One idea the team floats is that zinc and manganese are limited resources, so scorpions can only reinforce the most critical parts of the stingers instead of spreading the metals across their entire exoskeleton. Going deeper into the reasons behind what appears to be a design flaw in an otherwise neatly built stinger is one…
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Something strange is happening underneath Area 51. According to United States Geological Survey data earlier this week, over 100 people have reported at least 17 earthquakes within the span of only 24 hours not far from the infamous, highly…
NASA announced Friday Janet Petro, center director for the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is retiring. Prior to joining NASA, Petro worked in a variety of military and industry positions, ultimately beginning her career at the agency in 2007 and working her way up to center director, as well as serving as acting administrator…
Sideloading is a hot topic in the mobile sphere, and Google recently made a huge change for how it works on Android. I think it’s a fantastic change, and I wish Google would have added the 24 hour delay for sideloading unverified apps years ago, but I’m glad they’ve finally done it. The majority of…
Experiments involving dozens of European bird species — such as great tits, house sparrows and blackbirds — suggest the birds can distinguish human sex and react differently, but the reasons remain unclear. The western yellow wagtail (Motacilla flava), a small passerine bird in the family Motacillidae. Image credit: Sci.News. “When an animal faces a potential…
Are you tired? If so, you aren’t alone. An alarming number of the country’s adults are tired most days, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And that could have significant implications for public health. In 2024, the year the data were collected, nearly a third of all…
The boss of the UK’s biggest energy supplier has suggested that some households would accept an occasional electricity blackout in exchange for much lower energy bills. A year on from Europe’s largest power outage – which left tens of millions of people in Spain and Portugal without trains, metros, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and…
Watch: Artemis II crew surprises 5-year-old aspiring astronaut with new spacesuit 01:35 The Artemis II team gained a new member Friday, and the crew made sure their youngest teammate had the right stuff for space. When the Artemis crew launched from Florida last month, Jack, a 5-year-old aspiring astronaut from Atlanta, told CBS News he’s “so obsessed…
There are tens of thousands of near-Earth objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of…
Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as SpaceX aims to launch the vehicle’s next test…
