Smartphones have become an integral part of our everyday lives. From work and school to daily tasks, these handheld devices have brought everything into the palm of our hands. Most people spend 5-6 hours on their phones each day. And, given that our phones emit a tiny amount of radiation, we’re exposing ourselves to radiation for hours each day. But different phones emit different amounts of radiation. With the help of data collected by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, we visualize the radiation emissions of some popular smartphones in the market today
In the history of science, perhaps no theory was as revolutionary, both immediately and long-term, as Einstein’s General Relativity. In order to incorporate gravitation into the theory of relativity, an entire new set of developments were required, and Einstein alone was incapable of making them. Instead, it was only through the idea-sharing that took place with the rest of the physics, astronomy, and mathematics community that the final theory came to be
Archaeologists in Southeast Asia have repeatedly stumbled upon excavation sites filled to the brim with large stone jars, many of which have yet to be dated. The artifacts are as mysterious as the communities that left them behind, though current research estimates these ancient craftsmen lived sometime between the late second millennium BC and the early 13th century The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax. Or so the prevailing story goes. Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it
Having specific personality traits might be connected to our risk of developing cognitive problems later on in life, new research suggests – and that in turn might point to better ways of treating issues like dementia
spen Finstad and his team had been here before. The name itself, the Horse Ice Patch, suggested the presence of an ancient mountain pass, even at such a high altitude, nearly 2000 m above sea level. Indeed, they had made one or two finds there already. A 700-year-old medieval horseshoe and a horse legbone. The season of 2019, one with lots of sun, heat and ice melting, was about to come to an end. The team were busy rescuing the last finds from the Lendbreen pass and other sites. The forecast for the next day was really bad weather, and snow. But then their phones beeped
On all cosmic scales in the Universe, from planets to the cosmic web, it’s the gravitational force that determines the structures we get, not the electromagnetic or nuclear forces
The nuclear forces are only short-range, but electromagnetism stretches just as far as gravitation does, and is ridiculously more powerful
This implies the electron and proton have not only equal and opposite charges, but equal and opposite numbers in the Universe. But why is this so
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This past weekend, a couple of my friends and I went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once. I went in knowing two things about it: The first was that the very talented and fantastic Michelle Yeoh was in it; and the second was that it involved the “multiverse.” As the credits rolled, with tears trickling into my mask, I had a hard time discerning what was making me emotional. I say emotional because it wasn’t just one feeling, but a strange mix of several: joy, wistfulness, catharsis, yearning, hope
I was looking at the geology subreddit the other day and someone asked an intriguing question: why aren’t the Himalayas volcanic? They are the largest mountains on the planet and span thousands of miles but nary a volcano can be found. This might seem strange to many people as there are mountain ranges that are full of volcanoes — the Andes and the Cascades for example. Why are they different
In July 1958, an 8.3-magnitude earthquake at the Fairweather Fault rocked Alaska’s southern coast. The ground-shaking event caused a massive landslide at nearby Lituya Bay, which triggered a devastating tsunami that ripped through the narrow body of water and killed five people
A team of researchers from the University of Strathclyde, Clyde Porpoise CIC and CESIMAR–CCT CENPAT-CONICET, has found evidence of a lone dolphin attempting to communicate with porpoises. In their paper published in the journal Bioacoustics, the group describes audio recordings of a dolphin living among porpoises in the Firth of Clyde and what they believe to be its attempts at communication The Ingenuity helicopter has captured a unique bird’s-eye perspective of the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars. During its one-year anniversary flight on April 19, the little chopper took photos of the striped parachute used during Perseverance’s landing — often referred to as “7 minutes of terror” because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars — on February 18, 2021. It also spotted the cone-shaped backshell that helped protect the rover and Ingenuity on the trip from Earth to Mars and during its fiery, plunging descent to the Martian surface
Skywatchers, get set for a storm from the sun — and hopefully an ensuing display of the northern lights. After a dead sunspot hurled a ball of plasma, or superheated gas, toward Earth earlier this week, medium-sized auroras may stretch farther south than usual as Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the material
One meteor traveled quite a long way from home to visit Earth
Researchers discovered the first known interstellar meteor to ever hit Earth, according to a recently released United States Space Command document. An interstellar meteor is a space rock that originates from outside our solar system — a rare occurrence. This one is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it crash-landed along the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea on January 8, 2014
Archaeologists in Southeast Asia have repeatedly stumbled upon excavation sites filled to the brim with large stone jars, many of which have yet to be dated. The artifacts are as mysterious as the communities that left them behind, though current research estimates these ancient craftsmen lived sometime between the late second millennium BC and the early 13th century
Our ability to look at abstract symbols and map them onto sounds is one of the key skills for becoming a competent reader. In the academic world, this is known as phonological processing, and this skill can vary from person to person, with conditions like dyslexia making it more difficult for some
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Consumer genetics and genealogy company Ancestry announced a new feature, called SideView, that will give customers information about which bits of their DNA — and which parts of their ethnicity — were inherited from each parent. The tool can do that without having genetic information from the parents, which Ancestry says is a first in the industry
When temperatures in Antarctica soared to 38 degrees Celsius above normal – around 70 Fahrenheit – in March, a teetering ice shelf the size of Los Angeles collapsed. Scientists don’t know what role the extreme temperatures may have played in the event, but the heat rushed in through what’s known as an atmospheric river, a long plume of moisture that transports warm air and water vapor from the tropics to other parts of the Earth
An enormous comet—approximately 80 miles across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island—is heading our way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than 1 billion miles from the sun, which is slightly farther from Earth than Saturn; that will be in 2031
13.8 billion years ago, what we know as our Universe began with the hot Big Bang. The Universe was filled with matter, antimatter, radiation, and existed in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense, but expanding-and-cooling state. By today, the volume containing our observable Universe has expanded to be 46 billion light years in radius, with the light that’s first arriving at our eyes today corresponding to the limit of what we can measure
If you only look at one “space photo” this year then this one has to be it. Here it is to download—the Sun, our life-giver, in stunning 83-megapixel glory. You can zoom-in like never before to see close-up its filaments and flares. Taken from half way between Earth and the Sun, it was created on March 7, 2022 by the camera onboard the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft
A team of researchers from the University of Strathclyde, Clyde Porpoise CIC and CESIMAR–CCT CENPAT-CONICET, has found evidence of a lone dolphin attempting to communicate with porpoises. In their paper published in the journal Bioacoustics, the group describes audio recordings of a dolphin living among porpoises in the Firth of Clyde and what they believe to be its attempts at communication
A new study has identified patterns of nerve-like electrical activity being produced by fungi. What’s more, patterns within the activity appear to be comparable to similar structures in humans speech
“Brian Falkner said, “We are our memories
This is one of Assistant Professor Fred Hoerndli’s favorite quotes. Hoerndli, a neuroscientist in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, and his lab are celebrating a Cell Reports publication that provides new insights into the intricacies of memory formation and maintenance
Though it may seem like multicellular life dominates Earth, it is a relative newcomer to a planet that single-celled organisms have called home for more than three billion years. Modern humans, whose existence spans a paltry 300,000 years, have long been curious as to how life evolved from these simple organisms, and why
What are the best short stories of all time? How does one measure such a thing? One might look at famous short stories, iconic short stories, but how do we define that? Are the best short stories the stories that have best stood the test of time? If so, what does that mean? Perhaps they are still in every reading list, from middle school English class to postgraduate literary studies. Perhaps the best short stories ever written simply take root in our minds, our hearts, our very souls, demanding that we remember their imagery, their characters, their plots, the way they made us feel
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. But before there were dogs — or even dinosaurs — there were trilobites brutally biting each other on the Cambrian seafloor. New research has revealed that these armored predators didn’t only hunt smaller and weaker animals for food, but would occasionally take bites out of their trilobite comrades of the same species. This finding represents the earliest evidence of cannibalism in the fossil record to date
For the first time in 40 years, Italian Renaissance master Donatello (ca. 1386–1466) has a major solo show—and the curator, Francesco Caglioti, hopes the blockbuster exhibition will help elevate the master sculptor to the level of fame enjoyed by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo
The term ‘microplastic’ was coined just 18 years ago, but already they seem to be just about everywhere. Each year, the average human consumes an estimated 74,000 particles of plastic with unknown health effects. In March of this year, scientists announced they’d found microplastics flowing through our very veins
Graffiti is usually viewed nowadays as a modern scourge, a blight on buildings and highway overpasses in our cities that should be eradicated. However, the urge to leave your mark for posterity is nothing new, as ancient Greek graffiti carved into the Temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt clearly shows
The term ‘microplastic’ was coined just 18 years ago, but already they seem to be just about everywhere. Each year, the average human consumes an estimated 74,000 particles of plastic with unknown health effects. In March of this year, scientists announced they’d found microplastics flowing through our very veins
Shining only ~300 million years after the Big Bang, it may be home to the oldest stars in the universe, or a supermassive black hole. An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has spotted the most distant astronomical object ever: a galaxy.