Over the last half century, spacecraft have visited every planet and their major moons, as well as two dwarf planets and more than a dozen asteroids and comets. Thanks to high-res images, we know these worlds intimately and can appreciate what makes each of them unique. These days, fewer than 3 in 10 Americans are old enough to recall a time when our neighboring worlds were indistinct dots in even the most powerful telescopes.
And yet, even before there were spacecraft to show us, in the ...read more
Age 116, Kane Tanaka of Japan was recently crowned the oldest person on Earth. She’s six years shy of the longest human life on record: 122 years and 164 days reached by a French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment, before her death in 1997.
While turning 100 can get you a shout out on the Today show, there’s nothing newsworthy about surviving into your 70s. That’s just expected based on life expectancy. In the United States, on average, newborn males live to 76 years and female ...read more
Have you ever wished for eyes in the back of your head? How about your rear end?
Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have been studying “seeing” tails among several species of Australian sea snakes. That includes the olive sea snake, Aipysurus laevis, pictured here.
Their long tails make a tempting target for predators, but evolution has endowed at least three species of these sea snakes with a neat trick: the skin on their tails can sense light.
The scientists ...read more
After more than 60 years, McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s main research center, is set to begin its first major infrastructure update. In February, the National Science Foundation got the green light to start construction on the so-called Antarctica Infrastructure Modernization for Science, or AIMS, project.
As first reported by Antarctic Sun, the continent's NSF-funded newspaper, the project will consolidate the sprawling research station’s some 100 buildings into just six prima ...read more
The Iberian Peninsula of modern day Spain and Portugal has long held one of human history's lingering mysteries. Now, two new studies covering nearly 20,000 years have outlined the region's transformative genetic influence.
“It shows how tremendously powerful such transect through time studies are,” said Wolfgang Haak, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who led one of the two works. “Both studies shou ...read more
Oh, otters. The adorable weasel-puppies of the water. They famously hold paws while they’re sleeping so they don’t drift apart, which is about as cute as you can get. But these little marine mammals are also quite crafty. They’re often observed cracking open a tasty meal of mussels, crab or clams with the help of rocks. And a new paper out today in Scientific Reports says otters’ handy use of rocks can leave an archeological record.
There are a few ways otters get to th ...read more
More than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today, each with unique words and phrases. But linguists have usually assumed that the sonic palette humans have used to produce these languages hasn't changed much over time
But a new study, published today in the journal Science, suggests otherwise. After analyzing languages from across the globe, a team of researchers found that sounds like “v” and “f” are relatively new, emerging just a few thousand years ago ...read more
At geological time scales, what really controls the climate isn't the atmosphere, it's the ground. Most of Earth's carbon dioxide is held underground, in reservoirs of natural gas and oil, but also in the rocks themselves. As the planet's tectonic plates slide and churn against one another, they bury carbon deep beneath the surface while exposing fresh rock that will soak up more carbon over time.
That carbon can be liberated in large volcanic events, causing mass extinctions. But the pro ...read more
No form of birth control is 100 percent effective. Now, a new study provides an explanation for why a small number of women who use hormonal contraceptive methods still become pregnant, even if they use them correctly.
A new study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology explains that some women have an uncommon genetic difference that makes hormonal contraception less effective for them.
In the paper, researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine say that ...read more
For years, NASA has been working on their massive Space Launch System (SLS), a next-generation heavy lift rocket that could launch cargo and astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo Program. They've been developing it in tandem with Orion, a crew capsule that would carry those astronauts into Earth orbit and beyond.
Orion’s next big test flight, called EM-1, an uncrewed mission into lunar orbit, is currently scheduled for June 2020. But in ...read more
