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 ..
Tag : Science
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 ..
For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles. The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the ..
The retirement of the Atlas V and Delta IV led to a period of downsizing for United Launch Alliance, with layoffs and facility closures in Florida, California, Alabama, Colorado, and Texas. In a further sign of ULA’s troubles, SpaceX won a majority of US military launch contracts for the first time last year. Bruno, 64, ..
On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what ..
Some models suggest that clouds (and the convection that gives rise to them) will clump together more with global warming — and produce more rainfall extremes that often far exceed what theory predicts. But other simulations suggest that clouds will congregate less. “There seems to be still possibly a range of answers,” says Allison Wing, ..
“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of the collective,” Matte explains. “They’re shifting from self-investment toward a distributed workforce.” Power of the collective The researchers think the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of societal complexity. The transition from ..
