Volcanic eruptions in the mid-1340s triggered a chain of events that brought the Black Death to Europe. The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, ultimately wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Scientists have identified the bacterium responsible and its likely origins, but certain specifics of how and why…
Foundations of daily life are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming. As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World…
The Department of the Air Force approves a new home in Florida for SpaceX’s Starship. Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets…
A massive study of political persuasion shows AIs have, at best, a weak effect. Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections. To…
They’re quite a bit cheaper than manufactured nozzles if you can dissect them. Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts. It has produced micro-grippers with pneumatically operated legs taken from dead spiders and walking robots based…
Vaccine trial in the Netherlands hopes to protect against fentanyl-related overdose and death. Just a tiny amount of fentanyl, the equivalent of a few grains of sand, is enough to stop a person’s breathing. The synthetic opioid is tasteless, odorless, and invisible when mixed with other substances, and drug…
Prasad’s arguments “misrepresent both the science and the regulatory record.” On Friday, Vinay Prasad—the Food and Drug Administration’s chief medical and scientific officer and its top vaccine regulator—emailed a stunning memo to staff that quickly leaked to the press. Without evidence, Prasad claimed COVID-19 vaccines have killed 10 children in…
A distinct population that was isolated until the last thousand years or so. The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live there today. But the history of…
A first-in-the-nation heating and cooling network in Massachusetts is set to double in size. The US Department of Energy has approved an $8.6 million grant that will allow the nation’s first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling network to double in size. Gas and electric utility Eversource Energy completed the…
“China’s first rocket recovery attempt achieved its expected technical objectives.” China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher. LandSpace, a decade-old…
