Nearly one-third of U.S. military veterans get disability pay from the Department of Veterans Affairs, an all-time high. In the past year alone, the volume of new veterans’ compensation claims has “exceeded even our most aggressive projections,” Joshua Jacobs, undersecretary for benefits at the VA, told lawmakers this week. Why We Wrote This Congress scrambled...
Category: Art
Post
Post
South African Rock Art Appears to Draw Upon Extinct Creatures
Artists take inspiration from many sources. For the San people of South Africa, the spark that inspired some of their rock paintings may have come from fossils of creatures that went extinct more than 200 million years ago. A study in PLOS ONE says that not only did the San draw on bones of dicynodonts...
Post
Earth Had Ring System 466 Million Years Ago, New Research Suggests
Breakup of an asteroid passing within Earth’s Roche limit likely formed the debris ring during the middle Ordovician period, according to new research from Monash University. Tomkins et al. suggest that a large chondrite asteroid had a near miss encounter with Earth 466 million years ago, which caused it to break up as it passed...
Post
Curiosity and fart jokes help explain why ‘Volcanoes are Hot’
While Oliver does not read Popular Science in this new book, he learns about the Earth with the help of his volcanologist aunt. Jorge Cham A healthy dose of purposeful bathroom humor sets the stage for exploration in engineer and illustrator Jorge Cham’s new graphic novel Volcanoes Are Hot: Oliver’s Great Big Universe #2 ....
Post
How walking can prevent lower back pain
Lower back pain is one of the leading causes of disability, affecting an estimated 619 million people worldwide. For many people suffering from lower back pain, their condition is cyclical, and their pain returns even after recovery. Nearly 70 percent of people who recover from lower back pain may experience another episode within a year....
Post
Digging to the center of the Earth–or at least enough to bury poop
Earth and all its layers. Image: DepositPhotos Excerpted from Volcanoes Are Hot: Oliver’s Great Big Universe #2 by Jorge Cham. September 2024. Published with permission by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. Earth is a lot like a boba tea drink. You know those boba tea drinks they sell in some shops where they shake...
Post
Super Harvest Moon lunar eclipse: How to watch online for free on Sept. 17
A partial lunar eclipse observed in Sangju, South of Seoul on Nov. 19, 2021. (Image credit: Seung-il Ryu/NurPhoto via Getty Images) A partial lunar eclipse of September’s Super Harvest Moon is coming, and you can watch online for free. On Tuesday (Sept. 17), the Full Harvest Moon will experience a partial lunar eclipse that will...
Post
SpaceX’s Starship won’t be licensed to fly again until late November, FAA says
SpaceX’s Starship rocket launches on its fourth fully integrated test flight, on June 6, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX) SpaceX’s Starship will be grounded for a while longer yet. Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — flew for the fourth time in June, and SpaceX has been gearing up for flight number five...
Post
NASA finds summer 2024 hottest to date
This bar graph shows GISTEMP summer global temperature anomalies for 2023 (shown in yellow) and 2024 (shown in red). June through August is considered meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere. The white lines indicate the range of estimated temperatures. The warmer-than-usual summers continue a long-term trend of warming, driven primarily by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions....
Post
Kamala Harris’s Ascent Shows How Political Hardball—And Smart Polling—Pays Off
September 10, 2024 5 min read So far, enthusiasm for the Harris campaign has vindicated Democratic Party elites’ decision to push Joe Biden out of the race. Was this just a lucky guess based on political vibes? Or were there actual data supporting the decision? By Brianna Zichettella & Josh Pasek U.S. Vice President and...