Nature explains an artificial-intelligence breakthrough, with a computer that’s learned how to win at the complicated Asian game of go without studying the strategies and past… Read the rest “An AI has learned to play go… without being taught by humans.”
But, The Guardian says, we don’t have to worry about death by 8.5 tons of space junk – probably:
… Read the rest “Tiangong-1 is falling to Earth.”China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come
Popular Science wants to help you break the smartphone habit:
… Read the rest “Stop your smartphone from hijacking your brain.”“When we let ourselves space out and let our minds wander,” [Manoush] Zomordoi writes, “we do our most original thinking and
New Scientist reviews research that shows the first governments weren’t born as a consequence of agriculture. Instead, they might have had more to do with hunger, fear, and the threat… Read the rest “The birth of city-states (and government itself) didn’t happen like we thought.”
Teeny tiny critters, hanging out in the water. They’ve got cilia in a circle, waving around their tops as if they were wheels, spinning.
A glimpse of the microscopic… Read the rest “Science Art: Plate C from The rotifera; or, Wheel-animalcules, both British and foreign, 1889”
Science News reports on studies that find the parts of your brain in charge of navigation never rests, even when you’re asleep:
… Read the rest “Your brain’s mapmaker never, ever sleeps.”Nestled in a part of the brain called the medial entorhinal
Nature has more on Navajo leaders – in charge of the second-largest Native American group in the U.S. – possibly ending 15 years of forbidding genetic studies on their people… Read the rest “Navajo nation might just let geneticists study them after all.”
The USGS Earth Explorer program shared these before-and-after pictures of Puerto Rico. The main difference that’s visible from the Landsat 8 satellite… Read the rest “Science Art: Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, by Landsat 8”
NextBigFuture bigs up the Rice University researchers who added a pinch of asphalt and graphene to their batteries to create a high-capacity power source that that charges up 20 times faster… Read the rest “Battery charging got 20 times faster – by adding asphalt.”
Nature is following the geologists who are tracking, for the first time, the impressive number of – and factors involved in –earthquakes believed to be caused by human activity… Read the rest “Human-triggered earthquakes – how do we know?”
Nature, reporting on the effects of droughts and logging, reveals that the world’s jungles are now producing more CO2 than they’re socking away out of the atmosphere:
… Read the rest “Tropical rainforests have become carbon *producers*, not carbon sinks.”Whereas
I was going to post something else here, but then I saw this on nemfrog this morning and had to share.
It’s the Elephant-Headed Boy (Puer Capite Elephantino) and the Horned Infant (Infans… Read the rest “Science Art: Puer Capite Elephantino…. from Gaspar Schott, 1662.”
New Scientist reports with hope for celiac-disease sufferers on a new breed of wheat that’s genetically modified not to produce inflammation-causing gluten:
… Read the rest “GMO wheat is gluten free. (Hard choices, right?)”Gluten is the general
National Geographic (after Nature) introduces us to a brand new mammal species – or new to us, anyway – that tumbled out of a tree in the Solomon Islands. This is the once-mythical,… Read the rest “Welcome, giant coconut rat. Nice to meet you!”
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