The Inca Empire hung by a thread—literally. Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to track people, taxes, produce, livestock, and products like woven cloth…
VA Tech experiment was inspired by Death Valley’s mysterious “sailing stones” at Racetrack Playa. Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It’s the latest breakthrough…
Photophoresis can generate a tiny bit of lift without any moving parts. Most people would recognize the device in the image above, although they probably wouldn’t know it by its formal name: the Crookes radiometer. As its name implies, placing the radiometer in light produces a measurable change: the…
The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division will become a political appointee. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants…
“The mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve.” It’s no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter…
Sam Altman says we could soon have “high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces.” OpenAI and its cofounder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers, heightening the rivalry between the two billionaire entrepreneurs. The new venture, called Merge Labs,…
This will be the first national security mission to fly on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. After more than a decade of development and testing, US military officials are finally ready to entrust United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket to haul a batch of national security satellites into space. An…
Anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr. has vilified COVID-19 vaccines and the CDC. Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta are reeling from a deadly shooting that unfolded Friday evening. The shooting left one local police officer dead, at least four agency buildings riddled with bullet…
“Video used to be treated as a source of truth, but that’s no longer an assumption we can make.” It’s easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in…
Gulf of Maine will be site of safety and effectiveness testing. Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer…
