Limestone might not be the only source for Portland cement. Cement production alone currently accounts for about 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, so considerable effort is going into lowering that number. Efficiency can be increased, and energy sources can be swapped for cleaner ones, but a stubborn reality…
The vacuum giveth, the vacuum taketh, but the vacuum doesn’t let you taketh. This week, a company called Casimir Inc. emerged from “stealth mode” to announce that it had raised significant funding from venture capitalists willing to roll the dice on free energy. That’s right: a startup has gotten…
SpaceX’s upgraded Starship is set to launch on its first test flight as soon as Tuesday, May 19. Welcome to Edition 8.41 of the Rocket Report! The stories of the world’s two most powerful rockets are now intertwined. Hardware for NASA’s third Space Launch System rocket is coming together…
Study suggests “the bias is real but socially constructed, rather than grounded in how women actually sound.” Vocal fry, aka “creaky voice,” is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to…
Ocean heat plus human-caused global warming is a grim recipe for deadly climate extremes. Scientists said this week that a developing El Niño is likely to amplify heatwaves, droughts and floods this year, but warned that the long-term warming caused by burning fossil fuels remains the main driver of…
Distinct form of tooth protein in Homo erectus shows up in Denisovans—and us. Humanity’s ancestry has grown far clearer thanks to our ability to obtain ancient DNA. We now know that, as humans left Africa, they interbred with the groups they met there, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Evidence from the…
The type of bar matters when it comes to how it bends and recoils, but why is still a mystery. Olympic weightlifting consists of three basic movements performed on a barbell: the snatch, the clean, and the jerk (with the latter two executed in combination). At such an elite…
“Every time I go to the dentist, I think about that guy,” researcher says. The world’s first dentist was a Neanderthal, according to a recent study. 59,000 years ago in what’s now southwestern Siberia, a Neanderthal had a toothache. It must have been a doozy because they were desperate…
Early galaxy has elements produced by the Universe’s first supernovae. For decades, astronomers looking through telescopes like Hubble have been trying to catch a glimpse of the ancient epoch when the Universe’s first generation of stars ignited. But the small galaxies that were the building blocks of the cosmos…
SpaceX cleared an important milestone Monday on the road to launching a new version of Starship. For the third time in three years, SpaceX has stacked a new version of its enormous Starship rocket on a launch pad in South Texas, just a few miles north of the US-Mexico…
