(Credit: doppel)
For Americans, public speaking ranks higher on the list of fears than heights, blood, ghosts, clowns, flying, needles and…dying. Indeed, one in four Americans admits standing and delivering before a crowd of strangers is a dread inducing experience.
On top of that, it’s hard to get through life without encountering situations that force us to confront this fear in some form, which may explain why it’s so pervasive. As such, there are countless remedies: pict ...read more
By Dolores Hill and Carl Hergenrother, Target Asteroids! Co-Leads Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission
Today’s amateur astronomers carry on long held traditions in citizen science by making valuable contributions in data collection and monitoring celestial objects of all kinds. They supplement work done by professional astronomers and fill gaps in our knowledge. Imagine being a modern-day Tycho Brahe who, in the late-1500s, me ...read more
My, what sharp teeth you have, Janjucetus. New research finds ancient whales like “The Juce” here had dentition more similar to land carnivores than today’s filter-feeders. (Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons)
The biggest animals on the planet right now are baleen whales, which upped their size thanks to efficient filter-feeding. How they got that specialized system has long been a mystery, but a new study nixes some theories about it evolving out of ancient ...read more
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The FDA has seized vials of smallpox vaccine from a California immunotherapy company, claiming they had been used for an unauthorized cancer treatment.
StemImmune markets an unapproved treatment for cancer involving stem cells and a type of virus commonly used to inoculate against smallpox. The virus, vaccinia, is an attractive option because it’s good at getting into cancerous cells and can be genetically tweaked to improve effectiveness. It’s no ...read more
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Animals from sheep to fur seals share a curious acoustic trait: Their calls feature a vibrato-like trill.
Vibrato is the small, quick oscillation in pitch that musicians use to accentuate certain notes. It makes a note sound a bit wobbly and helps catch our attention. It’s found all over the animal kingdom, too — think the staccato “baaaaa’s” of a goat. But animals’ pulsating cries are far more than stylistic. A new study f ...read more
Texas National Guard members rescue survivors from Harvey on August 27, 2017. Photo by 1st Lt. Zachary West, 100th MPAD) CC-by-2.0
The biggest news right now is the devastation caused by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey. It wasn’t the arrival of the storm itself but rather the long and intense rains that have done the damage — and really, the flooding that the Houston area is experiencing right now is some of the most stunning and devastating in the last century for the United States. ...read more
The discussion of scientific papers on Twitter is largely dominated by spam bots, paid content promoters, and “monomaniacs” obsessed with a single issue. That’s according to researchers Nicolas Robinson-Garcia and colleagues in a new paper called The unbearable emptiness of tweeting—About journal articles
To reach their bleak conclusion, Robinson-Garcia et al. read 8,206 tweets. Tweets were included if they contained a link to a peer-reviewed paper in the field of dentr ...read more
