Ivan Ivanovich’s face obscured by the sign proclaiming him a dummy. via Astronautix
The countryside near Perm in the Soviet Union was rocketed by what sounded like an explosion in the afternoon of March 25, 1961. A capsule was falling from the sky, and before it hit the ground an ejection seat shot out, sending a passenger to a soft landing not far away. When recovery crews and volunteer helpers finally reached the landing site they rushed to the lifeless figure lying on the snowy gr ...read more
Mount Hora in Malawi, where researcher Jessica Thompson obtained the oldest African DNA ever successfully sequenced. (Credit Jessica Thompson/Emory University)
A great irony about Africa is that, even though it’s the birthplace of our species, we know almost nothing about the prehistoric populations who lived there: the bands of hunter gatherers who moved across the massive continent, interacting with and sometimes replacing other groups.
Today that changes.
Thanks to new research th ...read more
A global map from NASA of how Earth’s surface temperatures last month departed from the 1951-1980 August average. (Source: NASA GISTEMP. Note: part of Antarctica is gray because data from some stations there were not yet available at the time of this analysis.)
Last month was among the very warmest on record, according to two new analyses – and the heat is very likely to continue.
With less than four months left to go in 2017, the year will probably come in as second ...read more
Have researchers been as wrong about the dinosaur diet as famed illustrator Charles Knight was about hadrosaurs in this rather sketchy 1897 rendering? Duckbilled dinosaurs like this fella usually put four on the floor, and no dino dragged its tail or had the sprawling posture shown here. (Credit American Museum of Natural History)
Like that vegetarian friend of yours who sneaks a piece of bacon when no one’s looking, it appears that at least some dinosaurs previously though ...read more
(Credit: Iain Cameron)
Resting beneath the 1,000-foot cliffs of Scotland’s Aonach’s Beag mountain range, The Sphinx –one of the country’s proudest snowcaps—is on its deathbed.
“It’s a very sorry sight,” says Iain Cameron, a leading snow expert and arguably one of Edinburgh’s most dedicated “snow patchers,” a group of people who seek out and track the changes in the island’s coldest landmarks. These patches “tend to si ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
You’re bombarded with sensory information every day — sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes. A constant barrage that your brain has to manage, deciding which information to trust or which sense to use as a backup when another fails. Understanding how the brain evaluates and juggles all this input could be the key to designing better therapies for patients recovering from stroke, nerve injuries, or other conditions. It could also help engineers build more ...read more
(Credit: NASA)
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has been a jumping-off point to our understanding of galaxies throughout the universe. And though our picture of that home galaxy has evolved over time as astronomers have developed better ways to catalog and map its contents, we’ve largely believed the Milky Way was a “typical” example of a spiral galaxy. Now, astronomers are taking steps to determine whether that’s really true.
New data from the Satellites Around Galactic ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
A small dot on an old piece of birch bark marks one of the biggest events in the history of mathematics. The bark is actually part of an ancient Indian mathematical document known as the Bakhshali manuscript. And the dot is the first known recorded use of the number zero. What’s more, researchers from the University of Oxford recently discovered the document is 500 years older than was previously estimated, dating to the third or fourth century – a breakthroug ...read more
Is he one of the lucky ones? (Credit: Shutterstock/Herman Veenendaal
Dating is a tough game. No matter where you go, it seems like there’s always someone who’s more attractive, funnier or remembers to shower. Losing out sucks, but hey, at least you get to keep your penis.
Not so for ruddy ducks. They only grow penises during mating season, and when forced to compete for mates, the scrawnier ducks don’t even bother to put in much effort. Some ruddy ducks can grow pen ...read more
But despite claims to the contrary, one warmish summer in the Arctic does not repeal the long-term trend of human-caused warming
This visualization shows how the extent of Arctic sea ice has evolved through time. The animation begins when the ice reached its wintertime maximum extent on March 7, 2017, and it ends on September 13, 2017, when the ice shrank to its minimum extent for the year. (Source: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio/Helen-Nicole Kostis)
Arctic sea ice has sta ...read more
