Government bid to delay air pollution plan fails

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Air pollution has been described as a "public health emergency" The UK Government has lost a court bid to delay publication of its air pollution strategy, and must now release it before the June election. Courts had given the government until Monday 24 April to set out draft guidelines to tackle illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution. But late last week, ministers lodged an application...

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Most scientific studies only use male subjects. Here's why that's a terrible idea.

“Pigeons, or rock doves as people call them to be fancy, are fascinating creatures,” said Rebecca Calisi, a professor of neurobiology, physiology, and behavior at the University of California, Davis. “An average person might view them as common or boring or as pests, but pigeons have been unlocking secrets about biology and reproduction for centuries. Charles Darwin even kept pigeons and was, in part, inspired by them.” Calisi is a co-author on a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports which looked at differences in the genetic expressions...

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New research on eyeballs just might lead to a jet lag cure

Your biological clock is probably the most reliable machinery in your body: it runs 24-7 to regulate vital functions from sleep to metabolism and remains stubbornly steadfast when you fly across time zones. Scientists still don’t know exactly how this this internal clock works. But now researchers have identified a missing gear __that could offer a cure for jet lag. A recent study published in the Journal of Physiology discovered a new group of cells in the retina __that send signals about light changes from the eye to the brain. These cells produce...

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Language is training artificial intelligence to replicate human bias

Language is all about repetition. Every word you’re reading was created by humans, and then used by other humans, creating and reinforcing context, meaning, the very nature of language. As humans train machines to understand language, they’re teaching machines to replicate human bias. “The main scientific findings __that we’re able to show and prove are __that language reflects biases,” said Aylin Caliskan of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. “If AI is trained on human language, then it’s going to necessarily imbibe...

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Warning: Do NOT get into a breath-holding contest with a naked mole rat

“We had hints __that naked mole rats might be rock stars at surviving oxygen deprivation,” said Thomas Park, a biologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That's why he stuck a bunch of naked mole rats in a chamber with only five percent oxygen. As a point of comparison, the atmosphere at sea level is about 21 percent oxygen. The atmosphere at the top of Mount Everest is around six percent. The results of his experiment were published today in the journal Science, and they're pretty wild. “There's nothing special about five percent except...

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A river in Canada just turned to piracy because of global warming

A river in Canada just became a victim of piracy. River piracy. Yes, one river straight-up stole another river’s water, with a swashbuckling assist from a melting glacier and the unique landscape of the area deep in the Yukon. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience geomorphologists describe how the Slims river—which normally flows north—was abruptly cut off from its water supply. Now all __that water feeds a totally different river—the Kaskawulsh—which flows south. The researchers didn’t expect to observe a case of river piracy when they went...

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Unknown ancient reptile roamed the Pyrenees mountains

Image copyright Óscar Sanisidro / Institut Català de Paleontologia Image caption Artistic reconstruction of an archosauromorph The footprints of a mysterious reptile __that lived about 250 million years ago have been identified in fossils from the Pyrenees mountains. Scientists say the new species is a member of the group __that gave rise to crocodiles and dinosaurs. The reptile lived at a time when the Earth was recovering from a...

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Hundreds of icebergs are suddenly invading shipping lanes

There is a swarm of about 481 icebergs parked in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic right now, creating a hazardous area so treacherous __that ships are having to detour 400 nautical miles out of their way to avoid the Titanic’s infamous fate. The number of icebergs is unusual not only because of the large number but also because of the speed at which the icebergs gathered, and strange timing, early in the year. “As of March 27 we had only tracked 37 icebergs into the transatlantic shipping lanes in the 2017 ice season. One week later, on...

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As mountains grow, they drive the evolution of new species

Mountains aren't just beautiful: these locales also tend to host some of the richest diversity of species on the planet. We’ve known this for a long time—ever since Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian geographer and naturalist, first climbed up the Andes in the 18th century. But nobody has really figured out why. One popular hypothesis goes like this: the reason why mountains have so many different species is that, as mountains are uplifted by colliding tectonic plates, the process creates more environments, and therefore more opportunities for...

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How to make the best protest sign

On April 22, scientists, science-lovers, and at least one official Science Guy will be gathering in Washington, D.C. for the March for Science. A week later, on April 29, the People's Climate Movement will march in favor of action against climate change. If you plan to attend either event, you’ll want to voice your support for science. And __that means designing the perfect sign. Bigger is better, of course. Bold letters and ample surface area are key. Then there's carrying it. At marches in DC, sticks are forbidden for safety reasons, which means...

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Frankenviruses may have gobbled up host cells in order to grow

From the German-ish setting of Mel Brook’s 1974 cult classic Young Frankenstein to the discovery site of four new supersized viruses in an Austrian wastewater treatment facility, Eastern Europe seems to be positively teeming with entities __that push the boundary of what it means to be aliiiiiveeeee! Viruses are kind of a biological black box. We can’t agree on whether or not they’re alive. We aren’t super certain how they evolved. And we can’t even see them under a light microscope, let alone with our unaided eyes. In fact, you’d have to corral...

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There’s a treasure trove on the seafloor—and that could be a bad thing

Rare minerals might not sound as exciting as sunken treasure to you, but to the mining industry those materials could be literally more valuable than gold. And there are few regulations in place yet to stop deep sea mining from destroying the seafloor. Right now the bottom of the ocean's first line of defense is the International Seabed Authority (not to be confused with the International Waterbed Authority, which dissolved back in the late ‘90s). They’ve been working on the issue since they were first formed by the 1982 United Nations Convention...

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A forensic stabbing machine, a trio of solar flares, and other amazing images of the week

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Saturn moon 'able to support life'

Image copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI Image caption Easy to sample: Jets of water spew from the south pole of Enceladus. Saturn's ice-crusted moon Enceladus may now be the single best place to go to look for life beyond Earth. The assessment comes on the heels of new observations at the 500km-wide world made by the Cassini probe. It has flown through and sampled the waters from a subsurface ocean __that is being jetted into space....

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Violent end as young stars dramatically collide

Image copyright ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), J. Bally/H. Drass et al. Image caption These dramatic images show the remains of a 500-year-old explosion from the birth of a group of massive stars Scientists have captured a dramatic and violent image of the collision between two young stars __that tore apart their stellar nursery. Located in the constellation of Orion, the explosive event happened some 500 years ago sending giant streamers...

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The 10 best science images, videos, and visualizations of the year

We are all too aware of how hard it can be to explain science. Describing concepts, theories, processes, and phenomena use up a lot of words—and even after careful consideration those words can fall short. That's why for the last three years Popular Science has teamed up with the National Science Foundation to honor the best science visualizations out there. As part of this year's Vizzies, we're highlighting an intricate illustration of brain neurons and a visual explainer of humming bird tongues. We're celebrating a lexicon of American Sign Language...

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Fertilizer has saved billions of lives, but it also has a dark side

The following is an excerpt from "Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong" by Paul A. Offit. We’re not __that complicated. Although we come in different shapes and sizes, heights and weights, and backgrounds and temperaments, and although we have different genes __that make different proteins and different enzymes, we all boil down to four essential elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. If any one of these elements becomes unavailable, our time on earth will end. Three of the four elements are easily obtained. Hydrogen comes...

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Bill Nye is going to march on Washington

Bill Nye, star of the megahit "Science Guy" television show of the 90s, announced his public support of the March for Science in a blog post on Thursday. The April 22 march is billed as a call for the world to support and safeguard science in light of recent policy changes disrupting research at the Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, NASA, and more. The event will include a teach-in and rally on the National Mall followed by a march through the streets of D.C. Nye, whose new Netflix series will drop the day before...

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This graphene filter could make it cheaper to drink seawater

A new study released earlier this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology may be a major step towards making desalinated water—water in which salt is removed to make it safe for drinking—a viable option for more of the world. Researchers from the University of Manchester modified graphene oxide membranes, a type of selectively permeable membrane __that allows some molecules to pass while keeping others behind, to let water through while trapping salt ions. It's essentially a molecular sieve. Finding new sources of fresh water is important, because...

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Even our ancient ancestors had to deal with bed bugs

For about as long as humans have been living in places, bed bugs have been infesting them. In a new study in Journal of Medical Entomology, researchers present evidence of the oldest bed bug ancestors ever uncovered: tiny fragments of insidious insects from some 5,000 to 11,000 years ago. Cimex lectularius and Cimex hemipterus, the species __that haunt our nightmares (and sometimes, if we're really unlucky, our apartments) are thought to have split from their close relatives at least 98,000 years ago—perhaps even before modern humans hit the scene...

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What is climate change?

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionMatt McGrath explains why we should care about climate change BBC News looks at what we know and don't know about the Earth's changing climate. What is climate change? The planet's climate has constantly been changing over geological time. The global average temperature today is about 15C, though geological evidence suggests it has been much higher...

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