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Men use “vocal fry” more than women, counter to stereotype
Vocal fry, aka “creaky voice,” is a distinctive drop in pitch, usually at the end of sentences, associated with the speech patterns of young women in particular. Britney Spears is the go-to example of the trend, having famously used it in her 1998 smash hit, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time),” and she’s far from
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Protein in Homo erectus teeth suggests Denisovans gave us some of their DNA
Humanity’s ancestry has grown far clearer thanks to our ability to obtain ancient DNA. We now know that, as humans left Africa, they interbred with the groups they met there, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Evidence from the Denisovan genome also suggests that this was nothing new; the Denisovans had apparently interbred with an even earlier group.
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Once again, SpaceX has set a new record for the tallest rocket ever built
On Monday, SpaceX’s launch team loaded more than 11 million pounds (more than 5,000 metric tons) of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into both stages of the rocket after halting a previous fueling attempt Saturday night due to a technical issue. The launch rehearsal followed a test-firing of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines at the
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Huge landslide created a 500-meter-high tsunami in a major tourist area
The impact of 63.5 million cubic meters of rock hitting the fjord released forces large enough to be registered globally. The seismic waves that cascaded across the planet were recorded by sensor stations worldwide and were equivalent in energy to a magnitude 5.4 earthquake. The sloshing water within the fjord established a 66-second long-period seiche,
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Do you take after your dad’s RNA?
On a bright afternoon in Jiangsu, China, Xin Yin is playing personal trainer to some mice. One by one, he sets the rodents on a miniature treadmill that starts slow and gradually speeds up. These littermates are born athletes, able to run farther with less lactic acid buildup than average laboratory mice. The secret to
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Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab make a breakthrough in rotor technology
Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blade prior to testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot Space Simulator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 2025. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Engineer Jaakko Karras inspects a next-generation Mars helicopter rotor blade prior to testing it at supersonic speeds in the 25-foot Space Simulator at
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Manufacturing qubits that can move
Like any other manufactured chip, the wiring that connects the quantum dots is locked into place during the chip’s manufacture. Since different error correction schemes require different connections among the qubits, this forces us to commit to specific error-correction schemes during manufacturing. If a better scheme is developed after a chip is made, it’s probably
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RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive
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SpaceX is starting to move on from the world’s most successful rocket
It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to. The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a
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MIT’s virtual violin offers luthiers a new design tool
The construction of a violin. The construction of a violin. Credit: Sotakeit/CC BY-SA 3.0 Or perhaps it was the varnish Stradivari used: a cocktail of honey, egg whites, and gum arabic. A 2022 study involving nanoscale imaging of two such instruments revealed a protein-based layer at the interface of the wood and the varnish, which
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