It’s time for Nerd News, covering the most important news for your brain. Here’s a quick rundown of this week in science . . .
1. NASA is running a contest to find the best way to recycle astronaut poop in space. Whoever comes up with the best idea wins $3 million. Ideally, it would work with pee and puke as well.
2. In other space news: Uranus is full of surprises. That’s the line Earth.com went with after a study found the planet isn’t spinning as fast as we thought. It takes Uranus 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds to do one full rotation. That’s 28 seconds longer than astronomers thought it took.
3. In “that sounds risky” news: An energy company in Texas is working on a new type of nuclear reactor that’s smaller and could be moved from place to place. They say we’ll need “microreactors” to power all the huge A.I. data centers that are being built.
4. Happy National Pet Day . . . or is it? A study found dogs are creating an environmental crisis because there are just so many of them. Cats get a bad rap for killing birds and other wildlife. But dogs do it too, and there are four times as many of them . . . over a billion dogs worldwide.
(A separate study just found having a pet makes us as happy as earning an extra $90,000 a year though. So . . . sorry, planet. We’re keepin’ ’em.)
5. And in A.I. news: A study found ChatGPT is great at the structure of creative writing, but it still sucks at the creative part and doesn’t understand emotions well. The site “Study Finds” put it like this: “Robots are getting better at telling stories, but they still don’t understand what makes us cry.”
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