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How has sport performance changed and what are the sources of improvement? Training is the engine for improving world record sport performance. Wearables largely makes the engine run more efficiently rather than adding independent gains. Better training and sports science remain the dominant long-term driver of elite performance — the core of “individual excellence.” New ...

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Minnesota wildlife rehabilitator and ornithologist Foxfeather Zenkova trades sequins for imitation bird feathers when getting dressed up for a Saturday night. Recently, Zenkova donned an elaborate costume nicknamed “Ugly Mom,” all to care for an orphaned sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis). Outfits like Ugly Mom disguise human wildlife rehabilitators as adult animals, allowing them to care for orphaned animals and lessen the risk that the baby will imprint on a human before release.

“Many times a chick is found on its own, and a young sandhill should never be alone,” Zenkova, who runs Vulture Conservancy and Foxfeather and the Foxloft, tells Popular Science. “They stick like glue to their parents’ side, not straying more than a few yards from them until they’re basically full size and it’s time for migration in the fall.”

The puppets help cover up human hands during feedings. Image: Foxfeather Zenkova.

Sandhill cranes are one of the tallest birds in North America at nearly four feet tall with an impressive seven-foot wingspan. During the summer months, they are found in small bogs, marshes, and prairies across northern North America and the southeastern United States. During the winter, large flocks of sandhill cranes are found in Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, and Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge in Texas.

“They move with a prehistoric elegance, and their loud, bugling calls can travel for miles across wetlands, sounding like something you’d hear in Jurassic Park,” Zenkova says.

Sandhill cranes are also fast learners, highly observant, have a great memory, and are considered highly intelligent. However, this intelligence and innate social behavior can be a challenge in a rehabilitation setting.

“Craving strong social bonds and with eager minds, young cranes can become attached to people surprisingly quickly,” Zenkova explains. “Because they learn social behaviors from the adults around them, human imprinting can make it difficult, or even impossible, for them to live a normal life in the wild. That’s why rehabilitators go to extraordinary lengths to keep human interaction to a minimum, using crane costumes, puppets, mirrors, and captive surrogate foster cranes to help chicks identify with their own species instead of people.”

Another rehabilitation challenge is more physical—and can get uncomfortable in the summer. Cranes also move a lot and can walk mere hours after hatching. After a few days, they cover miles a day with their parents. This movement is critical to a young crane’s health and development and they can grow up to one inch per day. 

“This requires a lot of dedicated space and also time, and here during an uncommonly hot Minnesota summer this year it means me slogging around in the sun in full ‘Ugly Mom’ costume for hours a day, foraging and exercising different babies,” says Zenkova.

Currently, Zenkova’s clinic is caring for four orphaned sandhills, with a fifth on the way. Most chicks are orphaned after one or both parents are struck and killed by cars while crossing the road.  

Young sandhill cranes are rarely orphaned on purpose. It is usually because one or both parents have been struck by a car. Image: Foxfeather Zenkova.

If you believe that you have found an orphaned sandhill crane chick, it’s important to keep your distance at first. It is rare that a parent will abandon a chick and they may be hidden in vegetation or nearby but out of sight. 

“One of our orphaned cranes came in this year because it was parked under someone’s bird feeder for two weeks with no parents in sight,” Zenkova explains. “The homeowners [understandably] thought maybe the parents just visited occasionally like a mother deer or rabbit would, but it’s not normal for a baby crane to stay in one place alone like that and it did need help.”

Since these are wild birds, do not attempt to care for one yourself or turn to the internet for advice. According to Zenkova, it is full of misinformation that can end up harming the bird since rehabilitation is more than just feeding the animal. Reach out to a licensed animal rehabilitation center in your area as soon as possible, especially if the animal has obvious injuries or is constantly calling out. Animal Help Now can help you find licensed rehabilitators in your area. Animal rehabilitators are also always looking for volunteers to learn how to care for animals, as well as the public’s support through donations. 

After orphaned or injured cranes successfully heal, complete swimming therapy to strengthen broken legs, or learn how to be social with other cranes, they can be released. In Minnesota, where Zenkova works, rehabilitated sandhill cranes can be released in the fall.

“Rehabilitating cranes is a ton of work, but watching a crane chick heal and thrive is a great privilege for me,” Zenkova says. “There’s nothing better than the feeling of seeing them re-join their counterparts once again and get a second chance at a wild life at release.”

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The post Costumed ‘Ugly Mom’ helps orphaned sandhill cranes appeared first on Popular Science.

Walk your dog long enough and you’ll most likely see it: After peeing or pooping, you’ll see your trusty companion kick up a spray of grass and dirt with their back legs, sometimes in a real frenzy, then trot off. 

Some owners find it messy and tug their dog away. But the post-poop kick isn’t a bad habit to break or some quirky backyard dance. It’s a normal behavior, and there’s a real reason behind it.

It’s two signals in one

Dr. Carlo Siracusa, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the exaggerated kick is actually a way for a dog to leave a signal, or mark, for other dogs. “It’s a form of communication.” 

But this post-pee mark isn’t only about claiming territory. It’s also about presence and timing, a way of saying “I was here.” When a dog sniffs where another dog kicked the dirt or leaves, they can read the (sometimes literal) tea leaves and know how recently or long ago that other dog came by. That’s why dogs keep topping up their marks. A scent that’s a few days old provides different information from one laid down an hour ago. 

The kicked up mark carries two different pieces of information. There’s the smell, and there’s the scratching itself, which Siracusa describes as a visual signal on top of the scent. The kicking spreads the odor over a wider patch of ground and pushes some of it into the air, and it leaves a scuffed spot another dog can see. 

“If you are around, you can see me,” he says, speaking from the dog’s perspective. “But for those of you that are not yet here, you would smell that I was here.” He compares it to the way a cat marks, with a visible display in the moment and a scent that stays behind.

This little fluff ball is marking their territory and leaving messages for other dogs when they kick their legs back after peeing. Video: DOG KICK UP GRASS AFTER PEEING, @GhighiVlogs

Courtney Sexton, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, lands on the same two-part explanation, though she notes that she hasn’t studied ground-scratching directly. Excrement and urine are loaded with information, she says, and the kick helps broadcast it. 

“If you’re kicking after you go, it’s just going to spread that scent around a larger surface area and increase the likelihood that someone [or, more likely, another dog] passing by is going to catch it.” Some of it drifts into the air, so a dog downwind catches it, too.

The habit goes back to wolves

Sexton traces this behavior to dogs’ wild relatives: wolves. For wolves, territory matters, and scent marks are how a pack signals that this is their turf and warns others to stay away. Other wolves can read stress hormones in a mark or work out what the other animal has been eating. 

Studies of free-ranging dogs show that dogs, like wolves, also leave marks to signal where their territory is. In a 2012 study of a free-ranging dog pack, researchers found the dogs used their marks, including ground-scratching, to set up something like a property line and to threaten rivals during fights. 

A 2024 study of free-ranging dogs found males were more territorial than females and reacted most strongly to the scent of males from neighboring groups.

Most dogs in the world aren’t household pets, Sexton points out. Many are free ranging, living in loose groups where territory still counts. For a dog asleep on your bed the stakes are lower, but it’s held onto the behavior anyway. Even your domesticated pup often will take the same walking route every day and at the dog park, leaving other dogs pee-mail in kicked up leaves.

For some dogs, it may be about nerves

Siracusa adds a second factor from his clinical work. Anxious dogs, especially in busy environments such as crowded cities, may mark as a way of reasserting themselves. The point, he says, is to get across a simple “I’m around,” so that the dog can avoid difficult encounters with other dogs. 

He doesn’t push the idea too far. There’s no data showing anxious dogs ground-scratch more than calm ones, he says, only a broader pattern he sees in the clinic that anxious dogs mark more in general. 

Ground-scratching is just one way dogs mark. Others include urine marking and overmarking, where a dog deliberately marks over another dog’s scent. 

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No one has studied what’s actually in the scent

Dogs also have scent glands in their feet, so scratching probably lets out some scent from their paws while also spreading the initial mark. But what those glands add to the message hasn’t been studied, according to Siracusa. 

“There are glands in the paws,” Siracusa says, but which pheromones they release, and what each one means, hasn’t been worked out. 

There is some research pertaining to the paw scent, though. A 2020 study found dogs can tell one dog’s foot gland scent from another’s, though it was unclear whether they can tell the depositor’s sex from it. 

When it’s worth paying attention

For owners, when your precious Lassie kicks up the dirt after peeing, it’s usually nothing to fret about. Siracusa says he can’t remember a single client who found it worrying, or even annoying. Not every dog does it, and a dog that does may not do it every time.

What’s worth watching is a change from your own dog’s usual pattern. A dog that always scratches and suddenly stops, or one that starts doing it in a strained, awkward way, could be dealing with pain, rather than sending a message, especially if it comes with other signs like whining during elimination. 

“I’m more interested in the change in the normal behavior of a dog,” Siracusa says, “rather than the individual behavior itself.”

For the vast majority of dogs, though, it’s nothing to fix. So, the next time your dog fires grass and dirt across the yard, let them. Just mind where you’re standing.

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 dogs kick their back legs after pooping and peeing? appeared first on Popular Science.

In many policy areas, the usual convention wisdom on policy is actually in substantial conflict with many of the specific details that experts know about that policy area. However, experts who point this out are usually accused of being politically biased. Which is why we stay stuck in this situation.

However, while LLMs usually offer the usual conventional wisdom when asked simply about policy, they also know about and understand most of those details which are in conflict with it. Furthermore, at least for now LLMs are much less likely to be accused of political bias for reacting to such conflicts. Yes, they don’t notice such conflicts unless someone points them out, and even then they don’t usually update their main models as a result of noticing conflicts.

Even so, this seems to create an opportunity for LLM-judged policy debates. Let an analysis be a <2000? word text citing expert sources/results, and let a position be a <100? word summary, perhaps including a 0-100 numerical score.

Here is a draft process.

1. Pick a “resolved” policy claim, two debaters who agree to debate this, and an LLM to judge.

2. Each of these 3 parties writes & shares an initial position.

3. Each debater then offers an analysis by a deadline (e.g. one day).

4. LLM then responds with its analysis of those analyses, and its new position.

5. Each debater offers a responding analysis and position by a deadline

6. LLM again responds with an analysis and a new position

7. Each debater again offers analysis and position by a deadline

8. LLM gives its final analysis and verdict position.

As debater analyses can just point LLMs to standard expert results, three cycles of responses seem sufficient to force the LLM to see conflicts between its initial conventional wisdom position and detailed expert knowledge that debaters point it to. So final LLM verdicts should depend less on the usual conventional wisdom, and more on the logical relation between expert knowledge and the policy claim.

Maybe also pre-train the LLM on a particular policy analysis framework (e.g., econ efficiency) which all participants agree to use. So they don’t have to relitigate that.

SpaceX Starlink V5 satellite terminal directly integrated into the Cybercab’s roof structure (alongside the GPS antenna, 5G LTE antenna, FSD computer, and various cameras). This is a clean, factory-integrated design rather than the external Starlink Mini dishes spotted on earlier prototypes/testing vehicles (often mounted on the trunk lid). Starlink V5 directly integrated in Cybercab pic.twitter.com/FxzTtzjB6I ...

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The world-renowned athletic tracks installed for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the resurfacing was spearheaded by Mondo S.p.A.. They installed their state-of-the-art Mondotrack EI (Ellipse Impulse) at the Stade de France. If the world record mile run had the same conditions but had the most up to date track surface then the world ...

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SpaceX will post financial and operational results for the second quarter of 2026 after market close on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. SpaceX management will host a live audio-only webcast to discuss the results at 3:30 p.m. CT / 4:30 p.m. ET the same day. We will post our Q2 2026 financial and operational results on ...

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NASA’s asteroid-hunting Psyche spacecraft recently needed a little gravitational assist from Mars to keep speeding towards its intended target, but it didn’t leave the Red Planet empty-handed. While testing its various research instruments ahead of using them on the distant, metal-rich space rock 16 Psyche in 2029, the spacecraft snapped a travel album’s worth of flyby photos with its pair of identical cameras. 

NASA has released a compilation of the images taken during Psyche’s monthlong slingshot path in May. And unlike the thin crescent vantage point seen earlier, the stunning close-ups showcase the windswept surface, massive craters, and even the solar polar ice cap on Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.

“The imager performed brilliantly, delivering some rarely seen views of the Red Planet,” Jim Bell, Psyche’s imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

In addition to the pictures themselves, the team successfully tested Psyche’s camera calibrations and scattered light sensitivity. These trial runs also included highlighting Martian moons Phobos and Deimos—a process that will be repeated at the asteroid to hopefully locate any potential orbital moonlets. Meanwhile, mission specialists tested Psyche’s neutron and gamma-ray spectrometer. Planetary bodies and asteroids emit neutrons and gamma rays while absorbing waves of high-energy cosmic rays. Researchers can then use these waves to match with known elements to determine the object’s chemical makeup. At its closest flyby altitude of 2,864 miles, Psyche remained too far away to pick up any Martian gamma rays, but the team hoped to possibly flag neutrons as they left the planet.

“Around the time of Mars’ closest approach, the neutron spectrometer detected a count-rate enhancement close to what we anticipated. It was very gratifying to see,” said spectrometer science lead David Lawrence.

Then there is Psyche’s magnetometer. The instrument will eventually analyze the asteroid’s core, whose metal composition will reveal if it’s a rocky planet building block known as a planetesimal. Psyche’s magnetometer will still be a very useful tool before it reaches its target. It has been running ever since the spacecraft’s launch in 2023 so that researchers can measure solar winds. As it approached Mars, the equipment relayed a huge increase in its magnetic field that aligned with an area of the planet that absorbs the most solar wind known as the bow shock region.

“We didn’t anticipate big discoveries, given how extensively the planet has been studied, but we did complement Mars science with the data we collected through Psyche’s unique perspective,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley.

With Mars in the rear view mirror, Psyche is now continuing along its 2.2-billion-mile journey to its diminutive asteroid, with even more work to do.Next up is restarting its solar-electric propulsion system to supply sustained thrust, which specialists expect to handle later in the year.

The post Mars’ desolate desert landscape captured by asteroid-bound NASA spacecraft appeared first on Popular Science.

UPDATE, July 20, 2026, 3:21pm EDT: Friends of Big Bear Valley posted an update Monday afternoon confirming it was in contact with the rehabilitation center where Jackie is receiving treatment. In a Facebook post, they wrote: “Jackie is stable and they are waiting on diagnostic results that can take several days. When we have additional information, we will post it here. Jackie is a strong eagle and we as a community will get through this.

Meanwhile, Shadow is an excellent mate and father, he continues to care for Sandy and Luna while protecting the nest and territory.”

An adult bald eagle recently rescued by the Los Angeles County Parks San Dimas Raptor Rescue is likely an internet-famous eagle mom named Jackie. Millions around the world have tuned into the day-to-day lives of Jackie, her partner Shadow, and their current chicks Sandy and Luna via a 24/7 livestream of their nest. 

According to Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV), they are in touch with the rescue organization and other facilities involved in the eagle’s care.

“She is in the best place she can be and getting the care she needs. We have not received any updates but were assured by the facility they will contact us when they have information,” FOBBV writes, while sharing video of the rescue from the County of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation.

On July 17, an adult bald eagle was found on the ground near Dana Point Park. The same bird had been observed there the previous day as well. The eagle was also seen during a short altercation on the ground with two other subadult eagles. Cell phone video confirmed that the adult was able to fend off the other eagles by turning over and using its talons, but could not fly away. The LA County Parks San Dimas Raptor Rescue then picked up the eagle and it was transferred to an unnamed specialty care facility.

At the same time, FOBBV reported that it had not seen Jackie on their cameras for several days. However, it is not clear how many visiting eagles are currently in the area around Big Bear Lake and she is not banded, so it has been difficult to officially confirm if it is Jackie. 

This story is developing and we will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates. In the meantime, viewers can monitor Shadow as he cares for Sandy and Luna ahead of their impending fledging. 

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. 

On May 1, FOBBV announced the chicks’ names: Sandy and Luna.

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 after 54,000 names were submitted by fans.

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.

Can I help Jackie and Shadow?

Yes. Environmental groups are currently fundraising $10 million to protect Jackie and Shadow’s foraging area from development. Learn more at SaveMoonCamp.org.

The post Bald eagle Jackie rescued after fight with other birds appeared first on Popular Science.

Only a handful of species apart from humans are known to understand geometry. It’s considered so rare among other animals that most scientists have long assumed even our closest non-human primate relatives struggle to grasp the concept of shapes and space. But according to a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some monkeys may not only have a solid handle on geometrical ideas—they cognitively process them in the same way as humans.

“What surprised us wasn’t just that monkeys could do the task. It was that monkeys, children and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in fundamentally the same way,” Jessica Cantlon, a study co-author, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), explained in a statement. “That suggests these intuitions are part of the basic architecture of the primate mind.”

Canton and colleagues designed an experiment focusing on olive baboons (Papio anubis) and Rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) living at the New York’s Seneca Park Zoo’s Primate Portal, an ongoing project overseen by CMU researchers and the Rochester Institute of Technology. There, primates are allowed to freely interact with a touchscreen offering various customizable cognitive-based tasks. Data, code, and video of those results are then made publicly available as open access information.

In this case, the baboons and macaques were offered fruit for participating in a two-dimensional geometric shape matching game. Cantlon said that although the concept may sound simple, it’s deceptively more difficult because the objects don’t feature particularly distinct attributes across form, size, and color.

“You’d get tripped up, too,” she warned.

To measure the primates’ results, the team then offered the same game to preschoolers, 21 American adults, as well as nearly 80 adults from the Tsimane’ people. The Tsimane’ are an Indigenous subsistence agrarian group living in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia, and do not receive formal education like most other present-day societies. This helped Cantlon’s team to better separate factors like age and culture.

“Sometimes when you’re trying to study something in children, it can be difficult to untangle whether their ability is developmental or something learned from education or experience,” she explained. “So if we want to understand how children learn geometry, we need to understand what they bring to the table before formal instruction begins.”

Including the Tsimane’ proved crucial. The range stretching from the two primate species to human children and adults from different educational and cultural backgrounds showed a clear spectrum of understanding when it comes to basic geometry. The study results strongly imply that human children are born with evolutionary intuitions around space and shape. Instead of structured geometry education beginning from nothing, the lessons are built on those existing and innate principles.

Some of humanity’s most ancient artifacts support the argument that our species (and our evolutionary relatives) have long grasped Euclidean geometry. Inside the Blombos Cave in South Africa, paleoarchaeologists previously discovered a 70,000-year-old stone engraved with multiple parallel lines, as well as a 40,000-year-old mammoth tusk’s rows of notches in Germany.

“It’s one of the first things that humans wanted to write down. And those kinds of intuitions feel automatic to us, because we’ve encoded them so deeply,” Cantlon said.

However, it now appears that this encoding didn’t begin with us.

“One of the baboons, named Kalamata, was the hardest working monkey that I’ve ever seen,” added study co-author and CMU cognitive scientist Jialin Li. “He would come up to the screen and wait for me to turn the computer on, and then he’d just sit there for two to three hours just doing all kinds of mathematical tasks.”

The post Monkeys are surprisingly good at geometry appeared first on Popular Science.

A deep-ocean coral reef presumed dead for nearly 60 years off the coast of Benin was recently rediscovered and is teeming with life. A team of oceanographers led by Gérard Zinzindohoué at the Institut de Recherches Halieutiques et Océanologiques du Bénin documented their findings in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, which highlights just how much is left to learn about West Africa’s underwater ecosystems.

Scientists first identified the possible location during the 1960s, while surveying potential fishing areas, but assumed that whatever reef resided along the seafloor was dead. After receiving grant funding to revisit the area, Zinzindohoué and his colleagues spent days searching over seven miles of the Gulf of Guinea using sonar equipment before finally flagging two signals large enough to match the potential reef remnants.

Mesophotic coral reefs live at deeper depths than typical, shallower coral. Credit: Gérard Zinzindohoué

“It was not an easy field campaign,” Zinzindohoué recalled in a statement. “It was a mix of long days at sea, technical problems, and a lot of uncertainty.”

Zinzindohoué’s team then deployed an underwater drone and the National Geographic Exploration Technology Lab’s Deep Sea Camera System to get a closer look. About 165 feet below the ocean surface, they spotted the unexpected—the reef was far from dead.

“I still remember seeing those first images. It was a mix of excitement and disbelief, because after all this time thinking about this reef, suddenly there was something real in front of us,” said Zinzindohoué.

Based on the depth, the team determined the formation to be a mesophotic coral ecosystem. These ecosystems generally exist in much deeper waters than typical shallow coral reefs. With more limited sunlight, mesophotic coral doesn’t necessarily grow as a single, continuous reef. Instead, it takes the form of patchier or more intermittent colonies.

However, that doesn’t mean there is little activity in mesophotic systems. The underwater survey positively identified eight coral types and eight different species of fish living among them, including Guinean angelfish (Holacanthus africanus), golden African snappers (Lutjanus fulgens), and the Monrovia doctorfish (Acanthurus monroviae).

Zinzindohoué believes their discovery is the first confirmed living mesophotic coral on the Gulf of Guinea continental shelf, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.

“I think what we found is probably not an exception. It is more likely a reflection of how little we still know about coastal regions in West Africa and elsewhere,” he added.

Much more research is needed to fully understand the rediscovered ecosystem. Credit: Gérard Zinzindohoué

At the same time, return visits are needed to better examine the delicate ecosystems and confirm their health, diversity, and size. Historical data indicates they only imaged a tiny portion of a continuous mesophotic reef spanning nearly 25 miles parallel to Benin’s coast.

“If I had all the grant money in the world, the first thing I would do is return to the site with a proper scientific diving and sampling program,” said Zinzindohoué. “These are ecosystems that are still poorly known in this part of the world, and every additional piece of information matters.”

The post ‘Dead’ coral reef found alive and thriving off West Africa appeared first on Popular Science.

There is a report that SpaceX has placed its first orders for Nvidia GB300-based AI servers to Taiwan’s Foxconn. SpaceX will buy 13,000 racks for about 1 million GPUs/ It is a deal worth an estimated US$52 billion, ($4M each rack). It is a Taiwan media report citing unnamed industry sources. SpaceX has placed its ...

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Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, which we had working long before language. Back then we “vibed” by watching and copying others’ behaviors, and synching those to ours. In this way, we learned how to, and coordinated our: production, governance, norms, bonding within each community, and badging to show to which communities we belonged.

The rise of language was at first a small aid to coordinating such things. Words mainly referred to things we vibed, so we checked language claims against visible vibes. But over time words became more abstract, and more checked against other words and word-based summaries of observations. We slowly expanded the world of words, via writing, printing, computing, interpretation, logic, debate, and systems of education, law, science, engineering, and accounting. And also via more trade and a larger division of labor.

In the modern world, these changes induced more complex production, faster rates of change, and more mixing of people from previously separated cultures and contexts, all of which made it harder to use vibes to produce, govern, norm, bond, and badge. So we instead moved to use explicit language more to achieve these functions.

In particular, for norm definition and enforcement, we have come to rely less on a vibed sense, shared by close observers, that particular acts were norm violations, and more on language expressions of norms applied to third-party-verifiable language descriptions of actions. So we’ve changed norms and their enforcement to depend less on details of context that outsiders cannot see, vibe, or understand.

Thus our norms have been smoothed, likely losing many context-specific adaptive details created by millennia of prior cultural evolution. And as a result, they’ve often become drained of a lot of adaptive value. Though this process may at times also average over noisily-adaptive norms to extract a more reliable adaptive signal, if prior norm contexts being merged had a similar enough underlying adaptive structure.

These modern changes also made it much harder to bond and badge. Small peasant communities once bonded quite naturally by living and working in similar ways right next to each other, and badged naturally via each community drifting toward somewhat different styles of food, clothes, language, etc., variations that imposed few local adaption penalties. We moderns work harder to substitute for these lost bonding and badging mechanisms via shared religion, sports, music, humor, and fiction, but we find it hard to synch such things across the very wide scopes on which we moderns interact. Some of these work better for bonding while others work better for badging, but none work well for both at the widest scopes.

We moderns have thus turned to norms as our main way to bond and badge across the widest scopes. Especially via the process of shared expressions of outrage regarding particular norm violations. Accusations of violations of simple-language-expressed norms, based on widely visible behavior, can serve both to bond people with others who feel similar emotional outrage at such violations, and to badge them as belonging to the subcultures especially outraged by such violations. Often subcultures agree on which parameters are good or bad, but disagree on relative weights of parameters.

This eagerness to bond via sharing outrage plausibly induces an overly strict yet inconsistent enforcement of norms, as norm enforcers often care more about burnishing their image as norm enforcers than about getting the tradeoffs and consistency of norms right re their key function of shaping behaviors. Cultural evolution plausibly hasn’t had time to weaken norms and add consistency to compensate for these recent changes.

A standard result regarding political and cultural competition within a shared space is that differences between political coalitions and subcultures tend to collapse to a one-dimensional spectrum, even when the underlying space of possibilities is high dimensional. Attempts to emphasize other dimensions tend to be seen as betrayals of this one key dimension of conflict. This single dimension tends to be one where the most adaptive choices are less clear, and struggles within each side of this main conflict sometimes lead to realignments that change this dimension’s direction.

As a result, we end up seeing little variation on which cultural evolution can act. Furthermore, individual efforts to show loyalty to particular sides tends to create costly signaling games, i.e., contests to show that one is more devoted than others. This results in each side’s norms drifting toward more costly extremes.

The modern world has thus created an environment that tends to promote norms that are overly smooth and thereby drained, strict but inconsistent, and costly, relative to a behavior adaptiveness standard. Our norms are thus plausibly becoming less adaptive.

Some more independent baby animals—from precocial species—hit the ground running almost as soon as they’ve popped or hatched out. Others—called altricial animals—need parental attention before venturing out on their own.

Echidnas are altricial animals, and their young (called puggles) need lots of attention. Staff members at Harter Veterinary Medical Center in San Diego, California are experiencing their neediness first hand. At the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, Kathryn the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) has given birth to two puggles in one season, and one is being hand-raised. 

Echidnas are spiky, long-nosed animals native to New Guinea and Australia. Along with platypuses, they are one of two monotremes, or egg-laying mammals. An echidna egg hatches after around 10 days of incubation in the mother’s pouch.The puggle then emerges fur- and spine-less, and weighing approximately as much as half a miniature marshmallow. 

“Unlike a marsupial pouch, an echidna has a temporary “pseudo-pouch” that is only present when they are incubating an egg and raising a puggle,” Jennifer LeBeau, lead wildlife care specialist at San Diego Zoo Safari Park, tells Popular Science. 

The puggle then enjoys the pouch for around two months before the mother transfers it into the far end of a nursery burrow. Her work is far from over, however. For a few more months, the puggle will remain in the burrow, which the mother backfills with dirt. She will then return to the baby every few days to feed it. The puggle will start learning about the outside world once the mother stops backfilling the nursery.

One of the siblings was not gaining weight and is in the care of vets. Image: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

Kathryn is currently raising one of her babies in the burrow. Because the other sibling wasn’t gaining weight, it was transferred into human care at Safari Park’s Harter Veterinary Medical Center. Part of the puggle’s hand rearing included veterinarians taking regular ultrasounds of the puggle’s stomach, which enabled them to better understand the speed at which the puggle digested its formula. As a result, they came to a more precise decision of how often it needed to feed.

“The puggle that is being hand-reared is having daily checks by veterinarians and a minimum of twice daily checks by wildlife care specialists,” says Anthony Cerreta, a San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance clinical veterinarian. “Hand-rearing puggles from this age tends to have a lower success rate, so we will continue to closely monitor and intervene as needed should any further challenges arise.” 

The post Echidna ‘puggles’ weigh less than a mini marshmallow appeared first on Popular Science.

Anyone can mistake an identity, even astronomers. On August 28, 2025, researchers aimed their equipment towards an area of sky where they expected to find the asteroid 1998 SH2. Based on gravitational data collected during its previous 4.5 year orbits around the sun, the hopeful observers focused NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) planetary radar system in the space rock’s assumed location about two million miles from Earth. However, things didn’t go as planned—1998 SH2 was a no-show.

Astronomers knew some unexpected force was affecting its orbit, so they relied on optical telescopes to pinpoint the asteroid’s exact location. Once they actually found 1998 SH2, they quickly realized the mistake.

“After we measured the nongravitational perturbations affecting the motion of 1998 SH2 and recognized they weren’t compatible with the object being an asteroid, we suspected the object could be an active comet,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, explained in a statement.

The differences between asteroids and comets may sound minimal, but they’re crucial. Asteroids are large rocky objects infused with metals orbiting the sun as ancient leftovers from the solar system’s earliest formative stages. By comparison, comets are birthed at the outer edges of the solar system whose mixture of dust and ice vaporizes into a tail.

The last observations of 1998 SH2 took place in 2016, meaning the space rock had since completed two solar orbits. But after reviewing the available analyses once more, Farnocchia’s team determined the object could be generating minor amounts of thrust as it vented gas into space. These vents form when the sun’s radiation heats a comet’s dusty ice, creating a propulsive gas often visible as a bright tail and coma. But when a comet is much smaller, those telltale signs may become harder to find.

Knowing their mystery object’s approach would be its closest in years, Farnocchia connected with astronomers at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope near Mauna Kea, Hawaii, as well as the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Danish Telescope in La Silla, Chile. Meanwhile, researchers at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope on Chile’s Cerro Paranal mountain also gazed up at 1998 SH2. Their collective results, published in a recent study in the journal Nature Astronomy, proved their suspicions correct.

“The images we collected from these observatories showed a weak but clear tail, thus confirming that 1998 SH2 is, in fact, a comet,” said ESO astronomer and study co-author Olivier Hainaut.

Beyond rectifying the multidecade misclassification, the team’s findings are helping us better understand a subcategory of space objects called dark comets. These entities often have major irregularities in their orbits called pertubations, yet do not offer visible signs like outgassing, tails, or comas. Astronomers discovered the first dark comet in 2016, and have since located about a dozen more across the solar system. The study’s authors suggest that continuing to examine other faint, near-Earth objects with sufficiently powerful telescopes may even force further reclassifications of subjects that astronomers currently believe to be asteroids. Beyond respecting these space rock’s true identities, more accurate observations can also improve the safety of everyone living on this larger rock called Earth.

“Detecting these perturbations can be an important diagnostic tool for planetary defense that will help understand which objects may be comets rather than asteroids, how their orbits evolve, and how that influences their Earth impact risks,” said Farnocchia.

“That’s how science works—you form a hypothesis, and you set out to test it,” added Hainaut. “This data is exactly what was needed to confirm our hypothesis that 1998 SH2 was a comet.”

The post Near-Earth asteroid not an asteroid at all appeared first on Popular Science.

Gavin Baker says anything that increases competition and compresses margins at the model layer (foundation models) is net positive for every other layer in the AI stack — power, semiconductors, hyperscalers/neoclouds, and even software. A world with only 2–3 dominant high-margin frontier labs is bad for the rest of the ecosystem because those labs become ...

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Feeding an animal that is clearly in need of help might be our first instinct. However, this feed-first approach might be more harmful than beneficial because different species have different dietary requirements.

Take baby skunks, for example. Recently, Raven Ridge Wildlife Center in Washington Boro, Pennsylvania, was taking care of 50 juvenile skunks. The wildlife center’s employees found themselves assembling highly diverse meals for the adorable mammals. 

The daily menu included 15 cups of fruit, 15 cups of vegetables, a dozen eggs, 15 cups of moistened dog food, 6 cups of meat, and 3 cups of mealworms in addition to Calcium and Taurine supplements. Yet, when very young skunks arrive at the center, the little kits need a species-specific formula that copies milk from their skunk mother. 

Rescued skunks chowing down on their daily smorgasbord. Image: Raven Ridge Wildlife Center.

Imagine trying to cook any of this up in your own kitchen! What’s more, a wild skunk in trouble is likely dehydrated, and requires at least two days of rehydration before it can start eating again. If a dehydrated animal eats before it should, it might lead to refeeding syndrome, which could prove deadly. 

“Often, well-meaning individuals who find abandoned wildlife turn to Google for guidance on how to care for them. However, while Google can be useful, it does not provide the best advice for wildlife rehabilitation,” Raven Ridge Wildlife Center writes. “Many mistakenly opt for puppy or kitten formula, which does not meet the specific dietary needs of baby wildlife. Others may feed skunks cat food, but this option is typically too high in fat and protein, leading to obesity and serious health issues.”

June is typically peak baby skunk season. Image: Raven Ridge Wildlife Center.

Similarly to humans, skunks need a balanced diet that includes fruits, veggies, and lean protein. The Raven Ridge Wildlife Center team frequently comes across Metabolic Bone Disease, which is caused by imbalanced levels of essential nutrients. 

“If you encounter any wildlife, regardless of its age, it is important not to offer any food, as this could harm its health,” writes the wildlife center. “The best approach is to gently place the animal in a box and keep it in a warm, dark, and quiet location, and then contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator immediately.”

The post Found a baby skunk? Please don’t feed it. appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s the healthier choice, right? For those of us wanting to cut down on unhealthy treats, sugar-free candy might seem like the perfect alternative. You can have your cake and eat it too—guilt-free.

But is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Can you eat too much sugar-free candy?

The added sugars in regular candy are a dietary villain for two main reasons. First, they cause your blood glucose to spike, making your pancreas work overtime to produce insulin to clear it. This can contribute to high blood pressure, chronic inflammation, chronic inflammation, and over time increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Second, added sugars are empty calories, adding to your daily calorie intake without giving you any nutrients or making you feel full. This makes them a major contributor to obesity.

Sugar-free treats generally replace sugar with either artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols. While sodas generally use sweeteners such as aspartame or saccharin, sugar-free candy more often uses sugar alcohols known as polyols, such as xylitol or sorbitol. These are digested very slowly and are not fully absorbed, so these sugar alternatives don’t raise blood glucose the way normal carbohydrates do.

According to dietician and gut health expert Dr. Emily Leeming, around three quarters of adults eat more than their recommended daily sugar intake. Given the known health impacts of excessive sugar consumption, she says that choosing a sugar-free alternative to prevent crossing the threshold is often a good idea. 

However, there are some caveats.

Why sugar-free candy can cause diarrhea

“The sugar alcohol causes an osmotic shift in the gut,” says Dr. Kait Brown, clinical managing director at America’s Poison Centers. “It’s drawing water out of your tissues and into the gut. So, you’re getting a lot more water in the system. On top of that, the sugar alcohol is also being fermented by gut bacteria.”

If eaten to excess, these effects can be unpleasant.

“It can cause a lot of gastrointestinal distress,” Dr. Brown explains. If you eat multiple servings of sugar-free candy in a sitting, she says, you get gas production and bloating and can get more muscle movement in the gut. “That accumulates in having watery, loose diarrhea.”

There are also some concerns about consuming large amounts of sugar substitutes over time. Some studies suggest that regular consumption of artificial sweeteners could have a negative effect on the gut microbiome or even increase the risk of some cancers. 

Diet sodas may be more dangerous than sugar-free candy. Image: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images / Jakub Porzycki

However, these types of sweeteners are usually found in diet sodas rather than sugar-free candy, and the experimental data is not yet conclusive.

“It’s kind of early [stages of] looking into these [long-term] effects, and most of the studies seem to be on mice,” Dr. Leeming says. “The caveat with that, of course, is that mice are not humans.”

“The other thing that gets missed out of the conversation is that these studies are done at incredibly high doses,” she adds. “It’s not proportional to anything you would eat as a human being.”

Sugar-free candy is fine for most people—in moderation

Dr. Leeming and Dr. Brown both conclude that sugar-free candy can be a positive aid for many people to lower their sugar consumption, and most people are unlikely to eat an amount that would cause them problems.

“[The consumption] would have to be quite sizable,” says Dr. Leeming. “Like, if you’re spending all day chowing down on sugar-free sweets.”

The exception, she says, is that “if you have irritable bowel syndrome, then you’ve naturally got a kind of sensitivity to polyols [one type of sugar alcohol].”

This means that people with this condition should be more careful at checking the ingredient list when consuming sugar-free products, and experiment to discover their personal sensitivity to different types of sugar alcohol.

The FDA only requires products to display a label warning of laxative risks for products that could cause you to consume more than 50 grams of polyols daily, whereas some people with a polyol sensitivity might start to feel discomfort after eating 10 grams or less.

“It’s harder with food products [than medicines] because you don’t know the exact amount of a sugar alcohol that’s in there,” Dr. Brown says. “You might know that xylitol is number four on the ingredient list, but you don’t know” how much of the sugar alcohol is actually in the product you’re consuming.

But for most people, both doctors assure, there is no need to overthink it.

“I would always just recommend consuming in moderation,” Dr. Brown says. “If you notice your stomach starts to hurt, you’re probably eating too much, and you need to dial it back.”

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.

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The post Can you eat too much sugar free candy? Short answer: Yes. appeared first on Popular Science.

Superintelligence is not one event — it is and will be a frontier that advances domain by domain, in strict order of how cheaply each domain’s work can be verified. Synthetic data factories can push capability arbitrarily far above human level in any domain where the grader is superhuman-checkable — because there, self-play works, exactly ...

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