• The thinnest iPhone ever, measuring just 5.5mm at its thinnest point, but possibly up to 9.5mm with the rear camera bump included


• 6.6-inch OLED display with Face ID and a potentially smaller Dynamic Island


• ProMotion support for up to a 120Hz refresh rate (disputed by one source)


• A19 chip instead of A19 Pro chip


• A single 48-megapixel rear camera on an all-new elongated camera bar


• A 24-megapixel front camera


• A single speaker in the earpiece, no bottom speaker


• Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip


• Apple-designed C1 modem for cellular connectivity


• eSIM only, no physical SIM card slot worldwide


• USB-C port


• High-density battery


• Camera Control button


• Action button


• MagSafe


• 12GB of RAM, exceeding the 8GB minimum for Apple Intelligence


• Apple reportedly plans to release an iPhone 17 Air battery case

While it may look like a blazing red ruby, the 2.33-carat Winston Red Diamond is just that—a diamond. One of the rarest diamonds in the world, the Winston Red Diamond is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC–right near the more famous Hope Diamond. 

To learn more about this exceedingly rare Fancy Red diamond, Smithsonian gem and mineral curator Gabriela Farfan and colleagues spent two years researching its history and tracing its geological past. The team officially categorized the diamond and also narrowed down its potential country of origin as Venezuela or Brazil. The findings are detailed in a study published June 6 in the journal Gems & Gemology.

Ronald Winston, son of famed American jeweler Harry Winston, donated the roughly 8 millimeter in diameter diamond to the Smithsonian in 2023. It is the fifth-largest confirmed red diamond in the world. Based on its old mine brilliant cut, gemologists believe that it was likely mined before the middle of the 20th century. This older style of cutting diamonds predates the more modern brilliant cuts seen today. 

Gemologists estimate that one in every 25 million diamonds is fancy red. According to the Smithsonian, this specific red diamond’s documented history begins in 1938, when it belonged to the Cartier Family. The Cartiers then sold it to the Maharaja of Jamnagar India sometime before the 1980s. Winston purchased the stone from the Maharaja in the late 1980s and the diamond once adorned a ring worn by actress Brooke Shields in 1989.

At 2.23 carats, it is smaller than the largest confirmed fancy red diamond. The Moussaieff Red clocks in at 5.11 carats and has been displayed in museums around the world. On April 1,the Winston Red Diamond officially went on display at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. 

Scientifically describing and detailing the Winston Red’s color and history was one of the major goals of this new study. Red diamonds are exceedingly rare, which makes studying them equally difficult. 

A diamond’s color is largely determined by its chemical make-up. For example, a traditional white diamond is mostly composed of carbon. Small amounts of nitrogen will give a diamond a more yellow hue. If those nitrogen atoms have enough time–several millions of years–to aggregate in groups, the diamond will appear more brown. After even more years, if the nitrogen atoms form in groups of three surrounding a missing carbon atom, it will turn a yellow color. If the element boron replaces carbon, it produces a blue hue. 

Red and pink diamonds don’t owe their color to chemistry. The extreme pressures and temperatures deep within the Earth can lead to plastic deformation within the rock. During plastic deformation, the atomic bonds in the diamond break and re-form along imperfections called dislocations. These deformations will change the diamond’s atomic structure and affect how the light interacts with the stone. It’s this deflection that gives it its rosy hue. Pink diamonds get their color in a similar way, since the color red is a more saturated pink.

The Winston Red is also considered a Fancy Red diamond, meaning its color is pure red. It does not have any other modifying hues like purple, brown, or orange. Only 0.04 percent of fancy colored diamonds have this Fancy red color grade. The chances of finding a Fancy red diamond like the Winston Red is about one in 25 million diamonds.

[ Related: The mystery behind pink diamonds just got some more clarity. ]

To learn more, the team used several techniques including photoluminescence, spectroscopy, and cathodoluminescence to study the precious stone. These analyses confirmed the presence of plastic deformation bands and a pattern that officially classifies it as a type IaAB (A<B) Group 1 “pink” diamond. The diamond underwent significant pressure and temperature conditions when it was forming. They also found that the Winston Red gets its pure crimson color because it had a careful balance of the right pressure and temperature during its formation.

Based on its mineralogical characteristics and mid-20th century cut, the team believes that it likely originated in Venezuela or Brazil. However, its precise place of origin is still unknown.  

The post That’s no ruby. It’s an extremely rare red diamond. appeared first on Popular Science.

In his seven decades traversing our incredible planet–and having species named for him along the way–natural historian Sir David Attenborough has seen more of what Earth has to offer than most. However, even he was in for some surprises while working on the new feature-length documentary Ocean with David Attenborough. From stunning underwater ecosystems teeming with life, to the harmful effects of bottom trawling, the film shows that the mighty ocean still has a lot to teach us–even someone with credentials like Attenborough. 

“After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand the most important place is not on land, but at sea,” Attenborough states at the start of the film.

To learn more about the making of the film, Popular Science sat down with Toby Nowlan, one of the film’s directors, and marine ecologist and National Geographic Explorer Enric Sala. Answers have been condensed for clarity.

Laura Baisas: What was the most surprising thing you learned about our oceans throughout the course of working on the film?

Toby Nowlan: For me, there were two big take homes that really hit me hard as soon as I started making the film that got me really, really excited. The biggest one was how capable the ocean is of recovery. The process of protecting the ocean is very different from protecting the same area of land. When you protect an area of ocean, that space fills back up with life again, quicker and in a more spectacular fashion than anything anyone had dared to imagine was possible. And not only that, but it floods out, overflows, spills out into surrounding areas of ocean, and revives huge other areas of ocean. That process is a winning process for everyone, for every living thing on earth, for all the fishing communities, for all marine life, for all terrestrial life, for our breathable atmosphere, stable climate. The other thing that hit me was just that understanding that the ocean does not belong to a single person, does not belong to a group of people, group of companies or individuals or governments. It is for everyone on Earth. It’s our greatest shared asset. 

Enric Sala: For me, I’ve been working on ocean science and conservation for more than 35 years, but I had not seen bottom trawling underwater. That was the surprising thing for me. Even though I knew about the impacts of bottom trawling, I had never seen it. Even for a scientist who is used to working with data to understand things, there is nothing like seeing things with your own eyes.

LB: That’s a perfect segue to my next question. Why did you feel that showing bottom trawling was so important?

TN: It’s the story of the generation. We’re talking about something that was invented here off the south coast of the United Kingdom 700 years ago, and we knew it was a bad thing. There were these letters of complaint to the king 700 years ago, but back then it was these small boats with sails on. Fast forward 700 years, and it’s still happening, and not just that, but on a huge scale, thousands of times every day, around the ocean. It’s been happening just below the surface, below the waves, and for that simple reason, it’s been concealed from the world. So it was a really clear mission. We’re literally just showing what is happening around our ocean every single day. 

ES: As Toby said, in the 1300s people started bottom trawling, but we didn’t measure the catch really, until recently, just a few decades ago. But when scientists started looking at historical catches, we realized that today, for every hour spent bottom trawling, we are catching just 6 percent of what we did 120 years ago. Imagine what was there 700 years ago, right? This practice in the North Sea, for example, and English channel has been conducted non stop on a weekly basis, for almost seven centuries. 

[ Related: Humans have only seen 0.001 percent of the ocean floor. ]

TN: It’s just worth adding to that that this film actually isn’t an anti-fishing film. If anything, it’s a pro-fisheries film, it’s a pro ocean abundance film, ocean full of life, pro-thriving planet. And bottom trawling our protected areas is not how we get there.

LB: What was the biggest technical and scientific challenge?

TN: The trawling was technically difficult. You’re dealing with depth, filming in low light, a lot of movement. There’s so much turbulence down there that you’re dealing when. Then you see the violence of the process. These things are just thundering along the seabed, smashing into every rock and boulder and become this sort of self-created bulldozer. It took a lot of finessing to make sure it was at exactly the right depth, exactly the right distance behind the boat, and that it was just completely flat. 

ES: Scientifically, the challenge was to select the minimum number of facts to tell a story. Finding the science to tell a story was the easy part, because we have so many studies telling us what the impacts on the ocean are, and hundreds of scientific and economic studies showing the benefits of protected areas. Every statement in the film is supported by peer reviewed scientific studies.

LB: What do you hope people take away from the film and learn about our oceans in general?

TN: The take away is hope, and this is real. The process of recovery in the ocean is quicker and bigger and really works more than we’d ever thought possible. It’s already happening at every scale around the world. Wherever we’ve protected the ocean, it’s recovering faster on a greater scale than we’d ever imagined possible. 

ES: Protecting the land is very different from protecting the sea. If you create a national park on land, you protect mostly what lives within the boundaries of the protected area, so things can’t get out. But in the ocean, because of the water, many fish and lobster and scallops, they produce all these eggs. They release eggs into the water that can be dispersed for hundreds to 1,000s of miles, and that power of regeneration beyond the boundaries of the protected area, that’s the biggest difference between protecting a place.

LB: Finally, if you could be one sea creature for a day, what would it be and why?

ES: I wouldn’t like to be one of those mackerel on a bait ball, for sure! I’d like to be one of the curious dolphins, because they seem to have this permanent smile.

TN: I’m an absolute bird geek and mine would be the nice and albatross that you see from the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. These are the longest lived birds in the world, and when they feed their chicks, they can disappear for weeks at a time and cover hundreds of 1,000s of miles. They probably see more of the ocean than any other living thing, these birds, and I love that. So, they’re the ultimate ocean travelers.

Ocean with David Attenborough will debut on June 7 and stream globally the next day on Disney+ and Hulu on World’ Oceans Day. 

The post Q&A with the team behind ‘Ocean with David Attenborough’ appeared first on Popular Science.

A tiny, single-seat electric car is taking Japan by storm. The mibot, built by KG Motors, has pre-sold 3,300 units before it has even hit the streets — more than all of the Toyota EVs sold in 2024.

As Emily Forlini notes in an article in PC Mag, the mini-car is ideal for short trips, with a 62-mile range and 37 mph top speed. “The tiny EV gets over-the-air tech updates, has air conditioning and a small trunk. It charges up in five hours on a standard 100V household outlet; no need for "special charging equipment." At $7,000, the mibot is about half the price of Japan’s most popular EV, the Nissan Sakura.”

The design could become hugely popular in dense cities with narrow streets and low speed limits. According to Forlini, “Japan has been slow to embrace EVs, but it has more hybrids than traditional gas-powered cars on the road.” Although 55 percent of new cars sold in Japan are hybrids, just 2 percent are fully electric. “Perhaps a cheap, small EV can carve out a unique place in the Japanese market.”

• Japan
• Electric Cars
• Tiny Cars
• Small Cars
• Electric Vehicles

Does anybody actually like software subscriptions? Sure, it’s cheaper in the moment, but you’re literally never done paying for things you used to be able to own. If you want to go back to that golden era of software ownership, check this out. Instead of paying $99.99 every year for Microsoft 365, you can get a Microsoft Office Pro lifetime license for only $49.97 (usually $219.99).

This version of Office comes with lifetime licenses for:

• Word
• Excel
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• OneNote
• Publisher
• Access
• Teams (free version)

So you’ll have everything you need to do business, all in one suite. From working with documents to wrangling data and creating powerful presentations, you’ll find plenty of new features to help you be more productive at all stages.

Many of the tools within the suite were redesigned to be equally useful for data analysts mining enormous sets of data for company reports, designers seeking inspiration on how to present their work, and more. These applications haven’t left anything out.

The familiar ribbon-based user interface offers quick access to its available tools, features, and customizations. Details such as the indentation size of type in documents, layout, fonts, and much more can be easily customized by users. You no longer need to sacrifice work-related functionality to create more aesthetically pleasing documents, even when creating presentations, formatting emails, and more.

Now you can say goodbye to monthly or annual software fees. All languages are supported; naturally, only the best support is provided, such as free customer support. Updates are included, too.

This is a one-time purchase for a license that can be installed on one Windows PC for use at work or home. It will be associated with the actual device, rather than your Microsoft account. Your download links will be delivered instantly after purchase.

It’s only $49.97 to get a Microsoft Office Pro lifetime license, but it’s not going to stay that way.

StackSocial prices subject to change

_

Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows: Lifetime License

See Deal

The post If you’re sick of software subscriptions, check this out appeared first on Popular Science.

• Apple TV HD (2015)


• Apple TV 4K (1st generation, 2017)


• Apple TV 4K (2nd generation, 2021)


• Apple TV 4K (3rd generation, 2022)

• Apple Watch SE (2nd generation)


• Apple Watch Series 6


• Apple Watch Series 7


• Apple Watch Series 8


• Apple Watch Series 9


• Apple Watch Series 10


• Apple Watch Ultra


• Apple Watch Ultra 2

Is there a weekend warrior in your dad? Is he a commuter during the week and doing a century on Saturday? Scaling summits when he’s not climbing the corporate ladder? Training for a marathon in between meetings? If your dad contains multisport multitudes, or just wants to unleash his inner PGA pro, he’ll love the data and insights provided by Garmin devices, and they’re on sale for Father’s Day. From golf to gravel grinding to balance out the daily grind, there’s a device that can help Dad up his game. And it’ll get there by June 15 if you act fast. (While you’re at it, get your mom one, too. Have you even called her recently?)

Garmin

We already spotlighted this in our Father’s Day Gift Guide because I’m obsessed. I love testing e-bikes. And while many of them are commuters, I’ve gotten more and more into gravel bikes over the last year. And getting more and more into gravel bikes means getting more and more into metrics. You start thinking about everything from your gear ratio to your heart rate. And even better than thinking about these things is seeing them. That’s where the $699 Garmin Edge 1050 cycling computer and its vivid 1000nit color display make themselves known. Pair it via Bluetooth/ANT+ with a bike like the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 (which we’ve been testing and loving), plus compatible sensors like a heart rate monitor or one of the wearables below. Consolidating that data, the Edge 1050 mounts everything you could want—cadence to climb, stamina insights to turn-by-turn directions, etc.—conveniently and securely in your sightline. The auto-pause/resume feature is great for an accurate picture of output. And it’s got a speaker/on-device bell that’s deeply satisfying to ping at pedestrians who need to look up from their phones if they’re gonna walk on the trail. If Dad is a cyclist, this is the perfect cockpit upgrade. 

• fēnix 8 series – Save $200
• Instinct 3 series – Save $50
• Venu 3 series – Save $100
• Instinct 2 Series – Save $100
• Enduro 3 – Save $100
• Forerunner 965 – Save up to $100
• Descent Mk3i – $200 Rebate

• Approach R10 – Save $150
• Approach S70 – Save $50
• Approach S12 – Save $50
• Approach Z30 – Save $50

• Edge 1050 – Save $100
• Edge 840 – Save $100
• Varia RTL515 – Save $50

The post Help Dad save his metrics while you save money during Garmin’s Father’s Day sale appeared first on Popular Science.

Biologists estimate that four out of five animals on Earth are nematodes (AKA roundworms).The tiny, wriggling, transparent invertebrates are the most abundant creatures on the planet and are found nearly everywhere–from permafrost to the deep ocean. More than one million species make up this ubiquitous group, which includes parasites, decomposers, predators, and more.

“They’re not about to take over the world, because they already did,” says Serena Ding, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany tells Popular Science. “Global worming has already happened.”  

Yet despite their ubiquity in the environment and in research labs (where the nematode C. elegans is a common model organism), a new discovery highlights that there’s still a lot left to learn about these worms. 

Humble roundworms put cheerleaders’ pyramid-building skills to shame. In order to disperse and explore their environment, wild nematodes self-assemble into tower-shaped superorganisms, according to a new study led by Ding and published June 5 in the journal Current Biology. Together, groups of the one-millimeter long worms can act as hyper-coordinated construction squads, with their living bodies providing the raw material for functional, temporary structures. It’s a biological feat that even humans struggle to accomplish. 

This is also the first time that scientists have formally documented the nematode phenomenon occurring in nature. Worm towers– sometimes called swarms– “were kind of just whispered about in the worm community,” says Ding. Previously, there were anecdotal reports and documented observations of these multi-nematode assemblages in labs and other artificial settings, but it wasn’t certain if the formations happened naturally. Now, it’s clear that nematodes do, indeed, form towers without artificial interference.

“They do exist at high densities, they’re interacting, and they’re doing something together.” says Ding, who studies collective behavior. “This was the most exciting thing for me.” 

One tower can contain thousands of worms in a single aggregation, which looks like a cohesive drop of wiggly gelatin. The impressive team effort enables nematodes to hitch rides on passing insects to more favorable habitats and bridge otherwise untraversable gaps, Ding and her co-authors suggest. Studying this behavior could offer insights into the evolution of social animals and how group decision making unfolds.

Only a handful of organisms are known to form collective assemblages for the purpose of dispersing, similar to the nematode towers. “It’s actually super rare,” says Ding, noting that there are just three other, well-documented examples. Slime molds, which are technically single-celled amoebas, often take on multicellular forms, aggregating to make fruiting bodies that send out spores or moving from place to place in a group. Fire ants are known to form rafts with their bodies to get through flood waters, and arrange themselves into towers and bridges to navigate the landscape. Groups of spider mites weave themselves up with silk into a ball that can be carried to distant frontiers on the wind. 

With the new findings, nematodes gain membership to an exclusive group of evolutionary odd-balls. But though superorganism behavior is uncommon across the tree of life, worm towers themselves are surprisingly commonplace. 

To track them down in the wild, the researchers didn’t have to travel far. They started by looking at fallen fruit beneath trees on their university campus with a digital microscope. On rotting apples and pears, they found dozens of nematode towers wiggling at the edges and points of the fruits’ fleshy topography. The scientists also documented the behavior among nematodes found at a mushroom farm. Then, they devised a method of reliably recreating it in the lab.

Here’s their recipe for encouraging worm towers: place a few thousand nematodes on a food-free petri dish that’s flat except for a single tooth brush bristle pointing upwards. Then, wait for a couple of hours. It’s that simple. In hundreds of trials, the worms clustered into their writhing tower formation around the bristle more than 90 percent of the time. The longest towers in these experiments were well over a centimeter long (more than 10x a nematode’s body length). Prior observations have noted towers about five centimeters–or almost two inches–high. 

In additional experiments with fruit flies and with a plastic probe, the researchers showed that worm towers strategically move towards any object that touches them or brushes by. The quick collective action allows the towers to shift fast enough to glom onto the leg of a passing insect. Previous research has documented individual nematodes hitchhiking on insects. However, through tower building, it seems that hundreds of worms can grab a ride at once, making the unwitting bug more akin to a subway train than a single passenger vehicle. The scientists also recorded two instances of the towers probing around and forming bridges to reach new locations, like the petri dish lid. Both observations support the leading hypothesis that nematodes build towers to access new, more suitable habitats. 

Using worms tagged with a fluorescent protein, Ding and her colleagues further found that nematodes building a tower all tend to orient themselves in the same direction. The worms point their heads upwards, and their bodies undulate in time with one another. Yet how they coordinate this intricate collaboration remains unclear. 

Many of the new observations prompt more confusion than clarity. For instance, in the wild groups, towers were exclusively made up of larvae. In the lab, nematodes of all ages collaborated to build. What accounts for the age difference is unknown. Ding and her colleagues didn’t note any apparent competition for the top spots at the tip of the tower, where a worm is most likely to catch a ride. But it’s unclear if a less genetically homogenous group of worms might be more competitive. The researchers also don’t yet understand why the worms opt to disperse collectively instead of solo. Nor do they know how worms decide to begin forming a tower or the neural or sensory mechanisms that enable it. The basic physics of how thousands of tiny, slimy bodies manage to form something so coordinated and solid remains unresolved as well. 

“There are the sorts of questions that we want to address,” says Ding. Ultimately, she hopes to use nematode towers to better understand animal cooperation across species. 

For so long in science, nematodes have been seen as little more than a microbiology model system, allowing researchers to test genetic modifications, understand cells, and map neurons. But, in looking so closely at the worms, generations of scientists may have missed the bigger picture. Nematodes have complex behaviors that are the product of millions of years of evolution. Learning more about what they do could shed light on how animals large and small work together, says Ding. “It pays a lot to think about them as real animals,” she adds. “They’re everywhere, they’re important, and they do things.” 

The post Worm towers are all around us appeared first on Popular Science.

A Supreme Court decision in favor of a Utah oil pipeline will likely have sweeping implications for other energy, transportation, and infrastructure projects. According to reporting by Nina Totenberg for NPR, “The decision makes it easier to win approval for highways, bridges, pipelines, wind farms and other infrastructure projects.”

The ruling concerns a proposed oil pipeline in Utah’s Uinta Basin, which was approved by the Surface Transportation Board (STB). “The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington subsequently ruled that the Board had violated NEPA, by failing to consider the environmental effects from oil drilling and production, referred to as upstream, and oil refining and distribution, known as downstream.”

The Supreme Court’s reversal of that decision signals a rollback of NEPA’s powers. The act has been frequently used by environmental and community activists to block harmful projects and ensure that officials evaluate all the potential impacts of a project. 

• Uinta Basin
• Oil Pipelines
• Energy Infrastructure
• National Environmental Policy Act
• NEPA
• Environmental Reviews
• Environmental Impact Bonds