The annual Lyrid shower kicks off the 2021 meteor season by peaking this week. With very little in the way of celestial spectator events since the Quadrantid meteor shower in early January, the Lyrids signal good times ahead for sky gazers. The Lyrids don't produce a lot of meteors, perhaps 10 to 15 per hour, but are more likely to include bright, dramatic fireballs than other major showers, CNET reports. The source of the Lyrids is...
Some day, scientists believe, DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics. Researchers took a big step toward that future by developing a tool that can design more complex DNA robots and nanodevices than ever and in a fraction of the time, phys.org reports. In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from Ohio State University unveiled...
NASA helicopter Ingenuity achieved the first powered, controlled flight on another planet at 12:31 a.m. Pacific this morning, CNET reports. "We've been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is," said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung. "We can now say that humans have flown a rotorcraft on another planet." The rotor blades spun up to 2,537 rpm, about six times faster than an Earth-based craft. The flight attempt was delayed...
OK, relax, moms – we are talking about insects. Researchers have discovered that a species of ant can regrow lost parts of their brains, an ability never before seen in insects, reports CBC Radio's Quirks & Quarks. In most ant species, only the queen can reproduce. However in the Indian jumping ant, when the queen dies, female workers have the ability to take on the reproductive role for the colony. But the promotion from worker to...
Clemson University physicist Jian He and collaborators from China and Denmark created a potentially paradigm-shifting high-performance thermoelectric compound, reports Tech Xplore. "Our material is a unique hybrid atomic structure with half being crystalline and half amorphous," said He. "If you have a unique or peculiar atomic structure, you would expect to see very unusual properties because properties follow structure." The researchers created the hybrid material by intentionally mixing elements in the same group on the periodic...
A team of scientists claims to have cracked the code to a natural blue food dye. Some colours of artificial dyes are easy to replace, such as turmeric for yellow or beets for red, but finding a non-purplish natural source for the colour blue has stymied food scientists, reports CBC's Quirks & Quarks. In a study published in the journal Science Advances, a team of scientists says it has found a way to produce true blue,...
A team of researchers has identified 87 Neanderthal footprints found on an ancient shoreline on the Iberian Peninsula, phys.org reports. Researchers found evidence of as many as 36 individuals walking along a beach. The work involved studying footprints left on Matalascañas beach, in Doñana National Park, in Spain. Testing in sedimentary rock showed the footprints to be about 106,000 years old. They were revealed recently due to heavy rains. Researchers did not find evidence...
Researchers have developed a cost-effective technique that could deliver safe drinking water to millions of vulnerable people using cheap, sustainable materials and sunlight, reports Tech Xplore. A team led by associate professor Haolan Xu at UniSA's Future Industries Institute has refined a technique to derive freshwater from seawater, brackish water, or contaminated water, through highly efficient solar evaporation. "In recent years, there has been a lot of attention on using solar evaporation to create...
Researchers at Duke University have developed a method that uses machine learning, satellite imagery and weather data to autonomously find hotspots of heavy air pollution, city block by city block, reports phys.org. The technique could be a boon for finding and mitigating sources of hazardous aerosols, studying the effects of air pollution on human health, and making better informed, socially just public policy decisions. The air pollutants in which the Duke team is most interested...
Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity, Tech Xplore reports. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers formed two artificial neural networks trained with two generic deep learning methods. As researcher Marco Baroni explains: "We made the networks play a colour-naming game in which they had to communicate about colour chips from a continuous colour space. We did not limit the...
