A growing band of digital characters that converse, read faces and track body language is helping humans to communicate better with one another. While virtual helpers that perform practical tasks, such as dealing with customer service issues, are becoming ubiquitous, computer scientist M. Ehsan Hoque is at the forefront of a more emotionally savvy movement. […]
One of the planet’s deadliest viruses makes an annual pass through the United States with little fanfare. It rarely generates flashy headlines or news footage of health workers in hazmat suits. There’s no sudden panic when a sick person shows up coughing and feverish in an emergency room. Yet before next spring, this season’s lethal […]
A gigantic emergency arresting gear system, capable of stopping the largest four-engined jet aircraft without discomfort to passengers, is being developed for the French Ministry of Transportation. The system consists of a nylon net … which engages the aircraft for the full width of its wingspan. Net and airplane are brought to a slow stop […]
Giardia has plagued people for a long time. The parasite can bring about dysentery — a miserable (and occasionally deadly) mixture of diarrhea, cramps and fever. Scientists have now uncovered traces of the giardia parasite in the remains of two roughly 2,600-year-old toilets once used by the wealthy denizens of Jerusalem. The remains are the […]
Some ants have figured out how to keep from getting lost: Build taller anthills. Desert ants that live in the hot, flat salt pans of Tunisia spend their days looking for food. Successful grocery runs can take the insects as far as 1.1 kilometers from their nests. So some of these ants build towering hills […]
Jellyfish have gotten a bad rap. In recent years, concerns about rising jellyfish populations in some parts of the world have mushroomed into headlines like “Meet your new jellyfish overlords.” These floating menaces are taking over the world’s oceans thanks to climate change and ocean acidification, the thinking goes, and soon waters will be filled […]
A new eye on the variable sky just opened. The Zwicky Transient Facility, a robotic camera designed to rapidly scan the sky nightly for objects that move, flash or explode, took its first image on November 1. The camera, mounted on a telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego, succeeds the Palomar Transient Factory. […]
If the universe were a soup, it would be more of a chunky minestrone than a silky-smooth tomato bisque. Sprinkled with matter that clumps together due to the insatiable pull of gravity, the universe is a network of dense galaxy clusters and filaments — the hearty beans and vegetables of the cosmic stew. Meanwhile, relatively […]
On astrophysicists’ charts of star stuff, there’s a substance that still merits the label “here be dragons.” That poorly understood material is found inside neutron stars — the collapsed remnants of once-mighty stars — and is now being mapped out, as scientists better characterize the weird matter. The detection of two colliding neutron stars, announced […]
Galileo’s most famous experiment has taken a trip to outer space. The result? Einstein was right yet again. The experiment confirms a tenet of Einstein’s theory of gravity with greater precision than ever before. According to science lore, Galileo dropped two balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that they fell at the […]