Martin Aircraft in New Zealand built the prototype that’s closest to allowing you to jet to work. A fan-propelled, rotary-engine-powered jetpack with 200 horsepower, the Martin Jetpack (not pictured) keeps steady altitude even if riders’ hands leave the controls for a sip of coffee. “It’s ridiculously easy to fly,” says Mike Read, VP of sales at Martin. Its range? Thirty miles. Martin plans for the military to test it before consumers whiz it around. Want to know if your fantasy invention could become a reality? Tweet @PopSci or tell us on Facebook....
For thousands of years, explorers have navigated by following the natural world: the sun, stars, prevailing winds, and even moss. Common wisdom says __that moss grows only on the north side of trees, which means you can use it to find your bearings if you’re lost in the woods. This is generally true, says Caitlin Fong, an ecologist at California State University in Northridge. To thrive, moss requires damp and shady environments __that prevent it from drying out. And as you move north, away from the equator, the sun’s rays strike Earth at a southern...
Image caption The illegal trade in ivory has seen elephant numbers plummet Elephant populations in Africa have declined by around 111,000 over the past 10 years according to a new study. The African Elephant Status report says __that poaching is the main driver of the fall, the worst losses in 25 years. However the authors say __that long-term issues such as the loss of habitat also pose a significant threat. The report has been...
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The tusks of some 6,700 elephants have been piled in pyramids ready to be set alight on Saturday The largest ever pile of ivory will be set alight in Kenya on Saturday. But will it actually burn? The fire will be seven times bigger than any previous ivory fires - 105 tonnes of tusks have been piled in pyramids, some three metres high (10 feet). The idea is __that this will help tackle the illegal...
Yeah. No. Not going to happen. To instantaneously transport across space, our bodies would need to convert to energy and back without mishap. Even if we combined the storages of every computer available today, __that would hold just a fraction of the data for one human, says Caltech physicist Philip Hopkins. The energy isn’t anything to scoff at either. He says, “It’d be like launching all of the U.S.’s and Russia’s nukes in one spot and trying to contain that.” Want to know if your fantasy invention could become a reality? Tweet @PopSci or...
Image copyright Markus Vareavuo/naturepl.com Image caption Species __that migrate huge distances - such as the swallow were included in the research Migrating birds are arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, a study has found. Birds have reached their summer breeding grounds on average about one day earlier per degree of increasing global temperatures, according to the research by Edinburgh University....
Image caption The number of bumblebees in parts of Somerset dropped by 85% Bumblebees and butterflies have seen their numbers plummet after another year of unsettled weather, according to a National Trust study. The 10th annual wildlife report from the trust said mild winters and bad weather in summer created bad conditions for small plants. But whilst insects suffered, grass growth rose, meaning a good year for livestock farmers....
Today we remember Carrie Fisher. In a decades-long career she left many indelible marks, but none so great as her portrayal of Princess Leia in Star Wars. She filmed the first movie at age 19 and died on Tuesday morning at age 60, having just completed filming on her fifth Star Wars movie. Fisher’s Princess Leia was—like the rest of the Star Wars franchise—an inspiration to countless young science geeks. Here was a world filled with heroes and explorers, flying spaceships to unknown worlds and battling evil wherever they went. And it all depended...
Image copyright ZSL Image caption Protected parks and reserves for cheetahs are not sufficient as the animal ranges far beyond these areas The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers. The report estimates __that there are just 7,100 of the world's fastest mammals now left in the wild. Cheetahs are in trouble because they range far beyond protected areas and are coming...
Image copyright University of Maine/ ClimateReanalyzer.org Image caption Temperatures on Christmas Eve at the North Pole could reach close to freezing on Christmas Eve 2016 Temperatures at the North Pole could be up to 20 degrees higher than average this Christmas Eve, in what scientists say is a record-breaking heatwave. Climate scientists say these unseasonably warm weather patterns in the Arctic region are directly linked to man-made...
Image copyright Thinkstock There is likely to be about 10,500 cu km of Arctic sea-ice by the end of the week - a volume __that would tie for the lowest on record for a November. It is another indicator of just how warm conditions in the polar north have been of late. Temperatures of -5C have been logged when -25C would be the norm. Ice extent - the two-dimensional measure of frozen ocean surface - is also well down, running currently at just...
Cindy Lee Van Dover holds membership in a most exclusive boy’s club: Of the 42 gearheads, engineers, and former Navy commanders who have piloted the submersible Alvin—the stubby, cramped, three-crew midget research sub __that discovered the Titanic—she is the first and only woman. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says, “was to become an Alvin pilot.” It’s a feat __that takes months of training, learning the arcane language of check valves, autoclaves, ballast systems, oxygen monitors, electrical systems, and a Rube-Goldberg system...
You might not expect an oceanographer to be high on NASA’s speed dial, but when the space agency needed help mounting a mission to Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, it called one: Chris German. Ever since the geochemist found hydrothermal vents teeming with life in the Atlantic Ocean in 1997, he’s been an Indiana Jones in the search for vents, creatures, and the origins of life. A senior scientist at Woods Hole, German was among the first to use programmable underwater robots to explore the seafloor. The skill to operate them in difficult conditions—15,000...
Colin Devey launched his deep-dive career on land, studying a 66-million-year-old lava flow __that once covered half of India. But a year later, in 1987, he found himself on a research cruise to Tahiti, joining a bunch of fellow volcanologists and geochemists looking for volcanic rocks on the ocean floor. Though hard to see down there, he found the geology simple. “The continents are complicated because they’ve been around for billions of years and they’re messed up,” Devey says, “like a billboard covered in 150 advertisements. The oceans are like...
Image copyright Mark Witton/National Museums Scotland Image caption Artist's impression of how the animals might have looked Fossils of what may be the earliest four-legged backboned animals to walk on land have been discovered in Scotland. The lizard-like creatures lived about 355 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals emerged from swamps. The discovery plugs a 15 million-year gap in the fossil...
Image copyright Yu Chen Image caption The young ate meat while adults dined on plants Some dinosaurs lost their teeth as they grew up, according to fossil evidence. The hatchlings ate meat with their teeth, then used beaks to peck at plants as adults, say scientists. The discovery is a surprise and has not been seen in any other reptile. Limusaurus inextricabilis lived in China around 150 million years ago. The first fossilised remains...
The Office of Managment and Budget might seem like a less prominent position than, for example, the head of the EPA or the Department of Energy, but it’s a vitally important job. From the OMB’s website: The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the...
Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption When a connection between two nerve cells is busy, it gets stronger Three British researchers have won a prize worth one million euros, awarded each year for an "outstanding contribution to European neuroscience". Tim Bliss, Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris revealed how strengthened connections between brain cells can store our memories. Our present understanding of memory...
Image copyright UC Berkeley Direct recordings have revealed what is happening in our brains as we make sense of speech in a noisy room. Focusing on one conversation in a loud, distracting environment is called "the cocktail party effect". It is a common festive phenomenon and of interest to researchers seeking to improve speech recognition technology. Neuroscientists recorded from people's brains during a test __that recreated the moment...
Before humans travel to another planet—and __that day may be coming soon—a question will need to be answered: How will astronauts spend their time on a months- or years-long interplanetary voyage? In the movie Passengers, which hits theaters today, more than 5,000 people board the starship Avalon on a 120-year journey to a new world called Homestead II. Prior to launch they each enter a “hibernation pod,” which, through drugs and environmental controls, puts them into a suspended animation. Essentially, they're meant to sleep through all but four...
10,000 years ago, early humans were doing more than just gathering plants. They were putting them in pots. Not to grow indoors—the ubiquitous office ficus wouldn’t be around for thousands of years—but to grind up, cook, and eat. The ficuses found at one of the two Libyan Saharan archaeological sites were of a more ancient form, preserved alongside the pottery they were prepared in. Scientists have long known __that humans used pottery to cook animal products, but this new finding suggests __that early humans relied much more on plant nutrition...
Image copyright AFP / Getty Images Image caption Exxon Mobil chief Rex Tillerson has been appointed as the next US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of state, runs the world's most valuable, publicly traded oil company. The 64-year-old, Texas-born head of Exxon Mobil has worked for the company in the US, Yemen and Russia, and is known for his close ties with Russian President...
Image copyright ESA Image caption Artwork: A depiction of where the jet is moving - in the outer core. The Swarm satellites fly a few hundred km above the planet and sense its magnetic field Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core. They describe it as a kind of "jet stream" - a fast-flowing river of liquid iron __that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia. The moving mass...
A drum-based game of telephone has revealed how rhythm might have taken shape in human music. When people tried to imitate random drumming sequences and pass them on to new listeners, mistakes added up and transformed the patterns, scientists reported Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. Over time, the random noises become more structured and easier to learn, emulating how real music might have evolved. “Things __that are evolving culturally adapt to the brains of the people who are passing __that culture on,” says coauthor Simon Kirby,...
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