Science

Smartphones can be a distraction from other tasksPheelings media/Shutterstock Do you find yourself distracted at work, turning to your smartphone for a bit of mindless scrolling? One solution is to put your phone out of reach – but unfortunately, it seems this may not work. “People turn their phone upside down, hide it under a notebook, sometimes you see the slightly fatalistic ‘throw it over my shoulders behind me’,” says Maxi Heitmayer at the London School of Economics. He has previously studied phone use and found that people interact with their devices about every 5 minutes. To see if this distraction can be avoided, Heitmayer recorded 22 university students and office workers, aged between 22 and 31, working as usual on their laptops on a desk in a private ro...

Melting glaciers can have profound effects on nations all over the world—from mountain communities to small island states. At the U.N. headquarters in New York on Friday, March 21, U.N. General Assembly President Philémon Yang closed the proceedings of the inaugural World Glacier Day with a stark warning: “We cannot afford to wait, we must act before the ice disappears…before our glaciers all disappear.”  Alphabetically arranged flags outside the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Credit: Joseph Griffiths  The event was held in the Trusteeship Council Chamber, a space used from the 1940s through the 1990s to oversee the decolonization of territories under the administration of the U.N. The location was symbolic, since the chamber has long been associated with international coop...

Thunderstorms over Indonesia, seen from the International Space StationNASA Earth Observatory / International Space Station (ISS) An AI weather program running for a single second on a desktop can match the accuracy of traditional forecasts that take hours or days on powerful supercomputers, claim its creators. Weather forecasting has, since the 1950s, relied on physics-based models that extrapolate from observations made using satellites, balloons and weather stations. But these calculations, known as numerical weather prediction (NWP), are extremely intensive and rely on vast, expensive and energy-hungry supercomputers. In recent years, researchers have tried to streamline this process by applying AI. Google scientists last year created an AI tool that could rep...

The French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson is remembered for, among other things, producing three curious automata in the 18th century. A poster from the time advertised them all side by side: a figure that played a real flute, another that banged a tambourine and a duck that gobbled up corn and seemingly turned it into pellets of… well, use your imagination. For physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, these antiquated automata have a resonance with some of today’s most cutting-edge technology. Vaucanson’s inventions prefigured the industrial revolution, during which mechanisation went from being a quirky curiosity to a force that reshaped the globe. We may be at an analogous turning point today when it c...

As I ran the Austin Marathon recently, I thought about how this ancient ritual of traversing 26.2 miles brings communities together, promotes volunteerism and inspires people to root for complete strangers. Marathons are a celebration of human endurance and perseverance, but as an M.S. in Sustainability Science graduate, I couldn’t help but wonder: What is the environmental cost of this massive event? Thousands of paper cups and tiny plastic gel packs littered the streets, discarded by runners hydrating and sugaring up on the go. Medals, made of metal and ribbon, were handed out to every finisher—not to mention the overstock. The sheer amount of single-use materials—from bibs and timing chips to the plastic-wrapped recovery snacks and thermal blankets—raised questions about the sustaina...