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Human activity and appetites have weakened Earth’s resilience, pushing it far beyond the “safe operating space” that keeps the world liveable for most species, including our own, a landmark study said Wednesday. ​Six of nine planetary boundaries – climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, synthetic chemicals including plastics, freshwater depletion, and nitrogen use – are already
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Neutrinos are abundant subatomic particles that have a crucial role in the composition of the Universe. Initially considered massless, these barely-detectable particles ought to weigh something according to updated theories. Exactly what that measurement is has yet to be determined experimentally. An international team of scientists has come up with a new way to solving
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Now officially known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), ‘UFOs’ have certainly long captivated our curiosity. NASA commissioned a study team in 2022 to investigate such hard-to-easily-classify reports, and tomorrow they’re revealing the highly anticipated findings at a media briefing. The scarcity of high-quality observations of UAPs – defined as objects in the sky that are
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For nearly fifty years, mathematicians have puzzled over a deceptively simple question: how small can you make a Möbius strip without it intersecting itself? Now, Richard Schwartz, a mathematician at Brown University, has proposed an elegant solution to this problem, which was originally posed by mathematicians Charles Weaver and Benjamin Halpern in 1977. In their
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Ever since 1911, when British mycologist Michael Cressé Potter noticed that brewer’s yeast generated electricity, scientists have been trying to harness the power of microbial fuel cells. But the efficiencies of tiny, budding ‘bioreactors’ have been too low for practical use. What’s more, it turns out microbes can be surprisingly picky in what substrates they
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In an effort to create robots capable of controlling their own life-cycles, researchers have developed squishy little devices that can melt themselves into a puddle of goo. “We have mimicked death in a life cycle where the robot could end itself,” Seoul National University engineer Min-Ha Oh told Peter Grad at Tech Xplore. This ‘death’
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You’re running, but you’re not going anywhere. You’re falling, but you never hit the ground. You’re watching your loved one waste away, but there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re like most people, then you might be covered in a cold sweat by now, recalling a nightmare. Though our dreams are highly personal,
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There are several perfectly good reasons why water isn’t a popular medium for calligraphers to write in. Constantly shifting and swirling, it doesn’t take long for ink to diffuse and flow out of formation. An ingenious ‘pen’ developed by the researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany,
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Forty years ago this month the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a grim report warning us of the coming perils if we did not act on climate change. “Agricultural conditions will be significantly altered, environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted, and political institutions stressed,” they predicted in a report published in September, 1983. After