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(Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech) Extraterrestrial objects are constantly bombarding Earth; thankfully the vast majority are microscopic. Thanks to the planet’s atmosphere, we live largely unaware of this celestial fusillade, which averages about 100 tons a day and mostly burns up long before hitting the ground. From the few that do make impact, researchers can gather clues about the composition of our solar system, with the goal of understanding how planets and other b ...read more

“I am fearful this will affect the Arctic in ways that we have not seen yet” — Margot Wallström, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden Donald J. Trump walks out of the U.S. Capitol to be sworn in as America’s 45th President. (Source: White House Facebook page) Note: I’ve written this from Tromsø, Norway, where I’m covering the Arctic Frontiers conference. A version of this commentary is also scheduled to be published in the Norwegian newspaper Da ...read more

A train carries human visitors to the futuristic amusement park of “Westworld” populated by robot hosts. Credit: HBO Nobody would accuse the HBO show “Westworld” of being a sunny science fiction tale about artificial intelligence. The show features humanlike robot “hosts” who live, die, and live again to serve the fantasies of human guests visiting a Western-themed amusement park. But the dark premise of “Westworld” is still&n ...read more

By: Russ Campbell I grew up in Fishtown, Philadelphia, an inner city grid of red-brick row homes, corner bars, candy shops, and barely-breathing factories. Fishtown was not known for its wildlife. There were birds. A wide variety, if two counts as a wide variety: big birds (pigeons) and small birds (sparrows). There were cats and an occasional dog that escaped out of someone’s yard. On rare occasions, I’d see a squirrel scampering about on the telephone pole in my backyard. This was ...read more

Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933 at Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo, three years before his death. Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons. While I have mixed feelings about de-extinction, particularly for animals that have been out of the picture for thousands of years (I’m looking at you, woolly mammoth), I’d argue the species with the strongest case for giving it a shot would be Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Tas ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) The concept of being able to predict the sex of a baby during early pregnancy or even influence it by eating or doing certain things when trying to conceive has been the subject of public fascination and debate for many centuries. But surely the sex of a fetus is exclusively determined by the father’s sperm, carrying an X chromosome for girls and a Y chromosome for boys? It turns out this is not the full story. Since the 17th century, it has been recognized that sl ...read more

“Our results revealed characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with Gangnam Style”. So say the authors of a new paper called Neural correlates of the popular music phenomenon. The authors, Qiaozhen Chen et al. from Zhejiang in China, used fMRI to record brain activity while 15 volunteers listened to two musical pieces: Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style‘ and a “light music” control, Richard Clayderman’s piano piece ‘A Comme Amour‘. Chen ...read more

La Niña typically cools the Pacific. But this time, large swathes of warmer-than-average sea temperatures have muted the cooling. A comparison of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean for two seven-day periods: Dec. 28, 1998 to Jan. 3, 1999; and Dec. 26, 2016 to Jan. 1, 2017. The strong La Niña of 1998/1999 is characterized by widespread blue colors concentrated especially along the equator west of South America. Whereas today’s Pacific i ...read more

A remarkable and troubling new paper: Addressing reverse inference in psychiatric neuroimaging: Meta-analyses of task-related brain activation in common mental disorders Icahn School of Medicine researchers Emma Sprooten and colleagues carried out an ambitious task: to pull together the results of every fMRI study which has compared task-related brain activation in people with a mental illness and healthy controls. Sprooten et al.’s analysis included 537 studies with a total of 21,427 par ...read more