Sock Signals
Throughout Africa and Asia, elephants can be seen as problem causers. The behemoth mammals destroy crops and threaten farmers’ livelihoods when they trundle through fields after tasty snacks. Scarecrows, fences and noisemaking tripwires don’t deter the beasts, and tensions with humans can escalate so much that elephants are sometimes shot.
Now, scientists have discovered that the odor of angry honeybees is an effective elephant repellant. Th ...read more
Two years ago, a paper by Swedish neuroscientist Anders Eklund and colleagues caused a media storm. The paper, Cluster Failure, reported that the most widely used methods for the analysis of fMRI data are flawed and produce a high rate of false positives.
As I said at the time, Cluster Failure wasn't actually making especially new claims because Eklund et al. had been publishing quite similar results years earlier - but it wasn't until Cluster Failure that they attracted widespread attent ...read more
Weather forecasts and remote sensing imagery show that the Branson duck boat tragedy was avoidable
The duck boat tragedy in Branson, Missouri, was made all the more horrible by the fact that it was completely avoidable.
While Jim Pattison Jr., president of the company that owns Ride the Ducks Branson, claimed the storm “came out of nowhere,� nothing could be further from the truth.
...read more
Hidden away in the woods near the upstate New York town of Lake George is a cave. The entrance of the cavern, an abandoned graphite mine, is almost perfectly round, with a trickle of water running out of it. On a weekday morning in late February, researchers, led by Carl Herzog, a wildlife biologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, gather at the cave mouth and swap hiking boots for waders before filing in.
Kate Ritzko, a fish and wildlife technician for th ...read more
It has been not quite a half-century since human beings stepped foot on another planetary body for the first time.
Forty-nine years ago today, to be exact.
It was on July 20, 1969 when Neil A. Armstrong, Commander of the Apollo 11 mission, descended the steps of the Lunar Module and upon reaching the surface uttered these instantly famous words: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (Btw, if you think he didn't actually say "a man," ...read more
BAIKONUR, KAZAKHSTAN – That rocket looked so tiny from a mile away. Shining white against the dull beige sands of Baikonur, the Soyuz had three people on board all set for a ride to the International Space Station. From this distance, though, it appeared fragile, like a child's plaything.
Standing beside me was a member of the backup crew, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. He passed the time talking to me about other launches he had seen. When the Soyuz finally lighted ...read more
On Tuesday, Jupiter officially “gained� 10-12 moons. But that doesn’t make up for the dozens of moons the solar system has lost over time. Unlike the recent crop, the long lost moons were of pretty substantial size.
This includes even a few now missing moons for Jupiter. The king of our planets started out in a gas envelope, like the other planets. It’s system had quite a bit of heft, but the slow drag of this cloud m ...read more
The 2015 discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system, with its seven Earth-sized planets, has redirected much of the exoplanet search toward M-dwarf systems — and justifiably so. Based on Kepler data, researchers estimate M-dwarfs (the most common type of star) host around 10 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way alone. But one question that immediately pops up regarding the search for exoplanets is that of habitability. In addition to other criteria, the presence of an atmosphe ...read more
Many people have pointed out to me that there is a news frenzy about "fissures opening near Yellowstone". Now, considering that if this were happening, that would be newsworthy, I had to check it out ... and with most "news" about Yellowstone, it is much ado about nothing related to the volcano in Wyoming.
Climbers in Grand Teton National Park, to the south of Yellowstone, have noticed that the cliff face at Hidden Falls and Inspiration has been breaking off due to cracks ("fissures ...read more
Hunting for exoplanets is a complex and time-consuming process. When an exoplanet candidate is detected, researchers have to observe it passing by its host star three times before they can officially confirm its existence. This isn’t a problem if the orbital period lasts a few days, weeks, or months, but it isn’t exactly effective if the planet takes years to transit its star.
Now, a new method published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics aims to ...read more
