And then, pow pow, Biles is in the air, a möbius loop of motion 10 feet off the ground at the apex, more than a second in the air, twisting around her head-to-toe axis three times and flipping over her side-to-side axis twice before, bang!

Photo © John Hall Seeing 1,838 species of mammals takes an incredible level of trip planning, dedication and willingness to suffer. While mammal watching may never rival birding as a wildlife pastime, it is certainly growing – in no small part due to Jon Hall.

Why Ground Squirrels Look Like They’re Kissing. Photo © Dan Streiffert /Flickr Mateo started studying ground squirrels in 2002. While the ground squirrels I’m watching in Idaho don’t show family favor, they still recognize relatives even after hibernating for nine months.

It’s called a solid-state greenhouse effect—light penetrates the surface, passes through the translucent ice, and then hits darker regolith, which warms up. Could an insulating material create a solid-state greenhouse effect warm enough to make Mars habitable?

This multi-purpose substance also moisturizes the skin while it at the same time repels water, allowing the hippo to stay submerged for long periods of time. For lizards, cold-blooded animals found in often-warm environments, shade is particularly important.

Sikorsky is pitching the funky, fast S-97 Raider as a replacement for today’s light attack and scout helicopters, via the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program.

But getting there depends on loosening regulations and borrowing drilling techniques from oil and gas companies.“It’s a great resource, but one that doesn’t get a lot of love,” said Spencer Nelson, who directs the energy innovation program at ClearPath and wrote the memo.

This past September, Jenny Simpson headed out in the rain to the start of the 5th Avenue Mile road race with two pairs of running shoes in her bag.

On Monday, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo scolded China for using civilian polar research to further its military and commercial goals, including opening up a new “Polar Silk Road” for trade and shipping. Yun says Chinese scientists don’t see the conflict between scientific research and national goals of resource development.

Accordingly, parts of Jakarta are sinking by as much as 10 inches a year .That’s destabilizing buildings in the short term—some structures have sunk straight down, enveloping their lower levels in mud—but in the long term it means that about half the city is now beneath sea level.

Space Photos of the Week: Hubble Is Crabby Over Its Birthday. We’re going to start our weekly space gaze a few thousand light years away from Earth, at a nifty nebula.

It is probably one of the first “nature lessons” we learned at school: earthworms have to come to the surface after rain because they’re drowning. Another common explanation for worm emergence is that rain sounds like predators, so the worms come to the surface to escape.

Instead, it emphasized locally relevant ways for farmers to access, use , and manage water resources in ways which provide more stable revenue streams from sustainable agricultural production. This more diverse set of water sources mobilizes farmer and community-level investment in irrigation equipment and power sources that enhance productivity.

“The FAA looks at all of this information and decides, ‘OK, if it’s just likely that there's a significant problem here, it doesn’t matter what the cost to the traveling public is—we have to put safety first and ground this aircraft,’” Balog says.

Photo © David Sischo On a relatively warm Hawai‘ian day, the first of the new year, a colorful snail named George drew its last breath, and with it marked the end of an entire species.

Because of the federal government shutdown, the airport didn’t have enough Transportation Security Administration agents and air traffic controllers; things slowed to a ground stop . “They insert buffer time in their schedules and ground operations,” says Bo Zou, a transportation engineer at the University of Illinois.

“The idea is with three legs on the ground, it's always statically stable,” says Wyss roboticist Neel Doshi, coauthor on a Science Robotics paper describing HAMR’s new power.About that static: Think of the robot as sticking to the surface like a magnet, only the forces here are electric.

It’s a view of Rome that exists only in the imagination of the artist.Allchurch’s image maintains the compositional structure of Piranesi’s etching but replaces the Roman artifacts with British iconography ranging from the Glasgow Necropolis to the latest London high-rises.

We eventually found scores of American-veteran-focused Facebook pages producing politically polarizing content from outside the United States.Vietnam Veterans of America produced a report on our earliest findings for 11 committees in Congress and a host of alphabet agencies.

At current top speeds of around 27 miles per hour, he says elite male sprinters like Usain Bolt put down roughly five times their body weight, in between .085 and 0.09 seconds.Just for fun, I ask Weyand what kind of numbers a sprinter would need to complete the 100 meter dash in 9 seconds, on the nose.

“For 90 percent of the planet’s surface, you need satellites,” says Fabien Jordan, founder and CEO of Astrocast, one of the startups sending a satellite up next week.If shippers want to track assets at sea, farmers wish to check on the health of their crops, or governments seek to monitor dangerous bridges today, they must deploy powerful devices connecting to traditional satellite communications providers like Iridium, Globalstar and Inmarsat.

To Solve Flying Cars' Biggest Problem, Tie Them to Power LinesIn the age of cord cutting, San Francisco-based startup Karman Electric thinks flying cars should be able to connect to power lines for long-haul routes and go solo when they approach their destination.

However, I want to start with the simplest case of an object falling near the surface of the Earth that has a negligible air resistance force.

A single season of drought in the Amazon rainforest can reduce the forest's carbon dioxide absorption for years after the rains return, according to a new study published in the journal Nature.

The work will also be showcased in complementary museum exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, both opening September 28.“Anthropocene” is a term coined by Nobel-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe what he and some other scientists consider a new era in world history, an epoch beginning with the Industrial Revolution and characterized by mankind’s permanent alteration of the natural world.“For the last 12,000 years we’ve been in the Holocene epoch, which followed the last ice age and saw the development of human civilization,” Burtynsky explains.