Science

Touch both objects. They’re the same temperature, but the wood feels warmer, right? Why is that? It’s not about temperature but thermal energy. When your hand touches an object, there is a heat conduction interaction. Energy is transferred from your warmer hand to the cooler object until the two are …

The China National Space Administration has shared the first image from its Tianwen-2 probe, which is en route to Kamo’oalewa, a near-Earth asteroid. The image was captured by a camera onboard the probe, which is currently more than 3 million kilometers from Earth, and shows one of its wings with …

US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jan Schakowsky on Thursday sent letters to the two potential buyers of troubled genetic testing firm 23andMe demanding details about consumer data privacy should either of them acquire the company. Signed by 20 other Democratic members of Congress, the letters were sent to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals …

The US Environmental Protection Agency moved to roll back emissions standards for power plants, the second-largest source of CO2 emissions in the country, on Wednesday, claiming that the American power sector does not “contribute significantly” to air pollution. “The bottom line is that the EPA is trying to get out …

There may not yet be telescopes capable of unlocking all the secrets of supermassive black holes, but AI is now on the case. Recently, an international team of astronomers successfully trained a neural network with millions of black hole simulations to allow it to interpret fuzzy data captured from these …

“I think it’s the right policy, for us to take a national standard,” they said. While the intent of the AI moratorium may not have been to regulate physical infrastructure, the reaction from Massie illustrates just how much of a hot-button issue data centers are becoming across the country. The …

A 2014 study by the US military has also found that exposure to tear gas and pepper spray make people vulnerable to respiratory infections in the week following exposure compared with the week before exposure. Army recruits exposed to CS tear gas just once during basic training had a much …

A new Covid variant is being kept under surveillance by the World Health Organization (WHO) as its emergence has led to an increase in infections in several regions of the world. First identified at the end of January, the variant—called NB.1.8.1 but known informally as “Nimbus”—is a descendant of the …

Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft …