By his baby bawls, we may know the next James Earl Jones. According to a team of scientists from the United Kingdom and France, babies’ cries may accurately predict their voice pitch later in life. This, researchers say, is an indication that your golden pipes were tuned long before puberty, potentially even in the womb. What we do with this information is unclear, but their finding is certainly worthy of adding to the your-body-is-a-fortune-teller collection. You know the ...read more

We have swarms of scientists searching the skies for space oddities, but it's rare that they actually find one in the act of plunging to Earth. On June 23, a group of international geoscientists discovered a meteorite in Botswana that had been dwelling in space just weeks earlier. The fresh fragment broke off of asteroid 2018 LA as it plummeted to Earth on June 2, turning into a fiery meteor and exploding as it entered our atmosphere. Treasure Hunt The geoscientists spent five day ...read more

My doctor recently declared me deficient in vitamin D and prescribed a weekly pill. Because I take care to eat a healthy and diverse diet, I was a bit annoyed. She said it was no big deal and actually very common, the medical equivalent of a parent telling a child, “Because I said so.� Later on, I was grousing to some of my friends and many of them said they had gotten the same news.  It made me wonder: What is going on with vitamin D? A Vexing ...read more

A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. You probably do it. It might be ingrained from when you were a kid, and now it’s almost automatic. You see the flash of lightning – and you immediately start counting the seconds till it thunders. But does counting really get you a good estimate for how far away the lightning is? Is this one of those old wives’ tales, or is it actually based on science? In this case, we h ...read more

Cancer survivors often go through hell to earn the prize of simply returning to a somewhat normal life — none more so than children. But even after the cancer is gone, many young patients are still at risk for another kind of medical difficulty. Endocrine disorders, a class of issues characterized by hormone imbalances and including hyperthyroidism and metabolic disorders, are far more common among those who have survived cancer, two papers published late last month show. Ir ...read more

Spaceflight is like backpacking. If you can’t restock supplies like food and water along the way, how far you can travel is limited by how much you can carry. And in space, you also have to worry about having enough fuel for your spacecraft and breathable air for your crew. That’s why some researchers are looking toward technology that they call artificial photosynthesis -- a way of harnessing the sun's light to generate fuel and breathable air for longer m ...read more

Do we gain insight by comparing President Trump to a chimpanzee? Can we learn something useful about gender-based violence among humans by studying other primates? Can observing chimpanzees or bonobos tell us why humans go to war or how we can get along better? The urge to try and find the animal “roots� for human behavior is enticing because humans are animals. We are mammals, primates and hominoids (the superfamily of apes). Due to these realities, we s ...read more

Without an insulating coat of fat or fur, what’s an insect to do to survive cold winters? Some insects, like the mealworm beetle, are blessed with antifreeze proteins that keep them from freezing from the inside out. For decades, scientists knew this natural antifreeze existed, but they only had a vague idea of how it worked. Somehow, the proteins attach to tiny ice crystals that begin forming in cold water to keep the crystals from growing larger and harming the insect. Che ...read more

The early universe is a mystery. It's quite literally surrounded by a veil that obscures its distant, early light. But a new glimmer through that void could give us a glimpse into this mysterious era. Two papers released in the Astrophysical Journal (first paper, second paper) detail the discovery of a quasar dubbed PSO J352.4034-15.3373, or P352-15 for short. Quasars are the active centers of large galaxies where supermassive black holes shoot out jets of gas. The image is faint, but sho ...read more

In the why-aren’t-you-watching-this television show The Expanse, humanity has spread out into the solar system. Mars and Earth stand as bitter rivals, with Ceres settlers somewhere in between. A few companies even have settlers in the outer regions of the solar system. You wouldn’t necessarily want to live in the world of The Expanse, as fantastic as it is. Yet the show still plays to the dreams of those of us who long to wander the final frontier. However, ...read more