictional movies zombies are often undead. These ants infected with Ophiocordyceps are not dead and walking around. What makes real-life hosts similar to fictional zombies is that they are behaving in such a way as to benefit the parasite, not the host. Is there any reason to believe that a fungus like this could infect a human body and turn us into zombies? The very short answer is: No. Everything in the human body is so different from the insects that these fungi normally infect, including our physiology, our nervous tissue, and our body temperature. Even if the fungi were able to cause a small infection, the machinery that is needed for the fungus to do such a precise manipulation is simply not there. These fungi evolved strategies to manipulate specific insect hosts over millions and millions of years. They’re not generalists. Each species only knows how to deal with one particular insect. We don’t see the fungi specialists just jumping from one ant species to another, let alone from an ant species to another insect. Spreading from ant to human is just such a big jump. In the show, a fictional epidemiologist suggests that climate change could make harmful fungi more tolerant to warmer temperatures. As a result, they could more readily jump to warm-blooded humans. Is that a real concern? That’s actually a real concern that medical mycologists have [about harmful fungi like Candida auris, not Cordyceps], though that’s not my expertise. Most fungal infections are skin infections — or if, say, you’re an immunocompromised patient, certain spores that normally are benign might settle in your lungs and cause a problem. But most fungi don’t happily grow at our body temperature. Most of them actually prefer lower temperatures. Some experimentation shows that fungi could, perhaps, adapt to higher temperatures, as they adapt to a warming world. You can imagine that if their optimal temperature comes closer to our body temperature, fungal infections could become more of a problem. In the show, the fungus spreads through bites, not spores. That’s not how it would actually work if these fungi-infected zombies were real, right? If you play the game, you’ll see that spores do play a role in spreading infection. But no, the fungus wouldn’t spread through biting. Generally, across the fungal kingdom, going from one spot to another, or from one host to another, is done by spores. I’m a big fan of fungi. They decompose plants, they can be psychedelic. They’re also delicious. Is it unfair that Cordyceps are the villain in the show? It’s great that, finally, fungi are hip and happening. I hope the show sparks some interest in fungi in general, because they’re incredibly fascinating organisms. They’re more important than people might think. Luis Espin/Getty Images A Cordyceps fungus grows out of a wingless insect on a leaf in Ecuador. They are very much the villain in the show, and that’s generally how we see parasites, because they make us sick. But in nature, they’re actually super important and just as important as all the other organisms. They keep everything in check. If ants, for instance, weren’t pestered by certain parasites — not just Ophiocordyceps but anything else that makes them sick — then their numbers might get out of control. You might get an overpopulation of certain species. Taking out a parasite like this fungus might be like taking out a predator from the ecosystem, and that could cause biodiversity to decline. I’m kind of afraid to ask, but how common are fungi, in general? Not to scare you, but in every breath of air you take there will be fungal spores. Most of them are not harmful to us — most spores you’re inhaling right now are benign, or fungi that don’t know how to deal with our body, so you will never even notice them. But they are everywhere. Read More

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If you've ever compared a frozen pizza to the photo on the box, you know the feeling of being duped by appetizing looks. In our latest study published in Ecology and Evolution, we show that animals—in this case, bees—are also prone to being tricked into making poor decisions, which explains a lot about how gaps in perception are exploited in nature. Read More

In 1930, the Radio Manufacturers Association lobbied that backseat passengers were more of a driver distraction than a car radio; listening to the radio, they claimed, was safer than looking in the rear view mirror. Some strongly opposed the industry's claims, arguing car radios were distracting and hazardous. Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Ohio state legislatures all considered implementing car radio fines, and in 1935 Connecticut legislators actually did introduce a bill that would have placed a steep fine on radio installation — $50 in 1935, which is about $1,100 today. Others considered making car radio installation a crime [sources: Novak, Bureau of Labor Statistics]. It wasn't until 1939, though, that anyone actually studied whether a correlation between car radios and car crashes existed: Car radios played little to no role in car accidents, determined the Princeton Radio Research Project [source: Bijsterveld]. Read More

Will Nediger is a crossword constructor from London, Ontario, whose independent puzzles are published under the name “Bewilderingly.” Read More

The AMASS project would involve thousands of drones, on the ground, in the air and in the water, working together in a "swarm of swarms" to overwhelm enemy defences Read More

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will pass near Earth on Feb. 1 for the first time in 50,000 years, and could be bright enough to see through telescopes and binoculars. Read More

All over the world, children are being bullied by adults in school. New research now shows that these students could also be at increased risk of being bullied by their fellow students. Read More