“It took us a long time to gather enough data that we could have a clear picture of what was going on during the extinction,” Carvalho told Ars. While the study deals with Colombian fossils, Carvalho said the researchers can get a fair idea of what happened in rainforests elsewhere in Central and South America, though the effects of the asteroid's impact are somewhat variable from region to region.

As of 24 March, the New Zealand Drought Index (NZDI) map below shows that widespread dry to very dry conditions extend from southern Northland to Wellington, excluding Taranaki, and across the east of the North Island, as well as Marlborough, eastern and coastal Canterbury, parts of Otago and Southland.

This week, harsh winter weather swept the country and caused a huge number of problems, including delaying the shipments of hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses across the country.

The New Zealand Drought Index (NZDI) map below shows that dry-to-very dry soils are found in the northeastern South Island and along parts of eastern Canterbury.

Stringhini and his fellow researchers, who specialize in how online communities coordinate malicious activity, monitored the organization of mass Zoom-bombing actions on both Twitter and 4chan over the course of 2020.Their findings point to a surprising conclusion: The majority of Zoom-bombing cases the researchers observed began with a participant in the call posting the link publicly and inviting trolls and miscreants to attack it.

Hotspots are currently in place in much of Northland, parts of Auckland, northern Waikato and a small portion of East Cape, while hotspots have strengthened in eastern Wairarapa and expanded to include the eastern Tararua District and coastal Hawke’s Bay. The New Zealand Drought Index (NZDI) map below shows that meteorological drought and severe meteorological drought are in place in the northern half of the Far North District.

Our definition of what it means to "watch TV" has changed a lot over the last few years, moving from appointment television to on-demand viewing, but there are still parts of old-school, live TV that have stuck around, and even gained new life.

Since he first started working on Alvin as an engineer nearly 25 years ago, Strickrott has logged more than 2,000 hours in the deep ocean, where he learned to expertly navigate the seabed’s alien landscape and probe for samples with the submarine’s spindly robotic arms.

“They produce this, I think, very eye-catching and also strong message that these two types of stocks—the biomass stock and anthropogenic mass—they are actually at a crossover point more or less in 2020, plus or minus a couple of years,” says social ecologist Fridolin Krausmann of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who wasn’t involved in the research but was a peer reviewer for the paper.

Europe’s breeding bird populations have shifted on average 1 kilometer north every year for the past three decades, likely driven by the climate crisis, according to one of the world’s largest citizen science projects on biodiversity.

Once again, significant rainfall occurred in the western North Island during the past week, with widespread amounts of greater than 50 mm from southern Waikato to Kapiti Coast.

The bipartisan coalition, led by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, alleges that Facebook achieved its dominance through a years-long strategy of anticompetitive tactics, including its acquisitions of budding rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp. As it built up that dominant position, the suit argues, it began offering users a worse and worse privacy experience.

Trust in vaccines grows slightly, distribution faces challenges, and legislators plan for the next stage.

Much of the South Island saw small to moderate soil moisture increases during the past week, also small decreases occurred from Clutha District to Invercargill.Due to the expected rainfall over the next week, the western and lower North Island will likely see additional soil moisture increases.

Hawking and others sought to describe matter in and around black holes using quantum theory, but they continued to describe gravity using Einstein’s classical theory—a hybrid approach that physicists call “semiclassical.” Although the approach predicted new effects at the perimeter of the hole, the interior remained strictly sealed off.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an advisory warning that a group known as Berserk Bear—or alternately Energetic Bear, TEMP.Isotope, and Dragonfly—had carried out a broad hacking campaign against US state, local, territorial, and tribal government agencies, as well aviation sector targets.

The solutions that satisfy others strike them as false and inauthentic, and “their lives are one long drama of repentance and of effort to repair misdemeanors and mistakes.” Most people find it easy to diagnose themselves as one of these two types, and I hope I won’t offend you in saying that you strike me, unmistakably, as a divided soul.

Senator Josh Hawley, who wants to strip Section 230 protections from platforms if they moderate misinformation in political speech, cited Thomas’ memo and asked Barrett her views about it.Pai gave us a hint of his thinking: “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” he wrote.

There are more than a thousand asteroids with diameters larger than Didymos and Dimorphos combined, and if any of those were to strike Earth, it could lead to mass extinction and the collapse of civilization.“Everyone knows it’s possible to hit an asteroid,” says Justin Atchison, a DART mission designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Three days later and 1,200 miles south, in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, the players of the NBA launched a work stoppage in response.“We are calling for justice for Jacob Blake and demand the officers be held accountable,” George Hill said in an interview.

Back in 2015, theater chains freaked out when Netflix, presumably looking for a theatrical run in order to qualify for the Oscar race, wanted to release Beasts of No Nation in cinemas on the same day the movie became available to stream.

“We are very much interested in the automated tracking of students,” says Michael Sawyers, superintendent for New Albany-Plain Schools.A small but growing surveillance industry has sprung up around Covid already, with firms pitching everything from temperature-tracking infrared cameras and contact tracing apps to wireless beacons and smart cameras to help enforce social distancing at work.

Planning for this voyage has presented a few challenges for NIWA vessel operations manager Greg Foothead as he waited to hear if lockdown restrictions would be eased in time for the ship to leave.

Oxfam transfers digital money to thousands in need of relief in Syria, Greece, Kenya, Australia, and the cyclone-prone island of Vanuatu via SMS, an Android phone app, or an NFC card—a kind of contactless payments card that also acts as proof of ID.These applications, in Oxfam’s case the Sempo Cash and Voucher Assistance program, have proven capable of disbursing tens of thousands of dollars at a time to many beneficiaries within minutes—at a near negligible cost.

And while conditions have improved in most regions, NIWA meteorologist Ben Noll says river flows and soil moisture levels remain below normal for large parts of the North Island and upper South Island while before last weekend drought still persisted in the Coromandel Peninsula.

“We were initially encouraged that states and localities were taking action to try and keep people housed amid the pandemic,” Alieza Durana, a strategist at Princeton’s Eviction Lab, says.

Our new program, Agility Prime, leverages unique Air Force assets—test ranges, safety certifications, and military missions capable of logging steady flight hours—to build confidence in the technology, attract investors, and hopefully expedite domestic commercialization.Flying cars aren’t the only commercial technology the military can help accelerate.

Before I get to the calculations, let's look at the details of the system and the physics involved.

New estimates show that the locust population in East Africa—already numbered in the hundreds of billions—could increase 500-fold by June, causing massive food shortages across the continent.WIRED Recommends: Best Sunrise Alarms.You can sign up right here to make sure you get the news delivered fresh to your inbox every weekday!

A new United Nations-sponsored report offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of the challenges to global electoral integrity posed by the onslaught of misinformation, online extremism, and social media manipulation campaigns, and calls for a series of reforms from platforms, politicians, and international governing bodies.