The “space pups” made from freeze-dried sperm flown aboard the ISS. (Credit: Teruhiko Wakayama et al.)
Before they were born, these mice were astronauts. Or, rather, the sperm that would go on to deliver half of their genetic material were.
For nine months, mouse sperm was kept aboard the International Space Station, freeze-dried to preserve it. Brought back to Earth, the sperm was rehydrated, introduced to an egg and allowed to divide for about 20 days. The resulting mouse pups ca ...read more
What kinds of secrets does the average person keep? In a new paper, Columbia University researchers Michael L. Slepian and colleagues carried out a survey of secrets.
Slepian et al. developed a ‘Common Secrets Questionnaire’ (CSQ) and gave it to 600 participants recruited anonymously online. Participants were asked whether they’d ever had various secrets, at any point in their lives. The results are a monument to all our sins:
It turns out that extra-relational thoughts & ...read more
Infrared: IPAC/NASA Ultraviolet: STScI (NASA)
There’s a star 1,300 light years away that has exhibited some of the strangest behavior ever seen: something dims 20 percent of its light, something that is beyond the size of a planet. It’s called KIC 8462852, but most people shorthand it Tabby’s Star, or Boyajian’s Star for its discoverer, Tabitha Boyajian.
Here’s the thing, though. Absolutely nobody knows why it’s dimming that much. It could be a massive fleet ...read more
A shield-snouted brown snake (Pseudonaja aspidorhyncha) from Northern Territory, Australia. Photo by Christopher Watson
There’s an age old belief that baby snakes are more dangerous than adult ones. There are generally two proposed reasons why this could be: either a) young snakes have yet to learn how to control how much venom they inject, so they deliver all of their venom per bite, or b) that because the snakes are smaller, they need more potent toxins to successful ...read more
Up until 1963, both the U.S. and Soviet governments conducted over 500 atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. They blew up these weapons anywhere from 16 miles above Earth to 250, well into space. The resulting fallout is estimated to have raised levels of thyroid cancer across the country, and could one day even serve as a marker for the Anthropocene—the age of humans.
But the effects of these tests spread far beyond the surface of the Earth. A nuclear explosion creates a storm of charg ...read more
To find a month when the global average temperature over the land and oceans was below average, you have to go all the way back to December 1984, according to the latest monthly analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Including April 2017, that makes it 388 straight months in which the global temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average.
Like NASA's independent analysis released earlier this week, NOAA finds that last month was the second warmest ...read more
Anthropologists have long studied how rituals bind practitioners together. From African tribes moving rhythmically around a fire to the scripted kneeling and standing by Catholics during Sunday mass, participants deepen group identity through ritual.
But ritual also spills over into business and social situations. “The great thing about ritual is that anywhere humans are, a ritual will be there,” says Nicholas Hobson, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the University of Tor ...read more
Incest is generally not a good idea because children born of closely related parents can end up with genetic diseases. But some amount of genetic similarity between parents can actually be evolutionarily advantageous, as genes that evolve together tend to work best with each other in a given environment. So how do people select "optimally similar" mates? Well, these scientists hypothesized that mating with a distant relative might satisfy both ends: the relationship would be distant enough ...read more
