Hurricane Katrina, imaged on Sunday, August 28, 2005, near the peak of its intensity. (Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC)
2005 was a crazy year in the North Atlantic. That hurricane season saw not only the most tropical cyclones in recorded history for the region, it also spawned the lowest pressure measured in the Atlantic, the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever, the most hurricanes and the highest accumulated cyclone energy index on record. There were so many storms ...read more
No one mineral dominates the surface of Ryugu, so scientists are still trying to determine its composition. (Credit: JAXA)
Back in June, Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission arrived at the asteroid Ryugu, a near-Earth object that crosses our home world’s orbit. The spacecraft will touch down on the surface in October. But first, scientists must find the most “pristine” location possible – the spot least weathered by the hazards of outer space.
One Hayabusa2’s main goal ...read more
Kenneth Chau, an engineer at the University of British Columbia, helped shine a light on how electrons impart momentum. (Credit: UBC Okanagan)
Quantum mechanics, the science of the smallest stuff, is famously kooky. Light is both a particle and a wave, electrons zip around and travel instantaneously, cats are both alive and dead — it’s hard for our human brains to comprehend. One phenomenon that sort of makes a little sense, if you think about it right, is that light alone can push ...read more
Researchers uncovered the first direct evidence of hominin interbreeding in the bone fragments of a 13-year-old girl from Russia’s Altai Mountains. (Credit: Max Planck Institute)
Humans think of themselves as exceptional among the creatures inhabiting Earth. But it wasn’t always so.
Multiple groups of humans once co-existed with Homo sapiens, including Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans. And we did more than simply live alongside them — traces in our DNA reveal t ...read more
Map of shaking felt by the M7.3 earthquake in Venezuela on August 21, 2018. USGS.
Venezuela was hit by a M7.3 earthquake today, causing extensive damage across the northern part of the country as well as nearby Trinidad & Tobago. Shaking was felt as far away at Bogotá, Martinique and Guyana, thousands of kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter. This temblor may have the largest earthquake to strike Venezuela since a M7.7 hit off of Caracas in 1900.
Video and images of th ...read more
These rare-earth oxides are used as tracers to determine which parts of a watershed are eroding. Clockwise from top center: praseodymium, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium, and gadolinium. (Credit: Peggy Greb, US Department of Agriculture)
Most Americans use rare earth elements every day – without knowing it, or knowing anything about what they do. That could change, as these unusual materials are becoming a focal point in the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China.
Stanley ...read more
Waiting by the Phone
For now, engineers continue to listen to Mars for signals from Opportunity at her programmed fault check-in intervals. They also send prompts to the rover and listen for a response during these times. The team has also essentially widened the net — the radio science group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is listening daily for Opportunity on a broader range of frequencies than normal, using specialized radio equipment focused on Mars during most of the daylight hours a ...read more
The image shows the concentration of water ice on the lunar surface. The south pole and its hefty concentration of ice within craters is shown on the left, and the right shows the more sporadic, wide spread ice on the north pole. (Credit: NASA)
We’ve seen evidence of ice deposits on the surfaces of Mercury and Ceres, but we can now add a much closer celestial body to the club.
Research published on August 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that spec ...read more
A new wave of synthetic drugs is causing overdoses across the country. (Credit: busliq/shutterstock)
An explosion of strange new narcotics is hitting the streets, as clandestine chemists rush to produce drugs that exist outside the law.
One United Nations report tallied 644 new drugs discovered across 102 countries and territories between 2008 and 2015. And in an interview last year, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesperson said they encounter previously unheard of drugs on an almost wee ...read more
A subtle tweak in brain organization happened more than 60 million years ago. Without it, humans never could have evolved. (Credit: Jolygon/shutterstock)
Suzana Herculano-Houzel spent most of 2003 perfecting a macabre recipe—a formula for brain soup. Sometimes she froze the jiggly tissue in liquid nitrogen, and then she liquefied it in a blender. Other times she soaked it in formaldehyde and then mashed it in detergent, yielding a smooth, pink slurry.
Herculano-Houzel had completed her P ...read more
