Month: September 2024

Home Biology Plants & Animals / Ecology December 7, 2018 December 7, 2018 by Lewis Barnett, The Conversation Do you know this downy woodpecker? Credit: Lewis Barnett, CC BY-SA As a birder, I had heard that if you paid careful attention to the head feathers on the downy woodpeckers that visited your bird feeders, you…

ImageNancy Wilson performing in 1964 at the Hollywood Palace in Los Angeles. A forerunner of the modern female empowerment singer, she could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength.CreditCreditABC Photo Archives/ABC, via Getty ImagesNancy Wilson, whose skilled and flexible approach to singing provided a key bridge between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of…

Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer questions about your interactions with technology.Q: What is a bot?A: It’s a sunny day outside, but you wouldn’t know it. You’ve been staring at the modern hellscape known as Twitter for hours now, refreshing feed after feed. Your eyes are glazed over but you keep going; you’re too deep into Politics…

By Sen Mark R. Warner and Penny Pritzker5 minute ReadThe work landscape our children are entering today looks nothing like what our parents experienced. The notion of working for the same firm for your whole career is a distant memory, and anyone whose career trajectory looks that way is considered an outlier. Today, workers are…

ImageThe Crescent City Connection over the Mississippi River in New Orleans.CreditCreditMarka/UIG, via Getty ImagesNEW ORLEANS — How do the greatest cities succeed?The question could not come at a more critical time, as cities around the world face challenges — and opportunities — unimagined in human history. By some estimates, 68 percent of the world’s population…

For nearly 20 years, the best downhill mountain bikers in the world have gathered in a remote corner of the Utah desert to compete against one another in what has become the craziest event the sport has to offer. Held annually in Virgin, Utah, the Red Bull Rampage tasks riders with navigating down the side…

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, which brought the Great War to an end. The Great War, of course, would later come to be known as the First World War because an even greater war would follow within twenty years. Although it has been eclipsed in the public imagination by the Second World…

AbstractLevallois approaches are one of the best known variants of prepared-core technologies, and are an important hallmark of stone technologies developed around 300,000 years ago in Africa and west Eurasia1,2. Existing archaeological evidence suggests that the stone technology of east Asian hominins lacked a Levallois component during the late Middle Pleistocene epoch and it is…

Lenovo’s new Yoga C630 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 processor. Lenovo The best way to sell always-connected PCs is downplaying the actual connectivity part.At least, that’s what Lenovo has found through the past year of selling computers powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon LTE processors, said Matt Bereda, vice president of global consumer marketing for PCs and…

Timelines presented by auto and tech companies have positioned 2018 and 2019 as milestones in the development of autonomous-driving technology. But delays, reported development issues, and a fatal crash have raised questions about the near-term potential of self-driving vehicles. Experts told Business Insider that the media and autonomous-driving industry have created unrealistic expectations about the…

Home Earth Environment November 22, 2018 November 22, 2018 by Pat Eaton-Robb In this Friday, Nov. 16, 2018 photo, Joe Balog, a workforce management director at Travelers, examines weather, social media and other data from recent natural disasters inside the company’s catastrophe response command center in Windsor, Conn. The company uses the data to determine…

Stephen Lawlor and David Hunt have witnessed a lot of bullying. Among the principal victims, in their experience, are young, first-time mothers, who are sometimes so intimidated that they’re unable to eat. Isolating their tormentors in a separate group isn’t a solution, Hunt told me: “They just knock the crap out of each other.” The…

This is a choose-your-own-adventure review of the brand new choose-your-own-adventure Netflix special, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.  You can choose to remain entirely spoiler-free until you experience it for yourself. In which case: this is quite simply a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of interactive television. One that has cracked the code as to how you let the viewer…

The most important room in the house. Photograph: Tom Kelley Archive/Getty Images Chances are, you’re reading this in your kitchen. It’s not only regularly voted the most important room of the house, but it’s also the place we spend more money on than any other – filled, as it is, with the latest smart home…

ImageA modified Tesla Model X before an event to unveil the Boring Company’s tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday. It unveiled the first mile-long stretch of the company’s underground vision of a transit system.CreditCreditPool photo by Robyn BeckHAWTHORNE, Calif. — Fed up with Southern California vehicle snarls, Elon Musk set out to solve the persistent…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Alex Wong / Getty Images Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the search giant against criticism of political bias, concerns over its data collection policies and worries about efforts in China during a high-profile appearance on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.The leader of the world’s largest search…

Millennials Millennials, the first generation expected to be less prosperous than their parents, may also be less healthy. Image credit: Westend61 | Getty Images November 9, 2018 6 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Believe it or not, millennials are getting older (and sadly, so are the rest of us). With…

We’ve all got one of *those* stories.ImageCreditCreditGreg KletselPretty much everybody who’s ever held down a job has at least one bad interview story. For me, it’s showing up soaking wet in the middle of a downpour for an interview at a major publishing company.“This weather is terrible, isn’t it?” my interviewer asked as I stashed…

It seems like everyone’s getting home security cameras these days. Here are your best options. DisclosureEvery product here is independently selected by Mashable journalists. If you buy something featured, we may earn an affiliate commission which helps support our work. By Kevin Billings2018-12-24 10:00:00 UTC Home security cameras used to be only for the rich…

When it comes to foldable devices like the the Royole FlexPai and Samsung’s unnamed foldable phone, this major question inevitably comes up: Is that screen made plastic or glass? Plastic looks cheap, but today’s glass screen are more likely to break than flex when you bend them. Maybe not for long. CNET got an exclusive…

Here are the week’s top stories, and a look ahead.ImageCreditAl Drago for The New York Times1. A damning turn for President Trump and his associates:Federal prosecutors say he directed illegal payments during the presidential campaign to help prevent a possible sex scandal.The president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has said Mr. Trump, above, directed payments to…

More of that weird quantum art that always comes with quantum computing press releases.Illustration: E. Edwards/JQI (NIST)Quantum computers that can crack our strongest encryption methods might be decades away—but a group of entrepreneurs and researchers think we better start talking ethics now. Perhaps one of the year’s biggest stories was our collective realization that our…

When an experiment with existing open source technology does a “good enough” jobThe Victoria Police are the primary law enforcement agency of Victoria, Australia. With over 16,000 vehicles stolen in Victoria this past year — at a cost of about $170 million — the police department is experimenting with a variety of technology-driven solutions to crackdown on car theft. They…

The U.S. House of Representatives will see an influx of scientists as a result of the 2018 midterm elections.The 2016 election, specifically Donald Trump’s utter disregard for facts, galvanized scientists nationwide. A hundred thousand scientists marched on the capitol in 2017, and advocacy groups formed to promote science and scientists in politics. Last night saw…

Can we get a pit crew, too? — Racing tests engineers as well as their designs. Jonathan M. Gitlin – Nov 23, 2018 2:42 pm UTC ChevroletUpdate: It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, and many Ars staffers are currently sleeping off all yesterday’s tryptophan (or Soylent, we guess). So with a new racing season soon…

The definition of the sharing economy varies usually depends on who you ask — or what site you search. You will find that the definition often includes the sharing of a good or service through an online platform. The truth is, the sharing economy has existed for centuries. Communities historically shared limited resources instead of…

A number of app developers building third-party screen time trackers and parental control applications are worried that Apple’s increased scrutiny of their apps in recent weeks is not a coincidence. With Apple’s launch of iOS 12, the company has implemented its own built-in screen time tracking tools and controls. Not long after, developers’ third-party screen…

This past January, a woman was walking along a road in Tumwater, Washington when a man pulled her into the woods and raped her. This rape might not have happened had police quickly processed evidence from the sexual assault exam — or “rape kit”— from another Tumwater rape the previous summer. But because it took…

Technology has taken the business world by storm. People and businesses are progressively reliant on technology world these days. As a result, the people with impressive knowledge and experience with a computer are in demand.Considering this growing market trend, if you too wish to bag a profitable job, this article is apt for you. Here,…

ImageDara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, which is racing its rival Lyft to the public markets.CreditCreditBrendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSAN FRANCISCO — Uber confidentially filed paperwork on Thursday to go public, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, officially moving toward what is expected to be one of the biggest and…

New York TodayImageAmazon could soon be bringing as many as 25,000 jobs to Long Island City.CreditCreditJoshua Bright for The New York Times(Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.) It’s Tuesday. Good morning!Weather: Rain, mostly this morning, with a high of 51, then gradual clearing. Tomorrow the sun returns.Nice to meet you:…

Photo: Mario Aguilar (Gizmodo)A new app from a Latvian outfit called Sonarworks claims it can tune music to play perfectly through specific headphone models. So whether you’re using AirPods or a swanky pair of $900 Auduze LCD-2s, you’ll hear the same exact mix. Could the future of making music sound good be an app that…

Humanitarian crises, natural disasters, disease outbreaks — the needs today as pressing as ever, but the way we give is evolving. Thanks to tax law and technology, along with changing consciousness and shifting social mores, philanthropy experts say there are notable shifts afoot in where, when and how Americans open their wallets to charitable causes.…

In many ways, AI and machine learning are already becoming apparent in our day-to-day lives, especially in commerce. Specifically, retailers are turning to facial recognition systems to help them better target, market and sell their products to an increasingly harried and distracted shopping public.”I see the recent advances such as deep learning technology for vision…