Whether your preferred pint is crisp or hoppy, fruity or caramelly, you owe a lot to the single-celled fungus doing the important work of putting the booze in your brews. Hops may get most of the love on the craft beer scene, but yeast is an overlooked heavy-hitter when it comes to giving beer flavor. “Cool people are obsessed with yeast,” says Simon McConico, co-owner of Milwaukee’s Vennture Brew. “It’s because hops are sexy; yeast is a bit more nuanced.” H ...read more

White dwarfs are weird objects. These dense cores of dead stars pack as much mass as the Sun into a body about the size of Earth. They're left behind when a small- to mid-sized star ends its life by ballooning into a red giant and blowing off its outer layers in a series of explosive pulses. Although these puffs of ejected material eventually create a beautiful and expansive cloud of glowing gas called a planetary nebula, the process unfortunately tends to wreak havoc on any planets re ...read more

Spring is a great time to start using the GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper. Have you noticed any mosquitoes yet? Spring is upon us in the United States, and mosquitoes are already buzzing in many parts of the country. Below is a map that shows the approximate onset of the mosquito session throughout the contiguous U.S. You can observe how the mosquito season works its way northward as conditions become suitable for them to hatch and breed. If you don’t see mosquitoes already ...read more

We're probably going to get our very first actual picture of a black hole next week. Researchers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have scheduled a press conference for the morning of April 10, and they're expected to unveil an image of a supermassive black hole. It will be the first time humanity has actually seen one of the massive objects with our own eyes, and scientists are understandably excited about what the image will tell them. Cosmic Elephants But, images of black holes ...read more

As winter gives way to spring in the Arctic, the region's lid of floating sea ice is shriveling much more sharply than normal. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center's latest monthly update, published April 3, Arctic sea ice reached its maximum extent on March 13, which marked the end of the winter season. Since then, warming spring temperatures have caused the ice to shrink — and lately, the shrinkage has been record-setting. Late-March ice losses in the Berin ...read more

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket completed a static fire engine test shortly after 11am eastern today, in preparation for its first commercial launch next week. This will mark the second-ever flight of Falcon Heavy, delivering a communications satellite into space. Falcon Flight The test firing this morning went well, and mission managers are now targeting a launch on April 9. This is a slight delay from the earlier April 7 launch date, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warns the date might slip again. ...read more

The scrappy Israeli Beresheet mission successfully entered lunar orbit on April 4, joining a select club of nations and agencies that have ever circled the moon. This morning, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), who built and operate the spacecraft, released its first close-up pictures of the moon’s mysterious far side. And next week, on April 11, Beresheet will make its most daring maneuver as it attempts to land on the lunar surface. Slow but steady Beresheet lifted off fr ...read more

If stories about psychopaths fascinate you, you might’ve heard of something called the dark triad. It’s a trio of traits that psychologists developed in the early 2000s to measure the more sinister aspects of human personality. Now, a team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Hawai’i-West O’ahu has finally crafted a counterpart test of the so-called light triad traits. Dark Vs. Light Given the human tendency toward morbid curiosity, it’s no su ...read more

Whales evolved from hoofed, four-legged land walkers in south Asia more than 50 million years ago. Now researchers have unearthed the skeleton of an ancient four-legged whale in Peru. The discovery sheds light on how cetaceans dispersed from the Indo-Pakistan region to the Pacific Ocean. “The new find from Peru is the geologically oldest quadrupedal whale from the Americas, so it gives a minimum age [for] when they reached the New World,” said Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at th ...read more

In the quest for everlasting youth, many women buy hope in a jar. But despite being a multi-billion dollar industry, many skin creams and serums on the market don’t deliver the age-defying results they promise. But now, scientists say that it may be possible to reverse our skin's timeline at the cellular level. In a new paper published in Nature, a research team found that a collagen protein called COL17A1 plays a key role in maintaining youthful skin. Declining levels of this p ...read more