When the Sun Turns Off the Lights
The sun could create chaos by way of its coronal mass. ...read more
Month: April 2017
The Unsung Heroes of Science
Some scientists never got the praise they deserved. Here's to the ones history passed over. ...read more
Designing a Moral Machine
Artificial intelligence is learning right from wrong by studying human stories and moral principles. ...read more
The Heroes of Science
Here's to the household names and forgotten figures who accomplished incredible feats of knowledge — no capes required. ...read more
20 Things You Didn’t Know About … Earthquakes
Even though technology has helped measure strength and flag strike zones, earthquakes still have a few mysteries that rattle experts. ...read more
Octopuses Edit Their Genetic Code Like No Other Animal
New research into the cephalopod genome is undermining our assumptions about evolution, and the role that DNA mutations play in updating a species' physiology. Researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and Tel Aviv University have been studying how cephalopods — squids, octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiluses — edit their genome, and found that instead of relying on DNA mutations to adapt, they have the ability to make changes to their RNA, the genetic "messe ...read more
Dogs Don’t Process Language With Their Left Brains, After All
A case of left-right confusion misled researchers about how dogs process language. Last August, Hungarian neuroscientists Atilla Andics and colleagues reported that the left hemisphere of the dog brain is selectively activated in response to the lexical properties (i.e. the meaning) of spoken words. This result was very interesting, not least because lexical processing is also lateralized to the left hemisphere in most humans. The paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science. However, ...read more
Sizzling Exoplanet Has an Atmosphere, Opening Avenues for Finding Alien Life
On the list of exoplanets that could hold life, GJ 1132b wouldn’t come near making the cut. It’s a super-Earth whose upper atmosphere reaches 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees Celsius), meaning it only gets hotter as you move down. It’s barely a hair away from its star, completing a year in 1.6 Earth days. Life is incredibly unlikely to survive there. Yet it may be one of the most important planets to come along in the search for life. So why’s that? Well, it’s ...read more
Imaging a black hole’s shadow
As I write this, a conglomeration of radio telescopes scattered across Earth are acting as one giant instrument to try to image the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It’s no easy feat. A black hole, by definition, is so dense and the gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape its confines. So how can an object that can’t emit light and that doesn’t reflect light be observed? By looking for its shadow, and that’s exactly what the so-call ...read more
From the Stars to the Seas: Pairing Citizen Science with NASA Technology for Whale Shark Conservation
This post is part of our Divers' series. We encourage readers to continue the conversation by adding their own comments, question or concerns on our Facebook page. You’ll find links to other posts at the end of this story. When Jason Holmberg saw his first whale shark 15 years ago while scuba diving off the coast of Africa, he had no idea it would lead him to co-found a nonprofit that pairs citizen science with NASA technology to collect data on whale sharks around the world. ...read more