Lungs are remarkable organs that continuously achieve amazing feats, which they do so well that we take them for granted, except when their function is diminished. It all happens in a space inside your chest, divided in two and reduced by the presence of the heart, the great vessels and the esophagus. With Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg having recently returned to the court after surgery for lung cancer, I have been asked a lot of questions about the lungs, as I am a professor ...read more

The 7th annual March Mammal Madness Tournament (MMM) is upon us! What is MMM, you ask? Only the most engaging, riveting, and scientifically accurate bracket-based tournament around! 82 contenders enter, but only one (or this year, perhaps two) will be the Champion! March Mammal Madness was created in 2013 by Dr. Katie Hinde. Fed up with other March Madness-themed games that relied on popularity or cuteness to determine the winners, Hinde decided to create a game based on more realistic sc ...read more

Now that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule has successfully landed back on Earth and completed its first full test flight, dubbed Demo-1, Elon Musk's rocket company must quickly turn its gaze to the next tests on its journey to put humans in space. SpaceX launched early on March 2, docked with the International Space Station, and returned home Friday morning, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean at 8:45 a.m. EST. While SpaceX has flown many missions to the ISS with its cargo Dragon v ...read more

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule departed the International Space Station early Friday morning and began a series of thruster burns that steered the ship back toward Earth, where it safely splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean not long after 7:30 a.m. EST. The craft had been attached to the space station since Sunday, when it made its first docking under its own power after a successful Saturday launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket. This final phase of the Demo-1 mission was perhaps the biggest t ...read more

In the savannah woodlands of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park stalks an animal that resembles a cross between a goat and a deer. The antelopes known as bushbuck sport the white speckles, russet coats, and large eyes and ears of deer, but stand just two to three feet tall with a pair of dark, twisting horns that grow straight out of males’ heads. These secretive, forest-dwelling ungulates take cover from leopards, hyenas and wild dogs in the protection of trees and a network of es ...read more

Measuring the total mass of our home galaxy is a tough puzzle. It’s difficult to see it all at once, buried as we are within one of its spiral arms. And there’s a huge portion of the Milky Way we can never see, since it’s made up of dark matter, which doesn’t emit light at all. So to get an accurate number, researchers need to weigh both the visible and invisible material that makes up the galaxy. Now scientists have done just that, using new data from the Hubble Space T ...read more

You’ve likely heard by now that the movie Armageddon got it all wrong — it’s just not feasible to blow up an asteroid heading toward Earth with a bomb or few. But how unrealistic is it, really? New research set for publication March 15 in the planetary science journal Icarus is sending any hope humanity might have had to nuke an incoming asteroid threat even further into the realm of impossibility. Breaking up asteroids, it turns out, is really, really hard to do. The new ...read more

Greenland is a giant ice sheet covered in snow. Its snowline — the border where snow cover and bare ice abut — migrates with the seasons, sliding to lower elevations in the winter and shifting up in the summer. Now researchers find that not only does the snowline move much more dramatically than they thought, but it also accelerates melting of the ice sheet. That’s a problem because the Greenland ice sheet is melting into the ocean and contributing to global sea level rise. Th ...read more

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule will depart the International Space Station and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean early tomorrow morning. It has been paired with the space station since Sunday, when it made its first docking under its own power after a successful Saturday launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket. This final phase of the Demo-1 mission will continue studying Crew Dragon’s new build. That includes testing an upgraded parachute system to land the craft more gently than its carg ...read more

The remains of nearly 140 children dating to the year 1450 have been unearthed along the northern coast of Peru. Archaeologists say the burial is the site of the largest known mass child sacrifice in the world. The children — as well as the remains of more than 200 young llamas — were found in a mass grave located on a cliff just a thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean in the small, present-day fishing community of La Libertad near Trujillo. Archaeologists say the children ...read more