Latest news with #PopularScience
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Science
- Indian Express
Teens outperform Gemini, ChatGPT at top international math Olympiad
With the growing trends around artificial intelligence (AI), several industries are incorporating tools to make efficient. However, a group of teens at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) beat several AI platforms, such as Google's Gemini and Sam Altman's ChatGPT. Held in Queensland, Australia, the 2025 edition of the global competition consisted of 641 young mathematicians under the age of 20 from 112 countries, five of whom achieved perfect scores of 42 points, something neither AI model could replicate, a report in Popular Science stated. Google announced that its advanced Gemini chatbot managed to solve five of the six problems presented at the competition, earning a total of 35 out of 42 points, a gold-medal score. 'We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much-desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points — a gold medal score,' IMO president Gregor Dolinar stated in a quote shared by the tech giant, the report said. 'Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow,' he added. OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, also confirmed that its latest experimental reasoning model achieved a score of 35 points, the report added. According to OpenAI researcher Alexander Wei, the company evaluated its models using the same rules as the teen competitors. 'We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants. For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model's submitted proof,' Wei wrote on social media, as per the report. This year marks a significant leap for AI in math competitions. In 2024, Google's model earned a silver medal in Bath, UK, solving four out of six problems. That attempt took two to three days to solve. In contrast, the latest Gemini model completed this year's test within the official 4.5-hour time limit. The IMO acknowledged that technology firms had 'privately tested closed-source AI models on this year's problems,' which were the same as those faced by the human contestants.
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Why do turtles do the ‘Superman pose'?
The summer heat is on for millions and no matter your animal species, keeping our bodies cool is critical for survival. Humans seek out shade, water for swimming, and some deploy the uniquely-human technique of 'sitting in the air conditioning and barely moving.' Other mammals spread out on the grass or sploot to help regulate their body temperature and keep cool. For some turtles, it's basking or the 'Superman pose' that helps keep their bodies at the right temperature and much more. According to Everglades National Park in southern Florida, Florida redbelly turtles (Pseudemys nelsoni) are often seen with their limbs and/or necks stretched out in order to soak up as much sunlight as possible. It appears to work similarly to yoga in humans, with several benefits. It can warm up their bodies, boost their digestion, help make Vitamin D3 for stronger shells and bones, and importantly helps prevent infection. Basking helps the turtles dry out their shells, which can keep dangerous parasites from attaching. Ectoparasites–or harmful organisms located on the outside of an animal–like leeches can cause anemia in turtles, according to Canada's Think Turtle Conservation Initiative. Since being out in the direct sunlight is not a great environment for the leeches, they will go away and leave the turtles alone. While you may have been taught that all reptiles are cold-blooded and mammals are warm-blooded, there is more nuance than that in the animal kingdom. Birds, mammals, and some fish (including some living and extinct shark species) are considered endotherms. This means that they maintain a constant body temperature that is independent of their environment. Humans also fall into this endothermic camp. [ Related: Turtle's mysterious injury caused by a golf ball. ] Other fish species, amphibians, and reptiles like turtles are considered ectotherms. As an ectotherm, a turtles' body temperature changes alongside the environment around them. To help regulate their body temperature, turtles will bask on logs, fallen trees, rocks, and other surfaces in the sunlight with their limbs stretched out. Having access to safe basking sites in lakes, ponds, or marshes is crucial for this reason. Some snapping turtles will try to bask on hot asphalt, which can increase their risk of getting run over by a car. Since basking is a completely normal activity for turtles, it's important to safely observe them from a distance and leave them alone. However, if a turtle shows signs of distress, including heavy bleeding, injuries to their shell, or disorientation, call a local animal rescue or veterinarian's office and get their instructions on what to do. This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Mysterious ‘ship goo' contains new life forms
It came from the deep: a viscous black gunk oozing from the rudder shaft of a ship. At the end of August 2024, the crew of the Great Lakes research vessel R/V Blue Heron, first spotted the substance when the boat was brought to a Cleveland shipyard for propeller repairs. From the outset, no one was sure what to make of it, according to Doug Ricketts, Marine Superintendent at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Large Lakes Observatory. The muck looked like thick grease or oil, Ricketts tells Popular Science, but the rudder shaft wasn't supposed to be lubricated by anything more than lake water. Instead of a strong petroleum odor, the goop had a metallic smell. It also didn't leave a sheen on water, nor burn up in a blowtorch flame, during informal tests conducted by Blue Heron Captain Rual Lee. So, what was it? On the quest for answers, Ricketts brought a paper coffee cup half-filled with the mystery goop (labeled 'ship goo' in haphazard marker strokes) to university scientists. Laboratory analysis has prompted more questions than clarity, but the initial assessment of the 'ship goo' yielded at least one startling discovery. The mysterious tar-like material contained previously unidentified forms of life. 'I really didn't think we'd get anything, to be honest,' Cody Sheik, a microbial ecologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth tells Popular Science. 'Usually, when you're given a cup of tar,' you don't expect much, he adds. Under that assumption, he 'handed it off to a graduate student and said 'good luck'.' The graduate student successfully extracted DNA from the goo, defying Sheik's initial expectations– but still, he thought it might be routine sample contamination. It was only after the lab sent the extracted DNA off for preliminary, single-gene sequencing that Sheik realized he was in uncharted territory. When the results came back, he was shocked. 'A lot of the sequences came out really novel. I was like, 'oh, oh no, okay– this is a whole different story',' he says. [ Related: Pollution-eating microbes are thriving in infamous NYC canal. ] For a deeper look into the goo's microbial makeup, Sheik and his colleagues sent the sample for a second round of sequencing. This time, they examined the whole genomes inside of the goo, instead of just a single key gene region. The analysis confirmed that, though the goop microbes weren't especially diverse, they were unique. They reconstructed the genomes of more than 20 microbes, and compared them to comprehensive databases of previously identified organisms. According to Sheik, they found several novel archaea– members of a domain of single-celled, prokaryotic life that are distinguished from bacteria by their cell membrane composition. One of the microbes they found represents, not just a new species, but an entirely new order of archaea. For now, the scientists are officially referring to it as ShipGoo01. Another promising, oddball microbe could be a whole new bacterial phylum, Sheik says. If confirmed, that would probably be christened ShipGoo002. Others, too, might prove new to science. 'There's several of them that may be new genus, may be new families, for sure,' he notes. ShipGoo01 seems to be anaerobic, meaning it prefers an oxygen-free environment. Other microbes in the goo seem to gobble oxygen up and Sheik suggests that it's possible these exist in a mutually beneficial balance. Of the more familiar microbes and genetic markers, database comparison indicates that the bulk of the teeny tiny organisms are similar to those associated with oil wells, tar pits, and other hydrocarbon systems. Several seem to be related to microorganisms with international origins– from places like Germany. 'That's been kind of fun– trying to figure out where [it's from] and why it's in the rudder system here. It's becoming quite baffling,' Sheik says. In part, again, because the Blue Heron's rudder isn't regularly greased with oil, and because it sails on the Great Lakes in the Midwest. The ship hasn't always been in University of Minnesota custody. It was purchased pre-owned in 1997, Ricketts says, so it's entirely possible that the prior owners of the vessel did apply some sort of petroleum-based lubricant to the rudder shaft. But generally microbes need a steady food supply. Without any additional influx of grease in over 25 years, it's hard to know what the oil-associated microbes might be eating after all this time. Perhaps they're subsisting off of the metal itself, though Ricketts notes that the rudder shaft didn't look particularly damaged. Maybe organic matter from the lake water feeds the micro-beasts. Or maybe some secret third thing is going on. 'The more we start getting into this, the more I'm kind of clueless here,' Sheik says. 'We're doing a lot of sleuthing to try to figure this thing out.' He's hoping to get better answers on what the microbes are floating around in, and all of the microbial metabolic pathways present in the goop. Sheik also imagines using chemical isotope analysis down the line to establish where the atoms in the system are coming from. The carbon and nitrogen in algae, for instance, have a very different profile from the equivalent molecules in motor lube. 'It's like a 1,000 piece puzzle that we're trying to put together,' without any picture on the box to go off of, Sheik says. Once more of the image becomes clear, his lab plans to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. [Related: Can microbes that devour plastic waste be transformed into food for humans?] But there's one big challenge the scientists might not be able to overcome. The cup of goo (comprising about 100 milliliters of gunk) was the only sample taken, and getting more could be difficult–nigh impossible. The ship would have to be put in dry dock, with the rudder, once again, disassembled. And 'unfortunately, they did a really good job cleaning it last time before they put it back,' Sheik says. The rest of the ship goo 'may be lost forever.' Or maybe not. 'I don't think this ship is unique. I really strongly suspect that if you took the rudder post of any ship anywhere, there's a possibility of finding some organism–maybe a new organism–in that space,' Ricketts says. Before this, it would've been easy for him to imagine strange microorganisms popping up in a ship galley or on a fuel filter. But of all the places for something like this to be found, the mechanical rudder shaft at the far end of a ship is among the weirdest, Ricketts says. It just goes to prove, 'microbes are everywhere.' To better understand more of those undiscovered lifeforms, hiding in plain sight, Sheik says his lab would need secure funding and resources. Like many university science labs that rely, in large part, on taxpayer dollars, the future of his work is up in the air. 'Right now we're in this weird spot where we're just trying to struggle to keep our labs open,' he says. He worries that, moving forward, we'll miss out on ShipGoo3– but also on all the would-be advances that might come from it. Many prior microbe discoveries have proved useful in fields as varied as waste management and pollution remediation to life-saving drug development. 'As these dollars go away, our ability to do this primary research that can drive innovation goes away and could be lost for a very long time.'
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
How do airplane toilets work?
Even in an age where flying is a fairly regular occurrence, there are some things that you never forget about your first journey on an visceral thrill of being pushed back into your seat as the plane accelerates toward take-off, the jitters that accompany your first bout of turbulence, and the SLUUUUURP sound in the lavatory. The alarming noise ensues when you press the 'flush' button in an airplane toilet and the bowl's contents are magically sucked away into oblivion. With the noise and essentially 'clean' bowl as a result, there's clearly some sort of vacuum cleaner-type effect at how do aircraft toilets work? Aerospace engineer Bill Crossley, the head of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana, explains to Popular Science that the answer is as simple as it is ingenious. The system relies on one simple fact. 'When you go up to high altitude and you're flying fast, the pressure outside the cabin is a lot lower than it is inside,' he says. The laws of physics—and specifically the ideal gas law—dictate that the contents of a region with relatively high pressure will tend to flow into a region with relatively low pressure. Flushing the toilet on an airplane opens a valve between the pressurised cabin and a tank that remains at atmospheric pressure. That process creates exactly this sort of pressure differential. In other words, 'when you flush the toilet, you're basically opening a valve to the outside, and the pressure differential sucks away whatever's in the bowl,' Crossley says. The beauty of the system is that it doesn't require vacuum pumps or other complications to create the pressure differential. It simply makes use of the existing difference in pressure between the aircraft's interior and exterior at altitude. Of course, this requires that there is a pressure difference. On the ground, Crossley says, the system uses a vacuum pump. The pump remains in use until the plane reaches an altitude where the atmospheric pressure allows the system to work without it, at which point it is switched off. The idea itself is simple and has remained largely unchanged since it was first patented in 1975. However, retired aircraft engineer Nigel Jones explains that the complexity of the implementation still varies from aircraft to aircraft. Some planes' systems evacuate every toilet to a single tank, while others use multiple smaller tanks. Some use complex piping arrangements, while others opt for simpler configurations. [ Related: How does a composting toilet work? Ditch the flush.] Then there's the Lockheed TriStar, an airliner built between 1968 and 1984 that remains Jones' favorite to this day. The TriStar's toilets were famously arranged in a circle, and they were as idiosyncratic behind the scenes as they were to passengers. '[The TriStar] had a logic system to manage flushing,' he says fondly. 'It had a tank at the front for the forward toilets and another for the five or six toilets at the back. The system had three, I think it was three toilet pumps, and it would flush pumps in turn that the logic box would if say toilet five wanted to flush, the logic box would say, 'Right, it's pump one's turn.' It was incredibly complicated, and all just to flush the toilet.' Some might argue that this system sounds perhaps a little over-engineered. 'We did feel that way every time there was a problem and looking at the pump didn't fix it,' Jones concedes. 'If we had to go in and look at the logic box, we'd have to lie on top of the tank. This was… well, it was not pleasant.' While such complexity may be overkill–and is rarely found in modern airliners–Jones notes that some degree of twisting and turning in the system's piping is important for one simple reason: it slows down the waste. 'It's not a straight run [from toilet to tank], and it can't be,' Jones says. 'The vacuum pressure means that the drawing speed is such that if there were no bends in the pipes, the waste would hit the wall of the tank with considerable force.' How considerable? According to Jones, it would be 'enough that you could potentially break the tank.' Even without such a catastrophic outcome, he notes dryly, 'the noise would be most alarming.' Prior to the advent of the vacuum-based flush, planes used chemical systems similar to those that remain in use today in portable toilets, where the bowl connects directly to a tank full of the dreaded blue liquid. This also explains the origin of the term 'blue ice', which refers to waste that somehow escapes the tank—at high altitude, any such waste freezes immediately, and remains frozen until it returns to the ground, at which point it reveals its true nature to anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path. Such systems are vanishingly rare today, remaining in use only on aircraft large enough for aviation regulations to require the presence of a toilet, but small enough that a vacuum system is more trouble than it's worth. Crossley says that the only planes to fall into this category are small business aircraft, which are sometimes equipped with what he describes as a 'fancy port-a-potty.' On larger planes, he says, the vacuum system really is the only game in town. 'It's everything you want an airplane system to be: first, it's safe; second, it's reliable; and third, it's lightweight.' This story is part of Popular Science's Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you've always wanted to know? Ask us.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Skull that looks like a ‘Toy Story' character unearthed in Texas
Paleontologist Andre LuJan had an assist from nature with his latest exciting fossil find. Heavy rains helped expose a nearly complete skull of an enormous ancient salamander-like creature in a quarry in northern central Texas. And while it looks a bit like an anxious T. rex from a beloved children's film, this creature wasn't a dinosaur. LuJan found the Eryops megacephalus, a large, semi-aquatic predator amphibian with a large noggin that lived 280 million years ago. The climate at this time was a bit variable, but there were some long periods when desert-like conditions in present day New Mexico and Texas became a more humid and swamp-like environment. 'Eryops is an apex predator (amphibian) from the Permian period,' LuJan, who is also the director of the Texas Through Time Fossil Museum, tells Popular Science. 'They could grow up to six feet long (maybe more but this is based on known fossils).' These enormous salamander-like creatures weighed in at upwards of 200 to 400 pounds and likely would have eaten anything it could fit in its large mouth. Its head was designed for aquatic or semi-aquatic ambush predators, similar to living alligators and crocodiles. 'We can tell by the design of their skull that they were ambush predators, eyes on top of the head along with nostrils to conceal the body while they lay in wait.' Eryops likely didn't have the ability to chew, so would have eaten its prey whole or torn it into pieces. Paleontologists have uncovered their remains along estuaries, streams, or other bodies of water that could support hunting and breeding. Fossils of animals like it have been found in rocks dating back to the Permian in what was once the supercontinent Pangea. Eryops is also a member of a larger group of amphibians which includes present day frogs, toads, and salamanders. 'Think Hell Bender or giant salamander,' says LuJan. Finding a complete skull like this one is exciting and rare, since they will often collapse under pressure over the millions of years it takes for the bones to fossilize. Having a more complete skull offers up a more full picture of the animal's life. More skulls also helps because 'in paleontology, sample size is everything.' A wider pool of fossils to choose from enables more careful and accurate comparisons, which can tell us more about their evolution. 'In some cases finding pathological growths can teach us about ancient diseases and possible predation and interaction with other predators,' says LuJan. [ Related: A dinosaur 'tombstone' lurks underneath New Jersey. ] Eryops megacephalus went extinct sometime between 310 and 295 million years ago. However, it may have lucked out with its extinction time. It missed the Permian-Triassic extinction event, aka the Great Dying. Massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate changes that completely altered the planet's entire biosphere. Over roughly 60,000 years, 96 percent of Earth's marine species and about three of every four land species were wiped out. The fossils are being cleared and prepared to go on display at the nonprofit Texas Through Time Museum in Hillsboro, Texas–located between the cities of Dallas and Waco. The free museum is also home to the most complete Cretaceous shark ever found in the Lone Star State, a bull Mammoth skull, among other discoveries.
