At the same time, in many African countries, solar power now stands to offer much more than environmental benefits. About 600 million Africans lack reliable access to electricity; in Nigeria specifically, almost half of the 230 million people have no access to electricity grids. Today, solar has become cheap and versatile enough to help bring ..
Tag : Science
Once his team nailed how droplets become electrically charged and how the micro-lightning phenomenon works, they recreated the Miller-Urey experiment. Only without the spark plugs. Ingredients of life After micro-lightnings started jumping between droplets in a mixture of gases similar to that used by Miller and Urey, the team examined their chemical composition with a ..
The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with—like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of ..
There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gases regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, ..
The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago, and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon’s size, ..
Wiltschko and her students have now examined more than 20 languages, and every one of them uses little words for negotiations like these. “I haven’t found a language that doesn’t do these three general things: what I know, what I think you know and turn-taking,” she says. They are key to regulating conversations, she adds: ..
The answer lies in how quickly body size evolves. We found that birds and mammals that reached large sizes more rapidly have reduced cancer prevalence. For example, the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis evolved to reach its large body size—along with most other whales and dolphins (referred to as cetaceans) about three times faster than other ..
On Tuesday, the team behind the plan to bring mammoth-like animals back to the tundra announced the creation of what it is calling wooly mice, which have long fur reminiscent of the woolly mammoth. The long fur was created through the simultaneous editing of as many as seven genes, all with a known connection to ..
There’s little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little ..
Burning droplets bounce back. Credit: Zulu et al., 2025 Burning droplets bounce back. Credit: Zulu et al., 2025 Droplets bouncing off surfaces are an everyday phenomenon, like raindrops bouncing off lotus leaves or water drops sizzling in a hot pan, levitating and sliding around—aka the Leidenfrost effect. There is also an inverse Leidenfrost effect, first ..
