Sperm counts have decreased by more than 50%  in some wealthier nations, and that may be bad news for the future of the human race, scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an international team of colleagues warned this week in the journal Human Reproduction Update.

The researchers, led by Hebrew University epidemiologist Dr. Hagai Levine, reviewed data from 185 different studies conducted between 1973 and 2011 and discovered that sperm counts among men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand had fallen by nearly 60% in less than four decades, BBC News and New Scientist reported on Tuesday.

Specifically, the researchers conducted a meta-regression analysis of those previously-published studies and found a 52.4% decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3% drop in total sperm count among men from the affected areas, the study authors said in a statement. However, they added, no significant decline was detected among men living in Asia, Africa or South America.

While declines in sperm count have been reported since the early 1990s, the issues had remained steeped in controversy because of the limitations of previous research. However, Dr. Levine and his colleagues claim that study addresses those concerns by looking at a longer period of time, by using more rigorous analysis techniques and by controlling for possible confounding factors.

“Given the importance of sperm counts for male fertility and human health,” Dr. Levine said in an interview with New Scientist, “this study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp, ongoing drop in sperm count.”

Causes of the observed decline remain unclear

Furthermore, the authors say that their findings indicate that the rate of sperm count decline in affected Western men is not declining, as a significant drop was detected even when they looked only at studies that used samples collected between 1996 and 2011. Should these trends continue, Dr. Levine warned, it could pose a serious threat to the future of the human race.

“If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future. Eventually, we may have a problem… with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species,” the Hebrew University epidemiologist told BBC News.

Sheffield University professor Allan Pacey, who was not involved in the research, said that the new study “deals head-on with many of the deficiencies of previous studies” but did not remove the possibility of errors completely. “The debate has not yet been resolved,” he told BBC News, “[but] the paper does represent a step forward in the clarity of the data which might ultimately allow us to define better studies to examine this issue.”

Pacey also told New Scientist that, despite the decline, the average sperm count of Western men remained in the normal range. Possible causes of the reported decrease remain unclear, the study authors said, but previous reports have linked early exposure to chemicals used in pesticides and plastics, smoking, stress, obesity, diet and sedentary lifestyle to lower sperm counts.

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Image credit: Juergen Berger

For the first time in more than a century, researchers have discovered a new species of sunfish – a creature that could grow to nearly 10 feet (3 meters) in size and weigh at least two metric tons, and which is described in a recent edition of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The previously unknown species has been dubbed the Hoodwinker Sunfish (Mola tecta), and as Mashable explained, it was discovered by Australian Ph. D. student Marianne Nyegaard and her colleagues after a four-year hunt that started with samples of the creature’s skin and DNA.

As Nyegaard explained on the website The Conversation, she analyzed more than 150 samples of sunfish DNA as part of a population study conducted off the coast of Bali in Indonesia as part of her doctoral research. Sequencing the genomes of those samples revealed four distinct species of sunfish – three which were known, and a fourth that had never been identified.

Initially, “we didn’t even know what they looked like. All we had were skin samples containing the mysterious DNA,” she wrote. “The next step was trying to figure out what these fish might look like. Superficially, all sunfish look the same (that is, slightly strange)… So I started looking at pictures of sunfish, especially on social media, searching for something different.”

Finally, in 2014, she received pictures of sunfish spotted in Australia and New Zealand that had a strange structure on its back. Shortly thereafter, four of the creatures wound up becoming trapped on a beach in Christchurch, New Zealand, allowing her to get an up-close at the new species.

What the Hoodwinker Sunfish looks like (and how it got its name)

Unlike its relatives, the Hoodwinker Sunfish does not develop odd bumps on their head, chin and nose as they grow – their body dimensions change little as they grow older, Nyegaard said. Their back fins was also separated into upper and lower portions by a tiny, flexible piece of skin named the “back-fold,” and the creatures grow to sizes between 50 centimeters and 2.5 meters.

The Hoodwinker Sunfish is the first addition to the Mola genus in 130 years, Mashable said, and while its complete range remains unknown, it has been discovered throughout New Zealand (and particularly around the Southern Island), as well as Tasmania, South Australia, both Victoria and New South Wales (Australia), South Africa and southern Chile, the authors noted.

Based on the locations where the new species has been found, the researchers concluded that it appears to prefer swimming in colder waters. Furthermore, as is the case with most other sunfish, the Mola tecta appears to feed during deep dives into the water. Three of the specimens that they discovered had salps (a gelatinous sea creature somewhat similar to a jellyfish) in their digestive tracts, the researchers said.

“The new species managed to evade discovery for nearly three centuries by ‘hiding’ in a messy history of sunfish taxonomy, partially because they are so difficult to preserve and study, even for natural history museums,” Nyegaard, who was a student at the Murdoch University School of Veterinary and Life Sciences, explained in a statement. “That is why we named it Mola tecta (the Hoodwinker Sunfish), derived from the Latin tectus, meaning disguised or hidden.”

Confirming the status of the new species was not easy, she added: “The process we had to go through… included consulting publications from as far back as the 1500s, some of which also included descriptions of mermen and fantastical sea monsters… We retraced the steps of early naturalists and taxonomists to understand how such a large fish could have evaded discovery all this time. Overall we felt science had been repeatedly tricked by this cheeky species, which is why we named it the Hoodwinker.”

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Image credit: Murdoch University

Coffee is supposed to perk you up in the morning, but one particular brand containing a Viagra-like ingredient might give consumers more of a boost than they bargained for. The product has been voluntarily recalled because of the addition.

The ingredient was discovered by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in New of Kopi Jantan Tradisional Herbs Coffee, made by a company in North Texas. Bestherbs Coffee LLC is now voluntarily recalling any of the coffee sold between July 2014 and June 2016.

An FDA investigation uncovered the presence of desmethyl carbodenafil, which is structurally similar to the active ingredient in Viagra – sildenafil. The FDA then announced that the company was undertaking the voluntary withdrawal due to “undeclared active pharmaceutical ingredients and undeclared milk”.

Potential health risks

While the coffee was marketed as a “male enhancement product”, according to Time, the Viagra-like effects were not publicised, and the undeclared ingredients could cause serious health problems.

The FDA says the rogue ingredient “may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs, such as nitroglycerin, and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels. Men with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heart disease often take nitrates.

“In addition, people who have an allergy or severe sensitivity to milk run the risk of serious or life threatening allergic reaction if they consume this product.”

‘Like tequila in Mexico’

Bestherbs Coffee owner Albert Yee told The Washington Post that coffee such as this is hugely popular in Malaysia, and that “There are whole streets of it, like tequila in Mexico.” Believing Americans would also like the product, he began an import business.

Similar coffees, Stiff Bull Herbal Coffee and Caverlo Natural Herbal Coffee, also previously faced recalls after FDA investigation. Both supposedly contained Tongkat Ali, the root of a tree found in Malaysian rain forests. The root has long been popular in some cultures for having a similar effect to Viagra.

Stiff Bull Herbal Coffee claimed that at some point along the production chain, desmethyl carbodenafil had been mixed into their product in order to cut down on high costs of the Tongkat Ali, which is difficult to obtain. It is also very possible that this is how Mr Yee ended up with coffee that was more similar to Viagra than he had intended.

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Image credit: Glen Carrie/Unsplash

The large-scale movement of massive slabs of rock that divide the Earth described by the theory of plate tectonics may be essential for life on this planet – and on other planets as well, according to new research posted online earlier this month on the arXiv prepublication repository.

Plate tectonics, Live Science explained, is the theory that the planet’s outer shell is divided into a number of plates that glide over the mantle (the rocky layer that surrounds the core). The concept builds on the theory of continental drift by explaining how landmasses move around the Earth.

The plates in question are part of the hard, rigid, outermost shell known as the lithosphere, which glide over the mantle. Their motion serves as the driving force behind all geological features on a planet’s surface, and that movement is the result of convection in the mantle, the website said.

According to Scientific American, Earth is the only planet known to host both plate tectonics and biological life, and many scientists believe that there could be a link between the two. Some even argue that by helping to regulate a planet’s temperature over billions of years, shifting plates may actually be an essential ingredient for the existence of living organisms.

To further investigate this potential link, Arizona State University researcher Cayman Unterborn and his colleagues set out to determine the chances that exoplanets could undergo plate tectonics. They concluded that most of these distant worlds would be unable to do so for prolonged periods of time, although the results remains somewhat inconclusive.

Elemental composition the key to sustainable plate tectonics

As Unterborn’s team explained in their paper, the tectonic processes that take place on Earth are driving largely by the sinking of cold subducting plates into the underlying mantle – which is due in part to metamorphic transitions in the basaltic oceanic crust and the lithospheric mantle.

Those transitions, the study authors explained, are dependant upon the elemental composition of our planet – specifically, the quantities of the planet-building elements magnesium, silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum and sodium, which they noted: “vary in abundance across the galaxy.” Planets with contain higher concentrations of silicon and sodium, the researchers found, are less likely to undergo sustained plate tectonics.

“We find only 1/3 of the range of stellar compositions observed in the galaxy is likely to host planets able to sustain density-driven tectonics compared to the… Earth,” Unterbone and his colleagues wrote. “Systems outside of this compositional range are less likely to produce planets able to tectonically regulate their climate and may be inhospitable to life as we know it.”

“If you do need plate tectonics [to maintain life], this paper sounds like bad news,” Weber State University astronomer John Armstrong, who was not involved in the study, said in an interview with Scientific American. However, given that experts believe that there may be up to 40 billion potentially-habitable Earth-sized planets in the galaxy, even if only one-third (around 13 billion) can sustain plate tectonics, that’s “still a lot of possible habitable worlds,” he added.

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Image credit: ESA / Hubble, M. Kornmesser

Doctors were purportedly able to reverse brain damage suffered by a little girl who spent 15 minutes in the water, and whose heart did not beat on its own for two hours after the incident, according to research published this week in the journal Medical Gas Research.

According to Gizmodo and ScienceAlert, two-year-old Eden Carlson slipped past a baby gate, got outside and fell into her family’s pool while her mother was showering in February of 2016. She spent 15 minutes in 41-degree Fahrenheit water, suffering cardiac arrest as a result.

Eden was taken to Washington Regional Medical Centre in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she was revived two hours after being rescued. As a result of the drowning, she suffered damage to both the brain’s white and grey matter, and could no longer to speak or walk. Furthermore, she was unable to respond to voices and would shake her head uncontrollably, reports said.

In the hopes of reversing the brain damage,  Dr. Paul G. Harch from LSU Health New Orleans and his colleagues began what Gizmodo referred to as a “controversial” course of therapy: they administered pure oxygen gas, both at normal pressure and inside of a high-pressure hyperbaric oxygen treatment (HBOT) chamber, and managed to reverse the brain damage.

How the doctors managed to achieve ‘startling’ tissue regrowth

As the hospital explained in a statement, HBOT was not available at the Fayetteville, Arkansas hospital where Eden was initially being treated, so Dr. Harch began what is known as a bridging treatment to prevent permanent tissue degeneration until such treatments could be started.

He began administering short-duration treatment with normal (normobaric) oxygen, twice a day for a period of 45 minutes, through an airflow device. Those treatments started 55 days after the initial drowning incident, and eventually, the patient stopped squirming, became more alert, and eventually, she started moving her limbs and speaking with a limited vocabulary.

Twenty-three days after the normobaric oxygen therapy began, Eden and her family travelled to New Orleans, where Dr. Harch and his colleagues began treating her with HBOT. The little girl “dove” in a hyperbaric chamber for 45 minutes per day, five days per week for eight weeks, and after just 10 sessions, Eden’s mother reported that her daughter was performing at “near normal” levels in all areas expect gross motor function, at which time she started physical therapy.

After 39 sessions, the hospital said that the girl was able to walk with assistance, could speak at a level greater than she was capable of prior to drowning, had normal cognitive function and close-to-normal motor function and showed improvement on nearly all neurological abnormalities. An MRI performed 27 days after the final treatment session showed that there was a “near-complete reversal of cortical and white matter atrophy,” officials from LSU Health New Orleans said in a statement.

“The startling regrowth of tissue, in this case, occurred because we were able to intervene early in a growing child, before long-term tissue degeneration,” Dr. Harch explained. “In the absence of HBOT therapy, short duration, repetitive normobaric oxygen therapy may be an option until HBOT is available. Such low-risk medical treatment may have a profound effect on recovery of function in similar patients who are neurologically devastated by drowning.”

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Image credit: Eden Carlson/YouTube

Given the vastly different appearances of different dog breeds, it might be difficult to accept that all of them can trace their ancestors back to a single group of wolves, but that’s exactly what new research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications claimed happened.

In their paper, Dr. Krishna Veeramah, an assistant professor of ecology & evolution in the Stony Brook University College of Arts & Sciences, and his colleagues wrote that DNA collected from a pair of prehistoric dogs from Germany suggested that all modern dogs shared a single origin.

The genomes of those ancient dogs indicate that they were the likely progenitors of modern-day European dogs, the research team said, and their findings counter research published in 2016 that suggested that dogs were actually domesticated on two separate occasions, The Verge noted.

“Contrary to the results of this previous analysis,” we found that our ancient dogs from the same time period were very similar to modern European dogs, including the majority of breed dogs people keep as pets,” Dr. Veeramah explained in a press release. “This suggests that… there was likely only a single domestication event for the dogs observed in the fossil record from the Stone Age and that we also see and live with today.”

More DNA samples needed to end the debate once and for all

While the new study suggests that modern canines were domesticated once, between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, a different group of scientists published a paper last year which suggested that dogs were actually domesticated twice – once in Europe and once in Asia, with some of the latter dogs eventually replacing some early European dogs, according to Nature and The Verge.

However, after studying a 7,000-year-old dog fossil, as well as two others dating back between 4,700 and 5,000 years ago, and comparing their genome sequences to those of 5,649 wolves and modern dogs, Dr. Veeramah’s team disputes those findings. Instead, they argue that a lone group of dogs were likely domesticated, then later divided into two groups (Eastern and Western).

One of the reasons for the single-domestication conclusion of the new study, The Verge noted, is the fact that the authors of the 2016 two-domestication study shared their data with the authors of the newer paper. The team behind the earlier study reported findings traces of what they believed may have been an earlier, extinct European lineage in a 5,000-year-old Irish dog fossil. However, the authors of the newer paper said that they found no such evidence in the dog’s DNA – instead, they reported finding a technical error they believe tainted the earlier study’s findings.

Dr. Veeramah admits that this is likely far from the end of the debate over the origins of modern-day dogs. “Archaeologists suggest one and geneticists suggest another. People are always getting very different answers,” he explained in an interview with Nature. “More ancient dog DNA from genomes will ultimately solve the problem.”

“If we can add in other ancient samples from all around the world, it’ll give us a more comprehensive picture of population history and likely dog origins,” noted Cornell University geneticist Adam Boyko, who was not involved in the research. Those samples, however, must come from different parts of the world and different eras emphasized Boyko, who according to Nature is currently building an international database of canine genomes.

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Image credit: Vincent Munier/naturepl.com

While movies such as Jurassic Park would have you believe that a Tyrannosaurus rex would be capable of chasing down its prey at high speeds, new research published this week in the journal PeerJ has revealed that the massive predator could manage a top speed of just 12 mph.

In their study, William Sellers, a professor at the University of Manchester School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and his colleagues explained that the enormous carnivore was too large and too heavy to have traveled faster than 5.4 meters per second (12 mph) without collapsing.

While that’s about the equivalent of a brisk walk, as Gizmodo pointed out, the T. rex would still have been able to overtake most humans, as the typical person can sprint at speeds of between 8 and 15 mph, with only elite athletes capable of reaching velocities in the 20 mph range.

Sellers and his colleagues conducted an in-depth analysis of T. rex biomechanics, combining two different techniques – multi-body dynamic analysis (MBDA) and skeletal stress analysis (SSA) – and combining them into a single simulation model for improved accuracy. They discovered that the creature’s leg bones would have buckled under their own weight at higher speeds.

Predator would have still to be faster than its potential prey

Running gaits, the professor explained in a statement, would have resulted in “unacceptably high skeletal loads” and, most likely, in broken legs for the sprinting predator. The new study counters previous research suggesting that the T. rex was capable of running at speeds of up to 45 mph.

“Different studies using differing methodologies have produced a very wide range of top speed estimates,” Sellers noted. However, by utilizing “a new approach that combines two separate biomechanical techniques,” his team established that “true running gaits would probably lead to unacceptably high skeletal loads in T. rex,” he added.

Paleontologists had never combined MBDA and SSA to study the biomechanical properties of an animal before, Gizmodo said, and the new method allowed them to account for the amount of pressure that bones can manage before breaking. The new simulations calculated all of the forces in the limb bones of the T. rex to see what type of speed and impact that they could handle.

In addition to determining that the T. rex was far slower than some studies have suggested, the study authors concluded that the creature walked briskly in a “bird-like” manner. Even so, as the website noted, it still would have been more than capable of tracking down prey, as nearly all of the herbivores present in its environment would have traveled at much slower speeds.

“Our previous simulations of theropod bi-pedal running did not directly consider the skeletal loading but these new simulations do calculate all the forces in the limb bones and these can be used directly to estimate the bone loading on impact,” Sellers said. “It would be very valuable not only to investigate the gait of other species but also apply our multiphysics approach to different growth stages within that species.”

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Image credit: University of Manchester

Maryam Mirzakhani, the Stanford University professor who in 2014 became the first and to date only woman to win the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize, died Friday after a long battle with breast cancer, BBC News, the New York Times and other media outlets have reported.

Born in Tehran, Iran in May 1977, Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal (an honor given to between two and four mathematicians under the age of forty every four years) three years ago for her work on the interplay of dynamics and complex geometry, according to published reports.

Mirzakhani joined the Stanford faculty in 2008 and remained a professor there until her death, the university said in a statement. She had been battling breast cancer for several years, and the illness had recently spread to her liver and bones. Mirzakhani was 40 at the time of her passing, and is survived by her husband, Jan Vondrák, and a daughter, Anahita.

In an interview with the New York Times, Princeton University mathematician Peter C. Sarnak called her death “a big loss and shock to the mathematical community worldwide… She was in the midst of doing fantastic work. Not only did she solve many problems; in solving problems, she developed tools that are now the bread and butter of people working in the field.”

“Maryam is gone far too soon,” Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement, “but her impact will live on for the thousands of women she inspired to pursue math and science… Her contributions as both a scholar and a role model are significant and enduring, and she will be dearly missed here at Stanford and around the world.”

‘Brilliant’ researcher ‘embodied’ the spirit of a mathematician

According to the university, Mirzakhani specialized in the fields of moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry, using these complicated approaches to describe the geometric and dynamic complexities of curved surfaces like spheres and doughnuts in as much detail as possible.

While the majority of her work was theoretical in nature, Stanford explained, it could have an impact on the theoretical physics of the universe’s origins, as well as on the fields of engineering and material sciences (through quantum field theory) and mathematical cryptography. In addition to being the first female winner of the Fields Medal, she was also the first Iranian mathematician to receive the honor, according to BBC News.

“Maryam was a brilliant mathematical theorist, and also a humble person who accepted honors only with the hope that it might encourage others to follow her path,” said Tessier-Lavigne. Her Stanford colleague, Ralph L. Cohen, caller her a “a wonderful colleague” who “not only was a brilliant and fearless researcher, but she was also a great teacher and terrific PhD adviser.”

“Maryam embodied what being a mathematician or scientist is all about:  the attempt to solve a problem that hadn’t been solved before, or to understand something that hadn’t been understood before,” Cohen added. “This is driven by a deep intellectual curiosity, and there is great joy and satisfaction with every bit of success. Maryam had one of the great intellects of our time, and she was a wonderful person.  She will be tremendously missed.”

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Image credit: Getty

Ravens have proven themselves capable of planning ahead, according to new research published this week in the journal Science that demonstrated that these members of the corvid family could be trained to stash away a tool that they would need to use later while still in the wild.

Thinking ahead was once believed to be a uniquely human trait, but in recent years, experts have found that some adult great apes are also capable of pre-planning. Now, two cognitive zoologists from Lund University in Sweden have established that ravens possess a similar aptitude.

The zoologists, Can Kabadayi and Mathias Osvath, conducted a series of experiments to find out if a group of ravens could flexibly plan to use tools and barter with each other – tasks which they typically do not perform, but which are similar to those used to evaluate a great ape’s aptitude for planning ahead, according to NPR and New Scientist.

In one experiment, the ravens were trained to open a box that contained a piece of dry dog food by dropping a stone through a small tube. Then, after a short delay, the birds were shown several different objects without the reward box to see if they could select the correct item, and then save it for future use.

Initially, there was a 15 minute delay between the ravens’ selection of the object and the return of the reward box, and during this experiment, the ravens succeeded 86% of the time. Later, the researchers increased that wait time to 17 hours, but the success rate went up, not down – in fact, the birds succeeded at the task 88% of the time, according to NPR.

Findings suggest that the trait evolved independently in corvids

In another experiment, the birds participated in a bartering test, said New Scientist. Once again, they received training on how to use an object, but this time, they had to exchange said item for a reward. Afterwards, they had to select the correct item, hold onto it for 15 minutes, and the trade it with one of the researchers for a reward.

They succeeded nearly 77% of the time, so Kabadayi and Osvath once again increased the delay between the selection of the tool and its use to 17 hours, and once again, the ravens’ success rate went up. Despite the lengthy delay, the birds succeeded nearly nine out of every 10 times.

Based on the results of these experiments, the researchers wrote, “It is conservative to conclude that ravens perform similarly to great apes and young children” – and, it should be noted, better than monkeys, who have failed similar experiments in the past, according to NPR. Furthermore, they told New Scientist, the birds were clearly planning ahead from the first experiment onward, indicating that this was not merely a case of habituation.

The research shows that “ravens plan for events unrelated to caching – tool-use and bartering – with delays of up to 17 hours, exert self-control, and consider temporal distance to future events. Their performance parallels that seen in apes and suggests that planning evolved independently in corvids, which opens new avenues for the study of cognitive evolution,” the authors wrote.

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Image credit: Unsplash/Tyler Quiring

One of the largest icebergs ever recorded – a massive chunk of frozen water that is roughly the same size as the state of Delaware and which weighs more than a trillion tons – has broken away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, experts have confirmed using NASA satellites.

According to BBC News and the Los Angeles Times, the 1.12 trillion ton iceberg (which is large enough to completely fill Lake Erie twice) was confirmed to have broken away from the ice shelf on Wednesday and is now floating freely in the Weddell Sea, north of West Antarctica.

The calving event took place sometime between Monday, July 10 and Wednesday, July 12, and was confirmed Project Midas, a group of scientists from Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in the UK, using the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument, the US space agency said in a statement.

Scientists had been monitoring the condition of the Larsen C ice shelf for years, and particularly since January. That’s when a rift in the glacier grew by approximately 120 miles, which left the iceberg attached to the larger ice shelf by a less than three-mile-wide string of frozen water.

“We have been anticipating this event for months, and have been surprised how long it took for the rift to break through the final few kilometers of ice,” Project Midas lead investigator Adrian Luckman said in a blog post. “We will continue to monitor both the impact of this calving event on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, and the fate of this huge iceberg.”

Was climate change a factor, and what happens to the region now?

Although the iceberg poses no immediate threat to global sea levels, scientists told the Times that they are concerned that the massive glacier – one of the largest ever recorded – could have a long lasting impact on the continent and may be a harbinger of what’s to come due to climate change.

“When they break up, you just open the flood gates,” Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told the newspaper. While the Larsen C ice shelf is not in immediate danger, Rignot added,  “more bergs will detach; it will become weaker and eventually fall apart in a domino effect.”

According to Luckman, the size of the iceberg makes it “difficult to predict” how it will behave in near future. “It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments. Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters.” However, as the Times noted, this calving event reduced Larsen C’s size by at least 12% and has caused some concern that the rest of the shelf could ultimately become destabilized.

“In the ensuing months and years, the ice shelf could either gradually regrow, or may suffer further calving events which may eventually lead to collapse – opinions in the scientific community are divided,” Luckman said. “Our models say it will be less stable, but any future collapse remains years or decades away.”

However, one thing that Project Midas glaciologist Martin O’Leary emphasized is that this was a natural event and that he and his colleagues found no link to man-made climate change. Even so the calving event has pushed Larsen C’s extent back further than at any other time in history, and the research team believes that this will give them an opportunity to study how the glacier will be affected by rising air and ocean temperatures.

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Image credit: NASA Worldview

A former NASA engineer best known for his work on the Curiosity rover has designed a new, high-speed water delivery device – but this isn’t some kind of next-gen irrigation system, or a way to bring drinkable H20 to third world countries. Rather, it’s a big-ass SuperSoaker.

Specifically, it’s a big-ass SuperSoaker capable of firing streams of water at speeds of up to 272 miles per hour and producing enough force to shatter glass and carve a melon in half, according to The Verge. Not really the sort of thing you’d want your kids to play with, if we’re honest.

The mad genius behind the device is Mark Rober, a nine-year veteran of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California who is no stranger to tweaking toys, as Gizmodo pointed out: last summer, he created “the world’s largest Nerf dart gun,” which could fire foam darts at a top speed of 40 mph. Even that, however, pales in comparison to his latest creation.

Rober’s oversized water gun, which has apparently been certified as the largest ever created by the folks at Guinness, is seven-feet long and can be pressurized to 2,400 PSI. Even though it is far larger and much more powerful than SuperSoakers sold in stores, it still operates in basically the same way, according to The Verge: air (in this case, nitrogen gas) is pressurized and pumped into a water tank, where it is then released in a stream once the trigger is pulled.

While this is clearly no child’s toy, Rober has posted a parts list and a set of instructions online for enterprising men and women who may want to try and replicate his feat. However, using the pressurized nitrogen can be dangerous, and since Rober is a trained engineer and you (probably) aren’t, you may want to leave the creation of comically-oversized and overpowered child’s toys to the professionals.

Meet the man responsible – and some of his other inventions

Rober, who graduated from Brigham Young University with a mechanical engineering degree and went on to earn a Master’s degree from the University of Southern California, helped design and develop hardware for several NASA projects before leaving the agency back in 2014.

While still working at NASA, Rober launched a costume company called Digital Dudz working in his spare time. Digital Dudz became a massive success, thanks largely to videos he posted on YouTube, and he went on to earn a reported $250,000 in just three weeks. Rober eventually sold the company to UK-based costume-maker Morphsuits. He worked for Morphsuits for two years before departing and returning to his engineering roots.

In addition to the massive SuperSoaker and the oversized Nerf gun (which was capable of firing foam darts more than 130 yards and was also certified as a Guinness record), Rober has created a series of other unique items that he has featured in videos, including a motion-sensing dart board that automatically changes positions in order to guarantee a bull’s-eye with every throw.

That device, Gizmodo explained, took Rober three years to create and uses six motion-tracking cameras to operate. It uses regular darts, and once a person fires one towards the target, it takes only 200 milliseconds for computers to predict the trajectory of the throw and another 200 for the dart board’s motors to move it into the correct position. The board can reportedly reposition itself up to 100 times before impact, virtually guaranteeing a perfect result.

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Image credit: Screen capture/Mark Rober/YouTube