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1 week ago | 
gizmodo.com | Lara J Herrero |George Dvorsky
As we enter the colder months in Australia, covid is making headlines again, this time due to the emergence of a new variant: NB.1.8.1. Last week, the World Health Organization designated NB.1.8.1 as a “variant under monitoring”, owing to its growing global spread and some notable characteristics which could set it apart from earlier variants. So what do you need to know about this new variant?
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1 week ago | 
gizmodo.com | Katie Myers |Sophie Hurwitz |George Dvorsky
Sandra Anderson didn’t think the storm would be too bad. When her grandchildren asked if the dogs should be brought in, Anderson demurred, saying they’d be fine. But later that night, an alert on her phone warned her of a tornado tearing through her hometown of London, Kentucky. Seconds later, it hit her neighborhood. “I hollered for my handicapped son to hit the hallway,” Anderson said. “Windows were exploding.
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2 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Piyush M. Mehta |George Dvorsky
When you put your hand out the window of a moving car, you feel a force pushing against you called drag. This force opposes a moving vehicle, and it’s part of the reason why your car naturally slows to a stop if you take your foot off the gas pedal. But drag doesn’t just slow down cars.
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2 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Anita Hofschneider |Ayurella Horn-Muller |George Dvorsky
On a sweltering January day in 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 of the faithful in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, not far from where gold mining had ravaged an expanse of Amazon rainforest about the size of Colorado. “The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” he told the crowd.
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3 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Marianne Hem Eriksen |George Dvorsky
Pregnant women wielding swords and wearing martial helmets, fetuses set to avenge their fathers—and a harsh world where not all newborns were born free or given burial. These are some of the realities uncovered by the first interdisciplinary study to focus on pregnancy in the Viking age, authored by myself, Kate Olley, Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefsen as part of the Body-Politics project.
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3 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Tik Root |George Dvorsky
For the last two decades, homeowners have been able to claim thousands of dollars in federal tax credits to help offset the high upfront costs of going solar. Things were supposed to stay that way through 2034. But, this week, the U.S. House of Representatives proposed abruptly ending the incentives at the end of the year. If this idea survives the House and passes the Senate, it could upend the economic calculus of powering your home with the sun.
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3 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Melvin M. Vopson |George Dvorsky
We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature–one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose the law of gravity is simply an echo of something more fundamental: a byproduct of the universe operating under a computer-like code. That is the premise of my latest research, published in the journal AIP Advances.
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4 weeks ago | 
gizmodo.com | Kate Yoder |George Dvorsky
For much of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. Lake Carnegie froze solid, and skaters flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anybody wearing skates, since Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970.
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1 month ago | 
gizmodo.com | Sachi Kitajima Mulkey |George Dvorsky
Across seven decades and a dozen presidencies, America’s scientific prowess was arguably unmatched. At universities and federal agencies alike, researchers in the United States revolutionized weather forecasting, cured deadly diseases, and began monitoring greenhouse gas emissions.
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1 month ago | 
gizmodo.com | Kate Yoder |George Dvorsky
Efficiency standards for home appliances were once the conversational equivalent of beige — neutral, but aggressively uninteresting. But as political polarization has deepened, dishwashers, laundry machines, showerheads, and other household staples have begun to take on a new charge. With Republicans now in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, rules that quietly save Americans money on utility bills while conserving energy and water are suddenly at risk.
