(Credit: Ph.D. Candidate Thomas Onuferko, York University)
When I watch Planet Earth, what often comes to mind is the power of framing.
As the program jumps from species to species, I find myself siding with whichever creature currently holds the spotlight. I remember cringing as a horde of snakes overcame a newly hatched iguana in the Galápagos, and then cheering as a Komodo dragon tore limbs from its prey in Indonesia, all within the span of 20 minutes.
To veer so suddenly f ...read more
Humans have been captivated by Mars almost as long as we’ve been watching the night sky.
The ancient Greeks and Romans watched nightly as a reddish dot moved among the stars, growing dimmer and brighter in a two-year cycle. Each named it for the god of war; the Roman version, “Mars,” stuck. Renaissance astronomers became fascinated with the planet’s apparent backward movement, the so-called retrograde motion that could only be explained with the Sun, not the Earth, a ...read more
(Credit: pippeeContributor/Shutterstock)
There’s no escaping magnetic fields—they’re all around us. For starters, the Earth itself is like a giant magnet. A spinning ball of liquid iron in our planet’s core generates the vast magnetic field that moves our compass needles around and directs the internal compasses of migrating birds, bats, and other animals. On top of that, ever-industrious humans have produced artificial magnetic fields with power lines, transport system ...read more
Photo: flickr/Caden Crawford
Google Trends has become a productive source of data for social scientists, particularly those interested in when and where people search for the word “porn”. First, they discovered that porn searches peaked in winter and early summer, a result that lead them to believe that there actually is a human mating season. Now, they’ve looked at the results by state, and found some more interesting patterns.
Perhaps not surprisingly, &ldquo ...read more
With the eruption at Kīlauea dominating the news, I thought it important to highlight the other developing volcanic crisis that is happening right now. Check out that news after we catch up on what's going on in Hawai'i.
Kīlauea
UAS flight of Kīlauea Volcano's Lower East Rift Zone during the overnight hours of May 22, 2018, captures activity at the fissure complex and lava flows that extend to the ocean; helps scientists assess hazards. https://t.co/a5Bv42SxyE pic.twitter.com ...read more
By Nina Friedman
Learn, collaborate, and share your citizen science project tools at CitSciBio.org!
Back in 2012, Dr. Jennifer Couch and her colleagues at the National Institute of Health realized there was something missing in the greater biomedical citizen science community. The community did not have its own online collaboration platform.
Couch approached Katrina Theisz, a program analyst at NIH, and together they formed a working group. After a series of workshops exploring how ci ...read more
A 9-mile-wide asteroid smashed into a shallow sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. Some 75 percent of life on Earth died in the aftermath (Credit: Mark Garlick)
Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid set fire to the planet and began what was likely the worst day in history. Decades of research have helped illuminate the actual impact. But scientists are still figuring out what happened over the years that followed.
Based on studies of the impact site, it&rsq ...read more
(Credit: Samuel Scott)
Buried treasure doesn’t just exist in the movies.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) recently announced new details of the discovery of the San José — a Spanish galleon carrying a treasure of gold, silver and emeralds that went down in the War of Spanish Succession in 1708. You could quite literally say that its cargo is worth a boat-load — valued in the billions of dollars today.
Gold Under Those Waves
The sunken ship was found off ...read more
The non-avian lineages were not the only dinosaurs to experience a Very Bad Day at the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: the avian dinosaurs, better known as birds, were also hard-hit as global forests were destroyed. (Credit Phillip M. Krzeminski)
It’s the most common caveat you’ll hear about the End-Cretaceous mass extinction: It wiped out the dinosaurs, except for birds which are, you know, dinosaurs. A new study suggests that the global die-off nearly took birds out as well.
...read more
This tree is not dead, despite appearances. It's alive and happy, and it's been clinging to this cliff in southern Italy since the eighth century A.D. Researchers invented a new dating method to figure out that the pine is the oldest known tree in Europe.
Gianluca Piovesan of Università della Tuscia in Italy and colleagues spent three years taking samples from trees to try to find some really old ones. On mountain cliffs within Pollino National Park, they found a few trees ...read more
