Oustide feeds

Financial Firm Raymond James Analyst Brian Gesuale gave a SpaceX price target of $800. He told investors that industrialized access to orbit and AI are driving the most significant infrastructure convergence since the advent of the Internet with SpaceX building the foundational platform for the next generation of industrial capacity across transportation, communications, compute, manufacturing ...

Read more

In a win for animal conservation, a Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) recently gave birth to three cubs at Tanganyika Wildlife Park in Goddard, Kansas. The new litter came into the world on June 11 and consists of three furballs—one female and two males. 

Their mother, Sienna, is an orange tiger, while their father, Grayson, is a white Bengal tiger. All three cubs take after their mother’s orange hue. Given that white is a recessive trait in Bengal tigers, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The birth itself, however, was a bit of a surprise as it came with little warning. 

Pregnant tigers don’t look all that different from their nonpregnant peers, especially first-time mothers. What’s more, the team at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park hadn’t yet seen a confirmed breeding between Sienna and Grayson. As such, they were only truly clued in when a keeper saw mammary development in Sienna during a training session. 

“We saw some mammary development and realized we were most likely going to have babies,” Carnivore Supervisor Phoebe Andrews said in a statement. 

The yet-unnamed cubs are the mother and father’s first litter. Sienna’s maternal instincts came out immediately, and she groomed her babies and allowed them to nurse shortly after birth. Nonetheless, animal keepers are hand-rearing the cubs. 

“Hand-rearing is a deliberate choice,” reads the press release. “Newborn cats are fragile, and the park’s first priority is giving each cub the best possible chance at survival. Raising the cubs by hand lets keepers tailor nutrition to their needs, provide immediate medical care, monitor their health closely, and support healthy development through the most vulnerable stage of life.”

The trio spent their first weeks with their mother, and then was transferred to the nursery for full-time care. The keepers will weigh them, document their growth, and feed them several times a day. The siblings’ stripes are currently too alike to distinguish them visually. Instead, the animal keepers are using small fur trims as short-term identifiers. 

Unfortunately, the Bengal tiger family’s counterparts in the wild are threatened by deforestation, habitat loss, poaching, and conflicts with humans. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species classifies the species as Endangered.  

“They’re still endangered in the wild. It’s important to maintain a population in professional care so we can keep that genetic diversity,” highlighted Samantha Russak, Curator of Research & Welfare and Registrar at the Tanganyika Wildlife Park. 

The post Three tiger cubs born in Kansas appeared first on Popular Science.

AI developers and architects are indicating that Grok 4.5 is the best value for workflow execution and code generation. The basic coding tasks are about 60% of AI spend. There is significant traction being shown on Openrouter but it will some days to a few weeks to see the adoption of Grok 4.5 for those ...

Read more

As anyone who’s grown up favoring their southpaw can attest, the world overwhelmingly caters to right-handers. The vast majority of humans (somewhere around 85-90 percent) are right-handed, a tendency influenced by a combination of genes and environment. But it turns out this long-known preference towards the right may go back much further than scientists once thought—hundreds of millions of years further back, in fact. This preference toward the right may have been shared by some of the oldest known multicellular organisms.

That’s the core argument presented in a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports. The international team of researchers examined over 100 well-preserved fossils of Spriggina floundersi, an ancient, inch-long worm-like animal that wriggled its way around southern Australia about 550 million years ago. The majority of those fossils shared something in common: they all showed the creature favoring its left side. And since fossils are mirror-image impressions captured at a moment in time, that actually means the animals favored their right side during life. 

Researchers say this represents the earliest known example of this type of asymmetry in nature, and it may lend credence to the idea that handedness is hardwired deep into the evolutionary history of complex living creatures.

“The dominance of bends to the left in fossils of Spriggina suggests a preference for right turns in life and represents the oldest evidence of behavioural handedness among animals,” researchers write in the paper. 

Evidence of ancient handedness, trapped in stone  

Spriggina fossils date back to the Ediacaran Period, an era of immense biological change and adaptation. This period was responsible for introducing the first multicellular animals visible to the naked eye. Though they might not seem like much today, Spriggina and its contemporaries were some of the first animals capable of movement and other abilities scientifically considered complex behaviors. These are among the first organisms many people would identify as actual animals, rather than simply globs of goop.

The Spriggina fossil analyses in the study primarily came from Nilpena Ediacara National Park, located on the western part of the Flinders Ranges in southern Australia. It’s a remote area home to some of the best-preserved fossils from the Ediacaran Period. In this case, the collection of Spriggina fossils was buried together during some storm event around 550 million years ago.

Bend angles observed for Spriggina. Image: Scott D. Evans, Jenson Webb, Ian V. Hughes, William Parker & Mary L. Droser

And while it might not seem like it, the ancient hammerheaded worm has some key things in common with humans. Specifically, it’s among the earliest known examples of an animal with bilateral symmetry, meaning it has a distinguishable front and back, left and right, and top and bottom. That’s also true for humans and most animals today, but that wasn’t always the case. The findings suggest that favoring one side or the other isn’t some recent adaptation humans developed, but instead is possibly something deeply rooted in the way complex animals have evolved. While interesting on its own, the research stops short of answering why that’s the case.

“When we talk about being right-or-left-handed, most people likely think about how they hold a pencil or a kick a soccer ball,” American Museum of Natural History assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology and study lead author Scott Evans said in a statement. “But our research shows that an animal without hands or feet, living over 500 million years ago, may have had its own version of handedness.” 

Humans and handedness: It’s in the genes

The fact that the overwhelming majority of humans today are right-handed isn’t entirely explained by genetics. Certain cultures in Asia and Africa have traditionally viewed left handedness as unclean. Others have gone even further, baselessly suggesting it was a sign of influence from satanic forces. Those and other cultural forces have led generations of people who naturally favor their left hand to be forcibly steered away from it. Tools and basic infrastructure are also largely designed around right-handedness, which can further pressure those who are naturally inclined to favor their left to conform to the social standard.

Related: [Why are most people right-handed?]

But still, even when accounting for those factors, handedness has a strong genetic component. Studies show that as many as 40 genes may play some role in determining handedness, which can present itself even before birth, in fetuses. Though it’s still not entirely certain what causes some people to favor the left hand, some researchers attribute it to random mutations during early brain development.

And while left-handers have typically had to work harder in many respects, their minority status does offer some unique advantages, especially in combat and sports. In fact, some modern athletes today, like tennis legend Rafael Nadal, were actually born favoring their right hand but trained to use their left specifically for the slight edge it offers.

Obviously, quite a few things happened in the 548 million years between Spriggina and the first human ancestors, which may account for right handed dominance today. Still, the findings suggest this ancient biological bias may have an origin story far older than anyone had expected.

The post World’s first right-hander could be this 550 million-year-old worm appeared first on Popular Science.

The French president and his wife were among the audience of thousands at the debut performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. 

Cody’s raucous tribute to the golden age of the American West was already a huge sensation in the United States. In 1887, the show had taken the United Kingdom by storm. But the French weren’t quite sure what to make of the Lakota Sioux warriors and lanky cowboys as they came whooping into the outdoor arena, spurring their horses into streaks of lightning. Even one of the show’s most popular acts—the rescue of a stagecoach ambushed by Native Americans—left them cold.

Then, Annie Oakley skipped into the arena and launched into her act, her guns shattering a flock of glass balls thrown into the air. When her bullets were spent, she threw the pistols like hot irons and grabbed another. The audience roared to life. 

Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show was “a great success in every way,” declared the front page of the Paris Herald the next day. Within weeks, the French capital had been infected by “Wild West Fever.” 

In 1894, Thomas Edison filmed Annie Oakley showing off her sharpshooting skills. Video: Annie Oakley 1894 Filmed by Thomas Edison, silentfilmhouse The “Savage Indian” turned French celebrity

By the late 1880s, a deep nostalgia for an American West full of “savage Indians” and “noble pioneers”—a place that, by then, existed only in memory due to the brutal policies of the U.S. federal government against Native Americans—had settled into the American consciousness. 

Europeans, too, were intrigued by the idea of the vast plains and their “primitive Indians.” Indigenous people had been displayed in Paris for decades, sometimes as performers on stage, other times as temporary residents of “living habitats” in the city’s zoological gardens. Close to 400 Indigenous individuals from French colonies were living on the main fairgrounds that same year. Early anthropologists—adherents of Social Darwinism, the ideology that all human groups occupied a rung of the evolutionary ladder between savagery and enlightened civilization—studied them as specimens in the science of race. 

Parisians “had heard about the [American] Indians, but the Wild West Show was their first exposure,” says Steve Friesen, former director of the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave in Golden, Colorado, and author of Galloping Gourmet: Eating and Drinking with Buffalo Bill. “They saw the real thing and they were impressed.” 

Buffalo Bill as well as his father were firmly anti-slavery, and Buffalo Bill fought for the Union Army during the American Civil War. Image: Public Domain

Indeed, it wasn’t long before young Parisian women began flocking to the “Indian Camp” at the Wild West Show (the area where the performers lived, which was open to the public). Dozens stood waiting, ready to elbow one another out of the way to proffer cigarettes and coy smiles to the handsome, young Sioux warriors. Men, too, hung around, intrigued by the expert horsemen and sharpshooters. Cowboy hats and American- and Mexican-style saddles flew off the shelves of shopkeepers cashing in on the trend. 

Popcorn sold at the show, unfamiliar to the French, became so popular that, soon, it could be found at the city’s other sites of entertainment. By October, five months after the debut of Cody’s company, “it was said that the people of Paris seem to go to the [any] theater just to eat popcorn,” Friesen laughs.

Buffalo Bill Cody—Guillaume Buffalo to the French—was the ideal ambassador for the legend of the American West. Back in his own country, he was already a major celebrity—an authentic cavalryman, scout, who claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express, as well as a stage actor known for his charisma and good looks. 

Soon, “he became one of the darlings of Paris,” says Friesen. “Everybody wanted to meet him.” He, along with several of the Native American and cowboy performers, were often seen about town, at the theaters, and on the grounds of the World’s Fair, including climbing the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the event. 

This 1908 footage shows Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show that took Paris by storm in the late 19th century. Video: Buffalo Bills Wild West Show 1908 original footage, Motion Pictures

For six months, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show performed twice a day to a full-to-bursting 30,000-person arena that, despite being some distance from the core of the World’s Fair grounds, sometimes upstaged the main event. No one in town could get enough, including some of Europe’s most famous artists.

“Paul Gauguin went to the show once,” says Friesen. “He liked it so much he went a second time and then he went out and bought himself a Stetson hat. At the Musée d’Orsay, in a self-portrait he made in Tahiti, he’s wearing a hat that looks very similar.” 

Edvard Munch visited; French painter Rosa Bonheur was a regular fixture at the Indian Camp, capturing the performers on canvas. It was also in Paris that Cody met Thomas Edison, who was at the fair to demonstrate new electrical technologies. A few years later, he put the showman and his Lakota performers into one of the world’s first motion pictures. 

The Wild West lives on in Paris

“Buffalo Bill was basically the first emissary of the American West to France, telling people what the West was like,” Friesen says. The appeal was anything but fleeting. When the company returned for a six-month tour of the country in 1905, they reignited the “Wild West Fever” that had swept Paris 16 years earlier.

Today, the impact of that “fascination with the American West is certainly still being felt in the larger sense,” he continues.

Phoebe Anne “Annie Oakley” Moses poses in front of her tent in a camp for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show while touring in Europe, possibly in Paris in 1889. Image: Public Domain

According to Friesen, the trend of women wearing cowboy hats with skirts, Annie Oakley’s signature style, likely began with the Wild West Show. The kind of “Western” shops that cashed in on the trend back in 1889 are still found in the city and beyond. There is even a French steakhouse chain called Buffalo Grill that has featured a portrait of Buffalo Bill in its logo.

While the French were skeptical when Disneyland Paris opened its doors in the early 1990s, one thing in the Disney Village was “turning a really good profit,” Friesen says: their knockoff Wild West Show. 

“It had room for 2,000 people, twice a day, who would go in and eat American food—cornbread and steak and things like that. Everybody would get a straw cowboy hat and they’d watch a performance of Buffalo Bill kinds of acts,” says Friesen. 

“The popularity, the name recognition of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had enough of an impact that it remained all the way to the 2000s.”

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

Related 'That Time When' Stories

Charles Darwin’s daughter had an unusual hobby: Hunting phallic mushrooms

The strange Wild West tale of the first cow-buffalo hybrid

Inventor Beulah Louise Henry’s unstoppable rise to becoming ‘Lady Edison’

Beef tea was all the rage in the 1800s

The CIA once trained cats to be Cold War spies

Andrew Jackson’s White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy

The post In 1889, Paris became obsessed with the Wild West appeared first on Popular Science.

London, United Kingdom, 10th July 2026, CyberNewswire

Yipit estimates that Anthropic’s ARR has increased to $69 billion. It also noted that the pace of month-over-month ARR growth accelerated compared with May, with the average daily increase rising from approximately $400 million to $550 million. Yipit estimates that Anthropic’s ARR has increased to $69 billion. It also noted that the pace of month-over-month ...

Read more

Ix Tech Neo has a breakthrough 25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid platform– achieving near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability. They will mass produce them. These hands are designed to do something fundamental: remove the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots can actually do, and make data the only ...

Read more

SpaceX can own both the world’s largest satellite constellation and they could buy a ready-made network of 24,000 cell towers covering 80% of the American population. That combination would create something no mobile carrier has ever has which is high-speed 5G in cities plus continuous 5G coverage everywhere else from space. This is not science ...

Read more

Theo spent six figures in tokens testing OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol model to see whether if its better than Fable and what OpenAI have done to make it even better than 5.5. They breakdown why they both moved their agents to Linux boxes, how to actually burn $65k on a single loop, and the Codex vs ...

Read more

In a world first, doctors successfully completed not one, but two surgeries with the use of remotely controlled humanoid robots. The proof-of-concept preclinical trial involved gallbladder removals in large, non-primate mammals. A humanoid robot and a human attendant completed one procedure while a pair of robots conducted the second one..

Lifesaving, robotically assisted surgical procedures are commonplace in many medical facilities, but they have limitations. Many of these multiarmed devices are massive systems weighing over 1,800 pounds, and require specialized teams to install them into retrofitted operating rooms. They’re also typically only designed with one type of procedure in mind. In comparison, humanoid robots are what their name implies. At about five feet tall and weighing only 60 pounds, the surgery bots (nicknamed “Surgie”) are comparatively small, nimble, customizable, and much more affordable. With the proper training and technological advancements, fleets of Surgies could one day deploy to critically under-resourced communities.

“Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access,” Michael Yip, an engineer at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), said in a statement. “This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”

Yip and his colleagues recently detailed their groundbreaking trial in a study published in the journal Nature. Although the team needed to design adapters to allow each robot to hold surgical tools, operators said controlling them from afar felt unexpectedly natural.

“We were surprised at how well Surgie meshed with our workspace and workflow,” said UC San Diego surgeon Nikita Thareja.

“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room. So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space,” added UC San Diego surgeon and study co-author Shanglei Liu.

The first teleoperated humanoid surgeries did encounter a few early issues. The Surgie bots required recalibration multiple times, which greatly slowed the overall process compared to performing them with existing surgical systems. Latency between the controller and the robot also needs improvement. However, researchers are confident the technology will improve, and cite similar progress with robotic laparoscopic surgery. The first of those procedures took six hours, while today’s machine-assisted examples only take around 30 minutes.

A Surgie isn’t necessarily relegated to the operating table, either. The team envisions future humanoid robots could also assist by grabbing tools, or clean up following a surgery.

“One of our goals is to develop [an] autonomous surgical assistant,” Yip said. “Many communities struggle with adequate staffing on the surgical team, which means patients are not being treated. Our goal is an operating theater of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team.”

The post In groundbreaking first, humanoid robots performed surgery appeared first on Popular Science.

It’s easy to craft a paper airplane capable of soaring across a classroom, but one that can travel 200 feet is a bit harder. A group of students from Italy’s University of Pisa not only managed to reach that distance on a single glide—they did so with the Guinness World Record holder for the largest paper airplane ever assembled. 

Built using only paper and some glue, the team’s nearly 23-foot-long creation and its over 65-foot wingspan cruised through a warehouse at Italy’s annual We Make Future expo on June 25. According to the university’s announcement, the students broke a record previously held since 2013 by Germany’s Braunschweig Institute of Technology.

“It all started with [constructing] some paper airplanes between lessons, almost as a joke,” the team said in a statement. “We were students convinced that, with the right method, even a piece of paper could become real engineering.”

Science YouTuber Jakidale documented the design process and testing, which highlight the hours of trial and error, CAD renderings, and experimentation needed to pull off their collective success. You can watch the entire exercise in a pair of videos—provided you’re fluent in Italian. But even if you’re not well versed in the Romance language, it’s still fascinating to watch “Project Icarus” come together.

“In the end we managed to bring back to Italy a world record that had stood for thirteen years,” the team added.

Don’t have the engineering know-how or enough paper to craft your own gigantic glider? There are still plenty of aeronautically sound paper plane schematics to attempt, including one officially endorsed by NASA.

The post World’s largest paper airplane has a 65-foot wingspan appeared first on Popular Science.

SpaceXAI Grok 4.5 is built for real-world engineering. It excels in large codebases and handles long-running tasks that span multiple repositories, hundreds of skills, and a variety of tools. Grok 4.5 is efficient and fast. It uses half as many tokens per task, delivers higher tokens per second, and costs less than half as much ...

Read more

Not every invasive species is as dramatic or fearsome as a Burmese python or a feral hog—but that doesn’t lessen their impact on native ecosystems. Coastlines across North America and Europe have contended with the spread of the Manila clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) for at least the last century. Although a favorite among seafood lovers, the shellfish is also taking over the habitats of local shellfish, and even hybridizing with similar species.

After decades of slow conquest, the delicious mollusk is finally setting up shop along the New England coastline. According to wildlife biologists writing in the journal Biological Invasions, the region marked the Northern Hemisphere’s last holdout against the Manila clam.

“Given that Manila clams are everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere, it was only a matter of time before they showed up here, and we’ve been keeping an eye out for them,” Aly Putnam, a study co-author and University of Massachusetts Amherst ecologist, said in a statement.

The first tip off to the mollusk’s arrival came via a photo and a text message. Last summer, Putnam received a picture from colleague and study co-author El Fernekees Hartshorn depicting a suspected Manila clam shell. Putnam and fellow researcher Carolina Bastidas were leading a biodiversity workshop on Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor at the time, and began paying attention to the coastlines. It wasn’t long before they located many more Manila clams.

Coincidentally, an entirely separate team led by the Center for Coastal Studies had recently started investigating reports of “weird clams” near Provincetown, Massachusetts. They soon combined forces, confirming that Manila clams were definitely beginning to thrive in the area.

“I realized that this was a golden opportunity to not only combine forces, but also to catch a detailed snapshot of the moment a new invasive species establishes itself,” added study co-author and Williams College marine scientist James Carlton. 

The Manila clam’s origins are nowhere near Cape Cod. Instead, they’re native to Russia’s Sakhalin Islands and the coasts of Japan and southern China. The clams were introduced both intentionally and accidentally to North America and Europe during the early 20th century, where they quickly proliferated. The food industry also capitalized on the shellfish, turning them into a $7 billion-a-year industry.

While dense colonies can adversely impact local ecologies, they also offer nutritious food for crabs, small mammals, and seabirds. Now that they’re confirmed across the Northern Hemisphere, ecologists can begin to examine how the clams are spreading throughout New England, and how they will impact their new homes. Although they are likely here to stay, it’s not necessarily a terrible situation.

“On the positive side, because Manila clams can become a source of food for other animals, they can relieve pressure on native species—-for example, the predator pressure of green crabs on softshell clams,” explained Bastidas. “So, there could also be positive impacts.”

The post Invasive (but delicious) clams discovered in Cape Cod appeared first on Popular Science.

Morgan Stanley has an interesting 142 page report on SpaceX that has several material inconsistencies between its high-level assumptions about orbital compute scale, mass/payload, capex, and monetization and the known technical specifications for Starship launches, satellite power density, and real-world AI compute deals. However, we can set aside agreeing about the AI data centers in ...

Read more

The United States officially conducted 1,054 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992, but only one of them is known to have satellites among its casualties. In 1962, the U.S. detonated the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime thermonuclear warhead 250 miles above the planet. The resultant electromagnetic pulse (EMP) blast was vastly wider than expected, and even damaged an estimated 300 streetlights in Hawaii around 900 miles away. In space, Starfish Prime’s lingering artificial radiation belt also unintentionally destroyed many of the earliest satellites launched by the U.S., the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

“When you have a nuclear detonation in outer space, basically the whole body of the bomb becomes ionized, and nearly every single electron in the weapon’s mass becomes free,” Areg Danagoulian, a nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement.

Once free, these ions merge into the Van Allen radiation belt, where the electrons bombard everything in their path. This further ionizes particles while producing damaging radiation. To put it simply—detonating nuclear weapons in space can be as disastrous as detonating them on Earth.

In 1967, the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union signed the Outer Space Treaty designating the cosmos as the “province of all mankind” while also banning the usage or testing of nuclear weapons beyond the planet’s atmosphere. Another 115 other nations including China have since entered into the agreement, which by all accounts kept space neutral and nuke-free for nearly 55 years—until the satellite called Cosmos2553.

In 2022, Russia launched their alleged surveillance and sensor satellite, but watchdogs and critics immediately raised suspicions about its true purpose. Cosmos2553 has an unusual orbit, routinely passing through some of the most radioactive regions above Earth.

“It goes through the most hostile environment possible around the planet,” said Danagoulian. “Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.”

Cosmos2553’s true purpose remains unclear, but the worst case scenario envisioned by Danagoulian would have devastating consequences. A nuclear anti-satellite weapon in its position hypothetically has the capability to destroy many international communication and internet satellites, GPS, and reconnaissance equipment.

To make matters worse, it’s still extremely difficult to confirm whether or not a satellite houses nuclear weapons. After reviewing the available unclassified research, Danagoulian realized there still weren’t even any proposed methods to assess suspicious orbiters. But that doesn’t mean the problem is unsolvable.

According to Danagoulian, there is a way forward for international monitoring against nuclear satellites. In a feasibility study published today in Nature, he describes a new satellite-based sensor system that could be launched near a suspected orbiter, then monitor it for signs of nuclear activity. The key lies in a type of atomic reaction called spallation that involves energized protons in radioactive conditions.

“When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons. That’s a ridiculously large number,” said Danagoulian. “We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons.”

Basically, there are a lot of smoking guns—if you have the right equipment to find them. In his system, two neutron sensing panels called scintillators are installed between synthetic crystal diamond devices. The combined array allows it to differentiate between nuclear radioactive neutrons versus naturally occurring protons and electrons. From there, the device can estimate the neutrons’ direction of origin to determine if they’re natural atmospheric particles or those from a nuclear-bearing satellite.

Danagoulian calculated that his sensor system could flag an orbiting nuke with 99 percent accuracy if it spent a week orbiting within about 2.5 miles of the target. However, multiple sensor satellites within around 0.6 miles of the suspected weapon could get an answer after only a few hours.

“You can fake intelligence, but you can’t fake physics,” he added.

The MIT researcher stressed his system is currently purely hypothetical, and requires more development and real-world testing. At the same time, he hopes his feasibility study highlights that such solutions are not only realistic, but worth exploring.

“The goal right now is to get national labs to use this work for their own research, and to get policymakers to seriously consider this technology as a potential part of national technical means,” said Danagoulian.

The post New satellite system could detect nukes in space appeared first on Popular Science.

SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public today. Elon says it is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient and lower cost. Based on strong positive feedback from customers in our beta test program, @SpaceXAI will make Grok 4.5 available to the public tomorrow. It is an Opus-class model, but faster, more token-efficient ...

Read more

It’s no surprise how lovebirds got their name, and how that name became slang for an affectionate human couple. Mated pairs of these African parrots feed, cuddle, groom each other, and become distressed when separated. Their behavior is summed up even better by their Spanish name: inseparables.

Lovebirds are unusual not just because of their shameless PDA, but because they choose one mate for life. While more than 90 percent of birds pair up in the practice of “social monogamy,” most choose a new mate every year or every few years. Besides lovebirds and some other parrots, only a few birds actually mate for life, including swans, eagles (shout out to our favorite bald eagle team: Jackie and Shadow), and albatrosses. Mating for life is even less common in non-avian animals.

You might expect that it would be more practical to keep the same partner year after year than to have to find a new one every breeding season. But it’s not always the most effective plan, especially if the animal couple doesn’t stay together year-round. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, sticking with one mate is not in all animals’ best interests. Although some animals have lifelong partners, most prefer different breeding strategies. And far from the perfect picture of two lovebird soulmates, even monogamous animal relationships include just as many complications as human ones. 

Mating for life has many advantages

In birds, “social monogamy is linked to biparental care—the male and the female caring for the offspring together,” says Dr. Bart Kempenaers, Director of Ornithology at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Seewiesen, Germany. For bird parents, “it’s advantageous to stay together because you have to coordinate this care. With more experience breeding together, this coordination might be easier.” 

Teamwork for long-term partners isn’t limited to co-parenting. Kempenaers notes that some birds, such as cardinals, partner year-round, not just during the breeding season. When there’s no offspring to rear, the male and female cardinal defend their territory together. 

Mammals and other animals can also derive various benefits from a lifelong partnership. In addition to sharing parental care, wolves, coyotes, and foxes hunt and defend territory with their partners, while pairs of beavers maintain their dams and lodges together. Breeding pairs of French angelfish (one of the only fish that mate for life) don’t care for their young at all, but stick together to patrol their feeding grounds.

What makes some birds more likely to stay together

In birds, Kempenaers identifies longevity as one major influence on whether a species mates for life. “To stay together, both partners have to live to the next breeding season,” he says. And since “larger birds, like albatrosses, live much longer than a small bird like a chickadee” on average, says Kempenaers, the birds which mate for life are mostly large-bodied and long-lived. Albatrosses, which mate for life, can live over 50 years; chickadees, which do not, live only two or three years in the wild. 

Great blue herons do not mate for life. While they are monogamous during a single breeding season, they choose new partners every year. Image: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images / Ronen Tivony

Small animals also have more predators to contend with than large ones, decreasing their chances of surviving from one breeding season to the next. Many of the birds and mammals that mate for life, such as eagles and wolves, have few natural predators. 

There are also other factors which influence mating habits. For two partners to stay together long-term, they have to be able to consistently find each other every breeding season. Birds that mate for life are generally those that either stay together year-round, or return to the same places at the same time every year. They may even use the same nesting site every year, which biologists call “site fidelity.” 

Bird couples can “divorce”

The breakup of a pair of birds is often called “divorce,” but Kempenaers cautions that this term “suggests that it’s a decision by one or both partners to stay together or not, and that’s not necessarily the case.” 

Some birds that mate for life, such as cranes and swans, migrate together in family units. However, in most migratory birds, partners travel separately. This can lead to birds choosing a new mate out of necessity more than incompatibility with the previous partner. 

“If one of the partners comes back [from migration] but the other partner isn’t back yet, then this individual faces a dilemma,” says Kempenaers. 

“It doesn’t know if its partner is still alive. The breeding season is happening, it’s ready to breed. So this bird might decide to mate with another individual rather than wait for the partner who might never show up.” Even if the previous year’s partner shows up late, Kempenaers notes, the one who got there first will typically stay with its new partner.

For birds, seizing the opportunity to breed comes before human notions of fidelity. A study of mute swans found that their low rate of “divorce” was three times higher in pairs that did not breed successfully than in pairs that did (nine percent versus three percent). 

Related 'Ask Us Anything' Stories

Could raccoons become the new dogs?

Animals have personalities. Here’s what shapes them.

Why some animals eat their babies

Why sloths risk their lives to poop

How marine mammals stay hydrated in a salty sea

Why are there so many birds?

Animals also “cheat” on each other 

Social monogamy in animals doesn’t necessarily mean sexual monogamy. Even for species that mate for life, there may be survival benefits to teaming up with one partner while continuing to mate and have offspring with others. 

This behavior is common across bird species. In some cases, says Kempenaers, the “social father” cares for the offspring, “but he isn’t the father of any of them” genetically, or at least some of them. A study of black swan pairs found at least one baby fathered by a different male in up to 40 percent of nests. Similar behavior has been observed in socially monogamous mammals, such as wolves and gibbons.

“If you ask why it happens, or what the advantages are, it’s always important to distinguish between the male side and the female side,” says Kempenaers. Males who mate with many females might be trying to father as many offspring as possible.  However, says Kempenaers, “it is more difficult to understand” why female birds often take the initiative by leaving their nesting territory for liaisons with neighboring males. 

This might ensure that the female’s own genes get passed on, just in case her nesting partner is infertile. It might even bring in extra parental care from the other males, as has been observed in some birds, such as the blue tit. But the exact drivers for this behavior remain a mystery. 

There’s still much we don’t know about animal mating habits

Kempenaers explains that scientists are still working to define what better cooperation actually looks like in partners that stay together long-term. Other existing questions include how different mating systems evolve and why they can vary so much, even among species that have a lot in common. 

Kempenaers was part of a 2023 study on the Alaskan breeding grounds of a shorebird called the long-billed dowitcher. Dowitchers are relatively large, long-lived birds that practice social monogamy. “Both the male and the female are essential for reproduction,” says Kempenaers, sharing tasks like incubating eggs. 

One might expect a bird with these characteristics to return to the same mate and nesting site, at least for several years in a row. This is what similar birds in the same environment as the dowitchers do. Yet dowitchers choose a new mate and a new place to nest every year. “We found this really puzzling,” says Kempenaers. “If all the others come back to the same place, why don’t the dowitchers do this?” 

To find out, researchers put satellite trackers on dowitchers and followed their movements throughout the year. They found that “the females leave much earlier than the males from the breeding grounds, and they winter at different places,” says Kempenaers. Crucially, once they have mated, “they never meet up again.” But why dowitchers behave this way when other socially monogamous birds in the same environment do not “remains a bit of an enigma,” he adds. 

In nature, fidelity has benefits for some, but not for others, though what those benefits are is not always perfectly clear. And while it’s tempting to see animal relationships in human terms, monogamy in the animal kingdom often looks very different from human romance.

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 Do animals really mate for life? appeared first on Popular Science.

Melbourne, Florida, United States, 8th July 2026, CyberNewswire

BREAKING: The Pentagon has awarded SpaceX two of its biggest satellite contracts worth ~$6.5B • $4.16B for AMTI satellite constellation• $2.29B for Space Data Network• Builds military surveillance + space-based communications• For next-gen missile defense, per SpaceNews pic.twitter.com/c9GhFegiWg — DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) July 7, 2026 BREAKING: SpaceXAI plans to launch a new model with Cursor as ...

Read more