There were only around 170 million Homo sapiens roaming the earth a little over two millennia ago, at the commencement of the Common Era. Except for the enormous speed bump known as the Black Death, which took away 75 million people worldwide, the global human population has grown dramatically, from 910 million in 1800 to…
A soft robotic hand has finally completed a historic feat: beating Super Mario Bros.’ first level. Although fast pushing and releasing the buttons and directional pad on a Nintendo Entertainment System controller is a fun way to assess the machine’s performance, the actual innovation is in how it was designed. The Mario-playing hand, as well…
While the saying “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” is a piece of thankfulness advice, it also makes a point about how teeth have long been used as a gauge of age and health. Cavities, root canals, and crowns are the most common consequences of poor oral health for most people. However, scientists…
What does Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb have to do with co-founding a $1.755 million scholarly initiative to seek UFOs? Loeb announced the Galileo Project yesterday. It intends to create a network of telescopes powered by artificial intelligence that can look for evidence of technological alien civilizations on or near Earth. Outside scholars have mixed…
This morning, a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket launched from the flat Texas desert. Blue Origin launched the New Shepard model for the 16th time, and the third time this specific rocket and capsule had risen to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, it was the vehicle’s first time transporting passengers, including a paying…
Because we are in the business of preventing bad things from happening, it has been argued that public health succeeds when it is invisible. As a result, there is no such thing as a public health face. We see the face of the individual who got food poisoning, but we don’t see the faces of…
More than 40 million people rely on the water reserves stored by Lake Powell and Lake Mead, two of the biggest reservoirs in the United States, both of which are located along the Colorado River. Water levels in each of these bodies have hit historic lows as the American West continues to suffer from severe…
CRISPR, the gene-editing technique that allows scientists to change DNA with remarkable ease, was discovered almost a decade ago by a couple of biologists. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the Nobel Prize for Physics last year for their work. Scientists all across the world have been looking at how the technique may be utilized…
Getting on a train, bus, or ferry in some places might be a nightmare, yet it’s the only method millions of people have to go around every day. To traverse these oftentimes turbulent networks, you could rely on chance and experience, but if you’re a Google Maps user, you can just turn to the smartphone…
The features of your router make it easier to operate, but they also make it less secure. Thousands of routers have been hacked in recent years using weaknesses in the ubiquitous Universal Plug and Play (UPNP) protocol, which permits communication between devices on a network. Likely, your device is still vulnerable to this and other…