Enlarge / Finding a distraction is key for young children trying to resist the marshmallow. The psychologist who famously demonstrated the importance of being able to delay gratification to achieving later success in life died on September 12 in New York City. Walter Mischel, emeritus professor of psychology at Columbia University and self-proclaimed "Marshmallow Man,"…
Enlarge / A general view of Laguna Colorada located near the border with Chile, in the Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia. The Uyuni salt flats are estimated to contain 100 million tons of lithium, making it one of the largest global reserves of this mineral, according to state officials at the Bolivian Mining Corporation. MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty…
WHEN the women who fill the beds in Panzi hospital heard that Denis Mukwege had won the Nobel peace prize, they got up and started dancing. Laughter and clapping echoed through the hospital wards. Many women are recovering from internal damage caused by rape. One 30-year-old, suffering intermittent bleeding after being raped in a forest,…
Enlarge / Parking assist in action in a BMW 640i GT. Eric BangemanYou know all that safety stuff on new cars? Lane-keep assist? Adaptive cruise control? It has a downside... if you get in an accident. Cars with advanced driver-assistance technology are more expensive to repair than their less-autonomous counterparts, according to a study by…
A researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory holds a vial of fuel produced from industrial waste gas. A Virgin 747 will burn a blend of fuel made from waste gas and jet fuel in a flight today. The Chinese steel mill where LanzaTech opened its first waste-gas-to-ethanol facility this summer. LanzaTech A little after 7pm…
THE aerial party tricks of the F-35, a stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin, an American defence giant, wows audiences at air shows across the world. But without the sensors and electronics made by firms such as L3 Technologies and Harris, two medium-sized firms, the plane would not get off the ground. The F-35 would…
Enlarge / The Nobel Prize-winning first direct detection of gravitational waves announced in 2016 is being called into question. LIGO calls shenanigans. The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called "multi-messenger"…
A natural gas fracking well near Shreveport, Louisiana. The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) recently published two interesting sets of maps to show how the US energy mix has changed state by state between 2007 and 2017. That decade saw the rise of cheap natural gas that lead many utilities to switch away from coal,…
Enlarge / The jewel wasp administers two stings: one to paralyze the legs, the other to make the roach her zombie slave. If you ever want to witness just how horrifyingly "red in tooth and claw" nature can be, you only have to look to the emerald jewel wasp. The female of the species is…
Enlarge / An automobile chassis sits on display inside a Tesla Motors Inc. store in Munich, Germany, on Monday, March 30, 2015. In a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, the head of Panasonic's Automotive Division said that the company was on track to complete an additional three battery-cell production lines at Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory before the end…
