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7 days ago
- Entertainment
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100 years ago, the battle for television raged
Television's broadcast debut in 1936 unfolded like a plot made for the medium itself—complete with bitter competition, intrigue, celebration, and devastating setbacks. The story reached its climax when a fire at London's Crystal Palace destroyed parts of television inventor John Logie Baird's research laboratory on November 30, 1936. The timing could not have been worse. Baird was locked in a high-stakes showdown with his deep-pocketed rival, Electric and Musical Industries (EMI), who had partnered with wireless pioneer Guglielmo Marconi and the American radio giant RCA-Victor. Long before that fateful November day, the television landscape was crowded with inventors competing for the title to the as-yet unproven but promising medium. Despite his eventual defeat, Baird deserves credit for achieving the first wireless transmission of a moving image, as Popular Science writer Newton Burke reported in June 1925. The discrepancy between Baird's early success and later failure came down to a classic confrontation between old and new tech: Where Baird succeeded with mechanical television systems, he struggled to master the new and more efficient electronic technology. Despite its mechanical design, Baird's primitive television system was revolutionary for its time. Though it consisted of unwieldy components too impractical for commercial success, Burke noted that it successfully 'transmitted the motions of a human face, winking and smiling, from one room of a laboratory to another, without the aid of photography or wires.' The transmitted image was so crude that Baird's photographic evidence resembled the white hockey mask favored by serial killer Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th films. Yet Burke recognized its significance, writing, 'The fact remains that the outline of the face is plain, so are the shadows of the eye sockets and the shape of the open mouth.' Baird's achievement, while novel, built upon decades of previous work. His system incorporated ideas from Maurice LeBlanc, an engineer from France who published the first principles of television transmission systems in 1880's 'Etude sur la transmission électrique des impressions lumineuses,' or 'Study on the electrical transmission of light impressions.' LeBlanc's design was part of a six-volume engineering compilation devoted to the advent of electric lights, La Lumière Electrique, as reported by Popular Science in June 1882. Baird also drew from the work of German inventor Paul Nipkow, who had developed an 'electric telescope'—a pair of spinning discs capable of scanning still images and transmitting them through electric wires, which he patented in 1885. Meanwhile, Charles Jenkins, a Washington, D.C.-based contemporary, achieved the first synchronized video and audio transmission on June 13th, 1925, though his system only handled still pictures rather than motion. Understanding Baird's mechanical system helps explain both its breakthrough nature and ultimate limitations. His apparatus used a rapidly revolving disk equipped with lenses that focused light from the subject onto a selenium cell. This cell converted the light impulses into electrical signals suitable for radio transmission—crucial because radio waves were the only practical distribution medium available at the time. A synchronized receiving disk with a ground-glass screen then reconstructed the image. As Burke explained, 'The images received on his ground-glass screen are described as being made up of exceedingly fine lines of varying darkness.' However, the width of these lines and their flicker rate were constrained by the physical limitations of the mechanical apparatus—problems that would require electronic solutions to overcome. While Baird perfected his mechanical approach, gradually improving display resolution from 30 to 240 lines by 1936—today's displays are measured in pixels, 8K being the latest generation—other inventors pursued electronic television systems using cathode rays to scan and project images. This technological shift created one of the most bitter patent battles in broadcasting history. Philo Farnsworth, a farm boy from Utah, and Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian émigré who fled during the Russian Revolution, each claimed first rights. While Farnsworth was officially awarded the first electronic television system patent in 1930, Zworykin had filed the first U.S. patent in 1923. Their rivalry sparked a long and rancorous legal showdown between Farnsworth and RCA, who had hired Zworykin to build America's first broadcast television system, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which debuted at the 1939 New York World's Fair. In the years before NBC's American debut, the center of television development was London, where the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) sought to upgrade beyond Baird's crude broadcasts that had been running for nearly a decade. Recognizing an opportunity to accelerate progress, the BBC commissioned a head-to-head competition in 1936 between rival systems. Baird's team collaborated with Farnsworth to create a hybrid mechanical-electronic system, while EMI partnered with Marconi for transmission technology and RCA to leverage Zworykin's electronic innovations. (By then the patent dispute had been settled, with RCA paying royalties to Farnsworth.) Both teams would broadcast identical programming from London's Alexandra Palace, allowing direct comparison of their capabilities. Even before the Crystal Palace fire, Baird faced an uphill battle. His system couldn't match EMI's superior 405-line resolution or transmission range. The devastating fire that destroyed his laboratory equipment proved to be the final setback. Shortly afterward, Baird abandoned his television work altogether. John Logie Baird, the first person to wirelessly broadcast moving pictures, died in 1946 without any financial stake in what would become one of the 20th century's most profitable industries. His mechanical breakthrough had paved the way for the electronic systems that would dominate broadcasting, but the rapid pace of technological change left him behind.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- General
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Rescued baby skunks enjoy a good song
June marks the beginning of baby skunk season, when skunk kits start following their mothers out of their dens. In less than 24 hours, the Raven Ridge Wildlife Center in Washington Boro, Pennsylvania admitted 27 kits into their care. In a Facebook post, the wildlife center in southeastern PA, described a 'particularly heartbreaking case' in which a good Samaritan discovered baby skunks near an old shed. 'A single baby skunk or several skunk kits found alone are always in need of rescue,' Tracie Young, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator at the Raven Ridge Wildlife Center, tells Popular Science. 'Mother skunks are very protective of their kits and will never leave them out of her sight. The baby skunks have poor eyesight but a good sense of smell and that is how they locate and are able to stay with her, especially at night.' In other words, if a skunk kit is on its own, it's not because it strayed too far and got lost. Sure enough, the man also found what he believed to be the dead mama skunk. He thus put the babies in a box and drove them to the wildlife center. The facility's staff will care for the baby skunks for several months before setting them free, according to the post. Young says that they receive an average of 50 to 70 skunks kits during the busy baby season, and can admit over 20 adults throughout the year. Admitted skunks are typically suffering with issues spanning from rabies to soda cans stuck on their heads. The greatest threats to baby skunks include predators such as the great horned owls (skunks are apparently their favorite food), vehicle collisions, dog attacks, and even members of the public who 'fall in love with this little innocent cute ball of fuzz and decide to keep it.' Unfortunately, in states like Pennsylvania, this human exposure requires authorities to euthanize the skunk and test it for rabies. Young thus emphasizes that if anyone spots one or more motherless skunk babies, they should always reach out to a licensed wildlife rehabilitation center that specializes in skunks. [ Related: What to do if you find a baby bird out of its nest. ] Plus, life is pretty good at the Raven Ridge Wildlife Center (though the best place for a kit skunk is at its mother's side). Young explains that skunks have individual body language and attitudes, similarly to cats. Since they have 'poor eyesight and we never want to startle them, we actually sing to them,' she says, specifying that their song of choice is a modified version of the viral 'Baby Shark.' Baby skunk do do do do do do…
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- General
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Three osprey chicks hatch in 500-pound steel nest boxes
Operation Osprey is officially a success. Three osprey chicks are now sitting high atop the Bear Mountain Bridge overlooking the scenic and sturgeon-stocked Hudson River in New York's Hudson Valley. These three new chicks were born in a nest constructed just for them with the help of some humans from the New York State Bridge Authority. The steel nesting boxes were installed this year to keep the birds, eggs, and motorists safe and allow the osprey to stay in their preferred nesting spot on top of the bridge. 'We noticed that two years ago at the Bear Mountain Bridge, [that] they started building nests on top of the tower,' Craig Gardner, manager of maintenance for the New York State Bridge Authority, told Popular Science in April. 'It's not really an ideal spot for us, so we would go up and try to encourage them to go someplace else. But then last year, before we could get the nest, they laid eggs. So then we stayed away from the nest.' Roughly 20,000 vehicles cross the Bear Mountain Bridge every day and the osprey nests themselves are about 250 feet high, so any falling debris can cause car accidents. Bridge Authority workers typically try to encourage birds to nest on the lower spans, closer to the river and away from cars. But these birds wouldn't budge and appear to really like their perch high above the New York fjord. In 2024, the osprey clutch successfully hatched and the chicks remained in the nest for most of the year. For this year, safety concerns prompted the team at the Bridge Authority to build the special steel boxes to keep the residents of any nests built this year safe. 'We took it up in components and assembled it on the top of the tower,' says Gardner. 'They [the birds] were back there as soon as we left, rearranging the sticks and establishing their nest.' When all weighed together, the engineers took about 500 pounds of steel 350 feet in the air to install the nest boxes. The chicks are expected to remain there for several months. [ Related: To protect birds and motorists, engineers build a steel nest box on bridge. ] Thanks to ongoing conservation efforts in the Hudson River and the surrounding area, bald eagles, peregrine falcons, ospreys–and the fish that they need to survive–have seen a major recovery. The osprey are also the second most widely distributed raptor species, after the peregrine falcon, which can also nest on the bridges.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Science
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The science behind the smell of rain
You know the smell. It's there every time the first fat raindrops hit the ground—a distinctive, earthy scent that suffuses the air, an aroma that speaks of the changing seasons and promises relief from stifling summer heat. There's a name for the smell of rain, too: 'petrichor,' a poetic portmanteau of the Greek words 'petros' (stone) and 'ichor' (the blood of the gods in Greek mythology). Petrichor: the smell of rain. But what causes it? The name 'petrichor' was coined by Australian scientists Isabel Bear and Dick Thomas in 1964, in a paper that constituted perhaps the first serious scientific attempt to explain the phenomenon. The duo used the word to refer to an oil that they distilled from samples of soil and vegetation that were left for up to a year exposed to air and daylight but shielded from rain. They found that the oil contained a complex mixture of volatile organic compounds. One question left unanswered by Bear and Thomas was the origin of these compounds, and subsequent research has focused on one particular compound, a volatile bicyclic alcohol called geosmin. The compound was isolated a year after Bear and Thomas's paper, and its name literally means 'earth smell.' Along with another volatile organic compound called 2-methylisoborneol or 2-MIB, geosmin is primarily responsible for the characteristic smell of earth—and both contribute greatly to the smell of rain. Ryan Busby, an ecologist at the US Army's Corps of Engineers, tells Popular Science that these compounds exist in soil the world over, and that they're spritzed into the air whenever soil is disturbed. '[The compounds] accumulate in the pore spaces in the soil,' Busby explains. 'There might be some binding to soil particles. [And] research has shown that that impact with the soil surface causes the volatiles to be released into the atmosphere.' So where do geosmin and 2-MIB come from? Busby says that while the source of both compounds remains the subject of plenty of active research, the current scientific consensus is that they are released by soil-dwelling bacteria. Differing ratios of the two compounds may explain why the smell differs subtly from place to place. 'Geosmin is pretty consistent across the environment, while 2-MIB is more variable. [Where 2-MIB is present], it is released in much higher concentrations, so you get areas where there's huge concentrations, and then areas where there's none,' Busby says. The other components that make up petrichor—a myriad less powerful plant-related volatiles, and also perhaps the distinctive acrid smell of ozone that accompanies lightning—vary from location to location. Humans are remarkably sensitive to the smell of geosmin, in particular. In water, it can be detected at concentrations as low as 4 ng/L, which equates to about one teaspoon in 200 Olympic swimming pools. Busby says there are several theories for why this might be. 'One [theory] is finding water sources,' he explains. 'Geosmin seems to be more prevalent in moist, fertile soils.' The presence of moist soil means the presence of water, and it's easy to see how being able to catch a whiff of geosmin on the wind and follow it to a source of water would provide a valuable evolutionary advantage. It's not just humans who appear to be able to rely on the scent of these volatile compounds to find water, Busby says. 'Camels can detect geosmin and find oases in the desert from 50 miles away. Mosquitoes use it to find stagnant ponds for laying eggs, and raccoons use it to find turtle nests and buried eggs.' But while the smell of geosmin and 2-MIB are appealing to us, their taste is the complete opposite. 'It's kind of funny,' muses Busby. 'We love the smell, but we hate the taste.' In water, these compounds are responsible for the musty, moldy taste that indicates that water isn't safe to drink. Busby says, 'Any time you drink water and you think, 'Oh, this, this tastes like lake water,' it's because those compounds are dissolved in what you're drinking.' Again, there's most likely an evolutionary reason for this: it's one thing for the soil around a water source to smell of bacteria, but if the water itself carries the distinctive musty odor of geosmin and 2-MIB, it also most likely carries the potential for gastrointestinal unpleasantness. Busby says that this explains why geosmin and 2-MIB are 'the primary odor contaminants of drinking water globally.' There's one unanswered question here, though: why are geosmin and 2-MIB there in the first place? As Busby points out, while it's clear that 'there are a number of uses for geosmin for us, we're not sure exactly why [bacteria] produce it in such quantities. It's a [large] energy cost to produce a chemical like that.' So why do soil-borne bacteria pump out geosmin and 2-MIB? What's in it for them? A paper published in Nature Microbiology in 2020 suggested a possible answer. The study examined interactions between Streptomyces—one variety of geosmin- and 2-MIB-producing bacteria—and small creatures called springtails. (Springtails are one of three varieties of six-legged arthropods that are not considered insects, and they have a taste for bacteria.) Crucially, the researchers found that in the bacteria studied, geosmin and 2-MIB were produced only by colonies that were also producing reproductive spores. In fact, they can only be produced by those specific colonies: 'The genes for geosmin and 2-MIB synthases are under the direct control of sporulation-specific transcription factors, constraining emission of the odorants to sporulating colonies,' the paper explains. Springtails are attracted by geosmin and 2-MIB, so unsurprisingly, upon arrival at the odor-emitting colonies, they helped themselves happily to a tasty microbial snack. In doing so, they also consumed the bacterial spores. The spores were then able to pass through the springtail's digestive tracts and emerge ready for action from the other end. Busby says this might also explain why the smell of rain is strongest when it comes from rain hitting dry soil. 'As soil dries out, the bacteria are going to go dormant, and there seems to be a flush of release [at that point]. So from that respect, [the compounds] are a way to attract something that maybe will carry [the bacteria] to a more conducive environment for growth.' It might feel like the poetic appeal of petrichor is diminished somewhat by discovering that the oh-so-evocative smell of rain most likely exists to encourage a bunch of tiny arthropods to poop out bacterial spores. But ultimately, it's another example of nature finding a way—a co-evolutionary relationship that recalls bees and pollen, and one that extends its benefits to the rest of us. So the next time the rain hits dry soil, think about the tiny bacteria that both lead us to water and stop us drinking from sources that might harm us. 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
11-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Glow-in-the-Dark Salamanders May Have Just Unlocked the Future of Regeneration
What if the key to human limb regeneration wasn't buried in sci-fi dreams—but already in your medicine cabinet? Scientists at Northeastern University have uncovered a breakthrough that's raising eyebrows in both the dermatology and regenerative biology worlds. The chemical at the center of it all? Retinoic acid—a form of vitamin A that's also the active ingredient in isotretinoin, better known as Accutane. In a new study, which was published in Nature Communications, researchers mapped how axolotls. The Mexican salamander has a freakish ability to regrow limbs using varying concentrations of retinoic acid to guide the regrowth of bones, joints, muscles and skin. When an axolotl loses a leg, it doesn't just grow back—it grows back perfectly. And scientists now understand more clearly how that biological GPS works. At the heart of the process is an enzyme called CYP26b1, which breaks down retinoic acid and dictates how much of the chemical floods a given area. Higher levels mean longer bone growth. Lower levels cue the development of feet and digits. The implications are massive: by controlling retinoic acid levels, scientists were able to create glow-in-the-dark salamanders with either perfectly formed limbs or comically misshapen ones. While these findings are still at the basic science stage, researchers believe they've taken a major step toward understanding how to activate dormant genetic mechanisms in humans. Because here's the kicker: the genes involved in limb regeneration already exist in our DNA. We just don't know how to switch them back on—yet. Retinoic acid has long been linked to fetal development, and now it's being eyed as a possible tool to coax adult tissues into reprogramming themselves post-injury. It's not a silver bullet, but it might be part of the recipe. 'We might just need to remind the body what it already knows how to do,' James Monaghan, the study's lead scientist, told Popular Science. If that's true, the path to real human regeneration might be shorter—and stranger—than we ever imagined. Glow-in-the-Dark Salamanders May Have Just Unlocked the Future of Regeneration first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 10, 2025
