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GE and Lockheed ground tested a new air-breathing hypersonic jet engine capable of powering missiles to speeds well in excess of Mach 5 in a smaller, cheaper, lighter, and more efficient package than the most advanced scramjets in testing today. It is a rotating detonating engine. They did ground tests of a liquid-fueled rotating detonation ...

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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a trio of young stars in the process of becoming their best selves in the constellation Scorpius. Posted to the agency’s site on January 16 as part of its Hubble Stellar Construction Zones series, the three T Tauri stars—seen at the bottom right, upper center, and left along with many other stellar objects in the background—are forming inside the hazy Lupus 3 cloud about 500 light-years from Earth. While the image appears somewhat serene, the interior forces at play are anything but tranquil. 

A T Tauri star is a young star, usually less than 10 million years old. During this phase, the still-growing stellar object sees the dust and gas surrounding it begin to disappear as stellar winds, radiation, and other ionized particles bombard it. This dynamic environment is reflected in the star’s brightness, which randomly fluctuates depending on the material interactions underway in its accretion disk. More regular shifts in brightness can also occur as sunspots move in and out of view to astronomers here on Earth.

The T Tauri examples seen in Hubble’s image have a long way to go before they resemble the stars most observers recognize. Gravity will continue to bear down on the object until it forces hydrogen and helium elements to fuse in the star’s core, at which point it will finally become a main sequence stellar object.

The stars in Scorpius are further along in their growth than the protostars highlighted by NASA on January 14, however. About 1,300 light-years away, protostars in the “sword” of Orion are getting their start inside the constellation’s Orion Molecular Cloud complex. Astronomers aimed Hubble toward this area of the sky to better understand outflow cavities—areas where a protostar’s gas and dust is shaved away by nearby stellar winds.

The post Hubble spots three young stars going through growth spurts appeared first on Popular Science.

A 7,000-year-old grave site in present-day Oman indicates that the region’s Neolithic communities sometimes turned to an unexpected trade to not only survive, but thrive in the harsh desert landscape. According to findings published in the journal Antiquity, the people of southern Arabia actually hunted sharks and even stingrays.

Since 2020, researchers from the Archaeological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (ARÚ) have investigated Wadi Nafūn, an ancient grave site megalith (a structure built with large stones) used by Neolithic locals during the 5th century BCE. Amid their excavations, researchers found the skeletal remains of over 70 men, women, and children. But this wasn’t a single generation of people. The crypt’s size and subsequent radiocarbon dating indicate that Wadi Nafūn was built and maintained communally for over 300 years. 

“This monument was not built by a single small group. It represents cooperation, shared beliefs, and repeated return to a common ceremonial landscape,” project director lžběta Danielisová recently told Arkeonews.

Neolithic hunters likely also wore shark teeth as pendants. Credit: ARÚ Prague

However, Danielisová and collaborators faced an immediate challenge. Biological materials like teeth and skeletal fragments usually do not retain many organic components after being exposed to Oman’s arid climate for thousands of years. To properly understand their discoveries, the team needed to ship the materials back to the Czech Republic. There, they utilized isotopic analysis to examine a mineralized substance called bioapatite that remains on bones even after collagen disappears.

They particularly focused on traces of carbon, oxygen, and strontium to pinpoint some of each Neolithic person’s dietary sources of protein. But it was the discovery of certain nitrogen isotopes that surprised them most, as these compounds are only found in very specific marine animals.

“We know that these were not just ordinary proteins, but proteins from the top of the food chain,” Danielisová said in a university statement.

For hundreds of years, it appears the Neolithic communities of southern Arabia regularly hunted and consumed sharks. They didn’t only eat the apex predators, either. Throughout Wadi Nafūn, archaeologists excavated shark tooth pendants, additional tiger shark teeth, fishing tools, and stingray barbs. In order to harvest all these materials, the Neolithic hunters appear to have even used their own teeth to help process and prepare their catches.

“The teeth of this community have an interesting pattern. This indicates a specific diet and also that people used their teeth as tools,” explained ARÚ Prague anthropologist Jiří Šneberger.

Additional evidence gleaned from the isotopic analysis also showed that some of the individuals buried at Wadi Nafūn weren’t technically locals. Strontium and oxygen levels suggest certain adults buried here at least spent their childhoods over 30 miles inland. Taken altogether, the shark and human evidence illustrate a highly dynamic, resourceful, and collaborative region that used everything at their disposal to flourish.

“For the very first time, we were able to use natural science data to document specialized hunting of marine predators, directly by analyzing the local buried community,” said Danielisová. “The connection of this burial community with sharks is very interesting and is a new finding not only in prehistoric Arabia, but in the area of ​​all Neolithic cultures of the arid zone.”

The post In ancient Arabia, people dined on sharks and stingrays appeared first on Popular Science.

Cloudflare operates as a content delivery network and distributed DNS (domain name server) and it is down this morning. This is causing many other sites to be down like X. Its services protect website owners from peak loads, comment spam attacks and DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. UPDATE: Some systems are recovering. You can ...

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In Florida, giant invasive pythons, the state’s signature alligators, and bears that sometimes roam around theme parks are typically among the most upfront wildlife in the news. But when the temperatures drop, one reptile stands ready to take the limelight and also drop—iguanas. 

When air temperatures get cold enough, the reptiles will get stunned (or freeze) and fall from trees. Today, morning temperatures in Jacksonville and Tallahassee dipped as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, while Orlando hit the mid-30s, and Miami fell to the upper 40s. All temperatures that are cold enough to temporarily freeze an iguana. 

Reptiles like iguanas are cold-blooded—or ectothermic—reptiles that rely on external environmental conditions to regulate their body temperature. By comparison, warm-blooded or endothermic animals like humans and other mammals have a more consistent body temperature. Since the outside temperature has such a drastic effect on their bodies, cold-blooded animals often adapt their behavior as a response. They may bask in the sun to warm up or find shade to cool down and achieve a more balanced body temperature. 

CREDIT: Florida Lad.

When it gets cold, iguanas may also enter a dormant state called cold-stunning or freezing since they are not adapted to life in colder temperatures. Iguanas can start to slow down if the temperature gets below 50 degrees, and stun once they hit the 40s or 30s. 

“When that happens, they may lose their grip and fall from the trees,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Brandon Buckingham. “It’s a unique cold-weather hazard in Florida.”

After they fall from a tree, they may appear to be dead. However, their critical body functions will all still be working and they will continue to breathe. Once temperatures rise, they can jump back into action as if nothing happened. 

Iguanas can grow up to seven feet long and weigh upwards of 30 pounds, so it is best to be cautious when walking under palm trees in colder weather. Getting hit by a reptile of that size could be dangerous. 

If you see a frozen iguana on the ground, do not rush in to warm them up. Joe Gonzalez from the Iguana Police told WPTV in West Palm Beach that relocating or interfering with an iguana can lead to more problems.

“If you capture an iguana in your own yard and don’t move it anywhere else, that’s fine,” Gonzalez said. “But if you relocate it, you’re essentially taking your problem and dumping it somewhere else. This can have legal consequences, including fines.”

Instead, it’s best to just leave the iguana alone. It will usually be fine once it gets over 50 degrees again. 

The post Don’t pick up frozen iguanas appeared first on Popular Science.

If you’ve ever been around a cat, you know they can get the sudden urge to groom themselves at just about any moment. You’re petting them on the couch. They’re purring. Everything seems lovely and content. Then, they lose all interest in you and start licking their butt. 

But some felines don’t just lick themselves: They also lick you. A cat will be busy grooming themselves. Then, without warning, they’ll turn their spiky tongues on their unsuspecting humans. Other cats can’t be bothered and won’t ever groom or lick their human friends, or other kitty friends for that matter. 

So, why do some cats lick their owners? Are they trying to clean you, too? We asked an animal behaviorist and cat expert to help us sort out exactly what is going on when your cat licks you.

Mama cats regularly groom their babies

For a mother cat, grooming is an important part of child rearing. When a mama cat licks her kittens it serves two important purposes: keeping her kittens clean and promoting social bonds, Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist at Maueyes Cat Science and Education tells Popular Science. 

On the one hand, “mother cats are going to groom their kittens to help keep them clean and healthy,” says Vitale. Kittens can be especially susceptible to diseases, and “anybody who’s raised young kittens knows how dirty they can get, and a mother cat is not going to obviously bathe their kitten in a tub. They’re going to use their tongue to clean them.”

Cats learn to groom from their mothers. Image: DepositPhotos

But grooming also helps a mother cat strengthen her relationship with her kittens, says Vitale. A mother licking her babies is “one of the kitten’s first forms of social interaction.” 

It’s essentially a way for mothers to say, “I love you and I care for you.”

How grooming shifts for cats in adulthood

Kittens learn to groom from their mom, and usually start grooming themselves when they’re around four weeks old. Pretty soon after that, some cats “begin to reciprocate [their mother’s] grooming and they’ll groom their siblings or other unrelated cats and also preferred people in the house,” says Vitale. 

If your cat grooms other cats, animal behaviorists like Vitale call those cats their “preferred associates.” For instance, bonded cats often groom each other as a way to reinforce their bestie status. For cats, grooming other cats becomes “a very important social behavior that helps build bonds between the individuals.”

Wild cats lick each other, too

We also see the same behavior in wild cats where mothers groom their cubs to keep them clean and strengthen their connection, says Vitale. In adulthood, wild cats might continue to groom others. You don’t have to search hard to find adorable videos online of lions and tigers licking their besties.

Like domestic cats, lions will lick their feline buddies. Video: Lions Cuddling and Licking Each Other/ DerpDerp

But Vitale says there is one big difference here. A lot of wild cats, like tigers or even the closest relative of domestic cats, the African wild cat, “don’t live in social groups the same way the domestic cat does.” So they don’t always have the same opportunities to shower their buddies with love, because, well, they just don’t really have many buddies.

Cats lick humans to strengthen your relationship

So why, then, do some cats licks their owners? In general, if your cat licks you, it’s them saying (in so many licks) that they love you. 

Vitale says when her cat licks her, she sees it as them “engaging in a social behavior with me” that’s strengthening our relationship. “I’m thinking in my mind that they’re just in a happy mood and looking to hang out together and interact a little bit.” 

What if your cat doesn’t lick you?

While all cats groom themselves (which is why you don’t really need to worry about baths for most cats), not all cats groom other cats or their human friends. But should you feel bad if your cat doesn’t lick you? Does it mean they don’t love you? “No!” says Vitale. 

“Licking’s just one social behavior they could engage in. If your cat just sits on your lap, or sits near you, or your cat’s rubbing up against you, or your cat plays with you, those are all other social behaviors that show there’s a bond,” she says. Cats show love for their owners in all sorts of ways, she emphasizes. “Licking is just one thing a cat could do.”

Vitale has three cats, and of the three she says only one licks her, “very, very sparingly, like once or twice a month.” 

So, don’t worry, whether they’re a licker or not, your cat loves you. They might just have a different way of showing it. 

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Why do cats lick you? An expert explains. appeared first on Popular Science.

XAI has created Grokipedia and Grokipedia has a Nextbigfuture article. Nextbigfuture provided early coverage of Companies that Become deep tech Unicorns. Dozens of top Nucleqr fission and Fusion, quantum computer and Space Companies before They Became Billion $ Unicorns. There has been a surge in Grokipedia traffic to approximately 3.5 million daily visits, representing a ...

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Exlumina’s EVERLIGHT delivers wireless laser power to satellites and spacecraft, enabling longer missions, lower costs, and sustainable exploration in LEO, lunar, and deep-space environments. They will try to make the planned AI data centers in Space more efficient.

To study perceptions of causes of cultural change, I started with this posted list of the top 240 novels ever. I then asked (paid versions of) three LLMs to, for each novel, see if a main character is shown to have a stance of support or opposition to some social movement, and if so to pick the most central character like this. Re this set of novel characters, I ask what %-political (vs cultural) was the movement, how the character’s stance re it changed in the novel, and to pick from 8 possible causes of change.

Out of the 240 novels, ChatGPT found 9, Gemini found 35, and Claude found 99 where characters took a stance re a social movement. Of these, 5, 15, and 61, respectively, characters changed their stance. So the LLMs had rather different standards re how to decide those.

Their median movement-%-politics estimate was 85%, 80%, and 58%, respectively. For novels where the character changed their stance, those medians were 90%, 100% and 54%. The fraction of novels with a movement where it was <20% political is 0%, 3%, and 6%. That 3% is one novel, Don Quixote, while the 6% are On the Road, The Age of Innocence, Confessions, Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair, and The House of Mirth.

The fraction of characters whose stance changed who came more to support their movement was 80%, 40%, 34%. And “seeing unexpected events or facts in the world” was said to cause their stance change in 100%, 77%, and 82% of cases where a cause was identified. The next most common cause was “Change resolved inconsistency in prior norms”, at 0%, 15%, 7%. Here are the other 4 possible specific causes that LLMs rarely thought described novels:

• Saw opportunity to gain power, status, attention

• Saw prior associate or prestigious model change, copied them,

• Gained new associates or prestigious models, copied them

• It just felt right

Thus top novels are overwhelmingly focused on political, not cultural, change, and on change driven by characters seeing unexpected things in the world, and not driven by feelings, consistency, or copying associates. Typical real process of cultural change seem largely invisible to top novel authors.

A supermassive black hole is reawakening inside a distant galaxy cluster—and after almost 100 million years of slumber, astronomers now say it’s making up for lost time. According to a study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, J1007+3540 is erupting like a volcano and spewing plasma across interstellar space.

A black hole isn’t constantly devouring its unfortunate galactic neighbors. In fact, it can lay dormant for eons. But when one of these gargantuan entities finally reawakens, the resulting display isn’t only impressive—it illustrates the chaotic battle between its own cosmic forces and the pressures of the universe around it.

One of the most striking glimpses of such an event was recently captured by a team led by Shobha Kumari at India’s Midnapore City College. Supermassive black holes rarely emit magnetized, radio-emitting plasma, but according to Kumari, J1007+3540 is especially unique. After analyzing data collected by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands and India’s Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (uGMRT), researchers say there is undeniable evidence of multiple eruptions stretching deep into the universe’s past.

“It’s like watching a cosmic volcano erupt again after ages of calm—except this one is big enough to carve out structures stretching nearly a million light-years across space,” Kumari said in a statement.

The same images with labels showing the compressed northern lobe, curved backflow signature of plasma and the inner jet of the black hole. Credit: LOFAR / Pan-STARRS / Kumari et al.

Radio imaging revealed a small, bright interior jet indicative of J1007+3540’s internal forces revving back up. But surrounding this illumination is an older layer of fading, distorted plasma from previous active eras.

“This dramatic layering of young jets inside older, exhausted lobes is the signature of an episodic [active galactic nucleus]—a galaxy whose central engine keeps turning on and off over cosmic timescales,” added Kumari.

The supermassive black hole’s forces are unfathomably strong, but the influences of the giant galaxy cluster around it can’t be ignored either. The surrounding plumes of incredibly hot gas exert their own pressure, in this case even higher than most other radio galaxies. These cosmic regions then mangle and distort J1007+3540’s plasma jets as they race outward. For example, LOFAR’s imaging depicts a compressed northern lobe that is curving to one side due to the galactic gas. Complimentary data from uGMRT reveals a very steep radio spectrum indicative of old, weakened plasma particles.

“J1007+3540 is one of the clearest and most spectacular examples of episodic AGN with jet-cluster interaction, where the surrounding hot gas bends, compresses, and distorts the jets,” added Surajit Paul, a study coauthor and astronomer at the Manipal Center for Natural Sciences in India.

Moving forward, Kumari, Paul, and their collaborators hope to employ higher-resolution equipment to peer into J1007+3540’s core. In doing so, researchers can better chart how the black hole’s reignited jets travel through the galaxy cluster, as well as how often such events actually occur.

The post Black hole space volcano erupts after 100 million year nap appeared first on Popular Science.

a16z cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz join a16z general partner Erik Torenberg and Not Boring founder Packy McCormick for a discussion on the evolution of the media and information ecosystem over the past decade. The conversation explores shifts toward open, decentralized speech, the rise of creator-led platforms like Substack, and the decline of centralized ...

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A Mathematician with early access to XAI Grok 4.20, found a new Bellman function for one of the problems he had been working on with my student N. Alpay. Not an Erdős problem, but original research. Demonstrates AI generating novel math objects (Bellman functions for optimal control) quickly, linking to isoperimetric profiles and Takagi function ...

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I’ve read a bit about cultural change both in corporations and in our larger macro cultures. And one thing I’ve noticed is that firm culture change less often involves youth movements. Yes, when there are larger cultural youth movements, that does influence behavior in firms. But we don’t so much see youth movements particular to specific firms. Why?

I see four main explanations. The first is that most corporations just don’t last very long. As business change is often enacted via old firms falling and new firms rising, there is less need for youth to visibly fight for change there. Youths can instead just switch to other firms, or wait for new firms to arise. Macro cultures, in contrast, will only change if folks push for change, and youths can be more sure to win eventually if they just wait til the old are gone.

A second explanation is that, compared to larger societies, the hierarchical nature of a firm more structures its communication and choices. So young people with ideas for change tend to privately persuade supervisors to adopt them, supervisors who then become the face of such changes. Both because youths have more access to firm leaders, and because they can face stronger retribution for visibly opposing leaders. In macro cultures, it is harder for youths to meet and persuade leaders to support changes. Plausibly firm leaders, compared to macro leaders, have stronger incentives to adopt changes even when they are hard or threaten prior leader investments.

A third explanation is that different cultural units use somewhat different status markers. In a firm, it is easier to demonstrate concrete achievement influencing firm success, achievement reflected in hierarchical position. We are less sure who contributed how much to a macro culture’s success, less confident that rank there reflects achievement, and so are more willing to listen to people with more indirect markers of quality, like education, articulation, popularity, and energy.

A fourth explanation is that art, intellect, and morality abilities are more influential re macro culture changes, and in those areas we more have a myth of the genius who is visible early in life via their impressive public opposition to the old. So in those areas of life org leaders and supporting personnel take backseats to the foregrounded youthful geniuses, who become leaders of youth movements.

Each of these explanations suggests a corresponding approach to reducing the influence of youth movements in our macro cultures. We could make it easier to switch macro-cultures, give macro leaders better incentives and make their contributions clearer, and deconstruct the myth of genius.

Seven naturally-mummified cheetahs are more than just an exciting paleontological find. The specimens discovered in five caves near the city of Arar in northern Saudi Arabia offer a glimpse of hope for reintroducing the species to the Arabian Peninsula. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Cheetahs once lived in much of Africa, and Western and Southern Asia, but their range in Asia has decreased by 98 percent over the past several thousand years. As a whole, cheetahs only occupy nine percent of the territory they used to. On the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait) cheetahs were found as recently as 1977, when a hunter in Oman killed an adult female cheetah. However, the animals are now considered locally extinct in the region. There are five cheetah subspecies, and the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) is believed to have been the only subspecies that lived in present-day Saudi Arabia. The Asiatic cheetah is currently considered critically endangered, with only one small wild population remaining in Iran. Whether or not cheetahs could be reintroduced in the area is debated, largely due to continued habitat destruction.

During digs in five caves in 2022 and 2023, field biologist Ahmed Boug from Saudi Arabia’s National Center for Wildlife and his team uncovered skeletal remains of 54 other cats and seven naturally-mummified cheetahs. In desert regions, natural mummification is common due to the dry conditions where fungi and bacteria can’t thrive on a decomposing corpse. Deserts also have the right mineral content in the sand for preservation.

The oldest of the cat skeletal remains date back about 4,000 years ago. The mummified cheetah remains were much younger—ranging from only 130 to 1,870 years ago. 

They also extracted complete genome sequences from three of the seven mummified cheetahs. According to the team, this is the first time that this kind of genetic material extraction has been done on naturally-mummified big cats. While the most recent specimen is genetically closest to the Asiatic cheetah, the two older specimens are more similar to the Northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus hecki). This critically endangered species is found in the Sahara and several countries in northwestern Africa.

One of the mummified cheetahs as it was found in situ in a cave in northern Saudi Arabia. Image: National Center for Wildlife – Saudi Arabia

The authors say that their results indicate that cheetah subspecies could support the re-establishment of cheetahs in Saudi Arabia. An increased available genetic pool from other subspecies would make rewilding efforts more feasible, as subspecies can generally interbreed and create fertile offspring that further the population. The team also suggests that their method shows that ancient DNA records from similar specimens can inform future reintroduction plans for other endangered species.

The post Mummified cheetahs could help save the critically endangered big cats appeared first on Popular Science.

New York, United States, 15th January 2026, CyberNewsWire

McLean, Virginia, United States, 15th January 2026, CyberNewsWire

A young woman pushes a balled-up piece of napkin into a cup of Jell-O, asking the viewer to imagine that it is an airplane, high in the air.

“That is you flying through the sky,” she tells the camera. “There’s pressure from the bottom, pressure from the top, from the sides, pressure coming from everywhere.”

She taps the top of the Jell-O, making the suspended napkin ball quiver.

“This is what happens when there’s turbulence,” she says. “You feel the plane shaking, but [it] is not just going to fall down.”

The video is by Australian TikToker Anna Paul. Just days after she uploaded it in June 2022, it had accumulated more than 15 million views and thousands of comments from people saying it had cured their fear of flying. Paul says she got the tip “from a real pilot.”

But how accurate is the analogy? Is turbulence really like Jell-O?

@anna..paull

Fear of flying tip

♬ original sound – Anna Paul The origins of the Jell-O analogy

The Jell-O analogy is the brainchild of former airline captain Tom Bunn, who is now a licensed therapist and founder of the SOAR program, which helps people overcome their fear of flying. Over years of listening to clients express their worries, Bunn realized that explaining the science of flight was often not enough to reassure people that flying was truly safe.

“Clients would say they look up in the sky and see a plane and it doesn’t look like it should be there,” he says. “It should fall because they don’t see anything holding it up.”

Because these nervous flyers lacked understanding of the forces holding a plane in the air, they would feel the jolts during turbulence and panic, imagining the plane was about to drop from the sky. To help them overcome this fear, Bunn looked for an analogy that would convince the emotional part of their brains that the plane was not going to fall.

He found it by asking them to recall the familiar sense of air resistance growing as speed increases.

“If you walk across the room, air doesn’t slow you down,” he says. However, “if you’re in a car and push forward with your hand out the window, it feels about the same as putting your hand in a swimming pool and pushing against the water.”

Appealing to this logic, Bunn would ask his clients to imagine the air getting thicker as the plane accelerated down the runway. By the time they were in the air, it was the consistency of Jell-O, supporting them on all sides.

Bunn acknowledges that the analogy is not completely accurate scientifically. But it is an emotionally resonant way of visualizing the forces that hold a plane up during flight.

“Technically, it involves Bernoulli’s theorem,” he says. “It has to do with the fact that the bottom of the wing is pretty much flat and the top is curved.”

If you’ve ever put your hand out of the window in a car, you’ve felt the same kind of pressure that helps keep planes in the air when they fly. Image: DepositPhotos The science that keeps planes flying

Daniel Bernoulli was an 18th-century Swiss mathematician and physicist who formulated several key concepts in fluid dynamics. The most famous is Bernoulli’s principle, which states that an increase in the speed of a fluid decreases the pressure exerted by the fluid.

In a river, for example, water speeds up as it passes through narrower sections. The water pressure is lower in these constricted areas, as the acceleration is caused by higher pressure behind the constriction than within it.

Air behaves much like a fluid. When it encounters an obstacle, it compresses or speeds up as it flows around the object in its path.

“When the plane runs into the air, the air that goes across the top of the wing has to catch up,” Bunn explains. Because of the curve on the wing’s top, the air “has to take a longer route, so the molecules spread out slightly. So, they don’t push as much on the top of the wing as on the bottom.”

As Paul says in her TikTok video, there is pressure coming from the air above and below the airplane. But the wing’s design means that the air pressure is greater below it than in the faster-moving air above it, pushing the wing upwards. This is the phenomenon known in aerodynamics as “lift.” 

“The faster you go, the more powerful the Bernoulli effect,” Bunn explains. This is why, as a plane flies through the air at nearly 600 miles an hour, the pressure under the wings holds it in the sky as securely as a napkin ball in Jell-O.

Turbulence happens when blocks of air rub past each other at different temperatures, pressures or speeds. It can have many different causes, from thunderstorms to the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation, which pushes bands of air outwards. Its strength ranges from mild, causing little more discomfort than a slight trembling, to severe, in which passengers or flight crew can be thrown around the cabin and risk injury if not wearing seatbelts.

Related 'Ask Us Anything' Stories

How pilots avoid thunderstorms—and what happens when they can’t

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Turbulence is less scary than it feels

But while strong turbulence can feel alarming, Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot and writer of the Ask the Pilot blog, says that “people tend to have a very exaggerated sense of what the airplane is actually doing.”

“Airplanes have what we call positive stability,” he says. “When they’re disturbed from their position in space, by their nature they want to return to where they were.”

During turbulence, every jolt down is matched by an equivalent jolt up, holding the plane steady on its course—as if it were suspended in Jell-O.

“There has never been a plane crash from turbulence,” Paul says in her video. Is this true?

Bunn recalls one incident in the 1960s when a flight departing Japan’s Tokyo airport encountered severe turbulence off the side of Mount Fuji, causing it to suffer structural damage and crash into a forest. But, he emphasizes, such an incident would never happen today. For one, commercial jets would never fly so close to a mountain, knowing that these can disrupt air flows and cause strong forms of turbulence close to solid ground, where planes are naturally most vulnerable.

For another, improvements in airplane technology mean that planes are now much better constructed to withstand even the strongest forms of turbulence.

During testing of modern airliners, “you can almost bend the wing double [in half] and it won’t break,” Bunn says. In real situations, “you never see even a tenth that much wing flex.”

So, is turbulence really like Jell-O? Not exactly. But if you’re a nervous flyer, perhaps the image can help reassure you that the only real dangers from turbulence can be solved by simply wearing a seatbelt.

As Paul says: “You can just chill there. You’re just wriggling in jelly.”

In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

The post Is turbulence really like Jello-O? Pilots weigh in. appeared first on Popular Science.

Silver Spring, Maryland, 15th January 2026, CyberNewsWire

If you’re someone who mosquitoes just adore, we feel your pain. Unfortunately, new data indicates the number of mosquito species that feed on humans is increasing—and it’s likely to get worse.

Dr. Sérgio Lisboa Machado, a microbiologist from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, is the co-author of a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution on a potential link between deforestation and mosquitoes’ increasing preference for human blood. 

Whose blood is it anyway?

In the study, Machado and his colleague Dr. Jeronimo Alencar examined the feeding habits of several mosquito species in the Atlantic Forest, a moist broadleaf forest that stretches along the eastern coast of South America.

According to Machado, the project began as an attempt to figure out which local animals these mosquitoes were feeding on. 

“When we started our research, our main goal was to find the preferred blood source that some species of female mosquitoes use for reproduction,” Machado tells Popular Science

The process of identifying the blood in the creatures’ stomachs was time-consuming. The first step was identifying which of the region’s roughly 40 mosquito species were biting. This involved careful scrutiny of the creatures with a stereoscope. 

“The identification itself is not complicated,” Machado says, “but there is a shortage of entomologists to perform it.”

This fact, along with the need to transport the mosquitoes back to Rio de Janeiro for analysis, meant by the time the samples were analyzed, the DNA and RNA inside of them had started to break down. Even with these difficulties, the analysis provided Machado with a pretty good idea of which mammal species the mosquitoes in question preferred for dinner. In several cases, this blood was human.

 “This was something we didn’t expect,” Machado says. “Since we were in a forest reserve, we expected to find DNA from vertebrates in the local fauna.”

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Mosquitoes can barely see–but a male’s vision perks up when they hear a female

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What would a world without mosquitoes look like?

Shifting tastes

So why so much human blood? The researchers hypothesize that the Atlantic Forest’s changing environment has led these species to develop a taste for human blood. 

“We believe it’s a matter of opportunity given the lack of a preferred food source,” Machado says. “It seems that if mosquitoes can’t find their preferred blood source, they seek out whatever is available.”

As biodiversity declines and animal species go extinct, more mosquito food sources are disappearing. However, unlike many of the animals on which they feed, mosquitoes are adaptable creatures. There’s almost always a ready-made alternative, including humans. 

While this might be good news for the mosquitoes, it risks being terrible news for humans. As an increasing number of mosquito species develop a taste for humans, so too does the risk that species which have not been particularly problematic in the past could act as new vectors for blood-borne diseases.

Once mosquitoes acquire a new food source, they tend to develop a preference for that particular blood—and humans are one species whose availability is most definitely not declining. Today, the Atlantic Forest occupies barely a quarter third of its former area, and it’s not alone. With every passing year, more wilderness is lost to human incursion.

The answer seems to be first arresting, and then reversing, this process of deforestation and habitat destruction. But it’s not altogether clear that the damage is so easily reversible. Humans certainly aren’t going anywhere, so who’s to say that the mosquitoes won’t just keep feeding merrily on us regardless?

Machado expresses cautious optimism on how we can address how deforestation affects what mosquitoes eat.  

“We believe this is a reversible process, but this will require restoring the biome while simultaneously continuing our study. We are still seeking more evidence that [these] mosquitoes have a preferred food source. For now, we are observing that there is a possibility that they are adapting to different sources and do not [prefer] human blood.”

Jumping species

Nevertheless, humanity continues to play with fire as it pushes further and further into previously unspoilt ecosystems. A landmark 2001 study found that new diseases are twice as likely to be zoonotic—transmissible between animals and humans—than existing ones. The danger posed by such diseases was exemplified by COVID-19, which jumped from bats to humans to catastrophic effect.

While disastrous scenarios surrounding a novel pathogen spread by mosquitoes are hypothetical, there are also very real dangers linked to deforestation. For instance, the malaria parasite in the Amazon is largely spread by the Anopheles darlingi mosquito. It was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s, but re-emerged in the 1990s, and is now common. Another study found that cleared forest patches had created a perfect breeding environment for the insect, helping its return.

Ultimately, Machado stresses that it’s important to control the emergence of new disease vectors and thus mitigate further risks. 

“The re-establishment of ecosystems will certainly contribute to this and should minimize the climate changes we are experiencing,” he says. “We need to learn that our actions today, however small, will always have global repercussions in the future.”

The post Without forests, mosquitoes turn to human blood appeared first on Popular Science.

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