(Inside Science) -- In the battle of the sexes, sexually transmitted diseases may sometimes be a weapon that males use to win. That’s the conclusion of a new study that used mathematics to model an age-old evolutionary struggle: the quest to fill the next generation with as many of your offspring as possible. The findings probably don't apply to humans, and the outcome would vary depending on the animals and diseases involved, said the researchers. But by infecting a female with an STD, a ...read more

Underwater archaeologists excavating Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, South America, have been uncovering artifacts like this bowl. The finds offer clues to a long-vanished culture. Recently, a group working on Khoa Reef at the lake have uncovered a number of ritual offerings, including ceramic puma shaped incense burners, the remains of sacrificial llamas, and ornaments made of shell, gold and stone. The reef is located near the Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), an important religious site ...read more

No, you can’t actually take a picture of a black hole. But astronomers have promised to do the next best thing: To image the seething chaos just outside the black hole, known as its event horizon. To capture this region, just on the cusp of the black hole itself, astronomers have had to link telescopes from across the globe and focus them on the closest, most massive black holes known: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), which resides at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy ...read more

Astronomers have been grappling with the mystery of dark matter for a long time, and I mean a looong time. The history of dark-matter investigations goes back at least to 1906, when physicist Henri Poincaré's 1906 speculated about the amount of “matière obscure” in the Milky Way. Or really, it goes to back to 1846 and the first successful detection of dark matter: the discovery of the planet Neptune, whose existence had been inferred by its gravitational pull well befor ...read more

From an evolutionary perspective, the point of life is to procreate and pass on genes. That’s why most animals keep reproducing until their deathbeds. Yet in humans, females tend to live for decades after they're no longer fertile. All around the world, women experience menopause at around age 50 and routinely continue living into their 70s or 80s. Few other primates ever live long enough to make it through menopause. The rare individuals that do are usually ...read more

One year ago, astronomers announced their surprise discovery a galaxy almost entirely devoid of dark matter. As the first galaxy ever found lacking the elusive substance — which is thought to account for 85 percent of the universe's mass — the news rippled through the astronomical community. This left some researchers delightfully intrigued, and others understandably skeptical. "If there's [only] one object, you always have a little voice in the back of your mind sayi ...read more

Researchers have independently confirmed, for the first time, the detection of methane on Mars. For fifteen years, various research groups have claimed to see traces of methane in Mars’ atmosphere. Intriguingly, these often appear as puffs of gas that appear and disappear over short timescales. Groups have hotly debated whether the methane might be evidence of life, or merely geologic processes. Other researchers have argued whether the methane truly exists at all, or if the detections are ...read more

Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey is one of many made using the famed Lincoln County Process, which takes its name from the area where Jack Daniel's was first made. (Credit: monticello/shutterstock) Champagne is only champagne if it’s made in its namesake region in France, Scotch is exclusively distilled and matured in Scotland, and a “bourbon” label is reserved for products from the United States. And there’s one variation on the bourbon recipe — Tennessee Whiskey & ...read more

I'm a longtime fan of cosmic disaster scenarios. Not because I'm particularly gloomy (according to my friends and family, I'm actually more of a goof), but because they are fabulous ways to illustrate the workings of the universe. They are also great for making you appreciate the delicate set of contingencies that allow us to exist right now, right here on Earth. I wrote one of the first Armageddon-science articles, entitled "20 Ways the World Could End," which was published for the 20 ...read more