This article was created with Re:wild as part of Recurrent‘s charitable partnerships initiative, which supports non-profits that champion sustainable solutions for the planetary crises of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Dating back to Carl Linnaeus, the “father of modern taxonomy,” when scientists have talked about the wild, they were usually only talking about two of the six kingdoms of life on Earth. With more than 1 million described species, the animal kingdom has the most known species, followed by the plant kingdom with more than 250,000 known species....

Named Cholula, Barley, and Hops, the babies each way seven grams, or about the size of three pennies. Born on July 8, the babies, like other gray mouse lemurs at the DLC, are named after herbs and spices. Their mom is named Sriracha. Unlike other lemurs, gray mouse lemurs are not endangered, and are thought to be one of the most common types of lemurs in their native Madagascar. Many other species are in decline due to habitat loss and other environmental issues....

If you are interested in a 3D printer but aren’t willing to spend a fortune, then you are in luck. Right now you can get the ToyBox 3D Printer Deluxe Bundle for 36 percent off its MSRP as a Christmas Day Deal. It also ships fast, so you are guaranteed to have it by Christmas. ToyBox is designed to be easy to use and it empowers both kids and adults to design and print their very own toys....

“Surprisingly, the male ‘sting’ caused a pricking pain,” said Tsujii’s research partner Shinji Sugiura, also from Kobe University. With wasps, it’s usually the females that sting predators. “Based on her experience and observations, I hypothesized that the male genitalia of A. gibbifrons function as an anti-predator defense,” Sugiura said. It’s already known that female bees and wasps use modified ovipositors—a body part also used in egg-laying—to sting their attackers, including humans....

Last year, a man named Lee Spievak was working in a hobby shop when he accidentally put his finger into the blades of a spinning propeller on a model airplane. He lost half an inch of flesh, down to the bone. His doctors told him the severed portion would be lost for good. Fortunately for Spievak, his brother had access to a powered compound made from the cells lining the interior walls of a pig’s bladder....

“Loss of biodiversity, stresses on agricultural productivity, human health risks—the themes highlighted by WGII are not new,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said in a release last month. “We’ve been tracking most of them for years now. What is emerging is the indisputable evidence for how climate change is acting to compound and conjoin these challenges at a rate humankind is currently struggling to keep pace with, and how these impacts often hit the most vulnerable first....

There was no such map in 1993 because the only way to get one was to use anatomical methods: inject dye into the brain of an organism, kill it, and trace the color trail in the neurons with microscopes. Of course ethics rule out this sort of experimentation on humans. As a result, we know our primate relatives better than we know ourselves. Two recent studies, however, are finally laying bare the neural circuitry that Crick hoped to see—without a scalpel....

On Saturday, the office of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced that the state had received a $27.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to assess the feasibility of a superconducting maglev (also known as SCMaglev) train line between Baltimore and Washington DC. Currently, the trip between Baltimore and Washington DC takes about an hour by car, approximately an hour and 15 minutes by commuter rail, and 40 minutes via the only current high-speed option, the Acela Express....

Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, is a computer model that can recognize numbers, remember them, figure out numeric sequences, and even write them down with a robotic arm. It’s a major leap in brain simulation, because it’s the first model that can actually emulate behaviors while also modeling the physiology that underlies them. The program consists of 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems that are designed to resemble specific brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia and thalamus....

The update to Microsoft’s Surface line comes at an important time, with Apple and Google also recently announcing similar products in the category. Microsoft has been playing in this field (maybe struggling is the better word) since 2012, but in 2015, the concept has seen a surge of new interest, according to the company. “The momentum we see with Surface Pro 3 is off the charts,” says Panos Panay, Surface VP for Microsoft....

It goes beyond charging smartphones, and even tablets, by including a full-on, three-pronged power outlet on the top of its paperback-book-sized body. It’s a substantial addition to your bag, but it’s a solid performer that might be worth the weight, depending on your thirst for power. What is it? This 1.66-pound brick has a 22,000 mAh battery inside. For comparison, most modern smartphones have between 2,000 and 3,000 mAh cells inside, while the iPad Pro has around 11,000 mAh....

Before DART smashed into it on September 26, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to circle its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. Astronomers have been using telescopes on Earth to measure how much that time has changed. The data shows that the impact from the small spacecraft shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes, with a margin of uncertainty of about plus or minus 2 minutes. Shortening an asteroid system’s trajectory like this could help us deflect a massive space rock if it were to threaten Earth....

The 70-foot sunshield is critical to the James Webb Space Telescope’s operations, and unfurling it was no easy task. Its five layers, each a plastic sheet as thin as a human hair and coated with reflective metal, together provide protection of more than SPF 1 million. The telescope’s delicate scientific instruments also need to be extremely cold in order to detect faint infrared light—the sunshield will ensure Webb stays at a chilly minus 380°F....

More than a decade ago, she participated on the science team developing a probe that would have sampled the toxic atmosphere and scratched at rocks on the Venusian surface. NASA selected the mission as one of three finalists in 2009, but opted to go pick up asteroid dust instead. In 2015, she tried again. Dyar joined a group lead by Suzanne Smrekar of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to design an orbiter spacecraft that could map Venus’s landforms and rock types from above....

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, American Indian Nations have been closing their communities and taking steps to protect their members. Community health clinics have been preparing for a potential onslaught of cases and girding themselves for the onslaught of an epidemic that, according to The Washington Post, is likely to hit them harder than the rest of the country. The hardest-hit Nation currently is the Navajo Nation, which, as of April 7, reported 426 confirmed positive cases and 17 deaths....

Thermal-infrared images taken of Neptune over the past two decades reveal that thermal brightness dimmed in 2003, suggesting that the planet’s average temperatures in the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer that sits above the area where weather brews, dropped by about 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) over that timeframe. The results were published on April 11 in Planetary Science Journal. Like Earth, the smallest of the gas giants sits on an axial tilt which means that it has four seasons....

Today, designers have been able to create elaborate radar systems using multiple receivers. When a single device, like your mobile phone, for instance, pings multiple receivers, it can then be triangulated with incredible precision. Now, researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new radar scanning system that uses the opposite configuration, with one receiver and many transmitters. This new radio setup can create real-time images and video, even when objects are hidden behind walls or moving at hypersonic speeds....

New Zealand has no active cases of the novel coronavirus The last confirmed COVID-19 patient in New Zealand left the hospital 12 days ago. Since then, the country has kept a watchful eye to see if any new cases would pop up. With much relief, on Monday, health officials announced that, for now, the novel coronavirus has been eliminated in New Zealand. After extremely strict lockdown measures went into place in mid-March, which many credit for the country’s successful reduction in cases, New Zealand began to reopen in carefully-planned phases....