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Cow farts are an even bigger problem than we thought

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Climate change just isn’t that funny. Cow belches, conversely, are hilarious. It’s the rare issue that’s seriously impactful and giggle-inducing—bovine flatulence is a precious, smelly diamond in the climate change rough. And it turns out to be an even bigger problem than we thought. A new estimate of the global methane emissions from cow mouths and butts is 11 percent higher than previous stats suggested. The study was funded by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System program, and published in the journal Carbon Balance and Management. Fortunately, it seems that the U.S. estimates are still on track. It was mainly the global numbers that varied. That may seem like a tiny amount to be off by, but the dose makes the poison—and boy is there a lot of poison billowing into our atmosphere. This updated estimate says that livestock pushed about 119.1 million tons of methane into the air in 2011 alone. Carbon dioxide emissions are far greater in terms of volume, but because methane cap...
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These Are What the Google Artificial Intelligence’s Dreams Look Like

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Google's servers drive the much of the world's data, and apparently, they dream as well, according to a Google blog post by two Google software engineers and an intern. Google’s artificial neural networks (ANNs) are stacked layers of artificial neurons (run on computers) used to process Google Images. To understand how computers dream, we first need to understand how they learn. In basic terms, Google's programmers teach an ANN what a fork is by showing it millions of pictures of forks, and designating that each one is what a fork looks like. Each of network's 10-30 layers extracts progressively more complex information from the picture, from edges to shapes to finally the idea of a fork. Eventually, the neural network understands a fork has a handle and two to four tines, and if there are any errors, the team corrects what the computer is misreading and tries again. The Google team realized that the same process used to discern images could be used to ge...
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Fun facts about giraffe sex to keep you occupied while you wait for that giraffe baby

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A giraffe in Harpursville, NY is about to give birth. Or rather, she’s been “about” to give birth for several days now. As of the writing of this article, there are 74,000 people watching a live stream of April the giraffe just slowly wandering around her pen, flicking her tail, and stretching. It’s pretty boring. So instead of just sitting there watching a video feed, take this time to learn a little something about April and what she’s been through for the 15 freakin’ months that she’s been pregnant We’ll start at the beginning of this beautiful process: conception. Giraffes don’t have a set mating season. Instead they have an estrous cycle, which is a lot like the human menstrual cycle (but with less blood and slightly different hormones). The male giraffes don’t just mate with the ladies all the time, so they generally try to find a way to determine is the lady is fertile. How, do you ask? Pee. The answer is always pee. The boy giraffe lopes on over to the girl giraf...
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Net neutrality: Where do we go from here?

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Update on March 1: Since this article was published in December of last year, the FCC has officially published its rule that repeals net neutrality in the Federal Register. Now, in the U.S. Senate, advocates of keeping net neutrality rules in place are working on fighting the repeal, which involves using the Congressional Review Act. They have until late April before some small aspects of the repeal kick in, but it remains unclear when the major changes to net neutrality would become effective, if efforts to stop the repeal fail. Meanwhile, attorneys general from over 20 states, spearheaded by Eric Schneiderman of New York, are suing to stop the repeal. The Federal Communications Commission voted on December 14, 2017, to approve the Restoring Internet Freedom Act, which repeals the net neutrality rules that have been in place since 2015. By most reasonable accounts, this is a very bad thing. That vote is over and the act passed, so what happens next? Will the internet be...
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Will a cryogenically-frozen corpse ever come back to life?

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A teenager who tragically died of cancer recently has become the latest among a tiny but growing number of people to be cryogenically frozen after death. These individuals hoped that advances in science would one day allow them to be woken up and cured of the conditions that killed them. But how likely is it that such a day will ever come? Nature has shown us that it is possible to cryopreserve animals like reptiles, amphibians, worms and insects. Nematode worms trained to recognize certain smells retain this memory after being frozen. The wood frog (Rana sylvatica) freezes into a block of ice during winter and hops around the following spring. However, in human tissue each freeze-thaw process causes significant damage. Understanding and minimizing this damage is one of the aims of cryobiology. At the cellular level, these damages are still poorly understood, but can be controlled. Each innovation in the field relies on two aspects: improving preservation during freezing...
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