Science, Spoken

It’s the nightmare of travelers sitting near the emergency exit and the inevitable fate of bad guys tussling on a plane with James Bond—the door erupting open mid-flight, sucking them into the cold blue and white. This scenario was no doubt running through the minds of the passengers of a BA flight to Riyadh this week, when a man, reportedly in the grip of a panic attack, tried to pull open the aircraft door.

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As climate delegates discuss the planet’s future at the COP25 meeting in Madrid this week, a new study finds the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. That’s forcing polar bears and walruses to crowd onto shrinking beaches, starving reindeer and caribou, and driving extreme heat, drought, and sea level rise along the US coast. Those are some of the results of a new study published today in the journal Science Advances that reports the Arctic has warmed by 0.

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Earlier this year, a small group of spectators gathered in David Taylor Model Basin, the Navy’s cavernous indoor wave pool in Maryland, to watch something they couldn’t see. At each end of the facility there was a 13-foot pole with a small cube perched on top. A powerful infrared laser beam shot out of one of the cubes, striking an array of photovoltaic cells inside the opposite cube. To the naked eye, however, it looked like a whole lot of nothing.

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On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida bound for the International Space Station. The brand new rocket will be carrying a previously flown Dragon capsule loaded with supplies and experiments. It will mark SpaceX’s nineteenth trip to the space station as part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program. After the rocket booster sends its payload on its way, it is expected to attempt a landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

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Some so-called smart garments—clothing and accessories outfitted with sensors, Bluetooth, and other gadgetry—flirt with the absurd. Does anyone need a $1,000 touch-interface backpack that alerts you if you accidentally leave your phone somewhere? Or a (now discontinued) sweatshirt that tracks your movements and awards redeemable ‘points’ you can spend on gift cards and “VIP experiences”? Not really.

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Maiken Nedergaard considers herself a pragmatic woman. She’s got kids, a career, and she knows she feels better after a solid night of shut-eye. She’s also a neuroscientist at the forefront of research showing the biological value of sleep. In studies she coauthored in 2013 and 2019, she documented how during sleep, fluid washes over our brains, clearing out toxins like beta amyloid, which is linked to neurodegenerative diseases.

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This story originally appeared on Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When I pull into a parking lot in my Toyota 4Runner, I hope I won’t see any of my friends who are environmental activists. I hope I’ll fit into the eco-conscious (read small) parking spaces at some of the places I shop. I feel like a skinny-car person in a fat-truck body.

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When we’re talking about social justice, a tipping point is a beautiful thing—a court case that shifts public opinion, for example. For a species, a tipping point can spell doom, as an environmental catastrophe pushes a population to the brink. When it comes to climate change, there isn’t just one tipping point but many that scientists are increasingly pulling into view.

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The climate crisis is so epic, so vicious, so wide-reaching, that at this point there are few aspects of the human experience it isn’t transforming. Supercharged wildfires are devastating California, heatwaves are killing more people and more crops, cities are struggling to adapt to strange new climates. The global transformation currently underway is also increasingly exposing a fundamental yet often hidden factor complicating matters: gender.

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It’s become a veritable rite of passage for humans settling into their first apartments: Assemble a piece of Ikea furniture from a cryptic set of pictures without having either you, or the item in question, fall apart. What better way, thought researchers at the University of Southern California, to torture teach robots to manipulate the world around them.

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