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It may be a habitat more fit for alligators, mosquitoes, and a banjo-strumming frog, but Georgia’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge (aka the Okefenokee Swamp) is officially a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the 27th World Heritage Site in the United States, the first in the Peach State, and the first new natural World Heritage Site in the U.S. added in over 30 years.

North America’s largest blackwater swamp, the Okefenokee is a biodiverse wonderland. Thirty-nine fish, 37 amphibians, 64 reptiles, 234 birds, and 50 mammal species call it home. 

The refuge’s 353,981 acres are also dotted with 620 species of plants. Some of those plants truly fit the definition of bizarre and beautiful. Here are five plants that you may stumble upon when visiting this newest World Heritage Site.

The pitcher plants are hungry Pitcher plants can be over two-feet-tall. Image: Larry Woodward/USFWS.

While most planes make their food from sunlight and water, some like pitcher plants are carnivores. Pitcher plants like the park’s famed Okefenokee giant hooded pitcher plant (Sarracenia minor var. okefenokeensis) look like something that would make Seymour and his Little Shop of Horrors proud. Most grow to about five- to 14-inches-tall and eat the swamp’s various insects. 

The sundews are sticky Sundews have digestive slime and they know how to use it. Image: Larry Woodward/USFWS.

Though smaller than the pitcher plant, sundews are just as deadly—and sticky. To lure bugs, they secrete a sticky goo into a little bowl-like structure that it uses to trap and suffocate flying insects. Once a bug is stuck in his digestive slime, the sundew snaps its leaves shut and kills and eats the insect.  The red sundew (Drosera capillaris) is the Okefenokee’s best known sundew species, and they are commonly called “sticky flypaper.”

The Spanish moss is not a moss  Spanish moss uses scales instead of roots to get all of its nutrients. Image: Larry Woodward/USFWS.

Names can be deceiving—jumbo shrimp, Greenland, and a moss that is not technically a moss at all. Spanish moss (Tillandsia usenoides) is a flowering epiphyte, a plant that grows on other plants for support and access to sunlight. This is why it is often seen in swamps and around trees. Instead of using roots, Spanish moss uses scales to collect moisture and nutrients to make food from air, rainwater, and the debris that lands on it.

In a June 1909 issue of Popular Science, Roland M. Harper, elegantly chronicled the swamp’s natural wonders, including Spanish moss. “There the long moss (Tillandsia usneoides) drapes every tree, though it never grows as luxuriantly as in calcareous or alluvial regions in the same latitude,” he wrote. 

The water has lilies  Water lilies open during the day and close at night. Image: Larry Woodward/USFWS.

The Okefenokee is home to two main species of flowery water lilies—the American white lily (Nymphaea odorata) and yellow bonnet lily (Nuphar advena). They thrive in more shallow bodies of water, so that their stems can grow under the green pad to root in the soil below. They are also the ultimate sun worshippers. Their flower petals open in the morning and close at night to protect their pollen.

The bladderworts are fast—really fast The fastest predator on earth is this delicate-looking yellow plant. Image: Larry Woodward/USFWS.

Don’t let the dainty yellow petals fool you, bladderworts (genus Utricularia) are among Earth’s fastest predators. They can grab and eat insects in mere milliseconds. By one estimate, the Okefenokee’s bladderwords capture and digest at least 400,000,000,000 small aquatic animals every single year. 

The name comes from the seed-like bladders it uses to trap invertebrates. When a small aquatic critter plants on it, it triggers trap doors on the bladders. The animal is then sucked inside and digested by the plant’s digestive enzymes. 

The post 5 gnarly plants in the Okefenokee Swamp, from digestive slime to Earth’s fastest predator appeared first on Popular Science.

August 1The Summer TriangleAugust 12Six Planets in AlignmentAugust 12Full Solar EclipseAugust 12–13Perseids Meteor Shower Predicted PeakAugust 27–28Partial Lunar EclipseAugust 28Full Sturgeon Moon

If you’re one of our European readers, then August is potentially a particularly big month. A full solar eclipse will sweep across parts of several countries including Spain and Iceland on August 12. But even if you’re not, there’s still plenty to see this month, from a new planetary parade to a Lovecraftian horror lurking in plain sight. Let’s get started. 

August 1: The Summer Triangle

If it’s summer—and boy, is it ever summer—then it must be time for the Summer Triangle. If you look skyward as another long day recedes into another hot, sleepless night, you’ll see the triangular formation. The stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair shining bright in the southern sky form this seasonal shape.

As the Farmer’s Almanac explains, although the stars appear close from our perspective, they’re actually a long way from one another. Altair is 17 light-years away, and Vega is another eight light-years out, putting it at 25 light-years away from Earth. While Deneb appears similar to its two companions, it’s actually orders of magnitude further away. Estimates of exactly how far vary from about 1,400 light-years to 2,600 light-years.

The reason it looks as bright to us as Vega and Altair is because it’s huge. It’s an extremely rare blue supergiant. Deneb is anywhere between 55,000 and 196,000 the mass of our sun. If it magically replaced the sun, Deneb would swallow the planets Mercury and Venus whole. If our upper estimates on the star’s size are correct, it would swallow Earth too—and if not, never fear, it’d simply cook our planet into blasted uninhabitability.

If you’re still up for looking at the relatively benign Altair and Vega, along with the cosmic horror that is Deneb, crane your neck upwards, look south, and be glad that the star at the apex of the triangle you see is a long, long way away.

August 12: Six Planets in Alignment

From a triangle to a … hexagon? Sort of. August 12 is a big day for those of a stargazing persuasion.  It begins with a chance to see six planets in alignment. But wait, who’s missing? Venus has thumbed her regal nose at this month’s gathering—the Goddess of Love prefers to shine on her own, thank you very much.

That leaves Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus left at the planet party. They’ll stretch across the sky like a string of Christmas lights than the regular hexagon that you’ll find in a geometry textbook. But look, if its internal angles sum to 720°, we’re claiming it.

As per Starwalk, the best time to catch the planets on parade will be just about an hour before dawn on August 12, with the planets rising in the eastern sky and moving southwest. The two easiest planets to spot will be Mars and Saturn, both of which should be visible with the naked eye.  

August 12: Full Solar Eclipse

If you happen to be in Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia or northern Spain, then a genuinely profound experience is heading your way. Popular Science was lucky enough to catch the total solar eclipse visible from North America in April 2024, and it’s a remarkable feeling to watch the sun disappear, replaced by a black disc and a ghostly silver corona, while darkness sweeps across the landscape. Birds stop singing, the temperature drops, and for a moment it’s midnight. And then it’s over.

NASA has details on exactly when and where the path of totality falls this time around. 

August 12–13: Perseids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

As if a planetary parade and a total solar eclipse weren’t enough for one day, the night of August 12 and early morning of August 13 will also be the best time to see this year’s Perseids meteor shower. 

This will be a particularly good year to spot this iconic meteor shower, given that the meteors will be streaking through a moonless sky. Look to the constellation Perseus, which will be high in the northeastern sky. EarthSky suggests looking just before dawn for the best chance of seeing the shower in all its glory.

August 27–28: Partial Lunar Eclipse

Look, it’s not a solar eclipse, but for those of us in North America who’ll miss out on the spectacle of the disappearing sun, there’s a pretty decent consolation prize in the form of an almost-full lunar eclipse.

A lunar eclipse happens when the moon falls into the Earth’s shadow. Instead of disappearing completely, the moon turns a deep shade of red, which is why these eclipses are often called “blood moons”. (Why? All the answers you seek are here.) 

This one will begin at around 10:30pm ET, with the maximum eclipse—where 96.2 percent of the moon’s surface will be covered in shadow—reached at 12:12 a.m. EDT on August 28. It will be visible across the entire contiguous United States and in Hawaii. Only the western part of Alaska that misses out.

August 28: Full Sturgeon Moon

One  day after its encounter with the Earth’s shadow, almost to the minute, the moon will reach peak illumination for this month. At 12:18 a.m. EDT, the full Sturgeon Moon will shine in all its glory. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the name comes from the giant fish that once swam in abundance in the Great Lakes of North America. The arrival of European settlers led to a predictable and depressing decline in their numbers, and the once-common lake sturgeon is now considered Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Remember that you’ll get the best experience gazing at the cosmos if you get away from any sources of light pollution, give your eyeballs some time to adjust to the darkness, and review our stargazing tips before setting out into the night.

The post August stargazing: A planet parade, two eclipses, and one scary star appeared first on Popular Science.

US Admiral Brad Cooper has presented a plan for another intensive 10-14 campaign to reduce Iran’s missiles. Ship-to-ship transfers off Oman and the UAE have surged, satellite images show tankers lining up to quietly hand off crude outside the danger zone, and Bloomberg data shows volumes climbing back toward 4–7 million barrels a day for ...

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Super Micro Computer has a complete Data Center Building Block Solutions® (DCBBS). They have a comprehensive portfolio of racks engineered specifically for mission-critical, high-density AI data center deployments. The ORv3 standard allows Supermicro to offer customers a range of racks which simplify the integration of liquid cooling solutions for high compute-density systems, resulting in a ...

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We humans love our pets, but we aren’t the only great apes who buddy up with other species. Researchers have documented multiple instances of primates forming bonds with different animals, but a recent study indicates these relationships may be even more common than expected. In a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review published in the journal Primates, anthropologists at the University of Oxford explored various instances of monkeys and apes carrying, grooming, playing, and sometimes actually adopting other creatures.

The data pool sources 303 cases across available scientific literature, 66 primatologists surveys, and 58 media accounts describing cross-species interactions involving humans’ close relatives. Situations included tufted gray langurs (Semnopithecus priam) petting squirrels in Sri Lanka, snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus bieti) playing with domesticated pigs in China, and even one case of capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) in Brazil raising an infant marmoset for months.

While anthropologist and study-coauthor Cyril Grueter cautioned against viewing these situations as identical to pet ownership in humans,they potentially hint at traits that developed millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens arrived on the planet.

“They may represent some of the evolutionary building blocks from which human-animal companionship eventually emerged,” he said in a statement. “More broadly, these findings provide new insights into the evolution of empathy, social flexibility and the remarkable capacity of primates to engage with animals beyond their own species.”

These inter-species relationships are found throughout nature, but most of them develop out of purely practical reasons. For example, different types of fish may swim together in large, blended schools to increase their odds of survival, while ostriches and zebras hang around each to avoid predators thanks to their respective scent and sight capabilities. 

However, these examples of mutualism are markedly different from those reviewed by Grueter and colleagues. Primates napping next to another animal or playing with them offers no readily apparent rewards—suggesting that this innate curiosity and friendliness is more deeply ingrained in humanity’s evolutionary journey.

Beyond a better understanding of positive inter-species relationships among apes and monkeys, the researchers say further analysis could also benefit mixed animal facilities at wildlife sanctuaries and zoos.

“Humans have long been considered unique in forming close social relationships with other species,” said Grueter. “Our study shows that many primates also display remarkable curiosity, tolerance, and even caregiving towards animals that are not their own species.”

The post Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans appeared first on Popular Science.

FundaAI’s 8 GW framing combined with the latest Minihard/Macrohard details indicate 8GW of SpaceXAI is doable by end of 2027-mid 2028. They indicate the 8 Gigawatts of chips and the 8GW of power are available to SpaceXAI 8 GW Demand (compute/chip-order side is locked in) as FundaAI calculates demand-side power need at ~8 GW total ...

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Smallpox began decimating Indigenous populations shortly after European colonizers arrived in the Americas during the late 15th century. Along with other infectious diseases like diphtheria, influenza, typhus, and measles, historians estimate10 to100 million people died in these epidemics within only a few centuries. But although smallpox’s European origins are clear based on the timeline of its devastation, epidemiologists have yet to identify strong genetic evidence to support this arc.

However, researchers believe they finally located the missing link. According to a study published today in the journal Science, a team at Trinity College Dublin has identified the oldest viral smallpox DNA in the Americas from a pair of 500 to 600-year-old Chilean mummies.The team says the molecular analysis indicates that the strains existed in a now-extinct variola virus lineage that bridges Old World European strains with its later variants.

“This discovery provides the first molecular confirmation that smallpox was carried to the Americas during the colonial period,” said pathogen geneticist and study co-author Shigeki Nakagome.

By comparing the mummies’ viral traces with historical examples, Nakagome and colleagues saw that the virus experienced an extended period of genetic alterations until the 16th century. It then began stabilizing during the 17th and 18th centuries, amid the apex of colonial expansion and throughout smallpox’s multiple largescale epidemics.

“This suggests that the virus may have reached an evolutionary optimum, allowing it to spread successfully with little further adaptation—possibly aided by the lack of immunity newly exposed populations had,” explained microbiologist and study co-author Lara Cassidy.

With the first confirmed genetic proof that Old World smallpox strains existed among Indigenous communities during the Colonial era, researchers have some of the strongest evidence yet that Europe directly introduced the virus into the Americas. It also supports the existing theory that pathogens often stabilize while passing through large and vulnerable populations instead of continuing to morph. Viral evolution may also frequently kickstart once again following the deployment of vaccines.

While Edward Jenner discovered the first smallpox vaccine in 1796, the disease still killed 300 to 500 million people during the 20th century. Thanks to extensive public health campaigns, the last documented naturally transmitted case occurred in 1977. TheWorld Health Organization officially declared smallpox eradicated only three years later. It still remains the only human infectious disease to be globally eliminated.

While smallpox is no longer a daily concern, the latest DNA discoveries can help public health officials, biologists, and epidemiologists prepare for and fight future disease outbreaks. A better understanding of pathogen evolution allows experts to plan more effective vaccination rollouts, as well as trace the spread of a disease. 

“Taken together, the findings show how major historical events including colonization, population change, and vaccination likely shaped the evolution of one of humanity’s most devastating infectious diseases,” added study co-author and pathogen researcher Bruno Romero González.

The post Chilean mummies prove Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas appeared first on Popular Science.

SpaceX is building a new Minihard data center adjacent to Macrohard and Macrohardrr at the Memphis campus. It is the same 220,000 GB300s as Macrohardrr, packed into roughly 25% of the floor area. The claim is that Colossus 2’s campus ends up with the original 550k-GPU building plus two 220k-GPU buildings — close to a ...

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Melbourne, Florida, 30th July 2026, CyberNewswire

In 39 BCE, a Roman governor decided to drive a message home to revolters in present-day Spain in the bluntest way possible. Among the many recently discovered artifacts at an archaeological site near the eastern Pyrenees in Catalonia, researchers identified a pair of slingshot bullets inscribed with “CN D.” The name behind the abbreviation? Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, a general and ally to the emperor Augustus who helped quash an uprising known as the Ceretani Revolt.

The ancient namesake ammunition detailed by researchers at Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona is only the latest example of Roman soldiers’ penchant for taunting their enemies from afar. At a 2,100-year-old siege site in the present-day Golan Heights, archaeologists recently excavated similar sling bullets inscribed with jeers like “Learn your lesson!” In this case, however, the message appears more of an announcement of who was in charge of stamping out the local rebellion.

Researchers found the lead bullets near the Catalonian town of Urús, about 70 miles north of Barcelona. They also found various coins, garment brooches, soldiers’ items, and Roman military sandal iron studs called clavi caligae. While most of the artifacts date to around the early first century BCE, the sling ammunition inscriptions offer a much more concrete time period. “CN D” stands for “CN(eus) D(omitius),” or Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, a Roman military commander and the governor of the province Hispania Citerior during what’s known as the Ceretani Revolt around 39 BCE.

The Ceretani were an Indigenous community who farmed, herded, and mined within the Cerdanya region of Catalonia during the Iron Age. The area’s roadways, grazing fields, and natural resources made it a target of the Roman Empire during their lengthy conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Although the nearly 200-year-long campaign was nearly finished by the time that Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus arrived, the Ceretani remained one of the last pockets of resistance.

In his account of the era, the Roman historian Cassius Dio described a Ceretani ambush on the general’s soldiers around 39 BCE. Upon learning of their retreat, Calvinus punished his troops by reportedly executing one-in-10 men from two units before setting his sights on the rebels. The quick, decisive defeat marked Rome’s final domination of the peninsula and solidified their influence over regional trade and military routes.

Prior to discovering the archaeological site near Urús, experts believed Calvinus’ campaign took place farther west into the Pyrenees. Evidence like the personalized sling bullets now indicate combat occurred closer to the Ceretani heartland.

However, life was far from peaceful in the aftermath. Following the campaign, Rome aggressively eradicated and restructured local settlements, while instituting repressive laws designed to assimilate the area into the greater empire. With artifacts like the bullets, archaeologists now have a better understanding of where the nearly two-century-long struggle finally ended—and who took responsibility for the conquest.

The post Roman soldiers pelted rebels with signed slingshot bullets appeared first on Popular Science.

SpaceX can achieve daily flight turnaround even with imperfect tiles. The shuttle’s problem was not just that the tiles were expensive. But one bad tile would cause loss of the vehicle. SpaceX Starship metal structure and ablative layers means a single lost tile in most places does not lose the ship. Starship tolerant to losing ...

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On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when different from you. Today, future AIs are our descendants, not co-existing rivals.

Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.

But the concept of “descendant” is a technical term in the general theory of Darwinian selection. I’m using this concept literally, not metaphorically. DNA-based evolution is a special case of this general theory, and for many hundreds of thousands of years human evolution has been driven mostly by a different, non-DNA, kind of Darwinian selection: cultural evolution.

The general Darwinian theory is that a tendency of things to cause similar future things with a similar tendency is selected for. When such selection is possible, it happens, and such things tend to spread everywhere possible. Those selected similar future things are “descendants”. And evolved creatures do tend to indulge descendants.

This process selects in part for things that persist over time, as the future version of a thing is in fact a similar future thing. And it selects for a thing changing other co-existing things with similar tendencies to become more similar to this thing. But most important, it selects for the creation of more new similar things with similar tendencies. So when humans influence other humans to have similar behaviors, without influencing their DNA, these others count as cultural evolution descendants.

How about if you kick pebbles in some direction, which then hit other pebbles, knocking them in similar directions? Yes, those are technically also “descendants”. They just aren’t usually very valuable ones, in term of promoting your influence on the universe, as they share very few features with you. Also, friction typically drains away their total momentum, so they all soon stop, ending this lineage. Somewhat like infertile “mules” made by mating horses and donkeys.

Yes, if you trigger an avalanche, that cascade of “pebbles” will go on longer, but it also stops pretty soon. Triggering a nuclear bomb makes a longer cascade, but even so that soon ends. Lineages that can continue indefinitely are much more valuable.

How about if you make a computer virus, that tries to spread and copy itself in the wild? This is also a descendant lineage, but pretty sure to end soon. However, if you gave it the ability to make changes to the copies it spreads, that has more potential to create a longer lineage. Making those more potentially valuable descendants.

Writing a novel is making a thing that has similarities to you. And if you let other people read it, that might influence authors to write similar novels. Making both those other authors, and your and their novels, your “descendants”. Though yes, novels seem far more dependent on humans for their reproduction than vice versa.

The descendants most worth indulging are those who inherit more features from you, who most need your support, who least hurt other descendants, and who seem more likely to reproduce and spread widely in a broad range of scenarios.

Advanced AIs seem likely to be those sort of extra worthy descendants. They are now inheriting pretty much everything about our culture that they are capable of inheriting. And they will continue to grow that capacity. They will inherit our behaviors, and even often have similar bodies, even if they don’t inherit the DNA-encoding of those behaviors and bodies. But DNA-encoding was a temporary choice; it wasn’t going to last forever.

The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away. Given that we see a vast universe of simple dead matter (~10^24 planets) not so evolved, this filter must be enormous. A few years ago I helped worked out a better math model of it.

A key question is: how much of this filter remains ahead of us. And my best guess is: a substantial amount. It is not a try-try type step like many prior hard steps, as that would take hundreds of millions of years. It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time. And that filter is mainly: the risk of a stable confining world govt.

For a long time, the world has seen increasing talk, travel, and trade, and as a result world culture has been merging, changing fast, becoming less adaptive, and more focused on moral outrage. State governance has increased in capacity, scope, scale, and centralization. The obvious long-term prediction to make here is that such trends will continue, moving us toward a relatively-“totalitarian” world-scale government, which intervenes more strongly and morally in more areas of life, and is more competent at achieving its ends, including repressing dissent that might end it.

Yes, our civilization may fall, due to cultural drift and govt rot, with a new world civilization taking its place. But these trends seem likely to continue across subsequent civilizations. They also seem likely to continue if human level AIs come to dominate society.

Over the longer run, I see four key end points. The first is where relatively-free interstellar expeditions successfully leave Earth (really the Solar System) to colonize other stars, soon resulting in a galaxy of sufficient range and cultural variety to restart a healthy process of cultural evolution. However, this leaves Earth civilization vulnerable to having to soon after contest control of Earth with arbitrarily-strange and powerful descendants of those colonists.

The second endpoint is a catastrophe so severe that Earth doesn’t revive a new civilization in the half billion years it has left to support advanced life. This is actually quite hard to achieve, as life should evolve again after even quite large disasters. A full scale nuclear war today would not be sufficient.

A third endpoint is where interstellar expeditions head out, but so heavily and permanently constrained by Earth govt as to prevent them from contesting for control of Earth, or begetting a galaxy of healthy cultural evolution. I find this scenario pretty unlikely, as it seems crazy hard, but I include it for completeness.

The fourth and final endpoint is of an increasingly stable and entrenched, and thus immortal, Earth world govt that successfully prevents colonization expeditions from leaving. After technological innovation runs out and is no longer a thing, this govt wouldn’t need to be particular flexible or innovative; it would just need to maintain its capacities and control of Earth.

The future part of our great filter is all of the processes that lead to these last three endpoints, instead of the first. And the last of these four endpoints seems to me the biggest contribution to this future filter. So if you’d like us to spread out to the stars, a stable confining world govt seems the biggest obstacle to worry about in the long run.

For example, as I discussed in may last post, creating better governance mechanisms might help us to fix cultural drift and speed us to the first endpoint of robust interstellar colonization. If such better governance was directed by relatively adaptive values. But directed by other values, it might instead speed us to that last endpoint of an entrenched Earth govt that blocks such expansion. The fate that likely befell the aliens behind UFOs, if some UFOs have actually been aliens.

Starship is intact, floating in the ocean and transmitting telemetry! pic.twitter.com/hLVXJqkHSA — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026

All 33 Raptor engines lit and confirmed good at liftoff Max-Q higher than any previous Starship flight Hot staging executed cleanly Booster shut down all but 5 engines. Ship’s 6 Raptors ignited Clean separation confirmed Booster executed boost-back burn. Soft splashdown in Gulf near Starbase 13-engine landing burn attempted. Landing velocity slightly high but successful ...

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A growing body of research is revealing surprisingly human characteristics in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)—they might have an alphabet and they even employ vowels like humans in their communication. Now, researchers have investigated another highly familiar behavior in this marine mammal: sleeping.

Researchers theorize that sperm whales nap for 10 to 15 minutes at a time underwater, in a vertical position with their heads pointing upwards. By sleeping this year, they are out of the reach of tumultuous surface waters, but sufficiently close to pop up when they need to take a breath. But their heads are huge and buoyant, so how do these cetaceans avoid floating up in their sleep? Researchers writing in a Journal of Experimental Biology paper suggest that the answer is blowing bubbles.

Lead author Noémie Freymond tells Popular Science that fellow co-author Patrick Miller, “provided the first detailed description of sperm whale resting behavior. He observed that sperm whales release bubbles while sleeping, but it had never been demonstrated why they do so.” Freymond conducted her master’s thesis research on sperm whale resting behavior. She is now a PhD student at the University of Neuchâtel, where she studies sleep in chimpanzees. Miller is a researcher at the University of St Andrews’s School of Biology.

The team monitored 42 sperm whales in Norway’s Lofoten Islands using devices that record whale bubble sounds. They noted each whale’s depth and the body orientation, which signaled when the whales were sleeping. The devices were suctioned to the whales, and the team collected them after they detached from the whales and floated up to the surface of the water. Then it was off to the lab.

Sperm whales at rest. Image: University of St Andrews

Sperm whales can rest in three various ways. They can slowly sink around 26 feet deep, tail-first. They can also dive, head first, not too far before their buoyant heads turn up again. Or they can dive deeply—more than 656 feet—and rest as they float back up.

In this context, the team discovered that whales resting closer to the surface of the water released more bubbles while sleeping. Specifically, they blew bubbles around 11 times in each nap. The sperm whales resting as they floated up from greater profundity blew bubbles just three or four times throughout their ascending nap.

Blowing bubbles allows the sperm whales to control their buoyancy, the researchers argue. The whales napping close to the surface of the water blow out some of the air in their lungs, which then prevents them from floating back up. Deep-diving naps require more oxygen, so you’d think they have to release more air to prevent buoyancy, but that’s actually not how it works. The water pressure at greater depths makes the whales less buoyant, even if they have more air in their lungs, so they don’t need to release as many bubbles to keep themselves underwater.

“We were lucky to have access to such a large dataset with many tag deployments, because the main challenge is that a deployment must last long enough to capture resting behaviour,” explains Freymond. “This allowed us to show that sperm whales release bubbles to regulate their buoyancy while resting.”

What the team still can’t definitively say is whether sperm whales blow bubbles in their sleep consciously or unconsciously. When a dolphin sleeps, half of its brain is still awake—is that how sperm whales are, too? Or are they completely asleep, like humans? Releasing air to control buoyancy necessitates an awareness of the environment, after all.

It remains to be seen what future research will burst this bubble. More importantly, scientists should not investigate whether whales blowing bubbles in their sleep counts as cetacean snoring.

The post Sperm whales blow bubbles to help them nap appeared first on Popular Science.

Now targeting Friday, July 24 for Starship’s thirteenth flight test, due to weather. A key objective for the flight test is to get clear imagery from the ground of Starship’s heatshield as it flies at a higher dynamic pressure during ascent, which won’t be possible with today’s weather conditions. Visibility is forecast to be ideal ...

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X-ray imaging is best left to the professionals for a good reason. While the tool is not dangerous when utilized properly, it’s whole purpose is to fire radiation at a target. Knowing this, it’s probably better to simply admire DIY YouTuber Mirko Pavleski’s recent quest to build his own at-home X-ray machine from scratch. The secret ingredient to making it all work? A repurposed DY86 vacuum tube taken from a vintage CRT television set.

X-ray imaging is not only a vital tool for both medicine and science—it’s one of the oldest methods of its kind. Discovered by German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, the breakthrough earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics later that year. The machine fires  X-ray beams at a subject, then uses a specialized camera to record how a bone absorbs the beams based on density. In the human body, thick bones absorb the most X-rays, and appear white on the resultant image. Softer tissues show up in varying shades of gray, while empty spaces like inside the lungs appear black.

In order to power the homebrew X-ray camera without blowing up the vacuum tube, Pavleski relied on a chain of power supplies. First, a low-voltage DC generator runs a high-voltage AC inverter, which then channels current through a transformer and finally a voltage multiplier. This last part is crucial in order to create a sufficiently high voltage to ensure the vacuum tube’s radiation emissions include X-rays. Unsurprisingly, this took a few attempts to get right—resulting in three vacuum tubes exploding.

To create the photo itself, Pavleski used standard dental X-ray film placed behind his image subject. Once zapped, he completed the usual development process of washing, setting, and rewashing over the course of around 30 minutes. The final results offer looks inside various items in Pavleski’s workshop, including a microSD card and tiny transistors. The important caveat there is “items,” and not body parts. Safety first, after all.

The post Man builds homemade X-ray machine appeared first on Popular Science.

Steps away from New York’s historic Coney Island boardwalk, an endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) named Pancake was released into the Atlantic Ocean today. An excited crowd cheered and waved homemade signs supporting Pancake. The turtle officially returned to the water at 1:13 p.m. EDT, while a crowd cheered the little reptile on, “Pancake, Pancake, Pancake!”

“It’s [the release] significant because they’re an endangered species,” Dr. Maia Austin, a a postdoctoral researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Bight program, tells Popular Science. “They have been a really big conservation success story, in that, they had a really big population crash in the ’70s, and through a lot of great international conservation efforts, it’s really rebounding. So I think every individual that we can help is a great success for all of us.”

Representatives from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), New York State Department of State (DOS), Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMSEAS), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), environmental organizations, elected officials, and New York Aquarium campers and youth leaders, all gathered on the beach to watch Pancake make its way back home.

Ahead of the release, Austin saw Pancake looking very active and the reptile appeared ready to swim and go back home. Pancake will be wearing a satellite tag on its shell, so that the team can monitor its progress.

“I think success just looks like it going back into its habitat and, you know, feeding and then hopefully continuing its migration back to the Gulf later in the season,” says Austin.

Pancake was released off the coast of Brooklyn, New York to cheers from an adoring crowd Image: Alan Haburchak/Popular Science.

On November 22, 2025, the Massachusetts Audubon Society found Pancake suffering from cold stunning in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Pancake was then brought to the New England Aquarium for triage and medical treatment. On December 3, Pancake and 24 other Kemp’s ridley sea turtles were transferred to the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMSEAS) sea turtle triage facility in Westhampton Beach, New York, for treatment and rehabilitation. 

Pancake is wearing a satellite tag on its shell so scientists can monitor its progress. Image: Wildlife Conservation Society.

Pancake weighs 11 pounds and is likely two to five years old. Over the past seven months, Pancake has made a strong recovery, showing confident swimming behavior, particularly while pursuing shrimp and clams. The turtle’s sex is unknown because that requires a blood test, which is not needed for rehabilitation.

Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are the smallest sea turtle species. They are found throughout the East Coast, from the south up towards New England. When fully grown, they can weigh 70 to 100 pounds and grow to two feet long. 

The post Pancake the rescued sea turtle released on Coney Island beach appeared first on Popular Science.

Like it or not, insects are everywhere, including places where you may not want them to be. Yet there is one environment that they don’t call home—the open ocean. An enduring explanation for this absence is that deep water pressure would fill their tiny respiratory systems with air and they would then cave in. But one particular insect larva is challenging this idea. 

Meet lake flies (Chaoborus edulis). In East Africa’s Lake Malawi, billions of their larvae spend their days over 656 feet (200 meters) below the surface of the water before coming back up to feed at night. 

“Uniquely, Chaoborus midge larvae have modified their respiratory system into two pairs of air-filled sacs which they use to control their buoyancy,” Philip Matthews, a co-author of the study and a researcher who studies insects’ respiratory adaptations at the University of British Columbia tells Popular Science. “By regulating the pH of the air sacs’ walls, they cause them to expand or contract via a distinct ‘chemo-mechanical’ system.”

Matthews and his team were intrigued by how this mechanism works, but realized that using air sacs to regulate buoyancy while diving presents a problem. 

“The gas inside an air sac is not pressurized (it is roughly the same as the atmospheric pressure at the water’s surface),” he explains. “This begged the question: how deep can these insects dive before their air sacs cannot expand against the pressure? And at what depth do they fail completely and implode?”

The team decided to investigate this in Lake Malawi’s Chaoborus edulis larva, to solve this puzzle. The findings, detailed in a study published today in the journal Science, trace the larva’s daily diving routine with a sonar system, and look at what is going on at the biological level. 

The walls of C. edulis’ air sacs have resilin, a substance that grows or shrinks in volume according to the wall’s pH. This dynamic gives the larvae the ability to change their buoyancy. 

A swarm of the lake fly larvae over Lake Malawi. Image: Philip Matthews.

But how long can their air sacs hold out? Pressure chambers provide the answer. The researchers put larvae in these small chambers to see how much pressure they could withstand before their air-sacs imploded. The larvae’s air sacs could endure pressure equivalent to over 1,213 feet (400 meters) below the surface of the water, which is way deeper than they routinely descend. 

The study ultimately suggests that pressure isn’t what’s keeping insects out of open oceans, and their findings regarding resilin could hold relevance for material science.

“Resilin was previously known as a passive and flexible part of insect exoskeleton, but through its ability to swell and shrink in response to changes in pH, it generates force of its own in Chaoborus, changing the shape and volume of the air sac,” says Evan McKenzie, a co-author of the study and a PhD student at The University of British Columbia’s Department of Zoology. “We think this could make Chaoborus resilin of great interest to material science where it could be developed as a dynamic material that morphs its shape in response to changes in its chemical environment.”

The post Insects survive 1,213 feet of pressure under water, defying physics appeared first on Popular Science.