The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge was a spectacular failure. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had offered a US $1 million prize for the team that could design an autonomous ground vehicle capable of completing an off-road course…
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Next-Generation Spacecraft: How Caltech is Making Lightsails a Reality
Can lightsails be the future of deep space exploration? This is what a recent study published in Nature Photonics hopes to address as a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)…
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Worsening Climate “Whiplash” Helps Explain Why California’s Wildfires Were so Ferocious
At long last, the Eaton and Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles are almost fully contained.
It has been more than three weeks since the blazes erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, and now, as I’m writing this on Friday, Jan. 31, they are finally just a percent…
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Auricular Muscles Scientists Thought We Didn’t Use Actually Activate When We Listen Hard
If you can wiggle your ears, you can use the auricular muscles, which helped our distant ancestors listen closely. These muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling sound to the eardrums. Millions of years…
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Hotter cities? Here come the rats
If your city is getting rattier, climate change may be partially to blame.
In an analysis of 16 cities around the world, those that saw the biggest temperature rises over the years also had more rat complaints over time, researchers…
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With generative AI, MIT chemists quickly calculate 3D genomic structures | MIT News
Every cell in your body contains the same genetic sequence, yet each cell expresses only a subset of those genes. These cell-specific gene expression patterns, which ensure that a brain cell is different from a skin cell,…
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Scratching an Itch Promotes Allergic Inflammation, Study Shows
Itch is a dominant symptom in dermatitis (eczema), and scratching promotes cutaneous inflammation, thereby worsening disease. However, the mechanisms through which scratching exacerbates inflammation and whether scratching provides benefit to…
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Do science dioramas still have a place in today’s museums?
At first glance, it’s a simple scene. Six adult bison and a calf mill around a stream. But Matt Davis invites me to look closer. We are at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, where Davis is an exhibition developer. As he shows…
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Aibos in Hospitals, Chinese New Year Robots, and More
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
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Physics – Cooking Flawless Pasta
• Physics 18, 22
Scientists have pinpointed energy-efficient ways to cook al dente pasta and developed an infallible recipe for the perfect cacio e pepe sauce.
Lightman/stock.adobe.com
A bowl of pasta cacio e pepe, a… Continue Reading