In the last few moments of last night's Super Bowl, the Patriots intercepted the ball for the win after a spectacularly bad call by the Seahawks. But neither the Patriots' win or the Seahawks' collapse were the stars of last night's show. No, that honor belonged to the dancing sharks.
About 25,000 to 3,000 years ago, land mammals died out in massive numbers from the Arctic to the Caribbean, which scientists have attributed variously to climate change and human activity. Bats weren't as susceptible as their non-flying cousins — in the Caribbean, about 18 percent of bat species died out, compared to about 80 percent of land mammals — but still, several species disappeared from entire islands.
While NASA's Dawn mission is hot on the tail of the biggest rock in the asteroid belt, researchers are still finding new things within the treasure trove of data the spacecraft collected in 2011 and 2012. Back then Dawn was visiting Vesta, the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, which scientists thought would be bone-dry.
Despite headlines claiming otherwise, cyberwar is not epitomized by stealing Twitter passwords or publishing confidential emails. For militaries fighting wars in the future, the real cyber danger will be hostile access to secure networks, jammed signals, and fooled sensors on war machines manned and unmanned. To better understand how these attacks will play out, the Air Force Research Laboratory is soliciting papers for creating and then overcoming a virtual hostile sky.
It's tough living in a densely populated city. The air is polluted, the roads are congested, and the gas is expensive. Many urbanites resort to scooters for transportation, because they're fuel-efficient and easy to maintain. The problem is that they still run on pricey gasoline and emit CO2 among other toxic chemicals. Gogoro's new Smartscooter aims to change some of these downfalls typically found in two-wheeled vehicles.
In the 1920s and 30s, the Nazis tried to resurrect cows' wild ancestor, the aurochs, for hunting purposes. By crossing the various cow breeds that descended from the aurochs, German scientists hoped to create a beast that was similar in shape and ferocity to the original aurochs. The result was the Heck breed, which is physically not all that similar to its ancient ancestor—the cows are smaller and beefier—but they do appear to have inherited the aurochs' bad temper. A herd of the beasts in the U.K. has now proven unmanageable.
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