If you’re like me, your family’s Christmas tree is dripping with poorly-made ornaments you and your siblings slapped together in kindergarten. Seriously, one is just a picture of me with some spray-painted puzzle pieces around it.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a small part of Australia, though, you could probably gussy your tree up this year with a festive snail. (Disclaimer: This is a bad idea and will get you in a lot of trouble.)
Attenborougharion rubicundus i ...read more
Animals living on the ocean floor, where it’s too dark for anything to grow, have to wait for food to fall on them. Mostly this means they eat “marine snow,” a steady drift of tiny life forms and detritus from the ocean’s surface. But robotic expeditions off the coast of Mexico have revealed what might be another major dining option on the ocean floor: dead squid moms.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) sent one of its remotely ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
A new male contraceptive is set to begin testing next year.
Beginning in April, about 420 men will begin rubbing a hormonal gel onto their shoulders every morning, with the goal of lowering sperm counts below what’s needed to cause a pregnancy. If all goes to plan, they and their partners will spend a year relying only on the gel for birth control.
Another Try
The study is receiving joint funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Population ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Those of us brave souls who inhabit America’s northern climes know that it’s not the cold that brings on the winter blues. You go to work and it’s dark. You leave work and it’s dark. The sun? What’s that?
Indeed, as I post this at 3:30 p.m., the sun is already nearing the horizon. The sky above is dark. Today — the Winter Solstice — the sun will set at 4:20 p.m. here in Milwaukee.
But that’s actually pretty weird. It’ ...read more
I noticed the season’s first juncos hopping in my yard a few short weeks ago – an event I look forward to every year because I know their arrival here in New England means winter is on its way. And by “winter,” I mean, specifically, winter solstice – the longest night of the year, the end of six months during which the sun sets earlier and earlier every day. Like people of many cultures around the world, I celebrate the first day of winter because it marks the time ...read more
In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists confirmed that the oldest fossils ever discovered — found in a nearly 3.5-billion-year-old rock from western Australia — contain 11 complex microbes that are members of five distinct species.
The findings not only suggest that life on our planet originated some 4 billion years ago, but also help support the increasingly widespread theory that life in the universe is much ...read more
(Credit: NASA)
Exoplanets have dominated astronomy news so much in recent years, some people are getting sick of them. It’s funny to think that their existence has only been confirmed for 25 years. Before astronomers announced in 1992 that pulsar B1257+12 had a couple of planets in tow, the idea of planets existing beyond our solar system was just that, an idea. It made sense, but no one had ever seen any.
The not-so-secret motivation behind exoplanet research nowadays is the hope of one ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Ladies, looks like we might have another thing to worry about — well, at least for those of us who play soccer.
New, unpublished research, presented in November at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C., suggests female soccer players experience greater brain damage from heading the ball than men do. The injury occurs in white matter tracts — the long, branch-like nerve fibers, or axons, that extend from neurons, crisscross the bra ...read more
Dragonfly is a dual-quadcopter lander that would take advantage of the environment on Titan to fly to multiple locations, some hundreds of miles apart. (Credit: NASA)
A little over once a decade, through its New Frontiers program, NASA hosts a battle-royale lottery that sets the tone for the agency’s focus on the future of exploration throughout the solar system. This year, in terms of planetary exploration, NASA decided on sending drones to Titan and a claw-machine to a familiar asteroi ...read more
