You may have heard that dogs and their owners really do look alike. Now, new research has shown that owners and their pups often share personality traits, too. A paper, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, says a dog's personality reflects the personality of its owner. It also explains that dogs experience personality changes similar to how humans do over the course of their lives. Two researchers from Michigan State University surveyed the owners of 1,600 d ...read more

Susanne Hecker, Muki Haklay, Anne Bowser, Zen Makuch, Johannes Vogel & Aletta Bonn. (2018). Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy. University College London Press. Scientific progress is intertwined with the triad of the state, the scientist, and the citizen, all of which are emphasized in the field of citizen science. Taking a largely European perspective, Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy by Hecker at al., is in ...read more

When New Horizons flew past Pluto and its moon Charon in 2015, it took a lot of pictures. From studying those images, scientists have recently realized that while both bodies are covered in craters, almost none of those craters are small, meaning there may not be many small bodies around to smash into them. This changes astronomers’ views of the Kuiper Belt, the region of small – but apparently not too small – rocky and icy bodies of which Pluto is a part.   No Tiny Crater ...read more

It has been a great week for humans banging on things around the solar system. Japan's Hayabusa2 probe touched down and grabbed a sample of asteroid Ryugu; NASA's InSight is hammering into the surface of Mars; and a private Israeli spacecraft named Beresheet is heading toward an April landing on the Moon. But we are just beginners at the game. Nature has been banging and moving things around in the solar system for billions of years--and doing it with impressive efficiency. Case in point: ...read more

There are only so many hours in the day, and when work or school sucks up eight of them, it can be hard to squeeze in time for family, friends, exercise or binging Netflix. As a result, we often don’t get those eight hours of precious sleep during the week. But catching some extra z’s on the weekend can make up for it, right? Wrong, say researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a recent study, they found that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn’t countera ...read more

It's easy to forget it, but much of the world is invisible to us. I don't mean that in the sense of things being really tiny, or in any metaphorical way. No, most of the world is literally invisible. That's because what we call visible light is actually a tiny sliver of the much greater electromagnetic spectrum. The rainbow we see sits in the middle of a vast continuum of wavelengths, including everything from high energy gamma and ultraviolet radiation to much lower infrared and radio wa ...read more

A 17th-century Russian nobleman named Butterlijn had a bone to pick with his surgeon. Butterlijn, the story goes, had been struck in the head with a sword, and his surgeon repaired the injury by transplanting a piece of dog bone into Butterlijn’s skull. He survived, only to be excommunicated by his church because he was deemed no longer fully human. Butterlijn demanded that the surgeon take the dog bone back out; when the surgeon tried, he found that Butterlijn’s skull had regrown ar ...read more

Everything old is new again in TV-land, as it so often is. Last week we learned that kids still watch more television than anything else, and this week a new study comes out confirming what many of us have long suspected: too much TV can rot your mind — if you're over 50. It’s like the 80s never left! Now, to be fair, it’s all couched in the careful language of science, so technically it’s a decline in verbal memory that is associated with watching a specific amount of T ...read more

A NASA rover deployed to Chile’s Atacama desert has discovered microbes in one of the most Mars-like environments on Earth. It could prove helpful in the search for life on Red Planet. The life that the rover found was adapted to extremely salty environments, much like those on Mars. Scientists also say the life was patchy, which they expected and called a basic rule of ecology. That's because nutrients and water tend to accumulate in pools. But finding that this also holds true in extrem ...read more

The last time Jim Murphy saw snow in Los Angeles, he was 11 years old. It was December, 1968 — a week or so before holiday break — and the already unruly class was stirred into a frenzy when one sixth grader spotted the flurries outside. “Of course, everyone ran out of the classroom,” Murphy recalls. “The teacher had no control.” Northridge, where Murphy grew up, is a neighborhood of Los Angeles that sits at about 800 feet above sea level. Snow is more comm ...read more