(Credit: Shutterstock) Hang around any mom with a young child and eventually she’ll break out her baby voice. You know the one — the pitch of her voice goes up, her words are simple and exaggerated. It’s sometimes referred to as motherese, but researchers call it infant-directed speech. Whatever you want to call it, it’s pretty vital to little ones’ development. Says Elise Piazza, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, it “helps babies to segment this hug ...read more

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is best known for its giant carved moai. (Credit Terry Hunt) Thanks to its geography, the southeastern Pacific island of Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island — has been in the center of a long-running debate about how early people may have sailed back and forth across the planet’s biggest ocean. One theory suggested that, long before Europeans arrived, the island was a meeting point for Polynesians and Native Americans. Spoiler alert: a new s ...read more

The MOOSE concept. GE. Imagine an astronaut on board a dying spacecraft in orbit. The vehicle is losing power and there’s no way it will be able to make it safely back through the atmosphere. There’s no evacuation system in place and no other spacecraft ready to send up on a rescue mission. Without a way to get home, without some life boat of sorts, that astronaut is going to die in space… This was the nightmare scenario General Electric had in mind when it developed a space ...read more

Kirishima in Japan erupting on October 12, 2017. Image by James Reynolds, used by permission. For the first time since September 2011, Kirishima in Japan has started erupting. On the morning of October 11, new ash emissions began from the Shinmoe-dake cone on the large, complex volcano on the north end of Kagoshima Bay. The eruption have been relatively small ash-and-gas plumes that reached less than 1 kilometer (~3,200 feet) over the volcano and spread shards of volcanic glass (aka as ...read more

Shown here in X-rays, the Sun’s surface bubbles with activity as solar flares burst forth, spewing fountains of plasma outward. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltect/GSFC) You have probably heard of solar flares before. These bright eruptions from the Sun’s surface are triggered when knotted magnetic field lines within the Sun suddenly snap and reconnect, accelerating fireballs of plasma outward to distances up to 35 times the diameter of the Earth. But have you ever heard of nanoflares? ...read more

Marie Curie in one of her mobile X-ray units in October 1917. (Credit: Eve Curie) Ask people to name the most famous historical woman of science and their answer will likely be: Madame Marie Curie. Push further and ask what she did, and they might say it was something related to radioactivity. (She actually discovered the radioisotopes radium and polonium.) Some might also know that she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. (She actually won two.) But few will know she was also a major hero ...read more

(Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock) The search for a suitable male contraceptive has been long and mostly fruitless. Though ideas ranging from hormonal treatments to plugs inserted into the vas deferens have been proposed, none has yet made it to market, and men still rely on either condoms or vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies. A new method interferes with genes responsible for creating new sperm, which could be a more attractive approach. Snipping out a gene that regulate ...read more

Today artificial neural networks are making art, writing speeches, identifying faces and even driving cars. It feels as if we’re riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks is actually a renaissance of sorts. It may be hard to believe, but artificial intelligence researchers were already beginning to see the promise in neural networks during World War II in their mathematical models. But by the 1970s, the field was ready to give up on them entirel ...read more

And millions of lives may be at risk. Just 10 kilometers from the frenetic pulse of central Naples, in stark contrast to the Italian city’s impressive volcanic-stone churches and effortlessly stylish urbanites, sits a boxy, concrete building. Inside this unremarkable government outpost, accessed through a pair of sliding glass doors, is the Vesuvius Observatory monitoring room, lit by the cool glow of 92 flat-panel screens. On each screen, volcanic activity readings, including those f ...read more