The online encyclopedia now holds more than seven million articles and has become a standard guide for anyone seeking information. The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization in San Francisco, California, runs the project with about 700 employees, but Wikipedia still relies entirely on unpaid volunteers to write and edit its articles: hundreds of thousands of people contribute to the site each month, under a set of community-developed rules to deal with disagreements, cut down self-promotion and generate consensus.
In the U.S., more than 8 percent of all visits to a health care provider in the week that ended December 27 were for respiratory illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's the highest rate the agency has recorded since it began keeping track in 1997. According to the CDC, so far this season the flu has contributed to an estimated 120,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, including nine children.
Funes could learn languages and recite books from memory. Recalling a single day took him an entire day, as every detail accumulated itself in his mind in its most meticulous insignificance. The poor wretch saw this as a gift, but as his story unfolds, it reveals itself more as a curse, for remembering in such detail prevented him from distinguishing the essential from the superfluous.
We don't merely have the Hubble tension to reckon with, or the fact that different methods yield different values for the expansion rate of the Universe today, but a puzzle over whether dark energy is truly a constant in our Universe, as most physicists have assumed since its discovery back in 1998. While "early relic" methods using CMB or baryon acoustic oscillation data favor a lower value of around 67 km/s/Mpc, "distance ladder" methods instead prefer a higher, incompatible value of around 73 km/s/Mpc.
Shakespeare wrote in his play As You Like It that we humans go through seven ages. The first is the "infant mewling and puking"; next "the whining schoolboy"; then "the lover sighing like a furnace", followed by the soldier "full of strange oaths, seeking the bubble reputation"; then "the justice in fair round belly"; the sixth age is "with spectacles on nose"; and finally there's "second childishness".
Your stargazing experience can differ greatly based on where you are in the world. That's due in part to light pollution, which can drown out all but the brightest stars and satellites in densely populated areas. For truly unforgettable celestial views, you'll need to visit one of the darkest places in the U.S. on a clear night. DarkSky is an Arizona-based nonprofit with the mission "to restore the nighttime environment and protect communities and wildlife from light pollution."
This spectacular book of photographs of the Universe is dedicated to the late astronomer and broadcaster Patrick Moore, who introduced the authors to one another. Astrophysicist Derek Ward-Thompson, rock guitarist Brian May - who also holds a PhD in astrophysics - and astrophotographer J.-P. Metsävainio showcase some of the "billions of vast glowing islands in the immensity of what seems like infinite space and time". Several of the photos appear in adjacent pairs, visible in 3D with a stereo-focusing viewer.
For many of us humans, old trees - gnarled oaks or towering redwoods - are sources of psychological comfort. As elders who have weathered earlier times of crisis, they signify continuity and resilience. Their rings bridge present and past and remind us that our "now" is only one of many. But for longer-distance time travel, we must seek out even more ancient ancestors. The ones with the longest memories, full of insights germane to our Anthropocene anxieties, are right here in our midst:
You may have a leg up on the child prodigies who made you feel inadequate as a school kid. Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines - including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians - found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood.
I think the first thing to remember is: We are right at the beginning of this adventure. There's so much excitement that every little signal - every "wiggle" in a spectrum - gets people saying, "Oh! That might be life!" And then, on the other side, other people respond with, "I don't see enough wiggles, so there's probably not even an atmosphere. Dead planet. Move on." Both reactions are too fast.
Earthquakes usually strike without warning. But sometimes they come in clusters dozens or even hundreds of small quakes concentrated in one area over days or weeks. Geologists call these clusters earthquake swarms, and while they can be unsettling, scientists say they rarely signal that a major quake is imminent. Unlike the familiar pattern of a single large earthquake followed by aftershocks, swarms consist of many small quakes without a clear mainshock.
A global research team has analyzed the prospects for biomineralization on Mars, a process in which bacteria, fungi, and microalgae can create minerals as part of their metabolism, offering a byproduct that could be useful to prospective Martian explorers by providing the raw materials needed to produce aggregates such as concrete. With an extremely thin and mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, air pressure less than 1 percent of Earth's,
Greenland sharks are a biological anomaly. The animals can grow to more than 20 feet long, weigh more than a ton and can live for nearly 400 years, making the species the longest-living vertebrate on the planeta fact that could help unlock secrets to enhancing longevity. And now, in a study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists dial in to one of the Greenland shark's more remarkable features: it has functioning eyes and, more remarkably, maintains its vision well into senescence.
On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth. The robot spotted it in 2024 along the banks of a Martian riverbed and zapped it with an ultraviolet laser. It contained ancient layers of mud, compressed into shale in the 3.5 billion years since the river last coursed across the red planet.
The National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act has been drafted and is expected to be introduced this week after struggling to gain traction in previous years following the original National Quantum Initiative's expiration in late 2023, two people familiar with the matter told Nextgov/FCW. Reintroduced by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Todd Young, R-Ind., the new bill comes as quantum technology, particularly quantum computing, is expected to pose a significant threat to current cryptographic security schemes.
The animals do, however, have neuronsnerve cells that appear interconnected throughout their body. And now a new study shows that how these animals sleep is surprisingly similar to humans, suggesting that sleep may have evolved before even the most primitive brains. The findings, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, also help answer one of science's prevailing mysteries: Why do animals sleep?
Lazuli's design features a 3.1-meter mirror, which would make it larger than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (but smaller than the James Webb Space Telescope). It will also be equipped with a wide-field camera, a broadband integral-field spectrograph, and a coronagraph. Those instruments will be used to study everything from exoplanets to supernovae, but Schmidt Sciences also envisions Lazuli being used for "rapid response" purposes, such as quickly swiveling to gather data on objects spotted by other telescopes.
Researchers have found traces of what appears to be plant-derived poison on tiny stone arrowheads from South Africa dated to 60,000 years ago. The finding pushes back the origin of this revolutionary hunting technology by tens of thousands of years. Scientists have long been fascinated by the development of poisoned hunting weapons. For one thing, they would have seriously leveled up our ancestors' foraging game.
Để chống thấm nhà vệ sinh đạt hiệu quả bền lâu, việc lựa chọn vật liệu phù hợp là yếu tố then chốt. Tùy theo hiện trạng công trình, khu vực thi công và mức độ tiếp xúc nước thường xuyên, các vật liệu như chống thấm gốc xi măng cải tiến, màng chống thấm lỏng, keo polyurethane hoặc giải pháp chống thấm ngược sẽ mang lại hiệu quả khác nhau.
Lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) maintain the specialized lipid compositions of organellar membranes1,2. In humans, many LTPs are implicated in diseases3, but for the majority, the cargo and auxiliary lipids facilitating transfer remain unknown. We have combined biochemical, lipidomic and computational methods to systematically characterize LTP-lipid complexes4 and measure how LTP gains of function affect cellular lipidomes. We identified bound lipids for approximately half of the hundred LTPs analyzed, confirming known ligands, while discovering new ones across most LTP families.
Bumps or grooves of a range of sizes - from the sub-micrometre scales of visible-light wavelengths up to millimetres - affect how a surface scatters light. This can make a material more or less dull, or change its colour when observed from different angles. Molluscs, such as octopuses and cuttlefish, use tiny muscles embedded in their skin to produce these effects for camouflage or communication.
