Month: November 2018

Enlarge / Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), would need 100 times more oxygen than usual at smaller scales. (credit: Marvel Studios)

The ability to rapidly shrink down to bug size (and beyond) gives Ant-Man and the Wasp tremendous advantages. But it also comes with some scale-related drawbacks, most notably, more difficult breathing. Trick out their suits with insect-inspired microscale air pumps, compressors, and molecule filters, combined with the fictional "Pym particle" technology, et voila! Problem solved.

Anne Staples, a bioengineer at Virginia Tech, and her graduate student Max Mikel-Stites first outlined the respiratory difficulties Ant-Man and the Wasp would likely face while insect-sized in a paper published this summer in the fledgling journal Superhero Science and Technology. (Can I just say how delighted I am that this journal exists?) The group researches respiration at the microscale, using insects as models. They described their work at a meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mikel-Stites, a fan of the Marvel cinematic universe, was stoked for Ant-Man and the Wasp's release. So one day in the lab last spring, the conversation naturally turned to how difficult it would be for the superheroes to breathe when insect-sized. "Applying that perspective to Ant-Man and the Wasp seemed like a straightforward thing to do," says Mikel-Stites, who admits to being a bit nitpicky when it comes to science in the movies. And he couldn't stop thinking about the breathing problems that our superheroes would inevitably face.

A company called Energy Vault has proposed a new utility-scale battery that is both old and new at the same time. The "battery" is mechanical, rather than chemical, and stores energy much like pumped hydro does, but it does it with bricks.

If you're not familiar with pumped hydro, it works like this. The system pumps water from a lower elevation to a higher elevation when electricity is plentiful and cheap. When electricity becomes more expensive, operators release that water through a hydroelectric turbine to give the grid some extra juice. Similarly, Energy Vault wants to build a system of six cranes, which will electrically stack heavy bricks into a tower when electricity is cheap and plentiful. When electricity becomes more scarce and expensive, the cranes will release each brick and harvest the energy from their fall.

This system solves an important problem inherit to pumped hydro: it requires a pretty specific kind of topography and often causes environmental concerns.

Enlarge (credit: Natural History Museum of Denmark et al.)

You might not think of giant impact craters as being particularly subtle or in any way capable of hiding from us. If so, you’ll be surprised by the discovery, announced this week, of a 31-kilometer- (19-mile-) wide crater we didn’t know existed.

Let’s get the important questions out of the way—no, the crater isn’t home to a Godzilla or some Lovecraftian horror. It’s filled with ice. And that’s how it escaped our notice for so long.

The crater lies beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwestern Greenland. One of the tools researchers use to monitor the shrinking of the Greenland Ice Sheet is airborne radar surveys. The resulting high-resolution data shows the shape of the ice sheet’s surface, some of its internal layering, and even the bedrock below. In this case, it revealed a suspiciously circular depression in the ice near the glacier’s edge.

Enlarge / Elijah Price, aka "Mr. Glass" (Samuel L. Jackson), Kevin Wendell Crumb, aka "The Horde" (James McAvoy), and David Dunn (Bruce Willis) find themselves thrown together in a mental institution. (credit: Universal Pictures)

An evil genius in a wheelchair and a psychotic serial killer with superhuman abilities join forces to escape from a mental institution in the new TV spot for Glass—the third and final installment in what's become known as director M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable trilogy." The trilogy brings together characters from his 2000 film Unbreakable and his 2016 box-office hit, Split.

(Spoilers for Unbreakable and Split below.)

Unbreakable tells the story of a security guard named David Dunn (Bruce Willis). Dunn is the sole survivor of a horrific train crash who draws the attention of a wheelchair-bound comic-book art dealer named Elijah Price (Samuel Jackson). Price, who has a genius-level IQ, suffers from a rare disease that gives him very fragile, easily fractured bones. He has become convinced that he must have an opposite "unbreakable" counterpart; he thinks Dunn might be that man.

Enlarge / Kaitlin Myers, a shopper for Instacart, navigates the aisles as she shops for a customer at Whole Foods in Denver. Myers receives a grocery list from an Instacart customer and then completes the shopping on Tuesday, October 28, 2014. (credit: Denver Post / Cyrus McCrimmon / Getty Images)

Earlier this month, Instacart publicly announced that it had redesigned its "shopper experience for more choice and clarity," adding that it aimed to "provide clearer and more consistent earnings."

The San Francisco-based startup, which has more than doubled its total venture capital funding amount in a year to $1.6 billion, allows customers to buy marked-up groceries online. "Shoppers," in company parlance, are the ones doing the bulk of the labor—they constitute 70,000 workers across North America. The ratio of shoppers to bona fide employees is over 116 to 1.

Shoppers drive to the store, select the items, bag them, and deliver them. Sometimes they even correspond via app with the customer while shopping.

Enlarge / A baby Guinea baboon in its pre-diddling days goes for a ride. (credit: Michelle Bender / Flickr)

Male Guinea baboons have a curious habit. They will walk—or sometimes run—to another male baboon and say a quick hello in a very enthusiastic way: with a “mutual penis diddle”. Or sometimes it’s a quick mount from behind. Other times, they do a short dance-like “polonaise,” facing the same way, on their hind legs, hand on the other’s hip, and a few steps forward.

Clearly, this behavior needs an explanation. In some ways, it’s not all that much of a mystery: ritual greeting is actually fairly widespread among many primate species and takes many colorful forms. It's a behavior that's “common among males living in multi-male groups,” write the authors of a new paper exploring Guinea baboons’ greeting behavior.

So it’s no surprise that the Guinea baboons greet each other. But the intimacy of their behavior stands out. Unlike other species, where ritual greetings serve to cool down a tense or aggressive moment, for Guinea baboons, it seems to be more about keeping their social bonds strong.