Science and Tech

By Emma Wu While organizing items, everyone tends to place them smallest to largest, left to right. Why is that? This has been a debate...

On January 8th NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed the unfolding of its mirror, taking its final shape.

Recently, there have been alleged sightings of a new “variant” named Deltacron. Now, before you enter a state of profound panic, let us reassure you that there is no cause for concern.

Above is a photograph of the Lassen and Plumas National Forests nine years after the 2000 Storrie Fire. Surprising to most, the area is thriving with resprouting black oaks and live conifers. 

This has long been a question that people have wanted to understand. Can your next move be predicted? According to a study released in 2014, there is a way to do so using brain maps. Brain maps are brain scans that will track the firing of neural circuits around the brain, thus creating a path that was a response to a stimulus. The path of the neural circuits or areas of the brain are used to form the brain map. By tracing the path of the neural circuits based on the stimulus, researchers could predict which brain path would be run based on previous stimulated brain paths. 

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all been isolated from the rest of humanity for quite a while. Hunger is also something that we have all experienced as well. Scientists have discovered that these two states of hunger and isolation are linked.

Imagine playing video games by only using your mind. No controller. No keyboard and mouse. Or moving an object somewhere by just thinking about it. Such a superpower sounds familiar in science fiction or in your wildest dreams. But now, scientists and engineers are turning this superpower into a reality. The technology known as a brain-computer interface is enabling computers to read our minds and carry out the tasks in our thoughts.

On November 2nd, company X-Energy announced that their preliminary design for a production facility of nuclear TRISO fuel had been completed. If this project is to finish, it is another step towards improvement in nuclear power sources and cleaner energy for all.

“We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant,” writes Chuck Klosterman in But What If We’re Wrong?, a book devoted to the idea that it’s foolhardy to be certain of… well, basically anything. Consider it, though: most of history consists of old ideas being overturned by new ones, and some of the things people faithfully believed in just decades ago are laughable today.

The Middle Pleistocene (also called the Chibanian), which took place from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago, is a complicated period in paleoanthropological history. Although it saw the rise of Homo sapiens in Africa and Homo neanderthalensis in Europe, along with many of their contemporaries, little is known about it, and to make matters worse, the terminology used is often vague and contradictory.