Last March, it snowed. And snowed and snowed. It was so heavy that roofs around my town were caving in, trapping pets and trucks and leaving people homeless. My own roof had several feet piled on. One night, flakes perpetually pelting down, I couldn’t sleep. I listened for the creaks of soon-to-collapse timbers. I imagined the porch overhang ripping away from the kitchen. I stared into the dark. Did I eventually haul myself out of bed to shovel the roof? No. My fear of falling from such a ...read more

The hot gaseous exoplanet, also referred to as a “hot Jupiter,” HD 80606b. After finding a hot Jupiter around a surprisingly young star, scientists have now found three other massive planets in the system. (Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech) A Surprising Young Star Researchers have discovered a strange, young “toddler” star with four massive planets in orbit around it. This is the first time that so many massive planets have been found in such a young stellar system.The sta ...read more

Amanita muscaria. (Credit: FotoLot/Shutterstock) Psilocybin mushrooms, the “magic” fungi famous for giving users hallucinations and spiritual insight, may not actually be supernatural, but they come pretty close. A growing body of research suggests they might help treat a range of mental disorders, and there’s little evidence that they’re addictive. But the world of magic mushrooms extends far beyond psilocybin. Though they may not have intended it, these fungal chemica ...read more

Ganymede is one of Jupiter’s four Galilean satellites. It is the largest moon in the solar system, with a magnetic field capable of generating aurorae and a subsurface ocean of liquid water. (NASA/JPL) Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is an icy world that astronomers believe hides a liquid ocean beneath its surface. That fractured surface, which jumbles old and new features together, has long hinted at a complex history astronomers have sought to understand. Now, a new study to be ...read more

(Credit: D. Pimborough/Shutterstock) (Inside Science) — The crackle of wet rice puffs is more than a snappy advertising strategy: Pouring milk into a bowl of cereal might help shed light on the collapse of ice shelves and dams of compacted earth, a new study finds. Brittle, porous materials are prone to suddenly crumbling when they encounter high pressure or are soaked in liquids, an effect linked with the collapse of rockfill dams and the formation of sinkholes. However, ...read more

A red panda perches in a tree. (Credit: Frenchwildlifephotograher/shutterstock) Mammals are going extinct at an alarmingly accelerated rate. Now, researchers say that recovering the lost biodiversity will take millions of years. The discovery suggests shifting conservation tactics to protect evolutionarily distinct species. Looming Species Loss Mass extinctions — when Earth loses more than three quarters of its species in a short geological period — have happened five tim ...read more

Can we go to Mars without going crazy? In May 2001, Discover’s cover story asked exactly that, exploring unanswered questions about the psychological perils of humans crammed together and flung through space. At the time, scientists didn’t have much data to predict how people would handle the six-month journey. Researchers realized interpersonal skills and camaraderie would be critical to success. We’re still not sure how things would go. But growing interest in the mental risk ...read more

A dubious predatory academic publisher called Open Access Publishing London (OAPL) seems to have died. Their website has gone down, taking some 1,500 scientific papers with it. What can we learn from this? Long-time readers will remember my series of posts on OAPL back from when I first investigated it in 2013. As far as I can tell, it was a one-man operation. The man turned out to be a Dr. Waseem Jerjes. Jerjes is a dental surgeon with many legitimate research papers to his name, and he was fo ...read more

My favorite stock image of God, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (Credit: Creative Commons) It’s natural to believe in the supernatural. Consider how many people worldwide belong to a religion: nearly 6 billion, or 84 percent of the global population, and these figures are expected to rise in the coming decades. In the U.S., surveys show 90 percent of adults believe in some higher power, spiritual force or God with a capital G. Even self-proclaimed atheists have supernatural lean ...read more

This month, the five brightest planets in our solar system align and be visible in the night sky. (Credit: Derek Bruff/flickr, CC BY-NC) For the second time this year, the five brightest planets in our solar system — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars — will be visible in the night sky at the same time. The planets will form a line that rises up from the horizon in the western sky and it will be easiest to see after sunset this Thursday, October 18. However, all month t ...read more