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There’s a gaping 2,000-pound hole in Earth’s food web. Saber-toothed cats with 7-inch-long fangs, sloths the size of elephants, wombats the size of cars, and many of the world’s largest mammals disappeared between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. While 10,000 years may seem long ago to humans, that’s a blink of an eye in evolutionary time, and the disappearance of these megafauna still impacts us today.

According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), disappearing megafauna fundamentally reshaped the food web for modern animals. These effects are also more pronounced in North and South Americas than in other continents.

The world’s food webs all have the same basic principle—animals that eat are then eaten by others. When an animal goes extinct, the complex web of relationships shifts among the surviving species. If a predator disappears, their prey’s population may go unchecked, with a series of cascading effects. Based on previous research into large-animal extinction and food webs, study co-author and Michigan State University ecologist Lydia Beaudrot thought that the extinction of mammals weighing over three pounds could still have an effect tens of thousand years later. 

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To investigate this hunch, Beaudrot and her team analyzed the predator-prey relationships in 389 locations across tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Their study included over 440 mammals including lions, wolves, bears, and elephants. 

While the basic animal-eats, animal-gets-eaten structure remains true in all food webs, the number and types of species vary greatly between locations. Overall, the study found that food webs today have fewer, smaller prey in North and South America than they do Africa and Asia.

When they studied prey characteristics such as body mass and activity patterns, the team found that predators in the Americas typically stick with prey with a narrower range of traits, with less overlap among them.

Tens of thousands of years ago, many of the world’s biggest mammals disappeared. New research reveals where the ripple effects are still being felt in terms of who eats whom today. Image: Chia Hsieh, Michigan State University.

According to the team, the differences between the continents does not just stem from varieties in weather or seasons. Instead, the severity of past extinctions played a significant role in food webs. While each region suffered their share of losses, the Americas were hit the hardest. These continents have lost more than three-quarters of all mammals over 100 pounds during the last 50,000 years.

One example is giant deer. South America was once home to giant deer, including Morenelaphus brachyceros. These roughly 440-pound deer went extinct 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. When they disappeared, there was less prey for predators like saber-toothed cats and dire wolves. The loss of the deer essentially thinned out the food web.

“A lot of the lower part of the food web was lost,” Chia Hsieh, a study co-author and MSU community ecologist, said in a statement. 

Why most of Earth’s massive mammals disappeared is still up for debate. Some scientists believe that climate and environmental stresses are to blame. Others say hungry humans spreading out from Africa into other parts of the world played lead to their demise. 

Understanding extinction events of the past helps scientists better understand the potential long-term impacts of species facing the same fate now. Nearly half of all animals weighing over 20 pounds are classified as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Additionally, the planet may be experiencing a sixth mass extinction event. 

The team plans to study whether historical extinctions make certain communities more vulnerable going forward.

“By studying the past, we can also try to understand what to expect in the future,” Hsieh concluded.

The post We’re still recovering from losing the woolly mammoth appeared first on Popular Science.

The newest residents of the internet’s favorite eagle nest are rapidly growing right before our eyes. Nearly one month after hatching, Jackie and Shadow’s two to-be-named chicks are beginning to put more on thermal fur. This extra warmth was certainly helpful, after a snowstorm covered their nest in snow over the weekend.

What a difference three weeks makes. Image: Friends of Big Bear Valley.

According to nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), the chicks are also growing their first juvenile pin feathers. These spiky feathers on the wing’s tips are essential for flight. They will continue to grow until the chicks fledge about 10 to 14 weeks after birth.

The eaglets’ pin feathers are starting to appear. Image: FOBBV

In another important step towards their independence, FOBBV says they may have “tucked” for the first time. Tucking is a significant developmental shift and helps the birds stay warm by themselves, without relying on their parents for brooding.

As always, you can follow the little eaglets’ growth with FOBBV’s livestream 24/7.

Jackie and Shadow’s 2026 babies: Everything you need to know

It’s been another roller coaster nesting season for Jackie and Shadow, a pair of internet-famous bald eagle parents living in San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California. After two of their eggs were destroyed by ravens in January, Jackie and Shadow laid two new eggs that have successfully hatched.

Chick 1 hatched on April 4 at 9:33 p.m. PDT, while Chick 2 followed on April 5 at 8:30 a.m. Their large nest in Big Bear Valley east of Los Angeles is livestreamed 24 hours a day by nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) and has captivated millions. 

How long will the chicks stay in the nest? 

Chicks usually stay in the nest until 10 to 14 weeks of age.

What challenges do the eaglets face?

Before leaving the nest, the chicks face threats from other birds of prey, including hawks, ravens, other eagles, and owls. Inclement weather can also present challenges for the chicks. In 2025, a March snowstorm resulted in the death of one of Jackie and Shadow’s three chicks.

During fledging, only 70 percent of eaglets survive. One of the greatest threats is from cars that can injure or kill the birds while they scavenge for food on roadkill.

Who are Jackie and Shadow? 

The pair first got together in 2018 and successfully raised chicks in 2019 and 2022. However, their eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. Only 50 percent of eagle eggs successfully hatch, so this pair has already beaten the odds.

What happened to Jackie and Shadow’s 2025 eaglets?

In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. On March 13, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong winds. Only two of the chicks were visible on the live cam when the storm passed by the next morning. FOBBV later confirmed the passing of one of the chicks. The two surviving chicks were later named Sunny and Gizmo.

What happens after chicks fledge? 

Young eagles usually fledge–or leave the nest and fly–when they can flatten their wings and have feathers capable of flight. This typically occurs when the birds hit 10 to 14 weeks of age. Males also tend to take their first flight a little sooner than females. 

According to FOBBV, fledglings from Southern California have been spotted as far south as Baja California, as far north as British Columbia, and as far east as Yellowstone National Park.About 70 percent of bald eagles survive the fledgling stage. FOBBV does not tag their eagles, so it’s not possible to follow the chicks’ journeys after they flee the nest.

The post Jackie and Shadow’s chicks getting new feathers appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s a downright creepy feeling. You’re striding confidently down what seems to be a clear, open path, and then you feel it. Stretchy filaments dragging across your skin, your clothes—even worse, your face. The more you try to backtrack and flail your way out of it the more you feel like Frodo wrapped in Shelob the spider’s deadly web, your luckier friends snickering like orcs ready to take you back to Mordor. 

Long story short, walking through a spiderweb is awful. However, according to the National Park Service (NPS), there are ways to avoid the frustrating encounter. The first tip they list is sticking to the road most traveled. Since spiders are more likely to build their sticky and intricate homes near greenery, walking along the center of the trail can lessen your chances of becoming an arachnid home wrecker. 

Tip number two: “Sweep a hiking stick or trekking pole in front of you as you walk to catch any webs before you run into them,” the agency writes. “No need to go full Jedi on your first day with a new lightsaber—use it only when needed. And remember to say sorry. Manners matter, even to spiders.” 

Along the same lines, a brimmed hat can intercept webs and also protects your face from the sun’s harmful rays.The NPS also suggests—rather sensibly—walking slowly and carefully along a trail, and conducting your adventures during the middle of the day. Spiders are more active at dawn and dusk, so avoiding these times lessens your chances of an unhappy meeting. 

What’s more, a cheeky Facebook user had another clever tip that is bad news for tall friends, but a great strategy for all the short kings and queens adventuring into national parks. “Let the tallest member of your group lead the way. They will clear the path! Also, never be the tallest member of the group.”

But if, despite all this advice, you still walk into a spiderweb, rest assured that there’s another Lord of the Rings-themed silver lining from the NPS: “One does not simply become a master of karate. First, you must accidentally walk into a spider web.”

The post How to avoid the horror of walking through a spiderweb, according to the National Park Service appeared first on Popular Science.

Every day, you encounter sounds that you can’t technically hear. Some of these are produced at incredibly high pitches, but many others occur as infrasound. This range of ultra-low frequencies below 20 Hertz (Hz) are found everywhere—during thunderstorms, inside factories, and even amid rush hour traffic. But a growing body of evidence suggests that infrasound is regularly detectable in spookier situations. More specifically, the seemingly imperceptible tones may frequently show up in “haunted” hotspots.

This isn’t to say that ghosts generate ultra-low rumblings like crocodiles. Instead, researchers writing in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience suggest that infrasound may help explain why some places simply feel more creepy or foreboding than others.

“Consider visiting a supposedly haunted building. Your mood shifts, you feel agitated, but you can’t see or hear anything unusual,” Rodney Schmaltz, a psychologist at Canada’s MacEwan University and study co-author, said in a statement. “In an old building, there is a good chance that infrasound is present, particularly in basements where aging pipes and ventilation systems produce low-frequency vibrations.”

To better understand the potential relationship between unconscious auditory influences on human psychology, Schmaltz’s team asked 36 volunteers to sit by themselves in a room and listen to either unsettling or calming music clips. During half of the sessions, the study authors also exposed their volunteers to 18 Hz infrasound tones through hidden subwoofer speakers. Each person then filled out a survey to record their emotional responses to the music, as well as whether or not they suspected any exposure to infrasound. Finally, they provided a saliva sample to assess their cortisol levels.

Researchers discovered that participants’ salivary cortisol was higher when infrasound was present, whether or not the individual successfully flagged low-frequency audio. The volunteers also consistently reported higher levels of irritability and ranked the music as sadder overall. Interestingly, there was no statistical evidence suggesting people could reliably identify infrasound.

“Participants could not reliably identify whether infrasound was present, and their beliefs about whether it was on had no detectable effect on their cortisol or mood,” explained Schmaltz.

While cortisol levels are directly related to irritability and stress in humans, the experiment indicated the hormone may also be swayed by more subtle influences.

“This study suggests that the body can respond to infrasound even when we can’t consciously hear it,” Schmaltz added.

Past research supports their theory, including a famous incident from over 40 years ago. During the 1980s, a British engineer named Vic Tandy began noticing odd shapes at the corners of his vision while working in a factory for medical equipment. Coworkers had long alleged that the building itself was haunted. However, Tandy’s “visions” disappeared soon after discovering and disabling a nearby fan that was generating infrasound rumblings.

“As someone who studies pseudoscience and misinformation, what stands out to me is that infrasound produces real, measurable reactions without any visible or audible source,” said Schmaltz.

The study’s authors stress that they haven’t reached any definitive conclusions yet, citing the small sample pool and focus on a single frequency. That said, their work is one more indication that a ghost may not be what’s raising the hairs on the back of your neck—it may simply be some faulty plumbing.

The post That ghostly presence may just be bad plumbing appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s common knowledge that parrots can learn to speak like humans, sometimes a little too much. Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in England even has five foul-mouthing African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). But can they use names the way we do?

“Although we know that wild parrots and some other animals have vocal signatures and can even use them to direct communication to other individuals, it is difficult to state precisely that they use names in the same manner as humans,” Christine Dahlin, a professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, tells Popular Science. 

For example, a 2024 study found that wild African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) address each other with name-like calls. Wild bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) are also able to address each other with learned vocal labels. 

Dahlin is co-author of a study recently published in the journal PLOS One which aims to figure out if parrots learn and use names similarly to humans. To do so, the team worked with survey data on over 889 companion parrots because of their ability to copy human words. They discovered that a significant number of parrots can indeed apprehend and use names like us. 

A sample of parrots living with humans showed the ability to correlate names with individuals, but also to use proper names in ways humans typically don’t. Image: Lauryn Benedict.

“We found that many parrots can learn and apply names appropriately, with 88 different individuals using names appropriately, sometimes for single individuals (both humans and other animals),” Dahlin explains. “However, parrots also used names in contexts that are atypical for humans, often using their own name as a means to seek attention.”

Proper names help people manage complex social interactions. Since parrots are also extremely social creatures, Dahlin says that their work shows  how wild parrots might apply their vocal learning capabilities. 

“Parrots are very social animals with impressive mimicry abilities,” she points out. “If they can learn and use names appropriately in captivity, it would not surprise me to learn they are engaging in similar behavior in their wild flocks.”

The team is still collecting survey data, so if you have a chatty parrot pet, you can participate by sending in information through the Many Parrots Project, which they used in the study. Ultimately, this is just the latest research suggesting that humans aren’t all that much more special than other animals.

The post Parrots use names to talk to each other appeared first on Popular Science.

What are you the most wrong about? You know the least about stuff far away from you in distant galaxies, but as you have few opinions about that, and it hardly affects you, who cares?

But what are you the most wrong about where you do have opinions, and where they are consequential for you? Consider seven factors that say when you are BLINDED:

• [B]ound: When you are judged by your group on your confident and unthinking belief in and loyalty to particular claims, you won’t study them well.

• [L]ow-Impact: When you are wrong about factors relevant for collective choices, your vote barely moves them, and so you have little incentive to think about them to make them better.

• [I]ndefinite: When concepts come from a high dimensional space where it seems hard to pin them down, separate them, or to define or measure them.

• [N]on-Connected: When you see relevant concepts as coming from a whole separate realm that has no logical connections to all the usual realms where you know things.

• [D]evalued: When you declare yourself to be largely indifferent to the consequences for you, as something else matters much more to you.

• [E]vidence-Poor: When you actually have little relevant data to draw on, and the best data that you have supporting your opinion is the mere fact that some groups like yours have continued to exist and while holding this opinion.

• [D]ynamic: When the topic is about what changes to be making to your group’s collective choices, either recently or in the near future, the mere fact that your group exists no longer offers even weak evidence for those choices.

The max mistake topic area, with all of these factors, is: the adaptiveness of your morals.

Your group suspects that you are evil if you do not see their morals as obvious, and even suspects you if you had to think to come to agree with them. Morality is a collective choice, where you are punished for deviating, so to have an impact you’d have to change your group’s shared moral opinions. Moral concepts tend to be hard to pin down, and today most see moral claims as sitting in a disconnected realm where all our usual non-moral claims are not relevant.

On the topic of the cultural and DNA adaptiveness of your group’s morality (and norms and status markers), most people say they care much less about the adaptiveness of their morals than about the “moral truth” of their morals. Figuring out theoretically which morals are more adaptive is actually quite hard, and so our best evidence is empirical: which successful societies have had which morals. But the fact that your society seems inclined to change its morals lately in a particular direction is far weaker evidence for the adaptiveness of that direction.

The topic where you most need careful thought is also where your community most punishes such thought. This is our big blind spot on which our civ will likely fall.

If the next three Version 3 Starship flights go as planned. Flight 12 in May is the V3 rocket debut with in-space Raptor relight. Flight 13 will have orbital insertion and possibly initial commercial V3 Starlink deployments. Flight 13 should have booster recovery and if things go good a Starship catch attempt. Flight 14 could ...

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Consider the social ranking of who is how much of an intellectual. Think of this ranking as made by a weighted average of the opinions of other intellectuals. If we look at how this weighting changes across intellectual levels, there will be a median level, where half of the weight comes from opinions above that level, and half below.

I asked ChatGPT (5.5) and Claude (4.7) to give percentile estimates for the median level who judges who are the very best intellectuals, for the West in various years. They gave median 99%,99.5% for year 1000, median 96%,97% for year 1750, median 93%,90% for 1900, and median 88%,80% for 2025.

We have thus seen an increasing populism in who among us judges who are our very best intellectuals. Which is plausibly a source of intellectual decay. Especially as it is often noted that we usually find it hard to distinguish between mental quality levels above our own.

New weapon for US soldiers can wipe out drones and enemy in trenches with rapid fire air burst grenades. These are $50K per gun for the version being reviewed. This is a follow up to previously failed grenade weapons. One shot clears a room or can take a section of trench. Semi auto grenade launcher ...

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The Dylan Patel, head of Semianalysis, interview is a must watch for anyone tracking AI economics, infrastructure, and future societal shifts. SemiAnalysis’s own AI spend exploded from tens of thousands last year to $7 million annualized run-rate right now. Even non-technical staff are now heavy Claude/Code users. Semianalysis metrics and work are cited by Nvidia ...

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Many (Poincaré 1908, Schumpeter 1911, Ogburn 1922) have said that, as there are so many good ideas out there, most innovation is just simple combos of prior good ideas. This seems true of my best idea.

April 25, 1996, thirty years ago today, I first posted my best idea: decision markets, i.e., speculative markets that advise specific decisions by estimating decision-conditional outcomes. A.k.a., “futarchy” as applied to governance. It’s not my deepest, grandest, beautiful, or hardest won insight, just the one with the biggest expected impact.

My idea was a simple combo of two other long-well-known ideas.

The first prior idea I built on is that speculative markets do quite well at aggregating info. This was explored in theory (Emory 1896, Gibson 1889, Bachelier 1900) and in data (Cowles 1933, Working 1934). Even so in 1996, US regulators in practice only allowed risk-hedging, not info aggregation, as an “economics rationale” to allow markets to exist. (The allowed “price discovery” rationale was tied to helping other markets hedge risks.)

In 1984 I left grad school in physics and philosophy of science at U Chicago to go to Silicon Valley to do AI research, and on the side work with Xanadu, trying to invent the World Wide Web. Around 1988 I first started to have doubts about the Xanadu vision of reforming public convo by making criticism easy to find, and wondered what else we could do instead. So I started to think and write about the big potential of making speculative markets to aggregate info on far more topics. Like most everyone who first enters this space, I was first thinking mainly in terms of markets on the usual topics we see in mass media, punditry, and public policy debates.

The second prior idea I built on is that info is mainly valuable by informing specific decisions. For many centuries we’ve seen calculations of the value of certain specific info for specific decisions. And then we developed more general theory (Ramsey 1928, Hosiansson 1931, Blackwell 1951, Savage 1953, Schlaifer 1959). At Caltech social science grad school 1993-1997, I learned decision theory and the standard value of info calculation. Then wondering where speculative markets could add the most info value, ~1996 I realized that this would likely come from markets estimating specific outcomes given specific decision choices.

As I was one of the first to write on the big potential of prediction markets, many who entered this space over the years approached me. At which point I usually pitched this decision market concept. Which usually pushed them away, as they were focused, as I was initially, on those mass media and punditry topics. But I have doggedly persisted.

Most all innovations combine simple elegant ideas with messy details that make those ideas work. Mine is no different. To find the right messy details, one needs concrete trials and experiments trying different detail versions. It has been hard to find orgs willing to do this, as org decision making is usually quite political. But in the last few years we’ve thankfully started to see some trials.

As an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance. Imagine a governance that, when assigned a goal, would reliably achieve that if it is in fact feasible. This would radically reshape our whole world. (Yes, even if we soon get powerful AIs.) As decisions markets plausibly enable such competent governance, this is why I estimate their expected impact to be so very great.

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Human action plans are often organized around goal hierarchies, with lower-level subgoals helping to achieve higher-level goals. And many parameters correlate simply with this high-to-low goal axis. For example, lower-level goals and actions tend to take less space, time, and other resources. They are less likely to conflict with other goals, and more likely to be time-consistent. They are more easily evaluated for success, better described by simple abstractions, more reliably controlled, and more easily optimized by hill-climbing. They seem more observable, reversible, and substitutable, give faster feedback, and are more easily automated.

However, other related parameters depend on this key high-to-low goal axis in less simple ways; they instead peak at some mid-level, and fall away from that in both directions. For example, we have more conscious awareness of, give more conscious attention to, and make more deliberate choices re mid level goals. We can more clearly articulate them and their relations to other goals, and we can more easily teach others to manage them. People coordinate with each other more here, and our blame, credit, norms, and laws focus more here. There is more cultural variety of behaviors at these mid levels; other behaviors are more set by DNA.

A noteworthy exception is that such mid-peaking parameters often peak at much higher levels in large for-profit orgs, and in other large orgs, like militaries, with strong incentives tied to concrete goals. Such orgs often can and do articulate, measure, credit, and blame the behaviors of top people who mange high-level goals.

A simple interpretation of these patterns is that cultural evolution of coordinated behaviors faced a key tradeoff. Let me explain.

As thinking and talking takes time, there is a lowest level of goals and actions where we can discuss them as we choose and do them, so that such talk greatly influences those actions. While humans can and do watch and learn details of others’ behaviors that are at much lower-levels, we mostly do this non-verbally and unconsciously.

However, to enforce norms, including the norms that say that we should keep our promises, we humans need to be able say to others in sometimes-verifiable words what we and others have or have not been doing lately. So that we can complain about such actions, and recruit others to exert social pressures toward norm enforcement. To defend ourselves against such accusations, our conscious minds were created to manage key stories of what we’ve been doing lately and why.

So cultural evolution got into the habit of having us think and talk consciously about goals near this lowest-articulable level, and also to notice, copy, and teach chunks of behavior near these levels. And in addition, we mostly manage our norms, status markers, and key coordination mechanisms near such levels. As this cultural evolution process is pretty random and uncoordinated, efforts to abstract these norms and chunks most naturally expressed at these mid levels into higher level goals don’t usually achieve much clarity or coherence. Also, we seem reluctant to explicitly name cultural adaption itself as a big higher level goal.

So why didn’t we instead define and manage our social coordination using much higher levels goals? The simple correlations above say that such higher goals would tend to be less modular, less observable, and less easily described using abstractions. Making it harder for us to see and describe them, and to enforce norms about them.

However, with the invention of money and for-profit orgs, the world has now found new ways to use modular observable goals at quite high-levels. When we allow such orgs to manage key areas of life, they have shown remarkable abilities to effectively coordinate our behaviors. The problem is that, in many minds at least, their wider use would violate other key norms that we have inherited from cultural evolution.

Notice that cultural natural selection of individual behaviors seems insufficient to evolve better norms and status markers, as these are features of key game-theoretic equilibria, where individuals deviations are punished. We need instead to have collective deviations of entire cultures, i.e., units with much stronger internal than external conformity pressures.

Alas this process has been greatly hindered in the last few centuries by decreasing variety and selection pressures, and increasing rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. Which is plausibly causing such norms to decay, plausibly leading to civ collapse and replacement in a century or two.

While space exploration is serious and sometimes dangerous scientific work, that does not mean that there is no room for fun. Something as mundane as a little ball of water can be supremely entertaining.

In a video shared by NASA, Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are seen watching a ball of water floating around in zero-gravity. The water itself is moving around and shaping the light around it in some surprisingly complex ways.

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Without any force pulling the water downward, surface tension molds the liquid into a floating sphere. The light then bends inside the bubble, distorting and inverting images. According to retired NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, water like this offers a simple physics lesson and reminder that what see all depends on how we look it.

Wiseman is also no stranger to playing with water in space. During a mission in 2014, he and other crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) explored water’s surface tension in microgravity. They even went as far as putting a waterproof camera inside a bubble to get a water’s-eye view of zero-G. 

On April 10, the Artemis II crew—Commander Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Koch and Hansen—splashed down after their historic 10-day mission. Along the way, they surpassed Apollo 13’s record for farthest crewed spaceflight and captured breathtaking photographs of the far side of the moon. They also ate a lot of hot sauce and troubleshooted relatable toilet troubles. Their scientific work also will help prepare future astronauts to live and work on the moon, as NASA builds a future Moon Base and looks towards further expeditions to Mars.

The post Watch the Artemis II astronauts have fun with bubbles appeared first on Popular Science.

Ramses II (1303–1213 BCE), aka Ramses the Great, is easily one of ancient Egyptian history’s most recognizable rulers. While he isn’t the pharaoh cited in the biblical story of Exodus (a common misconception), Ramses II remained a certifiably powerful and accomplished king who oversaw Egypt’s New Kingdom for roughly 66 years at the height of its influence and grandeur.

This pharaoh wanted everyone to know it, too. Ramses II was responsible for many massive architectural projects across the kingdom, including sprawling temple complexes and extensive gold mining operations. These endeavors also included towering monuments carved in his image. In the eastern Nile Delta, archaeologists recently discovered the top portion of yet another statue of his highness. 

The sculpture section is now stored in a secure facility for further examination. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Located at the ancient site of Imet now known as Tel Faraoun, the sculpture’s proportions are in keeping with Ramses II’s sense of grandeur. According to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the upper half is 7.2-feet-tall and weighs between five and six tons. To guard against further damage, Egyptologists quickly relocated the statue fragment to a nearby storage facility, where they will analyze and restore the artifact for potential public display.

The over 3,000-year-old statement piece is in comparatively rough condition today, but archaeologists believe its surviving artistic details almost certainly tie it to Ramses II. Despite its size, experts also say the statue wasn’t crafted by nearby artisans. Instead, it was likely made in Pi-Ramsesse, the Egyptian capital established by the pharaoh himself, before workers transported it roughly 15 miles north to Imet.

The statue was likely crafted elsewhere before being transported to the site. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

But despite the statue’s enormity, researchers suspect it was once part of an even larger installation. Many similar archaeological sites have included immense sculpture projects called triads, which depict a ruler between a pair of deities to confer divine authority and safekeeping. 

Regardless of religious favor, life was apparently kind to Ramses II. Historical records indicate that by the time of his death in 1213 BCE, the pharaoh was 90 years old and father to somewhere between 88 and103 children.

The post Archaeologists discover 7-foot-tall statue of legendary Egyptian pharaoh appeared first on Popular Science.

The sun is an incomprehensibly gigantic, constantly roiling nuclear furnace—but some days are even busier than others. Based on data collected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, our solar system’s central star recently fired off not one, but two impressive X-class flares within hours of each other. The sun emitted an initial X2.4 solar flare at 9:07 p.m. EDT on April 23, followed by an X2.5 sibling of extremely hot, charged energy at 4:13 a.m. EDT the next morning. But while the X-class designation signifies the most intense tier of events, the latest pair pale in comparison to some of the most powerful on record.

Solar flares are as inevitable as they are powerful. While the sun’s baseline may seem chaotic to us, astronomers know that the yellow star follows a relatively predictable, 11-year cycle of electromagnetic fluctuation. These timelines switch between apex and nadir phases known as the solar maximum and minimum. In October 2024, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center confirmed that the sun had entered its most recent, roughly year-long solar maximum. Although it’s now firmly out of that phase, the sun still produces regular flares across its surface.

How solar activity affects Earth depends on a range of factors, including an emission’s strength and its direction. Direct encounters can affect the planet’s magnetosphere, generating colorful auroras, while also disrupting radio communication, GPS, satellite operations, and energy grids. Other times, we may barely even notice when a flare happens. 

Flare strength is classified in ascending tiers, with each subsequent level denoting at least a tenfold increase in power. A-class events are the weakest, followed by the B, C, M, and X-class.

Although the recent X2.4 and X2.5 flares were strong enough to cause temporary radio blackouts over portions of the Pacific Ocean, Australia, and East Asia, they don’t even rank in the top 50 strongest examples on record. The most powerful solar flare ever observed took place on November 4, 2003. The massive flare was rated at least X40, if not higher. The associated coronal mass ejection erupted into space at a speed of over 2.6 million miles per hour, causing massive energy grid and communications disruptions.

The post The sun just fired off two massive solar flares appeared first on Popular Science.

Tesla financial and operations numbers like free cash flow and margin were growing. Those were good things. They beat on earnings and other forecasted metrics. However, the discussion about higher capital expenditures spooked Wall Street. There was also not a hard core locked in timeline for scaled unsupervised robotaxi. The growth in FSD and the ...

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The brain of a honeybee (Apis mellifera) weighs less than one milligram and contains fewer than one million neurons, but that may be more than enough for surprisingly complex calculations. For decades, cognitive researchers and biologists have debated just how much the seemingly simple insects can comprehend. The answer may sound inconsequential, but it has major implications for how intelligence functions and evolves across species. Now, a team at Monash University in Australia says they have a definitive answer about bee smarts: Earth’s vital pollinators are pretty good at counting.

Previous work has indicated that bees understand addition, subtraction, and even the concept of zero. While skeptics countered with the theory that the insects are solely reacting to visual cues, some biological scientists including Scarlett Howard remained confident in their assessment.

“It can be challenging to put ourselves in the mind of a bee to imagine how they see the world, but trying to see the world through an animal’s eyes is an essential part of our work,” Howard said in a statement. “The bees always surprise us with how they move through the world, interpret our questions, and make decisions.”

To investigate the honeybee’s environmental comprehension, Howard’s team reviewed stimulus queues—in this case, increasing the varieties and quantities of black shapes on a surface—but with an added twist. They also included a blank surface to represent “zero” in their experiments.Using reward-based incentives, they then analyzed how well honeybees learned to comprehend and associate number frequency with shapes and numbers based on visual capabilities.

According to the team’s study recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, they eliminated the theory that honeybee choices are only influenced by low-level perceptual hints.

“This finding strongly suggests that bees were engaging in abstract numerical reasoning rather than relying on spatial frequency alone—something that a purely associative, frequency-based mechanism cannot explain,” the study’s authors wrote.

University of Trento neuroscientist and collaborator Mirko Zanon added, “Our results show that [previous] criticism doesn’t hold when you consider the biology of the animal.”

Outside of a laboratory setting, these cognitive skills may translate to a honeybee’s ability to count flower petals to determine and remember which plants are the most nourishing. The findings also may help improve artificial intelligence modelling, showing that in some cases, “less is more” when it comes to computational needs. Regardless, the team’s discoveries underscore the importance of appreciating nature’s wide, often surprising range of cognition.

“We see and experience the world quite differently from animals, so we must be careful of centering human perspectives and senses when studying animal intelligence,” said Howard.

The post Honeybees understand basic math appeared first on Popular Science.

Deepseek v4 is out now, about expected, close to frontier behind about 3-6 months maybe. The big thing is price, its 1.74 per million tokens in and 3.48 per million tokens out. The output tokens are like up to 10x cheaper than the frontier. If you accept gpt 5.2 or gemini 3 performance they will ...

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Just a few weeks ago, I had a long-haul flight to Europe from the East Coast. As I packed and prepared, excited about what was planned, I also wondered and worried: How the heck was I going to sleep on this eight-hour flight, so I wasn’t sleepwalking through sightseeing the next day?

It’s a conundrum many of us have faced. There are TikTok videos, articles, products, and advice galore about how to meet the challenge. But what exactly does the science say? What’s the best way to sleep on a plane?  

Popular Science went to the experts. Here’s why it’s so difficult to get sleep on a plane, and how to set yourself up for the best chance of getting some shut eye up in the air.

Why it’s so hard to sleep on planes 

Nearly every environmental cue is working against us on planes, making it near impossible to get to sleep. The human body evolved to sleep in dark and quiet spaces, explains clinical psychologist and sleep scientist Dr. Joseph Dzierzewski, senior vice president of research and scientific affairs at the National Sleep Foundation.

A circadian rhythm—our body’s internal clock—guides us. It helps regulate our cycles of sleep and wakefulness and is largely set by our exposure to the sun, he says. 

Inside an airplane, we get the opposite. Not only are we sitting upright—or only slightly reclined in smaller and smaller airplane seats—but light and noise are unpredictable and largely outside our control on a flight. A seatmate may decide to turn on their reading light all night—or the guy in the row behind you keeps calling the flight attendants for one more cup of water. 

Cabin conditions and timing add to the challenge. The air on planes is dry, which can contribute to dehydration, and long-haul flight schedules often don’t line up with our normal sleep window. 

And, when we attempt to force sleep at the wrong time for our body clock, we can get frustrated and anxious, Dzierzewski says. That can lead to a kind of performance anxiety about sleep itself that only makes it harder to drift off as we start worrying about being too tired for the next day’s business meeting or sightseeing excursion. 

Airplane seats have been getting steadily smaller since the 1970s. Image: Jon Hicks / Getty Images Jon Hicks

Even that much-touted in-flight drink can backfire. Alcohol contributes to dehydration and can also mean more overnight bathroom trips, sleep and health experts say.

Beware of TikTok advice

It’s also important to be cautious of advice from TikTok or Instagram influencers without a background in sleep science and plane safety. 

“Just because we all sleep does not make everyone a sleep expert,” Dzierzewski says. “Sleep is a science. You should want to consume sleep information from people with advanced degrees who are credible, trustworthy, independent, and perhaps not mainstream influencers.” 

Viral TikTok travel hack is actually a really bad idea

For instance, a viral TikTok travel hack claims to help you get better shut-eye in the air with a sleep position best suited for a contortionist. In the videos, travelers put their knees up against their chest and strap the seatbelt around their ankles or legs to keep them in place, which they claim allows them to rest more easily.

Don’t do it, say doctors and experts. Strapping the seatbelt around your legs poses serious safety risks if you encounter turbulence or another emergency while in the air. The posture could also set you up for a potentially fatal blood clot.

Don’t do this. Video: Wrap the seatbelt around your legs, @ZoreTomek

The position impedes blood in the veins in your lower extremities from getting back to your heart, says Dr. Marc J. Kahn, chief of hematology at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who spoke with Popular Science.

That creates stasis, or sluggish, pooled blood, which increases your risk for a blood clot in an environment that’s already conducive to clotting, Kahn says. When you sit for long periods, blood flow in the legs slows down.

How to actually sleep on a plane

Unfortunately, there is no single miracle hack to ensure you get a few hours of sleep on a plane, especially for those of us confined to seats that don’t convert into beds—something I experienced firsthand on my own red-eye flight to Europe. But, experts say, there are some practical strategies to improve your odds of getting some sleep on a plane. 

Control light and noise 

You can’t control what your seatmate—or the guy behind you—does when the cabin lights dim, but you can take some control of your personal environment. Pack an eye mask to create darkness, and earplugs or noise-canceling headphones to blunt the roar of engines or the endless chatter of the person in front of you. Some travelers love a neck pillow, but it’s not for everyone. 

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“You want to create a more welcoming environment for yourself when you’re on the plane as much as possible,” says Erin Clifford, a licensed professional counselor, who works with professionals about maintaining wellness routines while traveling, and author of Wellness Reimagined. 

“When we zone everyone around us out, it can help a little bit with our sleep.”

Prepare before you board 

Good in-flight sleep starts on the ground, Clifford says. Before a long flight, avoid heavy meals and caffeine and stay hydrated. Some travelers may benefit from carefully timed melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, under medical guidance, or apps that gradually shift sleep schedules toward the destination time zone. 

To wear yourself out—don’t skip your workout that day, Clifford says. “When we exert ourselves, it makes us want to sleep more.” 

Create a familiar, soothing routine

To work with your body clock, replicate home sleep cues in the air. Wear comfortable clothing and swap your screen for a book, podcast, or audiobook as “lights out” approaches, experts recommend. Tune into a white noise app through your headphones or slather on some favorite lotion if that’s something you do at home.

“If you’re a person who always does A, B, and C before bed, and you have a night flight and you want to try to sleep on this flight, if you can translate any of those behaviors or activities to the plane, go for it,” Dzierzewski says. “It’ll help serve as a cue that this is a safe place and it’s time for me to prepare for bed.” 

Maybe the secret to sleeping on a plane is just being exhausted. Image: SolStock / Getty Images SolStock Adjust your expectations

Even with perfect preparation, be realistic. Few people get a great night’s sleep on an airplane. Control what you can, and accept that some variables—from chatty seatmates to turbulence—will always be out of your control.

“Effort is the enemy of sleep,” Dzierzewski says. “The harder you try to do it, the more arousing you become, the more anxiety, the more frustrated, and all those emotions are incompatible with sleep.” 

Exhausted enough

During my overnight flight to Frankfurt, I did what the sleep and travel experts I’d interviewed recommended. The screen on the back of my seat froze—mid-movie—so I ended my screen time early for the evening. I donned an eye mask and earplugs and tried to get cozy with the airplane-provided blanket and pillow. Earlier in the day, I made sure to make time for my usual exercise routine and walked up and down the terminal for an hour before we boarded. 

Sleep came, but fitfully and sporadically. Later that morning, on my two-hour connecting flight, however, something different happened. Without all those extras, my eyes barely stayed open for takeoff. I slept for nearly the entire flight. Not even the noise of the drink and snack service jostled me awake. My eyes opened as we landed and, ultimately, the first day of my long-awaited vacation was everything I hoped it would be. 

So, perhaps, the moral of the story is this: Sometimes, to sleep on a plane, you just need to be exhausted enough. 

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 The best way to sleep on a plane, according to science appeared first on Popular Science.