Daniel Garisto, Symmetry
While America remains obstinate about using Imperial units such as miles, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit, most of the world has agreed that using units that are actually divisible by 10 is a better idea. The metric system, also known as the International System of Units (SI), is the most comprehensive and precise system for measuring the universe that humans have developed.
Bruce McEwen, Aeon Magazine
Stress pervades our lives. We become anxious when we hear of violence, chaos or discord. And, in our relatively secure world, the pace of life and its demands often lead us to feel that there is too much to do in too little time. This disrupts our natural biological rhythms and encourages unhealthy behaviours, such as eating too much of the wrong things, neglecting exercise and missing out on sleep.
Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic
No one knows how to talk about climate change right now.I don't have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the natural consequences of climate change seem increasingly severe and devastating.
Christoph Salge, The Conversation
How do you stop a robot from hurting people? Many existing robots, such as those assembling cars in factories, shut down immediately when a human comes near. But this quick fix wouldn't work for something like a self-driving car that might have to move to avoid a collision, or a care robot that might need to catch an old person if they fall.
Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic
While sleeping under the stars in the mountains near Boulder County, Colorado, on Sunday morning, a 19-year-old camp counselor was awoken by what he initially perceived to be a loud crunching sound. The sound, it turned out, was a black bear pressing onto his head as it dragged him from his sleeping bag.
Cosmos Magazine
They lived in the ocean and looked like plants but are believed to have been animals. In a world of micro-organisms they grew to become giants. We call them rangeomorphs, and they dominated their environment for 30 million years, up until about 541 million years ago, when the rest of evolution overtook them during the proliferation of complex plant and animal forms known as the Cambrian Explosion.
Ross Pomeroy, RealClearScience
Farmers and gardeners are locked in an eternal battle with pests. One of those pests is the humble snail. The sluggish and slimy creatures love to munch on anything green and moist, and leave their feces all over the place.To ward off snails, farmers sometimes employ the help of microscopic parasitic nematodes tiny worms. When applied to fields in a watery mixture, the nematodes seek out and infest snails, killing them over the ensuing weeks.
Helen Branswell, Stat
For years there have been warnings that advances in science could make it possible to cook up killer diseases in laboratories and unleash them on the world.This week came news that scientists at the University of Alberta have put together from scratch a relative of the smallpox virus and a reminder that the threat of deadly viruses created by humans is more than theoretical.
Ethan Siegel, Forbes
Since well before Einstein, it was the dream of those who study the Universe to find a single equation to govern as many phenomena as possible. Rather than have a separate law for each and every physical property the Universe has, we could unify these laws into a single, overarching framework.
Bruce Bower, ScienceNews
DNA retrieved from a child's worn-down fossil tooth shows the ancient Asian roots of extinct Neandertal relatives called Denisovans, researchers say.A 10- to 12-year-old female Denisovan, represented by the tooth, lived at least 100,000 years ago, conclude evolutionary geneticist Viviane Slon of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues.
Veronique Greenwood, Sci American
Some people, no matter what they do, simply cannot fall asleep until the wee hoursand do not feel rested unless they get up much later than most of us. These night owls may have a common form of insomnia called delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), which studies have suggested is at least partly heritable.
Science News
Particle physicists began fiddling with artificial intelligence (AI) in the late 1980s, just as the term neural network captured the public's imagination. Their field lends itself to AI and machine-learning algorithms because nearly every experiment centers on finding subtle spatial patterns in the countless, similar readouts of complex particle detectorsjust the sort of thing at which AI excels.
Freeland & Blake, Conversation
But now we need an update. While the fundamental principles set out in the treaty are vitally important to the peaceful and orderly use of outer space, the pace of development of space-related technology which allows for activities far beyond the contemplation of those that put the treaty together means that some activities in space may fall between the cracks.
