Discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy exceed 3,700 to date, but if that’s not enough for you, astronomers are now probing outside of the Milky Way to find exoplanets in other galaxies. A group of researchers at the University of Oklahoma has just announced the discovery of a large population of free-floating planets in a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years away. Their results were published February 2 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers used a method known as ...read more

The largest eruption in the past million years was at Toba in Indonesia. How big was it? It erupted over 3000 cubic kilometers of volcanic debris. 3000 cubic kilometers! That would pave the entirety of Rhode Island in a kilometer keep of ash, rocks, and pumice. It would take roughly 300 Pinatubo-scale eruptions to match that. The eruption itself created a caldera formed when the land collapsed when all that material erupted that spans 100 kilometers from end to end and 30 kilometers fr ...read more

Most plants are sneaky. You think they're staying put, until one morning when you wake up to find your houseplant bent toward the window, or a vine that's clambered up your fence. But other plants operate more quickly. They close up their leaves at a touch, or fling their pollen onto a bee. Researchers discovered a previously unknown bit of plant acrobatics in Costa Rica. There, a flower works like a jack-in-the-box to shove its stamens into a hummingbird's face. Dust ...read more

A brief letter in Nature got me thinking this week: Don’t belittle junior researchers in meetings Anand Kumar Sharma writes to urge scientists not to grill their junior colleagues at conferences: The most interesting part of a scientific seminar, colloquium or conference for me is the question and answer session. However, I find it upsetting to witness the unnecessarily hard time that is increasingly given to junior presenters at such meetings. As inquisitive scientists, we do not ha ...read more

We're about a month away from the 60th annual rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater Texas. The event proudly calls itself the world's largest—and for good reason. Last year, nearly 8,000 lbs of snakes were killed in this barbaric slaughterfest. But there are so many reasons why this all-out assault on Texas' reptiles is a terrible idea. Rattlesnakes have complex social lives, can live for decades, and are essential to their native ecosystems. As predators, they help keep po ...read more

Image: Flickr/Tax Credits Urban legend has it that “all” of our paper currency is tainted with cocaine. These scientists decided to test whether this is true, and if so, how much of the drug is there. By testing over four thousand bills of various denominations gathered from 90 locations over more than a decade, they estimate that the “average” bill carries only 2.34 ng of cocaine (a tiny, tiny amount), but any given bill has ~15% chance of having more than 20 ...read more

And what's happening in the New Arctic is not staying there Another month, yet another record low for Arctic sea ice extent in a warming world. January's average ice extent in the Arctic was 525,000 square miles below the 1981-to-2010 average, making it the lowest January extent in the satellite record. This is an astonishingly large loss of ice — equivalent to 80 percent of Alaska. But what happened in January was equally, if not more significant, for its timing. I ...read more

The oceans are largely unexplored, but if you want to find something interesting, there's no better place to visit than a hydrothermal vent. Often marked by dark plumes gushing into frigid water, the vents mark spots where magma rises close to the seafloor and heats the water to temperatures that can reach over 750 degrees Fahrenheit. Warmth and nutrients from the vents provide the basis for a vibrant deep-sea community, populated by creatures that often never see the sun's light ...read more

When it comes to improving memory, being in the right place at the right time could be key. Scientists are figuring out how to do that. Michael Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and his team developed an experimental brain stimulation technique that improves memory by applying a pulse of electricity directly to the brain when and where it’s needed most. In an early demonstration, they say their approach improved word recall in epilepsy patients by 15 perc ...read more

I, like a lot of other people on the internet, love rain. What can be nicer than a cool, refreshing burst of liquid precipitation, a sound so soothing people can actually pay to hear during dry spells? It’s good for dirty walkways, good for the plants, good for skydiving viruses…wait, what? Yes, it turns out that the rains are particularly rife with falling viruses. A new study out this week in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal is a census of the viral invader ...read more