Space

Squirrels  are not the only animals that stock acorns for winter. Some birds do it, too. And one species in California disturbed a telecommunications network with its storing practices. The birds hid their acorns in a wireless antenna in Central California. A video that’s going viral displays technicians opening a compartment on the antenna and releasing a flood of acorns. In all, an expected 300 pounds (35 to 50 gallons) of nuts fell out. Walter Koenig , a senior researcher with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, says he’s pretty sure the acorn woodpecker ( Melanerpes formicivorus ) was behind the act.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised his country's support to help putt out the Amazon fires. “People around the world are shocked and devastated to see the Amazon engulfed in flames,” he said at a press conference during the end of the G7 Summit in France. The Young PM said Canada is proposing to send water bombers and $15 million to help the affected areas. Trudeau also said that Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland had already "reached out to Foreign ministers in Brazil and Bolivia" to offer aid. “We could pretend that the situation in the Amazon is just part of a natural cycle but that's not exactly what's going on here,” Trudeau said Monday. “The toll of human activity and extreme weather events on our communities, our environment, our health and our world will continue to climb unless we take decisive action.” G7 country leaders have already applied pressure on the Brazilian government to react to the fires. Some of the c

You may remember seeing the photo several years ago. There’s a man with long, graying hair floating with his Shepherd mix sleeping in his arms and with his head on the man’s chest. Here’s the story behind that photo. John Unger adopted Schoep as a puppy. 19 years later, the elderly dog was suffering from arthritis and hip dysplasia. Unger realized that taking the pressure off of Schoep’s joints by floating with him was the best way he knew to provide his  beloved fur child with pain relief. A friend of Unger’s took a photo of the two of them, and it quickly made its way around the world. Once that photo became viral, their story made the news. Donations started pouring in from around the world, which allowed Unger to pursue other methods of pain management that gave him another year with his beloved Schoep. Even though Schoep is gone now, the love behind that photo can be felt around the world. Be sure to spread that love by sharing this video!

The rise in fires scorching in Brazil set off a storm of international outrage last week. Celebrities, environmentalists, and political leaders blame Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for destroying the world’s biggest rainforest, the Amazon, the so-called “lungs of the world.” Singers and actors incuding Madonna and Jaden Smith shared pictures on social media that were viewed by tens of millions of people. “The lungs of the Earth are in flames,”  said  actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen,”  tweeted soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. “The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire,”  tweeted  French President Emanuel Macron. And yet the photographs weren’t really of the fires and many were not even of the Amazon. The photo Ronaldo uploaded was captured in  southern Brazil , far from the Amazon, in 2013. The image that DiCaprio and Macron  uploaded  is over 20 years old. The photo Madonna

Austrian and Chinese scientists have succeeded in teleporting three-dimensional quantum states for the first time. High-dimensional teleportation could play an important role in future quantum computers. Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna have experimentally demonstrated what was previously only a theoretical possibility. Together with quantum physicists from the University of Science and Technology of China, they have succeeded in teleporting complex high-dimensional quantum states. The research teams report this international first in the journal  Physical Review Letters . In their study, the researchers teleported the  quantum state  of one photon (light particle) to another distant one. Previously, only two-level states ("qubits") had been transmitted, i.e., information with values "0" or "1". However, the scientists succeeded in teleporting a three-level state, a so-called "qutrit". In  quantum phy

In a move that is being taken as an inspiration to the world, a German circus transferred to holograms instead of real animals during one of its recent shows. German Circus Roncalli was started in 1976. According to local website  Rheinische Post ,  Roncalli had decided, in April 2017 , that the company would not use animals in its shows from 2018 onwards. “We have  decided against the animals  for the benefit of the animals,”  Rheinische Post  quoted the media director of Roncalli Circus as saying. “The focus of the Circus Roncalli is on poetic and acrobatic numbers,” he added. Visual solutions company Optoma was responsible for creating the holographic experience.

A new development could soon transform the design of almost every optical instrument in use today, including cameras, eyeglasses and telescopes. Uniting new developments in artificial muscle and flat lens technologies, a team of scientists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have made a new lens that works a lot like the human eye. Not only is the device proficient of focusing in real-time thanks to an elastomer muscle, it features none of the bulk of a traditional spherical lens. It can even do some things the human eye cannot, including adjusting for astigmatism and image shift, two variables that lead to blurry vision. All of this is thanks to a previous technology a team of some of the same scientists developed. The flat lens design this new artificial eye takes benefit of is called a metalens. It uses small nanostructures to focus light. In this way, it's able to focus the complete visible light spectrum at a single point. By contra

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, is a well-known futurist with a high-hitting track record for accurate predictions. Of his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate. Earlier this week, at the  SXSW Conference  in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil made yet another prediction: the technological singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years. The singularity  is that point in time when all the advances in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), will lead to machines that are smarter than human beings. Kurzweil’s timetable for the singularity is consistent with other predictions,– notably those of Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, who predicts that the dawn of  super-intelligent machines will happen by 2047 . But for Kurzweil, the process towards this singularity has already begun. In a communication to Futurism, Kurzweil states: 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefor

Earth Alliance, a new environmental organization made by Leonardo DiCaprio and his benevolent friends, Laurene Powell Jobs and Brian Sheth, has vowed $5 million to help preserve the Amazon rainforest. Fires have surged in the Amazon this year, the world's biggest rainforest is burning at remarkable rate since 2013, and Brazil's National Institute for Space Research says more than one-and-a-half soccer fields of Amazon rainforest are being devastated every minute of every day. The Amazon, which generates about 20% of Earth's oxygen, is usually referred to as "the planet's lungs." It is considered very important in slowing global warming. “#EarthAlliance has formed an emergency Amazon Forest Fund with $5m to focus critical resources for indigenous communities and other local partners working to protect the biodiversity of the Amazon against the surge of fires,” the  organization tweeted on Sunday . Earth Alliance stated that its emergency fund will be dispersed

The struggle with “Climate Despair ” is real. That is anxiety and despair triggered by news of environmental deprivation. Right now, for example, many have shared emotions of helplessness among the ongoing forest fires in the Amazon. This calamity has been going on for weeks, and the fires have become so bad that the state of Amazonas  declared a   state of emergency   this month. The problem, though, is not completely out of people’s hands. Studies have revealed that the fires are not initiated by natural events,  but by humans --our love for meat, to be exact. The fires are triggered by burning fallen trees to make way for livestock ranching, a developing industry in Brazil and the wider region. Data from  the Institute of Environmental Research in Amazonia (IPAM) reveals that the top ten cities in Amazonia with the most fire incidences also had the largest deforestation rates this year. The most real-world solution people can adopt to help is to reduce--or stop--their meat intake.

One YouTuber - Wolfie6020, who is a professional pilot, successfully completed a $100,000 challenge thrown out by a Flat Earther called Flat Out Hero. However the flat-earther didn't pay him what he owes. The flat-earther keeps on changing the conditions of the challenge and every time he gets disproven. So far, nothing has been paid, and at this point, it seems like Flat Out Hero the flat earther probably won’t. Thou Wolfie6020 probably never gets the money, he’s still the winner received a huge subscription bump from 8,000 to 58,000.

Four decades after their detection, the 13 enigmatic rings around Uranus stunned astrophysicists again this summer. In June, new pictures captured their warm glow for the first time. Well, warm for Uranus. At -320 degrees Fahrenheit, the rings are 10 degrees warmer than  the planet's surface , which is the coolest in our solar system. Researchers found the rings' temperature thanks to these thermal imageries. The results were described in a  study issued last month in The Astronomical Journal . To take the images, scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to measure the temperature structure of Uranus' atmosphere. They were astonished to discover that they'd picked up thermal readings of the planet's rings. "It's cool that we can even do this with the instruments we have," Edward Molter, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and the study's lead author,  said in a press release

Deep in western Russia, if you know where to look, you will discover a small group of dirty scrap metal and broken concrete. Which is not that stimulating. But if you rifle through the rubble, you will discover a big metal disc bolted to the ground. This is not just any old disc – it is the welded-shut cap of a borehole that drops more than 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) into the Earth. How deep is 12 kilometers, comparatively? Deeper than the deepest point of the ocean -  the Mariana Trench . In fact, this is the deepest hole we've ever dug into our planet.

In what was probably a territory war at a Seoul aquarium, a female sand tiger shark has consumed a male banded hound shark. It took the 8-year-old female 21 hours to consume the 5-year-old male inside a tank at the  COEX Aquarium . According to video of the eating, the female shark started with the male's head and gradually went about eating the rest of his body. This act of shark cannibalism possibly was the consequence of the sharks bumping into one another. “Sharks have their own territories,” an aquarium official told  Reuters . “Sometimes, when they bump into each other, they bite out of astonishment.” Although her best efforts to make a meal of the male shark, the female shark is expected to at some point regurgitate the remains of her former roommate.

As the Amazon Rainforest  continues to burn  as a consequence of cut-and-burn deforestation practices, we are gradually coming close the point of no return. Over the last 50 years, about 20% of the rainforest has been scorched or cut away,  according to  The Intercept .  As the recent fires continues and the  policies that led to them  stay to exist, another 20%— that’s 300,000 square miles — could soon be gone as well. At that point, researchers caution of a “cascading system collapse,” in which the Amazon starts to totally crumble, and discharge a  planet-devastating amount  of stored carbon in the process. The Amazon rainforest used to be a major carbon sink, meaning an area that kept massive stores of confiscated carbon from going into and heating the atmosphere. But  The Intercept  reports that the rainforest has already been  destroyed  by deforestation  to the point that the residual forest no longer makes up for the amount of carbon that’s already been discharged. If more get

Social media helped rise reporting of the wildfires, but it's also contributing to misrepresentation. There's no question that numerous parts of the Amazon rainforest are on fire, and  humans are probable cause of the blazes . In Brazil alone, there are 80% more fires in 2019 than there were last year, according to the country's space research center. More than half of the fires in Brazil are in its Amazon area. Satellite imageries are helping reveal just how many fires there are, and how much of their smoke has spread across the country. But photos on social media are conflating the present crisis with previous fires. One such photograph -- one of the most-shared photographs on social media -- displays a lush forest with an enormous wall of smoke rising from a fire. Musical artist and actor  Jaden Smith  shared the image on his Instagram, where it gathered over a million likes. YouTube celeb Logan Paul shared the image on Twitter, too. amazon rainforest: how can i help? ne

The hashtag  #PrayForAmazonia  went viral on Tuesday as social media users tried to draw the world’s attention to the Amazon rainforest, which has been devastated for weeks by fires so powerful  they can be observed from space . According to   Euro News , it is uncertain if the fires were produced by agricultural activity or deforestation. Both have  accelerated fast  under Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who made opening the Amazon to corporate misuse a key plank of his election movement. Twitter users on Tuesday condemned the media for paying too little attention to the Amazon fires, mainly given the vital role the rainforest plays in absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide—a capability that earned it the nickname “lungs of the world.” “The Amazon has been burning for three weeks, and I’m just now finding out because of the lack of media coverage,”  wrote  one observer. “This is one of the most important ecosystems on Earth.” Satellite data gathered by the Brazilian government’s