Ants carry lactic and acetic acid bacteria that help coagulate milk, as well as formic acid to acidify it. Fermenting milk to make yogurt, cheeses, or kefir is an ancient practice, and different cultures have their own traditional methods, often preserved in oral histories. The forests of Bulgaria and…
School buses are usually parked when the grid is under its biggest strain. The largest electric utility in Illinois is rolling out a program for a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electric school bus-charging pilot with three Chicagoland school districts, testing the functionality of bidirectional chargers that could make energy cheaper for…
“We fully intend to recover the New Glenn first stage on this next launch.” There’s a good bit riding on the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Most directly, the fate of a NASA science mission to study Mars’s upper atmosphere hinges on a successful launch. The…
Rodney Brooks says humanoid robots pose hidden safety challenges and won’t learn dexterity from video alone. When a robotics pioneer who has spent decades building humanoid machines recommends that you stand at least nine feet away from any full-size walking robot, you should probably listen. “My advice to people…
Who needs peer review? Plan offers easier grants to schools that agree to limits. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration had offered nine schools a deal: manage your universities in a way that aligns with administration priorities and get “substantial and meaningful federal grants,”…
Goodall’s immersive studies of chimpanzees in Africa redefined what it means to be human. Legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, whose immersive field research living among chimpanzees in the 1960s essentially redefined the relationship between humans and animals, has died at the age of 91. According to the Jane Goodall Institute…
The end of the EV tax credit in the US on September 30 helped spur sales. This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery numbers for the third quarter of the year. We’ve heard the same story for a while, one of diminishing sales as customers tire of a…
Smishers looking for new infrastructure are getting creative. Scammers have been abusing unsecured cellular routers used in industrial settings to blast SMS-based phishing messages in campaigns that have been ongoing since 2023, researchers said. The routers, manufactured by China-based Milesight IoT Co., Ltd., are rugged Internet of Things devices…
Giant sloths are extinct in part because they were tasty and nutritious. The extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna may be people’s fault after all, according to a recent study. A team of archaeologists recently examined animal bones at sites dating to the waning years of the last Ice Age. Their…
xAI’s claim that Apple gave ChatGPT a monopoly on prompts is “baseless,” OpenAI says. OpenAI and Apple have moved to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s xAI alleging that ChatGPT’s integration into a “handful” of iPhone features violated antitrust laws by giving OpenAI a monopoly on prompts and Apple…
