Featuring the latest in daily science news, Verge Science is all you need to keep track of what’s going on in health, the environment, and your whole world. Through our articles, we keep a close eye on the overlap between science and technology news — so you’re more informed.
Featured stories
The Los Angeles Zoo found a new way to raise more chicks.
Temperatures are soaring, imperiling workers and summer travelers.
AES has given its Atlas solar robot some AWS smarts and redubbed it “Maximo.” It helped complete an Amazon-backed solar farm in Louisiana and is now moving on to Bellefield, California, home of the largest solar-plus-storage project in the US. According to Amazon, it can “reduce solar installation timelines and costs by as much 50 percent:”
Besides automating heavy lifting, Maximo can also perform in nearly any weather or lighting condition, which is especially useful for the Bellefield project, which is located in a sandy desert area known for extreme heat. Once Maximo arrives there later this year, the robot will work alongside crews to lift hundreds of heavy solar panels into place.
Bullying works: after TikTok users complained about Chipotle’s inconsistent portion sizes, the company announced this week it is “doubling down” on training to ensure customers get “correct and generous portions.” It will cost the company $50 million, executives told analysts.
Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:
After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not—they’ll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges?
[Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter]
Here’s an incredible WSJ piece about zoo visitors connecting with gorillas by showing them videos of themselves, and zoo officials trying to push back:
A few self-proclaimed gorilla groupies come almost daily to the world-renowned San Diego Zoo, filming and then showing the “home videos” to the apes. [...] Tears came to the woman’s eyes as she said the zoo might want to block her and others from showing the animals videos. “Any enrichment is good enrichment,” she said.
Debatable!
This is what we’ve pieced together about her views on AI, privacy, antitrust and more.
Space
SpaceX says it’s fixed the Falcon 9 and will resume launches
NASA blew up this inflatable space station structure on purpose
NASA fired its space lasers to communicate with the ISS
The US wants to detect wildfires by satellite.
Energy
Here’s the robot building Amazon’s solar farms.
We’re at a make-or-break moment for US climate goals
High hopes and security fears for next-gen nuclear reactors
Puerto Rico files $1 billion suit against fossil fuel companies
Fitbit published a study in Nature Medicine using 6.5 million nights of sleep data from users that shows that sleep quality impacts long term health. In a nutshell, the worse your sleep quality, the more likely you are to have conditions like sleep apnea, obesity, migraines, high blood pressure, etc. You get it.
I won’t blame you for thinking “Duh” but this stuff can be helpful for researchers as it gives hard data to what we already know.
The Biden administration is investing $20 million in a program to use the GOES-R satellite for wildfire detection. The hope is that the satellite will spot blazes before 911 calls start, and see through a haze of smoke to point to where a fire ignited. That could help officials and firefighters respond more quickly and give them a leg up on fighting the fire.
It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.
That’s according to preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The world has been smashing records lately thanks to climate change: 2023 was the hottest year on record. Last summer was the hottest in the Northern Hemisphere in at least 2,000 years. And there’s still time to break more records this summer.
Mining companies want to harvest polymetallic nodules — which are rich in metals that can be used to make batteries — from the deep sea. But scientists just discovered that these so-called “batteries in a rock” might be creating oxygen through seawater electrolysis. It’s a wild revelation that poses new questions about the consequences of mining the deep sea before fully understanding what’s down there.
[Scientific American]
Scientists realized they’d found a field of pure sulfur stones after the Curiosity rover accidentally crushed one of them, exposing the crystals, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote this week.
The rover then collected samples to try to explain them, as elemental sulfur “shouldn’t be there,” according to one of the project’s scientists.
Fuel for advanced reactors is raising nuclear proliferation concerns.
The company that specializes in mobile 12V conversions of SpaceX’s internet-from-space kits has just released its first mount for Starlink’s smallest dish yet. Despite its size, Mini even integrates the Wi-Fi router (usually a separate box) into the laptop-sized package.
$249 gets you a versatile mount with shock absorption for your RV, boat, or overlanding rig.
1/2
After people in NYC reported a large boom at around 11:17AM that some attributed to military weapons tests, NASA Meteor Watch reports it was actually a meteor. With more reports collected from eyewitnesses, its latest update says the space rock's path took it west over New Jersey at 38,000 miles per hour.
Musk, who has been a resident of Texas since 2019, says he decided to move the companies because Gavin Newsom didn’t do what Musk told him to. Previously, Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters to Austin after local health officials closed the Fremont plant during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic; Musk has a history of political donations in Texas.
Trump’s new running mate went from saying “we have a climate problem” in 2020 to being “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” The New York Times reports. (Research shows greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are to blame.) Vance suddenly threw his support behind Trump, pushed to repeal EV tax credits and rollback pollution regulations.
[The New York Times]