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5 new mules set to patrol Olympic National Park
Five new mules at Olympic National Park in Washington State are ready for the busy tourist season. Murl, Cutti, Pip, Checkers, and Gopher join the park’s large working mule herd. Mules have helped maintain the trails in national parks since the early 1900s, and they continue to help monitor Olympic’s one million acres, 600 miles of trails, and 64 trailheads.
Murl, Cutti, Pip, Checkers, and Gopher were named by the park staff and are a nod to the different native plants and animals found at the national park. The mules help trail crews in more wild areas of the park.
Olympic National Park’s mule herd works from April through October and then spends the winter in a large pasture. Image: Olympic National Park.Mules are the result of interbreeding between a male donkey (Equus asinus) and a female horse (Equus caballus). Thanks to their strength, agility, and endurance, they are the perfect pack animal, according to Washington’s National Park Fund. The park’s over two dozen mules each weigh about 1,000 pounds and can haul roughly 20 percent of their body weight. They carry everything from trail maintenance gear to construction materials and research equipment during their working season—April through October. They will even support the park’s search and rescue teams, safely evacuating any injured hikers out of the wilderness.
When a new mule arrives at the park, they spend time next to older and more experienced mules to learn the ropes. They are housed in a corral in the Elwha River valley during their working season and head out to their winter pasture in Sequim for a five-month break.
To help introduce the mule team to the greater public, Olympic National Park featured a Mule of the Month last year. Previous winners include a spirited and quick “sports-model” mule named RainCloud and Daisy, who is dubbed a “magnificent matriarch.”
The post 5 new mules set to patrol Olympic National Park appeared first on Popular Science.
Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk
Nearly half of all known objects currently orbiting Earth technically classify as space junk, but the true amount may be even higher. Not only that, the debris continues amassing faster than it’s being removed.
The latest red alert report comes from the engineering components company, Accu, and is based on information compiled from the U.S. Space Surveillance Network and its Space-Track database. According to their assessment, there are at least 12,550 tracked orbital debris fragments circling the planet “with no control or purpose.” That’s around 47 percent of the 33,269 known objects, which includes almost 17,690 satellites. But with many of those satellites now inactive along with nearly 2,400 jettisoned rocket bodies, the total space junk is likely worse than the current numbers suggest.
Countries are racing to establish a long-term human presence in space and on the moon, but there are a lot of little problems to consider. More specifically, these issues range from the size of screws and paint chips to dead satellites. All that space junk orbits the planet at roughly 17,400 miles per hour, meaning even a tiny collision could derail an entire mission. In 2016, for example, debris no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimeter smacked into one of the International Space Station’s quadruple-glazed Cupola windows and left behind a quarter-inch-wide crater.
Crunching the numbers further, Accu calculated that there are seven debris objects for every 10 satellites orbiting Earth. The responsibility almost entirely falls on three contributors—China has generated 34 percent of the junk, while the United States and the Russian-aligned Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have both provided about 31 percent of the debris.
Most abandoned objects revolving around Earth follow a decaying orbit due to the planet’s gravity and will burn up during atmospheric re-entry. But that often takes years to occur, and as Accu points out, it doesn’t always erase the issue. Material like aluminum, copper, and lithium may vaporize before they hit the ground, but their particulates remain in the upper atmosphere. More research is needed to understand the full impact, but evidence already suggests harmful effects on the ozone.
So what’s being done to address the issue? Not much, unfortunately. Accu notes there are no major projects in development to remove space junk, although there is growing investments in at least maintaining or reducing the overall problem. The European Space Agency (ESA) is leading the charge with programs like ClearSpace-1, the first active debris collection mission. Meanwhile, a number of private companies are also beginning to implement their own endeavors. Technology like robotic arms, drag sails, and even harpoons are all being researched as potential ways to help address the problem.
The bottom line is that the roughly 15,550 tons of space junk currently above everyone’s heads is literally not going anywhere anytime soon. That’s about the same weight as 40 jumbo jets, and it’s only increasing. Accu’s report isn’t meant to offer concrete solutions, so much as highlight that this is a very real problem that requires international coordination and efforts to control. Without that, humanity is going to have a much more difficult time exploring the cosmos.
The post Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk appeared first on Popular Science.
The Return Of Culture
Capital, culture, and states are three key powers in the world. Which ones influences the others more, and how has that changed over time? I asked ChatGPT (5.5), Claude (4.6), and Gemini (3) to estimate pairwise influence each way on a 0-10 scale these over four time periods. The following table shows medians for the 3 LLMs for each period:
I’ve marked in green the more reliable entries, where the range across the 3 LLM estimates is 2 or less, and in red less the reliable, where that range is 4 or more. Note that estimates seem less reliable in more recent periods.
Below the main table I show the median estimates over all times. Oddly, these values are consistently 6 or 7. Maybe all the time-specific LLM estimates given are normed to be relative to this time-independent reference point? In which case, these numbers are mostly about changes over the periods, not constant over time effects.
To the right of the main table I show the net (sum out minus in) influence for each power at each period. The story told here is that before industry culture dominated, states were much weaker, and capital was much weaker still. Then in the early Modern period all three had about equal influence, though capital might have had a bit more. In the middle Modern period states dominated, with capital much weaker, and culture much weaker still. But then in the most recent Modern period, culture has returned to now dominate, with capital and states much weaker.
The part of this I feel most confident in is that the influence of capital, culture, and state on each other did change over this period, and it is worth trying to figure out how. I’m also pretty confident that the 1900-1970 period was the peak of state influence, and that culture had its peak influence both long ago and recently.
Sea shanties actually help people work together better
A few years’ back, a viral trend overtook social media that nobody saw coming: ShantyTok. Seemingly overnight, TikTok and Instagram were inundated with posts celebrating the niche world of maritime sea shanties. The fad ostensibly began with the spread of Scottish singer Nathan Evans’ version of “Wellerman,” a New Zealand whaling shanty with historical roots stretching back well over a century.
As newcomers dove into a vast backcatalog of songs, many quickly highlighted just how catchy these tunes really are. But while early sea shanty composers didn’t envision ever reaching the top of the charts, they certainly wrote them to be earworms. The sea shanty is only one variant of a work song—rhythmic melodies designed to help laborers keep pace with one another during repetitive, often backbreaking jobs. Other types of work songs developed over generations among Appalachian coal miners, prison chain gangs, and British textile workers, just to name a few examples.
While there are extensive anthropological studies on the folk tradition’s influence and importance of work songs, there isn’t as much empirical research into its efficacy during actual work. At Austria’s Central European University, a team of cognitive scientists recently delved into how songs like shanties may affect the laborers’ performance. Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provides strong evidence that work songs not only maintain collective timing among team members—the shared tempo prevents individuals from accidentally quickening the pace.
Groups often unintentionally speed up shared tasks, so much so that there is even a term for it: joint rushing. Don’t feel bad if you’re a victim of it, however. You’re not alone.
“This can happen even when they try to keep a steady tempo, and even among trained musicians,” cognitive researcher and study co-author Thomas Wolf told Phys.org on May 12.
Wolf, like many other listeners, became curious about work song traditions amid the #ShantyTok era. While reading Ted Gioia’s seminal book, Work Songs, he noted how the tunes were frequently described as “keeping the pace.” One prominent example was the Scottish tradition of oyster dredging, whose workers often sang to keep the right tempo while rowing.
Wolf and his colleagues decided to examine work songs under controlled laboratory conditions. They paid particular attention to two frequent aspects that they believed helped keep tempo—solo vocalization and metric subdivision.
“Many work songs are sung either by a lead singer or in call-and-response patterns, meaning that at least part of the vocalization is produced by only one person,” he explained, adding that the songs also regularly include “musical events between the instrumental actions.”
For instance, a work song for a task requiring an action like pulling a rope or swinging a hammer may include additional notes or syllables that coincide with the task itself. These musical subdivisions lower the chance of varied timing, which is known to cause joint rushing.
To test their theories, Wolf’s team asked pairs of volunteers to tap along to a metronome’s tempo, then continue to keep time once the device was turned off. They then compared their performances to those undertaken during a “work song condition” in which one person counted off “one, two, one, two,” (and so on) with the metronome. Taps needed to match the one, while the “two occupied the space between taps. Although their past research showed joint rushing is difficult to control even among groups of trained musicians, the results were completely different in the latest experiments.
“What was striking in this study was that, just by having one person count in a specific way, joint rushing was not only reduced, but statistically speaking, it was completely eliminated,” said Wolf.
Their findings indicate even simple vocalizations can strongly influence group coordination. According to the study’s authors, this means that work songs are not only popular because they keep people aligned. They also prevent the speedier ones from throwing everyone else off their groove. Although interesting from a historical standpoint, this research could help inform solutions to coordination problems that many people deal with today in sports, occupational safety, high-stress situations, and physical rehabilitation. So while sea shanties and other work songs helped laborers during a bygone era, the psychology behind them can still help people for generationst to come.
The post Sea shanties actually help people work together better appeared first on Popular Science.
NASA satellite images show how a massive tsunami in Alaska changed the landscape forever
New satellite images are helping scientists understand a major tsunami that changed the landscape of a popular tourist destination in Alaska forever.
On August 10, 2025, a tsunami larger than the Eiffel Tower ripped through Tracy Arm fjord in southeast Alaska. The rapid retreat of the South Sawyer Glacier triggered a landslide that swept huge rocks down the picturesque waterway visited by millions aboard Alaskan cruises every summer. At least 64 million cubic meters of rock slid down the slope of the glacier. The rocks created an enormous tsunami that stripped trees and other vegetation from the opposing fjord wall up to 1,578 feet above sea level.
The NASA-USGS Landsat satellite images show the dramatic changes to the landscape. In one photo taken on July 26, 2025, the fjord is surrounded by green vegetation.
The shores of Tracy Arm on July 26, 2025. Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.In the second image, taken nine days after the landslide on August 19, the fjord is dominated by a gray scar made by the cascading rock.
The shores of Tracy Arm on August 19, 2025. This image was taken after the tsunami and landslide. Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.Image: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.“The bright landslide scar on the north side of the fjord is striking, as is the ‘bathtub’ ring around the fjord showing the areas where the forest was leveled by the tsunami,” said Dan Shugar, a geomorphologist at the University of Calgary.
Sawyer Island, located about 6 miles away from the landslide, also turned from green to brown. Only a few trees still stood at the island’s higher elevations.
Over the past several months, Shugar and his colleagues combined satellite, airborne, and ground-based observations with eyewitness accounts and simulations to build a complete story with how this historic event transformed. Their analysis was published May 6 in the journal Science.
Their analysis found that water continued to slosh around the fjord for more than one day. Geologists call this water-sloshing phenomenon a seiche. Both the landslide and resulting seiche produced seismic signals that were detected around the world and equivalent to a magnitude 5.4 earthquake.
The landslide scar and the zone where vegetation was stripped by the resulting tsunami are both visible in this aerial photo of Tracy Arm and South Sawyer Glacier, captured on August 13, 2025. Image: U.S. Geological Survey/John LyonsThe Landsat images also show that the South Sawyer Glacier retreated significantly in less than a month. Typically, glacial retreat takes much longer.
“Part of that occurred between the date of the first image and the date of the landslide,” Shugar said. “But part of it is from the landslide itself, which broke off a big chunk of the terminus of South Sawyer Glacier, resulting in a slurry of icebergs in the fjord.”
Fortunately, no one was injured in the event, largely because it occurred around 5:30 a.m. local time. The wave did sweep away some gear from a group of kayakers camping on Harbor Island near the fjord’s mouth. Passengers aboard a small cruise ship in neighboring Endicott Arm also reported swings in water levels and a strong current associated with the tsunami.
In response to the event, at least six cruise lines have eliminated the Tracy Arm fjord from their itineraries for 2026 due to the hazards. The United States Geological Survey also warns that steep, mountainous landslide areas are “inherently unstable” and that the Tracy Arm fjord tsunami will likely continue to change the landscape.
The post NASA satellite images show how a massive tsunami in Alaska changed the landscape forever appeared first on Popular Science.
There’s a reason we don’t have birds the size of elephants
This article was originally featured on The Conversation.
Exactly how did birds evolve from dinosaurs? It’s a mystery that has been with us for more than 150 years, and palaeontologists are still hunting for pieces of the puzzle today.
Among them is the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Steve Brusatte, whose latest book, The Story of Birds, tells the whole fascinating story. We caught up with him recently to find out more.
Of all the great dinosaur subjects, why this story?I’ve always been fascinated by birds. They are all around us and there’s such a stunning diversity and variety. As a palaeontologist I specialised early in the theropod (two-legged) dinosaurs. This is the group that includes T.rex and Velociraptor – and gave rise to birds.
The more I studied theropods, the more I became more curious about the modern-day animals that descended from them. Back in the early 2010s my PhD was about the origin of birds. Its core involved building a big new family tree of theropod dinosaurs to understand where birds slot in, how they evolved from dinosaurs, and how their body features came together.
I wrote about the dinosaur bird connection in my first book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs (2018), but that was just one chapter. It made me think it would be really fun to do an entire book on the subject. That was how my new book, The Story of Birds, came together.
Is there still any debate about birds evolving from dinosaurs?I think people have generally heard that birds descended from dinosaurs. In the newer Jurassic World films you even see feathers on some of them. And yet it hasn’t really broken through to the public consciousness that today’s birds really are dinosaurs. They are part of the dinosaur family tree. They just happen to be a peculiar group of dinosaurs that got small and evolved wings, took to the skies and have survived until today.
It was Charles Darwin’s great disciple, Thomas Henry Huxley, in the 1860s who first noted similarities between the skeletons of some dinosaurs starting to be found in Europe and those of modern birds. This was back before anybody knew what DNA was, for instance.
Huxley’s idea did enter the public consciousness, at least in Victorian Britain. Darwin added it to the later editions of On the Origin of Species. But then it went out of favour. This was the great era of exploration, especially in the US and Canada. The frontier was being pushed westwards, and all these new dinosaurs were being found – Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and later Brachiosaurus and T.rex.
None look anything like birds. I think dinosaurs obtained this stereotype as giant reptilian monsters, and this still largely dominates the public consciousness today.
Yet there were also a lot of smaller dinosaurs. Many had feathers and wings, and many were very bird-like. It’s really only in the past few decades that the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs has become scientific consensus. The discovery of feathers on dinosaurs in the 1990s really sealed the deal on that.
What mysteries remain?There are of course still things we don’t know, like how dinosaurs started to fly. How did they start to move their wings in a way that generated enough lift and thrust to get them airborne? Did they run on the ground and use their wings to defy gravity? Did they do it from the trees down, using these wings as a way to manipulate gravity? That’s one of the biggest mysteries.
Another area of uncertainty is which dinosaurs were the closest relatives of birds. The more fossils we find, especially feathered dinosaurs in China and other places, the more it’s clear there was a whole bunch of small dinosaurs with feathers. A lot had wings, some had wings only on arms, some on arms and legs. Some had wings of feathers. Some had wings of skin like a bat.
There was a huge diversity of them right around that point in the family tree where proper modern-style birds evolved with big arm wings that they flap to keep airborne. Each new fossil gives us more information but also another layer of complexity. It makes it just a little trickier to untangle the knot of exactly which dinosaurs were the closest rivals of birds. You still see new discoveries being made every year.
You say in the book that wings evolved not to fly?The fossils tell us clearly that feathers evolved long before any of these animals were flying. Many dinosaurs had simple feathers; they looked like little strands of hair. In fact most dinosaurs probably had them – they just don’t normally preserve because they decay away so quickly. It’s in spectacular fossil sites where lots of dinosaurs were buried quickly, usually by volcanic eruptions, where you see a lot of these feathers (Liaoning province in north-eastern China is a good example).
But these feathers were not used for flying. There’s clear evidence from the fossil record that feathers evolved in a simpler form for other reasons. Our best hypothesis is they evolved for insulation, to help them stay warm – just like hair in mammals.
Later on, these feathers evolved on some dinosaurs into quills that made up wings. But the fossil record shows that the first wings that show up in dinosaurs between the sizes of sheep and horses. Those wings were only about the size of laptop screens, and by the laws of physics, those could not keep an animal of that size in the air.
That hints that wings probably also evolved for another reason and were only later co-opted for flying. We can tell a lot of these feathers had flamboyant colours and patterns, so one leading idea is that wings first evolved for display, to attract mates; to intimidate rivals. This is still true today, of course.
You can imagine if those wings got bigger over time, more flamboyant, more ornate, at some point the laws of physics would take over and they would generate some of those aerodynamic forces. It’s not like we have fossils of the exact dinosaurs that were the first to flap their wings, but that is at least what the fossil record is telling us.
Did dinosaurs have to get smaller for flying birds to evolve?This is a big part of the story. Some dinosaurs, such as T.rexes, got bigger over time, but the dinosaurs that evolved into birds had been getting smaller for tens of millions of years. We don’t know why exactly, but there’s all kinds ecological niches where it pays to be small: it’s easier to hide, you can grow more quickly, and so on.
So it seems you had this group, that their bodies were getting smaller, and their wings were getting bigger. At some point you had a wing that was big enough to keep a body that was small enough in the air. At that point, natural selection could take over and start refining these dinosaurs into ever better flyers.
Is it an accident of evolution that flying creatures the size of elephants don’t exist?Animals that need to flap wings to fly can’t be that big. The biggest flapping flyers today are wandering albatrosses, and their maximum wingspan is about 3.5 metres. We have fossils of birds that were bigger: the Pelagornithids were giant soaring birds that went extinct right before the ice age. They had wingspans that were something like 7 metres long. But beyond that, I think it would be very hard to flap wings to fly.
It makes total sense to me that it was probably a crow-sized to lapdog-sized raptor dinosaur that first started to flap as opposed to some dinosaur the size of an albatross. It’s just that the stereotype of dinosaurs being huge makes it harder to envision some small dinosaurs flapping and flying.
How did birds survive the asteroid?That was a big mystery for a long time. There were proper birds at least 150 million years ago, which means they lived alongside their dinosaur cousins for some 80 million years. Then the asteroid comes down around 66 million years ago and all the dinosaurs die except the birds – why is that?
The reality is that lots of birds went extinct at the same time as the other dinosaurs. Many birds were still quite primitive and would have looked a lot like their dinosaur cousins. The only ones to survive were very modern-style birds. They had beaks instead of teeth, big wings and large chest muscles, and could grow really quickly like birds today.
A lot of recent research has clarified why they survived. What it comes down to is: the asteroid was a shot out of the darkness of outer space, a six-mile wide rock that smashed into the Earth one day. It changed everything instantaneously. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and wildfires. There was dust blocking out the sun, giving rise to a nuclear-style winter that lasted several years. Natural selection can’t work on that timeframe, so when the asteroid hit, all the animals had to confront the situation with the features they already had.
Most of the dinosaurs were big, and nothing bigger than a husky dog survived on land. With all these fires and acid rain and storms, simply being outside and exposed to the elements would have been bad. If you were smaller you could hide away more easily.
Also, modern-style birds had a bunch of features that turned out to be beneficial. They grew to adult within year, so it didn’t take too long for them to nurture the next generation. They could fly away from danger. But crucially they also had beaks, which could have allowed them to eat seeds.
When the Earth went cold for many years, ecosystems collapsed. Plants did not have sunlight to photosynthesise. So plant-eaters died, which meant meat-eaters died. Seeds were probably the last foods that survived. If you could eat them, it could probably have got you through those lean years.
We have gut content of birds from the Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago) and we can tell a lot of them did eat seeds. So the modern-style birds had a good hand of cards just as the world became this fickle casino and survival was a matter of the odds.
Which bird species appeared after the asteroid?Bird fossils from the Cretaceous (meaning before the asteroid) are limited because it’s hard to fossilise birds. They’re small and their bones are really delicate. But we do know there’s birds like Vegavis and Asteriornis that lived in that period and were respectively members of the modern groups of ducks and chickens.
It doesn’t mean other modern species like owls or falcons weren’t there, but certainly they were not a major component of the ecosystems at the time. Then the asteroid hit and we start to see in the Paleocene (66 to 55 million years ago) fossils of things like penguins, mouse birds and multiple other modern groups.
Yet the really strong evidence about what happened is from the DNA of modern birds. Researchers are using whole genomes now. They can compare the similarities and back-calculate to predict when two groups would have diverged. When you do this, it predicts there was a big bang of bird evolution right around that time – including species like owls, parakeets, falcons and hawks.
It makes sense that if you have a mass extinction that kills 75% of species, there would have been abundant opportunity for whatever survived. But we’re still waiting for fossils to confirm this directly. It’s a real target for people doing fieldwork to confirm this story by finding the fossils of birds up to 5 to 6 million years after the asteroid.
You write that great birds have come and gone – talk us through some of thoseThere are more than 10,000 species of birds today, basically double the number of mammal species, so in that sense we’re still in a dinosaur world. But there are even more incredible extinct birds, some of which went extinct quite recently because of us, as we’ve spread around the world and changed the environment very quickly.
A lot of these fantastic birds got their start in the ecological vacuum after the asteroid. There were birds that became basically born-again T.rex and Triceratops – filling the top predator/top plant-eater role in a lot of ecosystems.
In South America were the “terror birds” (Phorusrhacidae). They stood taller than a person, had a head the size of a horse head and a massive hooked gnarly beak. They were the top predators there for tens of millions of years. South America was an island for lot of that time; only later did jaguars and big dogs arrive.
South America’s terror bird, once the apex predator on the continent. Harper Collins, CC BY-SAIn many places, birds were the biggest plant-eaters. Australia had birds called demon ducks (Dromornithidae) that lived for tens of millions of years. Think of the modern duck and super-size it by 100. Some were heavier than cows.
Elsewhere there was New Zealand’s moa and Madagascar’s elephant bird. Elephant birds were maybe the heaviest birds of all time. They laid eggs the size of watermelons. Many of these birds couldn’t fly. They gave up that ability as a trade-off to allow them to become really big.
The Pelagornithids also really fascinate me – the birds that were double the wingspan of an albatross. They lived for tens of millions of years, sailing the world’s thermals like giant kites. They would have been utterly spectacular animals.
Pelagornithids had twice the wingspan of the modern wandering albatross. Harper Collins, CC BY-SAWe only know about most of these birds because of fossils – except for some like the moas and elephant birds and demon ducks, which did meet humans but didn’t last long, unfortunately.
Is it surprising birds never became as intelligent as humans?When I was growing up in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, it was an insult to say “you’re a bird brain”. It’s such an unfair biological slur, because birds are very smart.
It’s just that they have small brains – I don’t know how many hummingbirds could fit into the head of an elephant. But when it comes to the size of the brain relative to the size of the body, which is largely what matters for cognition, problem-solving and so on, birds are right up there with mammals.
Song birds learn intricate songs. Similar to a human language, they learn them from tutors, they babble when they’re young and make mistakes, then master their avian language later on.
Parrots can mimic human speech. And whereas plenty of animals use tools in a rudimentary way, some crows can make their own tools. It’s really only crows and humans and maybe some close primate relatives that do that. Crows take sticks and branches and twist and turn them. They make hooks out of them and use them to probe for food.
Since the asteroid, there were probably long stretches where it was actually birds that were the cognitive superstars. It was maybe only a few million years ago when some primates eclipsed birds in having the biggest brain relative to body size.
When did birds start singing?Sound doesn’t fossilise, of course. But we can look at the family tree of modern birds. We can look at the songbird group and use DNA to predict when they would have originated. We can then look at the fossil record of the skeletons of birds, and see if they more or less match up with what the DNA suggests.
This tells us that song birds go back in Australia as long as 50 million years ago. Songbird evolution then probably went into overdrive about 27 million years ago. This was probably triggered by tectonic events such as little microplates, and islands moving around and forming new corridors and environments in South East Asia.
It’s only in the past 20 million years or so where you’ve had songbirds moving around the world. Nowadays, more than half of birds are song birds.
Anything else that is a priority?The very first birds in the fossil record – proper flapping flight birds like Archaeopteryx – are from about 150 million years ago. Archaeopteryx had big feathered wings that could flap, but also teeth in its jaws, as well as big claws and a long tail. It’s the quintessential evolutionary link in transitional species, and has been known since the 1860s, when Huxley and Darwin wrote about them. Archaeopteryx was integral to their idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
We still haven’t discovered anything much older. We have some new fossils from China that are about the same age. Yet these birds must have had ancestors that were a bit more primitive, that could only fly in more of a rudimentary way. That’s one thing we’re waiting for, maybe from the Late Jurassic (162 to 143 million years ago) or even Middle Jurassic (174 to 162 million years). Those fossils would give us proper insight into how flapping flight really originated.
The Story of Birds US edition publishes on April 28, while the UK edition publishes on June 11 and is available for pre-order.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
To read an extract from the book, click here.
The post There’s a reason we don’t have birds the size of elephants appeared first on Popular Science.
Teen builds ‘Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle’ to detect ecological threats
Fifteen-year-old Evan Budz was on a camping trip when he saw a snapping turtle that would become the impetus for an award-winning invention. As someone who loves hiking, canoeing, and just being outside, the Canadian high school student from Burlington, Ontario, had actively been looking for ways that he could go out and help the planet.
“My parents brought me up with the sort of principle that every place that I visit, I should leave it a bit better than I found it,” he says. So when Budz noticed the turtle swimming in some nearby waters, he knew that he’d found his next passion project: a bionic robot turtle that could help protect underwater environments.
How a turtle inspired an award-winning science project“When I saw the snapping turtle, it was so graceful, fluidic, and generally non-disruptive” to its surroundings, says Budz. “I thought it’d be really interesting to go and try and replicate its natural swimming kinematics [basically the study of how things move]” in a robot.
Along with mimicking the fluid motions of a wild green sea turtle in the water, his autonomous device uses AI to monitor underwater ecosystems for ecological threats, such as invasive species and coral bleaching.
“Most current underwater technologies can produce things like noise from their propellers or very high-pressure water streams,” which can erode environments, he says.
However, by mimicking the motions of a sea turtle, Budz’s robot can move through the water innocuously, gathering vital data in a way that doesn’t stress marine life or damage delicate habitats. “I don’t want to harm the various places that I’m hoping to protect.”
High school student Evan Budz works on the flippers for his bionic turtle. Image: Evan Budz How to build a robot turtleTo create his bionic turtle, Budz got to work studying the reptile’s locomotion. He watched videos of sea turtles swimming and talked with experts at his local aquarium, learning how the reptiles use their front flippers to propel themselves forward and their hind limbs for steering. He then used his 3D design and electronics know-how to plan a prototype in SolidWorks, a 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and engineering software. From there, the high school student started creating his robot turtle’s 3D parts.
The robot has four flippers in total—with the larger front flippers providing its main propulsion and its smaller rear flippers used mainly for stability and changing direction, just like a real turtle. It also has a main acrylic tube “body” for housing its electronic components, which include a Raspberry Pi microcomputer. This runs AI models to detect environmental threats and records and transmits data. In addition, the bionic turtle navigates the water using various sensors. These include a GPS module for position tracking, allowing the robot to follow a predefined grid pattern.
Budz’s robot also has a front camera for “seeing” its surroundings, along with additional sensors on its exterior to help guide the autonomous reptile, offer depth control, and check for ecological hazards like microplastics and bleached coral.
Meet the Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle, aka BURTWhile not an official name, Budz has been calling his invention “BURT,” an acronym for “Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle.” BURT maintains the same body-to-flipper-size proportions as a real-life sea turtle but is smaller overall, which allows it to move easily in different environments. It weighs about 11 pounds, though much of the robot’s weight is just added metal that allows it to sink down. This gives BURT an opportunity to monitor depths well below the water’s surface.
“To achieve neutral buoyancy in the water,” says Budz, “I needed the turtle to basically be heavier than the force of buoyancy that’s pushing it up.”
Budz did much of BURT’s testing in his grandparents’ backyard pool. Image: Evan BudzBURT can swim for up to eight hours per charge on a lithium battery, though it also has a solar panel that can keep it going for even longer periods. Right now, Budz has BURT set up to swim at the typical speed of turtles (approximately 0.5 miles per hour). “If I do want it to swim faster, I can just change the flipper oscillation frequency,” meaning the rate of its flipper strokes.
Most of BURT’s testing has taken place in Budz’s grandparents’ backyard pool, which has a depth of just over eight feet.
“I basically went out and created a simulated coral reef setup using 3D models,” he says, programming the turtle to understand what coral bleaching and invasive species actually look like. “And the turtle then swims around them to simulate what it would do in a real-world environment.”
BURT is also set up to follow a predetermined search pattern, “so there’s no need for any sort of tether like you might find on a traditional underwater drone.” The bionic turtle scans its surrounding waters through its front-mounted camera, with all of the recorded data then feeding back into its Raspberry Pi microcomputer. According to the Budz’s testing, BURT has been able to detect replicated coral bleaching with 96 percent accuracy.
Budz tested BURT in Lake Ontario. Image: Evan Budz BURT, the robot turtle, keeps getting smarterBudz’s next step is to bring BURT into different environments to see how deep the robot can actually go. To deal with especially murky waters, he has installed lights on the front of the robot and added an ultrasonic transducer, which utilizes high-frequency sound waves to detect potential obstacles.
This year he’s even developed a new holographic imaging device, which he’s using to record the structural characteristics and shapes of tiny particles in waterways. He then uses a custom-trained neural network, which processes data in a way that’s similar to a human brain, to classify if each particle is a microplastic.
Although Budz built his robot as a labor of love, it’s since won some major awards, including first prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, held in Latvia in 2025, and the Canada-Wide Science Fair, an annual science fair in which finalists qualify from approximately 25,000 competitors.
Budz’s goal is to have a fleet of these sea turtles that can be set out to detect ecological threats. “I’ve already looked at coral bleaching, invasive species, and microplastics,” he says, “but there are so many different places where this can be used.”
In The Workshop, Popular Science highlights the ingenious, delightful, and often surprising projects people build in their spare time. If you or someone you know is working on a hobbyist project that fits the bill, we’d love to hear about it—fill out this form to tell us more.
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The post Teen builds ‘Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle’ to detect ecological threats appeared first on Popular Science.
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Why coffee tastes bitter, according to molecular biology
Regular coffee drinkers know there is a big difference between a brew’s aroma and its taste. A cup may smell warm and full-bodied only to leave you with a lingering bitterness behind the first sip. Researchers have long known a coffee’s potentially acrid flavor profile is dictated at a molecular level thanks to your tongue’s taste receptors, but how that occurs has remained a mystery. Now, a team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has the answer thanks to precise imaging technology—and their findings may have much wider ramifications beyond the coffee pot.
The details were published in the journal Nature Structure & Molecular Biology, and focuses on TAS2R43, one of our 26 different bitter taste receptors. These mechanisms are expressed throughout the human body, and likely evolved to guard the species against toxic substances as well as helping regulate our metabolisms.
“Bitter taste receptors are thought to be important for detecting toxins, pathogens, and harmful bacteria in the airways, gut, skin, and organs, initiating immune responses, clearing pathogens, regulating immune cells, influencing hormone secretion, and aiding digestion,” explained study co-author and molecular biologist Bryan Roth.
Scientists first determined the microscopic structure of TAS2R43 a few years ago, but until Roth’s team, no one had analyzed how it responds to bitter compounds. To accomplish this, researchers relied on a technique called cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). This method involves flash-freezing biological molecules, then employing electrons to generate highly detailed 3D images of their overall shape. Roth and his colleagues recorded how TAS2R43 receptors responded to coffee’s bitter elements including caffeine and mozambioside, then compared those to the reaction of other receptors.
“In this work, we solved the structures of TAS2R43 bound to bitter compounds and showed, in molecular detail, how this receptor detects bitter molecules,” said molecular biologist and study co-author Yoojoong Kim.
Researchers now have a molecular framework for creating future compounds that intentionally control how someone experiences bitterness in drugs or foods. Aside from finally understanding how taste receptors like TAS2R43 physically respond to bitter molecules, the discoveries could also help develop new medical treatments.
“In the long term, this could help guide the development of new therapeutic strategies for diseases involving airway defense, gut function, inflammation, or host responses to microbes,” Kim added.
The post Why coffee tastes bitter, according to molecular biology appeared first on Popular Science.
Why coffee tastes bitter, according to molecular biology
Regular coffee drinkers know there is a big difference between a brew’s aroma and its taste. A cup may smell warm and full-bodied only to leave you with a lingering bitterness behind the first sip. Researchers have long known a coffee’s potentially acrid flavor profile is dictated at a molecular level thanks to your tongue’s taste receptors, but how that occurs has remained a mystery. Now, a team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has the answer thanks to precise imaging technology—and their findings may have much wider ramifications beyond the coffee pot.
The details were published in the journal Nature Structure & Molecular Biology, and focuses on TAS2R43, one of our 26 different bitter taste receptors. These mechanisms are expressed throughout the human body, and likely evolved to guard the species against toxic substances as well as helping regulate our metabolisms.
“Bitter taste receptors are thought to be important for detecting toxins, pathogens, and harmful bacteria in the airways, gut, skin, and organs, initiating immune responses, clearing pathogens, regulating immune cells, influencing hormone secretion, and aiding digestion,” explained study co-author and molecular biologist Bryan Roth.
Scientists first determined the microscopic structure of TAS2R43 a few years ago, but until Roth’s team, no one had analyzed how it responds to bitter compounds. To accomplish this, researchers relied on a technique called cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). This method involves flash-freezing biological molecules, then employing electrons to generate highly detailed 3D images of their overall shape. Roth and his colleagues recorded how TAS2R43 receptors responded to coffee’s bitter elements including caffeine and mozambioside, then compared those to the reaction of other receptors.
“In this work, we solved the structures of TAS2R43 bound to bitter compounds and showed, in molecular detail, how this receptor detects bitter molecules,” said molecular biologist and study co-author Yoojoong Kim.
Researchers now have a molecular framework for creating future compounds that intentionally control how someone experiences bitterness in drugs or foods. Aside from finally understanding how taste receptors like TAS2R43 physically respond to bitter molecules, the discoveries could also help develop new medical treatments.
“In the long term, this could help guide the development of new therapeutic strategies for diseases involving airway defense, gut function, inflammation, or host responses to microbes,” Kim added.
The post Why coffee tastes bitter, according to molecular biology appeared first on Popular Science.
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