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There’s nothing quite like a maddening math problem, mind-bending optical illusion, or twisty logic puzzle to halt all productivity in the Popular Mechanics office. We’re curious people by nature, but we also collectively share a stubborn insistence that we’re right, dammit, and so we tend to throw work by the wayside whenever we come upon a problem with several seemingly possible solutions.

This triangle brain teaser isn’t new—shoutout to Popsugar for unearthing it a couple years ago—but based on some shady Internet magic, the tweet below reappeared in my feed today and kick-started a new debate on our staff-wide Slack channel, a place traditionally reserved for workshopping ideas, but instead mostly used for yelling about other stuff that we occasionally turn into content.

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BEIJING (AP) — China counted 170 deaths from a new virus Thursday and more countries reported infections, including some spread locally, as foreign evacuees from China’s worst-hit region returned home to medical observation and even isolation.

India and the Philippines reported their first cases, in a traveler and a student who had both been in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the new type of coronavirus first surfaced in December. South Korea confirmed a case that was locally spread, in a man who had contact with a patient diagnosed earlier.

Locally spread cases outside China have been a worrying concern among global health officials, as potential signs of the virus spreading more easily and the difficulty of containing it. The World Health Organization is reconvening experts on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

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A creature so rare that it has only a few recorded sightings across the world has been caught on camera by stunned scientists.

The benthic siphonophore, which looks like a single animal, is actually a “floating city” of many smaller organisms working together.

The creatures are so rarely seen that their ecology is almost unknown, though they are thought to make their home at depths of up to 3000m.

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Inspired by the functioning of the human brain and based on a biological mechanism called neuromodulation, it allows intelligent agents to adapt to unknown situations.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enabled the development of high-performance automatic learning techniques in recent years. However, these techniques are often applied task by task, which implies that an intelligent agent trained for one task will perform poorly on other tasks, even very similar ones. To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Liège (ULiège) have developed a based on a called . This algorithm makes it possible to create intelligent agents capable of performing tasks not encountered during training. This novel and exceptional result is presented this week in the magazine PLOS ONE.

Despite the immense progress in the field of AI in recent years, we are still very far from . Indeed, if current AI techniques allow to train computer agents to perform certain tasks better than humans when they are trained specifically for them, the performance of these same agents is often very disappointing when they are put in conditions (even slightly) different from those experienced during training.

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Russian scientists have proposed a concept of a thorium hybrid reactor in that obtains additional neutrons using high-temperature plasma held in a long magnetic trap. This project was applied in close collaboration between Tomsk Polytechnic University, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics (VNIITF), and Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS. The proposed thorium hybrid reactor is distinguished from today’s nuclear reactors by moderate power, relatively compact size, high operational safety, and a low level of radioactive waste.

“At the initial stage, we get relatively cold using special plasma guns. We retain the amount by deuterium gas injection. The injected neutral beams with particle energy of 100 keV into this plasma generate the high-energy deuterium and tritium ions and maintain the required temperature. Colliding with each other, deuterium and tritium ions are combined into a helium nucleus so high-energy neutrons are released. These neutrons can freely pass through the walls of the vacuum chamber, where the plasma is held by a magnetic field, and entering the area with nuclear fuel. After slowing down, they support the fission of heavy nuclei, which serves as the main source of energy released in the hybrid ,” says professor Andrei Arzhannikov, a chief researcher of Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS.

The main advantage of a hybrid nuclear fusion reactor is the simultaneous use of the fission reaction of heavy nuclei and synthesis of light ones. It minimizes the disadvantages of applying these nuclear reactions separately.

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The regenerative properties of axolotls has led to them become one of the most studied species of salamander in the world. In 2018 their genome, which is 10 times longer than that of humans, became the longest yet to be sequenced. However, understanding the functions of the genes associated with axolotl regeneration has proven a challenge for scientists, as they are contained within reams of repeated lengths of DNA.

Researchers at Yale University have developed a novel screening platform to potentially circumvent this problem, and bring the possibility of applying this regenerative process to humans a step closer. Their novel screening platform involved the creation of markers to track 25 of the genes suspected to be involved in axolotl limb regeneration.

“It regenerates almost anything after almost any injury that doesn’t kill it,” said Parker Flowers, co-author and Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University.

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There’s a good reason why we need to take a closer look at the sun. When the solar atmosphere releases its magnetic energy, it results in explosive phenomena like solar flares that hurl ultra-energized particles through the solar system in all directions, including ours. This […] can wreak havoc on things like GPS and electrical grids. Learning more about solar activity could give us more notice of when hazardous space weather is due to hit.

You can see structures on the surface as small as 18.5 miles in size.

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