 H.M.S. Challenger: Humanity's First Real Glimpse of the Deep Oceans
We know more about the surface of the moon than about the ocean floor. Scientists estimate that 91 percent of life under the sea hasn't been discovered yet and more than 80 percent of the ocean has never been explored. What we do know about the ocean makes it almost more mysterious. It's an alien landscape, complete with undersea mountain ranges and trenches deeper than Mount Everest is tall, home to a glorious nightmare carnival of weird, often glowing animals.
And most of what we kn...
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Premature Commercialization in Suicide Prediction
A Swedish company called Emotra make a device to detect someone's risk of suicide based on measuring the body's autonomic responses to certain sounds. It's called EDOR®.
I've been blogging about this machine for the past 18 months (1, 2, 3) because such a product, if it worked, would be very important. It could help save countless lives. Unfortunately, I don't think EDOR® has been proven to be effective. As I've argued in my previous posts, the evidence just isn't there yet.
Now,...
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How Passing Asteroids Reveal the Secrets of Distant Stars
Stars in the night sky appear as tiny points of light because they are too far away for your eyes to resolve. But even through powerful telescopes, stars still appear as mere points because they are too small to see their true physical size at vast distances. Now, a group of astronomers from over 20 different institutions has found a way to combine a unique telescope array with passing asteroids to measure the diameter of two distant stars, including the smallest star directly measured to da
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NASA Announces Upcoming ISS Crews, Which Won't Fly Commercial
Ever since the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has been paying Russia for rides to the International Space Station. They'd hoped that dependency would finally end in 2019. But with its new lineup of flights and launch dates released this week, the space agency acknowledged they're not quite done needing Russia's Soyuz rockets yet.
NASA will remain dependent on Russia for the next round of space station rotations. Thanks to delays in commercial launches by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA
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Two Neutron Stars Collide, Forming a Magnetar
In October 2017, astronomers announced the first detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars earlier that year. The event also rung in the era of multi-messenger astronomy, as more than 70 telescopes observed the event's afterglow in optical light, X-rays, gamma rays, and more. Now, an X-ray signal dubbed XT2 from a galaxy 6.6 billion light-years away has revealed another neutron star merger, which left behind a single, heavier neutron star with an incredibly powe...
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How A 'Snowball Chamber' Might Help Scientists Finally Find Dark Matter
If you enjoy watching videos on the internet, you've likely already witnessed the phenomenon known as supercooling. Basically, the process involves taking ultra-pure water and putting it into a clean, smooth container that lacks any structural defects. If the conditions are right, when you attempt to freeze the water by dropping its temperature below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius), it will surprisingly remain in a liquid state.
This is because in order for ice crystals...
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Scientists Discover 1.8 Million Hidden Southern California Earthquakes
Southern California is famous for its sandy beaches, wine country, theme parks and Hollywood glitz. And also its earthquakes. Now, researchers have identified more than 1.8 million previously unknown earthquakes that hit Southern California between 2008 and 2017. The findings suggest these truly tiny earthquakes — as small as just 0.3 magnitude on the Richter scale — happen every 174 seconds, yet they're hardly felt on Earth's surface.
"The goal was to produce a state of the art...
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Simbakubwa: Mega Carnivore Hiding In A Museum Drawer
Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what's now Kenya and you've got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The enormous bitey mammal was identified only after researchers rediscovered partial fossils of it, forgotten in the backroom of a museum.
To be clear, Simbakubwa is neither a bear nor a member of the extended feline family, even though its name is Swahili for "big lion." Instead, the mas
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The Quest For the Roots of Autism — and What It Says About Us All
As alarm grew over autism prevalence at the turn of this century, there was much public talk of a growing "epidemic." That language has since softened, and it is now clear that many autistic people were there all along, their condition unrecognized until relatively recently.
But what is the cause? The emerging narrative today is that there is no single cause — rather, multiple factors, roughly sorted into the categories of genetics and environment, work together in complex ways....
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We Might All Have Synesthesia, New Study Suggests
Oh, to be a synesthete, those rare people with access to an extra layer of perception. Sounds have colors. Words have taste. Colors play music. The list goes on. The phenomenon isn't totally understood by scientists, but the general idea is that those with synesthesia experience sensory inputs differently than the rest of us.
It's no wonder that synesthesia is common among artists. But for those of us that just see letters as letters and can't taste a song, synesthesia is more apt to ...
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Understanding the Sacrificial Puppies Found in Shang Dynasty Graves
During the last centuries of China's Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them.
Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to ac...
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Gobihadros: New Member of Duck-billed Dinosaur Dynasty
Toothy tyrannosaurs and enormous titanosaurs may be the most dramatic dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, but plant-eating hadrosaurs had the numbers. These widely-distributed animals, often called duck-billed dinosaurs, are among the most commonly found fossils from the period that stretched 66 million-100 million years ago. Yet the hadrosaur origin story remains a bit of a mystery. Today, a magnificent new find from Mongolia fills in some of the gaps.
Paleontologists unearthed multip...
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Tiny Star Flares 10 Times Brighter Than the Sun
On August 13, 2017, the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescope spotted an intense solar flare from a tiny star barely bigger than Jupiter. But despite this sun's diminutive size, the flare gave off as much energy as 80 billion megatons of TNT. That's 10 times as powerful as the strongest flare ever observed on our own sun. It's also the coolest star ever observed to give off such a hot flare, and the spectacular outburst is teaching astronomers the power of small stars.
Light it ...
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Turducken Space Rock: Antarctic Meteorite Hid Comet Inside Asteroid Remains
Our solar system is a whopping 4.5 billion years old. And those earliest days were some of the most interesting for astronomers. That's when the planets formed, building from dust grains into the whole worlds that now populate our space neighborhood. But most of this material has been drastically changed since its early days - incorporated into planets, or baked by the sun and weathered by time. However, if we could find material that hasn't been changed in some way it would help...
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Researchers Resuscitate Pig Brains Hours After Death
Researchers say they've rebooted pigs' brains four hours after the animals died. The scientists managed to restore some blood flow and brain cell activity to the dead animals' brains by pumping a protective solution through the tissue using a proprietary technology they call BrainEx. The brain was never alert and researchers did not restore consciousness, but the work could lead to new ways to aid recovery after trauma like heart attacks and strokes, the researchers say.
"BrainExâ...
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Aphid Suicide Squads Save Colonies With Body Ooze
Don't you just hate it when a moth larva busts in through the wall of your house like some squirmy lepidopteran Kool-Aid man? If you're a colony of aphids living in a gall, this is a real threat. But luckily there's a team of heroes ready to spring to action, even sacrifice themselves, to repair that wall and save the rest of the clan.
A team of Japanese researchers has been studying this phenomenon for over 15 years. Their latest work, out this week in PNAS, breaks down the interes...
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Astronomers Find Oldest Type of Molecule in Space
Everything has a beginning. That's true for stories, for people, for the universe and even for chemistry. The Big Bang itself produced just a handful of elements (variations of hydrogen, helium and lithium nuclei), so researchers have a pretty good sense of what the first atoms and molecules might have been. But the very first molecular bond to form, linking together atoms of different elements in a single molecule, has long been missing in action.
Known as a helium hydride ion (HeH+), ...
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NASA's Twins Study: How Spaceflight (Temporarily) Changes the Body
Brothers compete. So in 2016, when astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth after spending a year in space, it must have really annoyed his identical twin brother — retired astronaut Mark Kelly — that Scott was two inches taller than when he left. However, Scott's temporary increase in height was not the only thing that changed during his trip.
As part of NASA's Twins Study, while Scott was in space, Mark went about his daily life on Earth. Over the course of the year-long mission, res...
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Workplace Wellness Programs Change Some Behaviors But Not Outcomes
Turns out workplace wellness programs don't work so well. According to a large-scale study over 18 months — the first of its kind to study the issue — initiatives intended to help employees get healthier and more productive, and cost the boss less money, have decidedly lackluster results. Some employees did adopt better behaviors — or at least said they did. However, health outcomes and productivity did not change, and there was no benefit to the company's bottom line.
In the U....
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Regular Users of Marijuana Can Require More Sedatives During Medical Procedures
Increasing numbers of Americans are using marijuana. In some states, obtaining marijuana is as easy as walking into a store and picking out what catches the eye in a glass display case. But even as states move to legalize recreational and medical cannabis, it remains a taboo topic, even in doctors' offices.
Now, a new study suggests that keeping marijuana use secret from medical professionals probably isn't a good idea. A team of researchers in Colorado has found that people who r...
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Astronomers Find a Third Planet in This Weird 'Tatooine' Star System
Like the planet Tatooine from Star Wars, two suns — one bright, one dim and red— rise over the horizon of Kepler 47d. But unlike dry and sandy Tatooine, this planet's surface is gassy and indistinct. The system also holds two smaller planets; one planet closer to the double suns, and one farther out. Both lack a solid surface. If you visited in a spaceship, all the planets would be easy to spot because they're packed, along with their stars, into a space smaller than Earth's orbit ...
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Scientists Discover Genes Causing Age-Related Hearing Loss
Even though our ears get bigger as we age, our hearing tends to fade. This ironic problem is common and gets progressively worse the older we get. An estimated 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 have disabling hearing loss. And losing hearing can mean having a hard time understanding what people are saying, which can lead to social isolation and depression.
Although the tendency to lose hearing in old age gets passed on from generation to generation, little is known ab...
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Cassini Finds Deep Lakes and Phantom Ponds on Saturn's Moon Titan
Before NASA's Cassini spacecraft plunged into Saturn's depths, it performed a final 2017 flyby of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. This remote world is the only place in the solar system other than Earth that hosts large bodies of standing liquid. Titan's liquid is methane and ethane instead of water. But these lakes and seas make the moon one of the most interesting places in our solar system. And researchers are just starting to learn how these bodies of liquid change with Saturn's s...
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Meet the Snake That Hunts Birds With a Spider On Its Tail
When Steven Anderson first examined a specimen of the Iranian spider-tailed viper, he, of course, noticed the arachnid-shaped lump on the dead snake's tail. It was 1970, and the herpetologist was at the Field Museum in Chicago examining what the museum assumed to be a Persian horned viper, a snake common throughout the Middle East.
But this one had such a bizarre growth on its tail. To Anderson, a biologist who studies reptiles in Southeast Asia, it resembled "an oval knob-like struct...
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Researchers Are Unraveling How Ketamine Works as an Antidepressant in the Brain
Ketamine is making headlines left and right, and for good reason. The drug, once popular as both an anesthetic and among party-goers, has recently gained traction as a treatment for depression. In fact, the FDA approved the first ketamine antidepressant just a few weeks ago. Despite its rise, ketamine still has some unresolved issues: its effects don't last very long and the reasons behind why it works as an antidepressant are unclear. Now, a new paper in Science has revealed some of the m...
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Illuminating the night with curtains of light: the aurora borealis seen from above and below
I've been meaning to write a story about the aurora borealis ever since I captured photos of an astonishing display in January when I was visiting Tromsø, Norway to cover the Arctic Frontiers conference. Finally, the satellite image above offered the perfect excuse.
It was captured by the Suomi NPP spacecraft as it orbited above North America on March 28, 2019. The spacecraft has a nighttime sensor that can capture relatively faint emissions of light under varying illumination con...
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Meteor Showers Hitting the Moon Reveal Underground Water
When NASA astronauts first landed on the moon in 1969, they saw a desiccated world, bone-dry and devoid of any life-giving water. The Apollo astronauts, planning to stay only a few days, had brought plenty of water for their own needs. So this finding was disappointing for the hazy plans of future lunar outposts, but not immediately concerning.
Decades later, humans have learned that the only economical way to explore space longterm is to use the resources we find along the way. And lu...
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PepsiCo Partnered With a Russian Start-up Trying to Create Orbiting Billboards
The idea to launch billboards into space may have seemed like just another marketing gimmick. Back in January, Discover first reported on a Russian start-up company named StartRocket that said it wanted to use swarms of mini satellites called CubeSats to project ads on the night sky from low-Earth orbit. Readers reacted harshly to the announcement. Some called it "repulsive." Others urged boycotts of any company that took them up on the offer.
But the beverage giant PepsiCo actually...
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Why Apollo Had a Flammable Pure Oxygen Environment
Fire, as we know, needs three things: a source of heat, fuel and oxygen. Apollo lunar missions had all three in spades. There was plenty of electricity running through the spacecraft, lots of material that could be fuel and a 100 percent oxygen atmosphere under pressure. So why exactly did NASA design a spacecraft that was an explosion waiting to happen? (This is a question I get *a lot* so I hope this gives a full answer!)
[embed]No...
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TESS Spacecraft Finds its First Earth-Sized Planet Around Nearby Star
The next generation of exoplanet hunting has arrived in the form of NASA's Transiting Exoplanet and Survey Satellite. TESS looks at closer and brighter stars than Kepler, the spacecraft that first turned the trickle of exoplanet discoveries into a deluge. While TESS, which launched last year, is just beginning its sky search, it's already started discovering new planets. Astronomers say they've discovered an Earth-sized planet dubbed HD 21749 c that sits just 52 light-years from Earth...
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Ariana Grande's PTSD Brain Scan
The brain became a celebrity this week when Ariana Grande shared the results of a scan of her brain seemingly showing signs of severe PTSD:
Is there any science behind this?
Not really.
The source of the scan isn't clear but I'm 99% sure that the image was taken at one of Dr Daniel Amen's controversial clinics. Amen uses similar graphics in his brain scans. If it is an Amen scan, then the 'blobs' seen on Grande's brain represent areas of increased or decreased cerebral blood flow (C
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Watching Falcon Heavy Land is a Glimpse at the Future of Spaceflight
After a successful launch that delivered the Arabsat-6A satellite into its planned orbit, SpaceX also succeeded in landing all three of the boosters for their Falcon Heavy rocket — a first for the private space company. On a previous test flight, SpaceX landed and recovered only the side boosters. The launch was also Falcon Heavy's first commercial endeavor.
[embed]Three for three
After multiple delays throughout early Apr...
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The latest bomb cyclone swept dust from Mexico and Arizona all the way north to Minnesota
As the latest monster spring storm spun up over the U.S. Four Corners region on April 10, high winds drove huge amounts of dust all the way north to the Upper Midwest, where it fell as dirty snow.
You can see the low-pressure center of the cyclone spinning counter-clockwise in the animation above of GOES-16 weather satellite images. Below it, watch for the gargantuan plumes of khaki-colored dust being swept up and driven to the northeast.
Also check out the lighter, sand-colored patch...
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Israel's Beresheet Lander Crashes into Moon
Israel's Beresheet spacecraft, which was set to land on the moon today, suffered an engine and communications failure, causing it to instead crash into the lunar surface. Details are still emerging about what exactly went wrong.
Within the last five minutes or so of the landing procedure, mission control reported temporarily losing telemetry data before regaining it again. Shortly after, the main engine shut off, but engineers managed to restart it. Then, they reported a communications fa
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Running Made Us Human: How We Evolved to Run Marathons
This Monday the 123rd annual Boston Marathon will take place, with an expected 30,000 participants and a half million spectators. The top finishers should complete the grueling 26.2-mile course in just over 2 hours by clocking a pace of under five minutes per mile.
I know. It's painful to imagine. Most of us couldn't maintain that speed for one mile — forget 26 of them.
But take heart, recreational runners of the world. Your endurance abilities are actually extraordinary, when com...
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The Denisovans May Have Been More Than a Single Species
In anthropology, bones don't always tell the whole story. Ancient remains can be so rare that an entire species of hominids can be compressed into one single fragment of bone. Thousands of generations, millions of individuals, epic untold stories — and our only insight is a stray tooth, or a few curving shards of skull.
That leaves us without a true view of who these people were, even when it comes to our most recent ancestors, like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans. But a new study u...
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How A Good Gut Bacteria Became A Vicious Pathogen
In 1984, bacteria started showing up in patients' blood at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinic. Bacteria do not belong in the blood and such infections can quickly escalate into septic shock, a life threatening condition. Ultimately, blood samples revealed the culprit: A microbe that normally lives in the gut called Enterococcus faecalis had somehow infiltrated the patients' bloodstreams. Doctors typically treat infections with antibiotics, but these bugs proved resistant to...
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A Quarter of Japanese People in Their 20s and 30s Are Virgins, Study Finds
Nearly a quarter of Japanese people under age 39Â are virgins, according to a new analysis by a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo.
The findings, published in BMC Public Health, show that Japanese young adults are having less sex today than their counterparts were decades ago. Both men and women are having their first sexual encounters later in life, and many are entering their 30s as virgins.
While Japan's increasingly sexless generation may seem shocking, people in oth...
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Solution for Climate Change Could Come From A Few Targeted Actions
If you've been following climate news, you've probably heard about an approaching "tipping point" toward climate change — the point of no return after enough small changes brought us to certain disaster.
But what if the opposite were just as likely? One group of researchers thinks that a few small, positive changes could "tip" us back in the right direction. They're calling them "sensitive intervention points," or SIPs for short. And some of them might be inevitab...
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New Video Shows Mice Go Nuts In Space
Space travel, you may have heard, is hard. Hard on the brain, to design ways to slip the surly bonds of Earth in the first place, but also hard on the body, which needs to withstand conditions it was never designed for. If NASA's serious about sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars, we'll need to get a much better grasp on how spaceflight affects the human body. And instead of simply flying more and more people to space to find out all the potential effects, scientists have turne...
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'Technical Glitch' Doomed Israeli Beresheet Lander in its Final Moments
Israel's Beresheet spacecraft, which was set to land on the moon yesterday, suffered an engine and communications failure, causing it to crash into the lunar surface. Details are still emerging about what exactly went wrong.
SpaceIL and the Israeli Aerospace Agency (IAI), who built and operated Beresheet, have released a few specifics about the spacecraft's last moments. The trouble began when the lander was just 8.7 miles above the lunar surface, and was caused by a vague "technical g...
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Israeli Beresheet Mission Will Attempt to Land on the Moon Today
Update: Israel's Beresheet lander has crashed into the moon after suffering an engine and communications failure.
After a nearly seven-week adventure since its launch, the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft will attempt make history today and touch down on the surface of the moon at 10:25 p.m. Israel time (2:25 p.m. Central). It's a monumental undertaking and if it succeeds, Beresheet and its creators will join the select ranks of those who have safely landed on the moon - thus far only the ...
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The Real Story Behind Game of Thrones' Dragonglass
[This is a sneak preview of our June issue. Subscribe here to get access to many more great stories from Discover]
Shiny and sharp, obsidian is enjoying a bit of a pop culture moment. It plays a central role in HBO's hit fantasy series Game of Thrones, now wrapping its final season. Called dragonglass on the show, obsidian is one of only two substances that can cut down White Walkers, malevolent otherworldly warriors.
In the real world, the volcanic glass reveals the human story in a...
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Falcon Heavy Launch Delayed Again. Launch Now Targeted for Thursday Evening
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch was delayed again yesterday, this time due to high winds. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said back on April 5 that because this is the first launch of Falcon Heavy's Block 5, the latest and most powerful version of its boosters, they are being "extra cautious." Mission managers are now targeting this evening, again at 6:35 p.m. EDT, with an approximately two-hour launch window.
You can watch the livestream here or on SpaceX's website.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/w
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Mars' Methane Mystery Deepens with New Spacecraft Data
The European Space Agency's ExoMars spacecraft failed to find any traces of methane on the Red Planet during its hunt from April to August of 2018. This goes directly against recent positive reports of methane by ESA's own Mars Express spacecraft and NASA's Curiosity rover, which both saw methane in 2013.
ExoMars has a sensitive detector that can pick up just one-tenth the amount of methane that Mars Express witnessed. That leaves two options: either one set of observations is in erro...
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SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Prepares for First Commercial Liftoff Tonight
Editor's Note: This story has been updated from a previous version.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy will likely launch on its first commercial flight today. The rocket launch was postponed from early April due to unspecified concerns, and then postponed again just this week due to weather. But Wednesday has a clear forecast with an 80 percent probability of a launch, so odds are good the mission will proceed. The launch window opens at 6:35 p.m. EDT this evening and extends until 8:32 p.m. EDT on...
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Fossils Reveal A New Species of Ancient Human in the Philippines
At the northern tip of the Philippine island of Luzon lays Callao Cave, an expansive, seven-chamber limestone warren. Researchers report today they have uncovered the bones of a now-extinct, previously unknown human species near the far end of the first chamber. The discovery adds to growing evidence that human evolution and dispersal out of Africa is much more complicated than scientists once thought and and reinforces the importance of Southeast Asia in the history of our species. The rese
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What The Event Horizon Telescope Reveals About Galaxy M87
A massive international collaboration of researchers has released the first-ever direct image of the hellish environment surrounding a supermassive black hole. As part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, the team used a global array of telescopes to probe the fiery disk of material swirling around the gargantuan black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.
The results confirm that the hot gas swirling around a black hole is traveling at nearly the speed of light, creating a chaot
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Event Horizon Telescope Releases Humanity's First Ever Black Hole Image
On Wednesday, astronomers revealed the first image ever taken of a black hole, bringing a dramatic conclusion to a decades-long effort. The iconic image offers humanity its first glimpse at the gas and debris that swirl around its event horizon, the point beyond which material disappears forever. A favorite object of science fiction has finally been made real on screen.
Their target was a nearby galaxy dubbed M87 and its supermassive black hole, which packs the mass of six and half billio
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The Event Horizon Telescope: How It Works
A black hole isn't an easy thing to photograph. The famously inscrutable objects are so dense that even light can't escape their vicinity. By definition, they are invisible. So when the Event Horizon Telescope team released the first image of a black hole, but what they really released is an image of the black hole's event horizon — the minimum distance from the black hole's center where gravity is still weak enough for light to escape.
And how they imaged the supermassive black ...
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Inside The Event Horizon Telescope's Quixotic Quest to Image a Black Hole
Trying to take a picture of a black hole — an object that is, by definition, invisible—sounds like an exercise in futility. But for decades, theoreticians suspected it may just be possible to get a detailed view of a black hole's perimeter, right up to the edge of the event horizon, the fabled point of no return. And a core group of astronomers spent years trying to turn that prediction into reality. Now, they finally have.
Astronomers announced Wednesday that they'd captured a cl...
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It Took 10 Million Years for Biodiversity to Recover From Dino-killing Impact
Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid struck off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, killing 75 percent of life on Earth, including the non-avian dinosaurs. The space rock left a roughly 100-mile-wide crater and destroyed global ecosystems. Now, a new study shows that it took more than 10 million years of evolution before biodiversity recovered.
And the scientists behind the study say their find carries a grave warning for our current era of human-caused extinction, dub...
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SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Prepares for First Commercial Liftoff Wednesday
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy will launch on its first commercial flight tomorrow. The rocket launch was postponed from early April due to unspecified concerns, and then postponed again just this week due to weather. But Wednesday has a clear forecast with an 80% probability of a launch, so odds are good the mission will proceed. The launch window opens at 6:35am EDT.
Falcon Heavy is a modified version of SpaceX's standard Falcon 9 rocket, essentially made up of three Falcon 9's strapped to...
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Analysis of 4 Million Pitches Reveals Umps Really Do Suck at Calling Strikes
Baseball is back, and fans can anticipate another season of amazing catches, overpowering pitching, tape-measure home runs - and, yes, controversial calls that lead to blow-ups between umpires and players.
Home plate umpires are at the heart of baseball; every single pitch can require a judgment call. Yet ask any fan or player, and they'll tell you that many of these calls are incorrect - errors that can affect strategy, statistics and even game outcomes.
Just how many mistakes a...
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A Beautiful Look at a Hostile Planet
One of the great challenges in searching for life on other planets is that we still have so much to learn about life on our own Earth. Amazingly, that is true not only at the micro level of biochemistry and genetic codes, but at the macro level as well. You would think that there would be little left to learn about elephants, bears, penguins, and jaguars--the creatures sometimes lumped together by jaded zoologists as "charismatic megafauna"--but you would be wrong.
The new series "Hostile
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Weak Electrical Currents Can Restore Working Memory In Older Adults
It's not just you. As you age, it gets harder to remember the digits of a phone number, or calculate how much tip to leave without resorting to an app. Our so-called "working memory" is responsible for keeping this kind of information at the forefront of the mind. And it fades with age.
Now researchers have found that stimulating the brain with weak electrical currents can restore working memory in older adults. The discovery lays the groundwork for combating memory decline with ag...
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The Human Brain Has been Getting Smaller Since the Stone Age
I don't mean to alarm you, but the average human brain size is shrinking. And we can't blame reality T.V. or twitter. No, this decline began tens of thousands of years ago.
It's something of a well-known secret among anthropologists: Based on measurements of skulls, the average brain volume of Homo sapiens has reportedly decreased by roughly 10 percent in the past 40,000 years. This reduction is a reversal of the trend of cranial expansion, which had been occurring in human evoluti...
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The Driver is the Brain of the Car
Suppose, if you will, that alien scientists came down to Earth and began to study the local lifeforms. But let's suppose that these aliens arrive by the side of a busy expressway, and stay there. Our extraterrestrials might conclude that cars are the dominant inhabitants of Earth.
Cars clearly exhibit intelligent behaviour, being able to navigate around obstacles and follow complex instructions on road signs. How, the aliens may wonder, do the cars manage this? What is the seat of car int
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Now in Lunar Orbit, Israel's Beresheet Mission Preps for Moon Landing
The scrappy Israeli Beresheet mission successfully entered lunar orbit on April 4, joining a select club of nations and agencies that have ever circled the moon. This morning, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), who built and operate the spacecraft, released its first close-up pictures of the moon's mysterious far side. And next week, on April 11, Beresheet will make its most daring maneuver as it attempts to land on the lunar surface.
Slow but steady
Beresheet lifted off ...
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Craft Beer's Quest For The Funky Flavors of Wild Yeast
Whether your preferred pint is crisp or hoppy, fruity or caramelly, you owe a lot to the single-celled fungus doing the important work of putting the booze in your brews. Hops may get most of the love on the craft beer scene, but yeast is an overlooked heavy-hitter when it comes to giving beer flavor.
"Cool people are obsessed with yeast," says Simon McConico, co-owner of Milwaukee's Vennture Brew. "It's because hops are sexy; yeast is a bit more nuanced."
He adds, "Yeast...
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The Decades-long Struggle to Draw a Realistic Black Hole
We're probably going to get our very first actual picture of a black hole next week. Researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have scheduled a press conference for the morning of April 10, and they're expected to unveil an image of a supermassive black hole.
It will be the first time humanity has actually seen one of the massive objects with our own eyes, and scientists are understandably excited about what the image will tell them.
Cosmic Elephants
But, images of black holes
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A Planet's Core and a Dead Star Give Us a Glimpse of Earth's Future
White dwarfs are weird objects. These dense cores of dead stars pack as much mass as the Sun into a body about the size of Earth. They're left behind when a small- to mid-sized star ends its life by ballooning into a red giant and blowing off its outer layers in a series of explosive pulses. Although these puffs of ejected material eventually create a beautiful and expansive cloud of glowing gas called a planetary nebula, the process unfortunately tends to wreak havoc on any planets ...
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As the Arctic heads into the warm melt-season, sea ice is tracking at record lows
As winter gives way to spring in the Arctic, the region's lid of floating sea ice is shriveling much more sharply than normal.
According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center's latest monthly update, published April 3, Arctic sea ice reached its maximum extent on March 13, which marked the end of the winter season. Since then, warming spring temperatures have caused the ice to shrink — and lately, the shrinkage has been record-setting.
Late-March ice losses in the Bering Sea be...
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The Light Triad: Psychologists Outline the Personality Traits of Everyday Saints
If stories about psychopaths fascinate you, you might've heard of something called the dark triad. It's a trio of traits that psychologists developed in the early 2000s to measure the more sinister aspects of human personality. Now, a team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hawai'i-West O'ahu has finally crafted a counterpart test of the so-called light triad traits.
Dark Vs. Light
Given the human tendency toward morbid curiosity, it's no surprise we'...
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SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Completes Engine Test Fire, Readies for First Commercial Launch
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket completed a static fire engine test shortly after 11am eastern today, in preparation for its first commercial launch next week. This will mark the second-ever flight of Falcon Heavy, delivering a communications satellite into space.
Falcon Flight
The test firing this morning went well, and mission managers are now targeting a launch on April 9. This is a slight delay from the earlier April 7 launch date, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warns the date might slip agai...
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Hayabusa2 is Going to Blow a Crater in an Asteroid Tonight
The Japanese Hayabusa2 mission has been in orbit around the asteroid Ryugu since June 2018, but tonight is its most spectacular event. In a few hours, the spacecraft will drop off its carry-on impactor, scurry to a safe hiding spot, and then blow a crater into the side of its asteroid home. The spacecraft has spent its time so far studying the asteroid's rocky and weathered surface, and researchers now hope to get a glimpse of the inside of Ryugu.
Boom Goes the Dynamite
Hayabusa2 wil...
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TESS Spots an Exocomet Around One of the Brightest Stars
The planet-hunting TESS telescope has big shoes to fill — shoes that once belonged to Kepler. Before its retirement last October, the pioneering Kepler Space Telescope spent 10 years paving the way for the search for planets (and possibly life) outside the solar system. Of the nearly 4,000 exoplanets found around other stars to date, Kepler found more than half. But now, TESS is up to bat. And it's already off to a great start.
Over the next two years, TESS is expected to find rough...
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Four-legged Whale Fossil Reveals When Whales Reached The Americas
Whales evolved from hoofed, four-legged land walkers in south Asia more than 50 million years ago. Now researchers have unearthed the skeleton of an ancient four-legged whale in Peru. The discovery sheds light on how cetaceans dispersed from the Indo-Pakistan region to the Pacific Ocean.
"The new find from Peru is the geologically oldest quadrupedal whale from the Americas, so it gives a minimum age [for] when they reached the New World," said Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at the ...
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Scientists Discover A Protein That Seems to Fight Aging In Our Skin
In the quest for everlasting youth, many women buy hope in a jar. But despite being a multi-billion dollar industry, many skin creams and serums on the market don't deliver the age-defying results they promise. But now, scientists say that it may be possible to reverse our skin's timeline at the cellular level.
In a new paper published in Nature, a research team found that a collagen protein called COL17A1 plays a key role in maintaining youthful skin. Declining levels of this protein...
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Parker Solar Probe Will Zoom By the Sun Again Today
The Parker Solar Probe is zipping through the sun's outermost layers today at 213,000 miles per hour, enduring sizzling temperatures that would fry most other spacecraft. The probe will come within 15 million miles of the sun, reaching perihelion, its closest point, at 6:40pm EDT. But it's so close even now that it hasn't been able to send back data to Earth since March 30. The probe must keep its protective gear pointed straight toward the sun, leaving no wiggle room to point an anten...
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Offshore Human-Built Structures Offer Habitat For Dining Seabirds
These days, offshore oil and gas platforms, harbors, breakwaters, and offshore turbines, litter coastal areas. Artificial structures now alter more than 50 percent of some natural coastlines in Australia, the United States and Europe. The noise and the risk of collision raises concerns for marine life. But the human-built structures benefit wildlife, too.
Now researchers have discovered that wakes created by an offshore turbine produced a dining hotspot for seabirds. The discovery shows ...
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Scientists Find Out Why the Terracotta Army's Weapons Were So Well Preserved
To protect Chinese emperor Qin Shihuang in the afterlife, thousands of clay soldiers joined him underground some 2200 years ago. The discovery of this Terracotta Army in the 1970s was a great gift to archaeologists — and fans of "ancient lost technology" stories. The trope, which has some basis in fact, suggests that our ancestors were privy to some knowledge or technology that would still be useful, but has since been lost to the ages.
When researchers discovered that this buried, anc...
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Why Moisturizers With SPF Don't Work As Well As Sunscreen
Many facial moisturizers brag about their sun protection abilities. But new research shows that user error is stopping SPF-containing moisturizer from providing much of a defense against the sun's harmful rays.
Researchers found that people miss more of their faces when putting on moisturizer than they do when applying sunscreen. The findings mean we need to pay more attention to better protect against skin cancer. And, when it's really sunny out, sunscreen might be the better choic...
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Here's What Scientists Think Their First Picture of a Black Hole Might Look Like
Humanity may soon get its first-ever picture of a black hole. Scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced this week that they'll be holding a press conference Wednesday, April 10, and they're expected to reveal the results of their years-long quest to catch a black hole on camera.
What that picture will look like is still unknown. But scientists think they have a pretty good idea of what a black hole should look like. For years, astronomers have been running simulations...
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Why Do Humans Have Wisdom Teeth That Need to Be Removed?
Wisdom teeth seem like a biological mishap. Our third and final set of molars to grow, wisdom teeth don't quite fit in many people's mouths, leading to millions of surgeries per year. But in some people, these "extra" teeth come in just fine, while others don't have them at all.
What's the biological story here?
First let's establish what's probably not the story: Conventional wisdom about wisdom teeth assumes evolution was doing away with these unnecessary chompers until mod...
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Scientists Put Cameras on Sharks to Watch Them Hunt Seals in a Kelp Forest
Tall undulating seaweed known as kelp grows in thick underwater forests off the southern coasts of Africa. The kelp forests were once thought to provide a safe haven to Cape fur seals from great white sharks. Then researchers put GoPro-like high-resolution cameras on the predators.
Instead of being deterred by the underwater flora, the sharks dive right into thick kelp forests in pursuit of prey, the researchers find. It's a new discovery for shark researchers, who had previously thought
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SNAPSHOT: Underwater Archaeologists Find Pre-Incan Artifacts in Lake Titicaca
Underwater archaeologists excavating Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, South America, have been uncovering artifacts like this bowl. The finds offer clues to a long-vanished culture.
Recently, a group working on Khoa Reef at the lake have uncovered a number of ritual offerings, including ceramic puma shaped incense burners, the remains of sacrificial llamas, and ornaments made of shell, gold and stone.
The reef is located near the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), an important religious site
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Male Animals Might Benefit From Infecting Their Female Partners With STDs
(Inside Science) -- In the battle of the sexes, sexually transmitted diseases may sometimes be a weapon that males use to win. That's the conclusion of a new study that used mathematics to model an age-old evolutionary struggle: the quest to fill the next generation with as many of your offspring as possible.
The findings probably don't apply to humans, and the outcome would vary depending on the animals and diseases involved, said the researchers. But by infecting a female with an STD,...
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The Event Horizon Telescope May Soon Release First-Ever Black Hole Image
No, you can't actually take a picture of a black hole. But astronomers have promised to do the next best thing: To image the seething chaos just outside the black hole, known as its event horizon. To capture this region, just on the cusp of the black hole itself, astronomers have had to link telescopes from across the globe and focus them on the closest, most massive black holes known: Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"), which resides at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, as we...
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Science Uncovers the Secrets of Tennessee Whiskey
Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey is one of many made using the famed Lincoln County Process, which takes its name from the area where Jack Daniel's was first made. (Credit: monticello/shutterstock)
Champagne is only champagne if it's made in its namesake region in France, Scotch is exclusively distilled and matured in Scotland, and a "bourbon" label is reserved for products from the United States. And there's one variation on the bourbon recipe — Tennessee Whiskey — that's ma...
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Astronomers Discover a Second Galaxy Without Dark Matter
One year ago, astronomers announced their surprise discovery a galaxy almost entirely devoid of dark matter. As the first galaxy ever found lacking the elusive substance — which is thought to account for 85 percent of the universe's mass — the news rippled through the astronomical community. This left some researchers delightfully intrigued, and others understandably skeptical.
"If there's [only] one object, you always have a little voice in the back of your mind saying, 'but what ...
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The Grandmother Hypothesis Could Explain Why Women Live So Long
From an evolutionary perspective, the point of life is to procreate and pass on genes. That's why most animals keep reproducing until their deathbeds.
Yet in humans, females tend to live for decades after they're no longer fertile. All around the world, women experience menopause at around age 50 and routinely continue living into their 70s or 80s.
Few other primates ever live long enough to make it through menopause. The rare individuals that do are usually zoo captives, who s...
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Dark Matter is Real. "Dark Matter" is a Terrible Name for It
Astronomers have been grappling with the mystery of dark matter for a long time, and I mean a looong time. The history of dark-matter investigations goes back at least to 1906, when physicist Henri Poincare's 1906 speculated about the amount of "matière obscure" in the Milky Way. Or really, it goes to back to 1846 and the first successful detection of dark matter: the discovery of the planet Neptune, whose existence had been inferred by its gravitational pull well before it was actuall...
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Astronomers Finally Confirm Methane on Mars
Researchers have independently confirmed, for the first time, the detection of methane on Mars. For fifteen years, various research groups have claimed to see traces of methane in Mars' atmosphere. Intriguingly, these often appear as puffs of gas that appear and disappear over short timescales. Groups have hotly debated whether the methane might be evidence of life, or merely geologic processes. Other researchers have argued whether the methane truly exists at all, or if the detections are...
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There's a Ticking Time Bomb in the Constellation of Orion...
I'm a longtime fan of cosmic disaster scenarios. Not because I'm particularly gloomy (according to my friends and family, I'm actually more of a goof), but because they are fabulous ways to illustrate the workings of the universe. They are also great for making you appreciate the delicate set of contingencies that allow us to exist right now, right here on Earth. I wrote one of the first Armageddon-science articles, entitled "20 Ways the World Could End," which was published for the 20
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Colorado River Basin states agree on 'pain-sharing' plan to deal with drought affecting 40 million Americans
But the stop-gap measure, now before Congress, includes a provision that some regard as a major step backward
For the 40 million people who depend on water from the Colorado River Basin, including me, there's no escaping this stark reality: Our thirst for water exceeds what's actually available.
That's mostly because rising temperatures are sapping moisture from the environment even as demand for water resources in the region is going up.
The result: a run on the banks — lakes...
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Here's What Scientists Hope to Learn as LIGO Resumes Hunting Gravitational Waves
After a year of downtime to perform hardware upgrades, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is ready for action and will turn on its twin detectors, one in Washington state and the other in Louisiana, on April 1. This time, it will also be joined by the Virgo collaboration based out of Italy, and possibly also by the KAGRA detector in Japan later in the year. Combined with the hardware upgrades, scientists expect these updates to allow LIGO to spot more observations
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Hunting Cosmic Fireworks in the Magellanic Clouds
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the most stunning naked-eye sights you can spot in the southern sky. Over the past few billion years, these two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way have been locked in a complex dance that has led to numerous interactions between them. And each time they get close, their gravitational forces disrupt the gas clouds within them, spawning the formation of thousands of new star clusters.
Now, astronomers need...
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Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Stew In Wastewater Treatment Plants
Antibiotics save us from all kinds of unfortunate ailments, from strep throat to ear infections. But the bacteria that cause these and other ailments are gaining an edge. Antibiotic resistant bacteria are on the rise around the world and spreading in people as well as the environment, making it harder to treat infectious diseases.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria grow in places that humans interact with, like our water systems. Urban wastewater treatment plants teem with antibiotic resist...
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The Case for Trident: NASA's Shrinking Window for a Mission to Triton
The last and only time astronomers got a close look at Neptune's moon Triton was in 1989, when Voyager 2 sped by, taking images of just one side of the moon. But that brief encounter revealed plumes of material shooting out from a world so distant and cold that any activity was immediately fascinating. Scientists now think the moon has an underground ocean. This makes it a prime target for finding potential alien life in a frozen zone of the solar system well outside the standard Goldilo...
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Antihistamine-infused Contact Lenses Could Help With Allergies
With the warm weather upon us and the once-frozen plants coming back to life, springtime feels like a long-awaited oasis for most people. But for some, the resurgence of trees and grass can trigger seasonal allergies, and turn springtime into a sneezy, snotty mess. Instead of just popping your allergy meds and hoping for the best, a group of researchers think they may have just enabled a new approach to allergy relief.
Research published on March 19 in the journal Cornea shows how conta...
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Saturn's Small Moons Formed From The Dust of Its Rings
NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn may have ended in 2017, but researchers are still analyzing the vast amount of data it sent back over its final spectacular months. Astronomers most recent findings, published Thursday, center on five of Saturn's small ring moons: Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Pandora and Epimetheus. During six close flybys near the end of its mission, Cassini uncovered new insights into how the moons formed, and what gives them their different colors.
And astronomers say they...
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Dogs Can Smell Epileptic Seizures, Study Finds
People have long known that the canine sense of smell is a powerful tool. Dogs lend their super snouts to help find missing people, illegal drugs, and even screen for diseases like malaria and cancer. Now, scientists say that dogs can add a new talent to their sniffing repertoire: detecting seizures.
A small study has found that humans emit a distinct odor during epileptic seizures, and that some dogs can be trained to recognize the smell. In a new paper published in Scientific Reports t...
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High-tech Melanin Might Help Put Technology Inside Our Bodies
We have a complicated relationship with melanin, the natural chemical pigment that gives color to our eyes, hair and skin. It protects our skin from harmful radiation from the sun, but can also lead to cancer. There's also the whole matter of discrimination based on differences in physical appearance caused by melanin, which we as a species are apparently still working on.
Scientifically, things are no different. A type of melanin known as eumelanin is electrically conductive, meaning i...
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Scientists Create Blood Vessels That Become Living Tissue
Heart disease is the leading cause of death around the world. Many cardiovascular disorders damage blood vessels, the network of ducts the heart pumps blood through to send oxygen and nutrients to the rest of the body. But fixing damaged blood vessels often requires replacing them with blood vessels from other parts of the body or synthetic substitutes. Neither solution is great.
Now researchers report Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine that they have engineered art...
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