Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered have been in relatively tight orbits around their host stars, allowing us to track them as they repeatedly loop around them. But we’ve also discovered a handful of planets through a phenomenon that’s called microlensing. This occurs when a planet passes between the line of sight between Earth and ..
Tag : Science
On Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued a now familiar order: because of a supposed energy emergency, a coal plant scheduled for closure would be forced to remain open. This time, the order targeted one of the three units present at Craig Station in Colorado, which was scheduled to close at the end ..
The US has adopted more of a middle ground approach, essentially letting private companies decide what they wanted to do. Daymude and his co-authors wanted to investigate these markedly different approaches. So they developed a computational agent-based simulation that modeled how individuals navigate between wanting to express dissent versus fear of punishment. The model also ..
The case regarding cancelled grants moved relatively quickly. By June, a District Court judge declared that the federal policy “represents racial discrimination” and issued a preliminary order that would have seen all the cancelled grants restored. In his written opinion, Judge William Young noted that the government had issued its directives blocking DEI support without ..
The authors, Mark Butler, Donald Behringer, and Jason Schratwieser, hypothesized that these solution holes represent an ecological trap. The older lobsters that find shelter in a solution hole would emit the chemicals that draw younger ones to congregate with them. But the youngsters would then fall prey to any groupers that inhabit the same solution ..
Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it ..
The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used ..
But the ones that are about nature, about natural disasters, are based on very keen observations and repeated observations of the landscape. They also can contain details that are recognizable to scientists who study earthquakes or volcanoes. The scientists then realized that there had to be, in some cases, eyewitness accounts of these geomyths. Geomythology ..
Gamwell sees echoes of Mitchell’s dark stars, for instance, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” particularly the evocative 1919 illustration by Harry Clarke. “This seemed to have been an early analogy to a black hole for many people when the concept was first proposed,” said Gamwell. “It’s a mathematical construct ..
Not just a seasonal gig Frankly, what’s most interesting about the paper isn’t those three fundamental categories, but the personalized glimpses it gives of the people who choose to become professional Santas. While a few Santas might make six figures, most do not, and may even lose money being Santa—they do it anyway for the ..
