Pop Science Report

Frank Pinedo
This 'acoustic lighthouse' bird could keep other birds from killing
themselves
The Acoustic Lighthouse generates a high-pitched sound that prompts birds to slow down. Birds hit the
brakes by pointing their tail feathers down, which makes their body shift upright, causing them look ahead
instead of at the ground. “All that’s missing is the brake-screeching sound,” Swaddle said.
The fast, fancy, and futuristic cars from the 2018 Geneva Motor Show
This swoopy supercar gets its name from one of racing’s most famous drivers: Ayrton Senna, who died in
1994 after a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix. It uses a 4-liter, turbocharged V8 motor that pushes 789
horsepower. That’s a lot for a car that weighs roughly 2,700 pounds. All that power puts its acceleration on
another level—its 0-60 mph time is a ridiculous 2.8 seconds. It’s a race car that crawls in just under the
regulations that make it road legal.
The shape of your city could determine how hot it gets at night
If you live in a grid-like city, such as New York or Chicago, whose design at the nanoscale looks like
atoms in a crystal, you are more likely to be hotter at night than if you live in a chaotically arranged city,
London or Boston, for example, which resemble the disordered atoms of liquid or glass.on or Boston, for
example, which resemble the disordered atoms of liquid or glass.
Egg whites could help power a clean-energy future
Egg whites — they’re not just (a cholesterol-free) breakfast anymore. A Japanese researcher has found a
way to use molecules from a protein-based chemical found in egg whites to generate hydrogen more
efficiently, putting scientists a step closer to producing hydrogen from water without using fossils fuels and
raising the possibility that hydrogen could become a clean, carbon-free source of energy. Currently, most
hydrogen is produced by processes that emit planet-warming greenhouse gases.
This car doesn’t need a steering wheel or pedals
The car’s onboard computers make all of the driving decisions—including steering, accelerating, and
braking—which cuts out manual controls and the possibility of human interference. The digital system has
multiple backup circuits that operate simultaneously, so crucial elements (electrical power, navigation, and
crash detection) won’t completely fail, even if there’s a malfunction.
Our stupid brains love spreading lies all over the internet
Because most people get information from social media without thinking about which traditional news
outlets the stories come from, the researchers—Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral of MIT’s
Media Lab—didn’t just look at “fake news” published in full-article form. They instead tracked “rumor
cascades,” or the spread of tweets involving any piece of information (texts, photos, links to articles) that
purported to be true news. That leads us to a brief caveat: this study isn’t necessarily evaluating our ability
to tell whether or not a news article is biased to the point of absurdity, or downright untrue. A tweet with a
lie in it isn't exactly the same thing as a news article full of misinformation.
How to follow as your favorite shows come and go from Netflix
Ironically, Netflix is not the best source for telling you what's available on the streaming service. However,
it does have a couple tricks you can use to learn about new content. For information about soon-to-expire
titles, on the other hand, you'll need a third-party service (read on to find a good one). Netflix doesn't
share this data on the site itself, presumably to avoid drawing attention to how frequently videos rotate
out.
Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so
you can make it through Tuesday)
That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in
Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the
Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake
inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000
kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the Toba eruption. It also
makes one much more significant claim. As the researchers write: “Our results raise the question of
whether the modern human population on the south coast of South Africa was the sole surviving
population through a decade or more of volcanic winter.”
Why so many diamonds are making science headlines this week
Diamonds that aren’t made in a lab are typically born deep in the Earth, with the largest diamonds formed
hundreds of miles under the surface of our planet. It's impossible to observe that environment directly. Our
deepest hole only extends 7.5 miles into the ground in Russia.
All the ways daylight saving time screws with you
The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And
honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being
invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea. It has several
origins, two of which can be traced back to doddering old white dudes whose leisurely lives meant they
were collecting bugs and golfing in the evening. They didn’t understand why more people weren’t
appreciating the out-of-doors, and so introduced the idea of shifting the daylight hours, basically in order
to fit their own daily routines.